Wrinkled hands.

Here it is 4:30 a.m. and I find myself wanting to write. When I was younger, middle school age and into high school, I remember that writing about my thoughts and feelings was cathartic. I used to play around with writing poems. Over the years I'm not sure what happened to my many pages of journaling, but I find myself drawn back to it at this time in my life. It's still somewhat therapeutic and nowadays it's certainly much easier because of technology so why not take advantage of it. I have heard that some people find it comforting to talk to a tree, well, I suppose, this is my form of talking to a tree.

I will eventually try and share my life story. The only way I can think to do this is by sharing one story at a time, and not in sequence as it happened. I have a lot on my mind and I am going to try to make sense of some pretty harsh experiences, like the untimely deaths of my father, a sister, and my husband. There have been years of incest, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, cheating, and lying. But there has also been resiliency, true joy, love, hope, faith, and the knowledge that no one gets through this life without experiencing deep valleys mixed with the upward feelings of heaven. We all have a story, and if we were to live the exact same experiences, we would have different perspectives on those same stories. Reality is individual.

Getting back to when I used to write poems, and I wrote a lot, here is one I remember that was a type of haiku:

"A wrinkled hand lay across the table; time had slipped swiftly through his fingers." 

And it has. I look at my hands and I wonder where the time has gone! My hands have wrinkles and sun spots and they look o-l-d-e-r, kind of like I'm ageing. I was living at home in Scotia, California only yesterday, it seems. Here I am, 58 years old; wow, time does fly.