It has been a pretty unique year with random stressors that I did not anticipate. Luckily, there were close calls but nothing was lost. Yet, as the year draws to close I feel drained of some inner energy much like one who has suffered a few significant losses.
Maybe that is what a series of near misses will do to a person. Reading this Elizabeth Bishop poem made me think about loss, impending loss and so on. Perhaps I should go into the new year being better prepared and with more grace- learn the art of losing better and placing things in context:
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
For me that would more than two lovely towns and several rivers and a sub-continent at least. Those losses are quite old now and certainly whatever disaster it may have been it is long gone and forgotten by now. The scene that I do remember is seeing the truck packed with everything in house leaving a plume of dust. We would follow by train later that day.
Our neighbors had asked us over for lunch - our home was completely bare. People look at you differently when you share a "last meal" with them. I would go on to have such meals with a few other families over the decades when I left a certain town for good. Those people are all lost - some I cannot even remember their names though once we were friends and neighbors. One of them gave me dried chamomile flowers for a bad cold I was suffering from right before the move and a good luck charm that still hang's in J's room. I did recover from the cold quite promptly and the charm has likely served me well over the years because I have been fortunate in more ways than I can count.
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