I Wore Plastic Bread Bags on My Feet

Greetings fellow travelers,
As I was falling asleep last night I was thinking about the importance of being real as I travel through these 40 days. I don't think anyone wants the pollyanna version of my experience. Day two arrived and it did not feel as sparkly as day one. Hmmm........did I want to be this real this quickly? I guess so. I am not currently living in the home or the climate that I would prefer. Most days I am very trusting that this is where I need to be right now and I will move in the perfect time. I have had a tendency to postpone happiness in my life - anyone have that problem? I save the good towels, the good dishes, the new scarf - waiting for some special time. I guess I learned this from my Grandmother who lived through the Depression. When she died we found all kinds of brand new things that she was saving for a special time and then they never got used. Isn't that crazy? It is all special. We should be breaking out the fine China when we have take out or peanut butter and jelly. Every moment we have the joy and privelege to be alive is spectacular and although it is sometimes hard to maintain that high level exuberance in every single moment I do feel that is the ultimate goal. So....back to my living situation....living here even though I have known for sometime that I would be moving has been a huge lesson for me to live in the now. To not fool myself into thinking I will be happier when.... (fill in the blank) or that some moment in the future is going to be more special than this moment I have right now. Some days this is easier than others. Today was a harder day. The cool thing is that even when I don't feel so okay with everything I am still aware that God is present. When I wipe the slate clean in my mind I can begin again. My discouragement or unhappiness is a direct result of thinking things should be different than they are. One of the best remedies for this is to put myself in a different environment. So the baby and my older son Greg and I went for a snack and a trip to church (remember - that is really Barnes and Noble.) We got to spend time with our friend Sharlyn who you will hear about and see pictures of as this journey unfolds. When we left there I heard something tell me to drive home a different way. I found myself in my original hometown of Brooktondale. I had my camera and these pictures are some of what I saw. The water is where I used to swim as a child, I can't believe that my Aunt would let my cousins and I walk down here and swim alone and then take an even further walk to the market for popsicles - ALONE. The oldest one being 11 or 12. The playground is where I went to nursery school and that is the same exact playground. I am thinking that thing must be loaded with lead paint. I am still here though. Probably because by the time I got my mittens tucked in just right to my snowsuit and my boots buttoned up perfectly it would be time to come back in. True story. I rarely made it out to play because everything had to be just right. Hmmm... those issues surface early huh? I grew up in the time where we wore rubber boots with the side clasps and before we put our feet in the boots we put them inside used plastic bread bags. We were recycling so young. It was really not too comfy and within minutes your sock was squished down and your foot was directly on the plastic. It wasn't long before that was one big sweaty mess and pretty soon the sock and the plastic bag were wadded up in the toe area of the boot and you just had your bare foot inside the nasty rubber boot. It is freaking me out just to write that. For a young girl who was trying to make a fashion statement along with having a few sensory issues it was just easier to stay inside. Can you imagine???? So here is that playground and my four year old self played there 35 years ago. I like to think about how my spirit is the same exact spirit. Sometimes I try to get a movie going in my head of my younger self and watch this young girl discover her world. It is good to love you inner child. When I hear the voice of blame or shame trying to get the best of me it helps to remember that young sweet freckled face girl who just wanted her socks to stay on her feet. I just want to pick her up and say "you will still get your chance outside and I will help you until your socks feel just right". It makes sense that I haven't always gone for the fun, imagine finally being ready to play with your friends but they are all on their way back in and now you can't go out. I am not having a pity party but it is so interesting to see how these earlier experiences begin to cloud our perception and drive our behavior. I saw myself sitting on the slide and I saw God with her big blue eyes full of wonder and her chubby little cheeks which she never worried if they were fat. She was just right and still is. The other picture is the front of the church where I was baptized. The place where my parents promised to teach me about God. In our family it was more of a ritual than anything else and for most of my early years I believed in the Sky Daddy version of God. Thank God that is in the past. The picture of the house is the very first place I ever lived. My father built that house but we haven't lived there in over 37 years. So I guess today was about going back to the beginning. It is sometimes good to take a look at your past and honor it for what it was. It is also good to know that anything we tell ourselves about the past is part fact and part fiction. Some of us spend our whole lives living in our story. This can be very limiting and confining. Nothing that happened in the past can control our future unless we allow it. I learned so much about this by reading a book called Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping. I HIGHLY recommend it. It changed the entire way I view the process of forgiveness. Please read it. I think there should be a required reading list to participate in life. They have them in college, why not the college of life? The final picture is of a closed down bar that I used to go to with my Dad. My father is a contractor and Saturdays is when he did estimates. I would go with him and when he was done we would go here. It was owned by a family friend named John. The name of the bar was Honest Johns. I would drink Shirley Temples and my father would have beer and I would play a bowling game and eat pretzels. Now I could get into a whole story about my Dad being an alcoholic and how awful to let his child sit in a bar... when really it was kind of fun and times were different then. It was an era of a certain kind of naivte' - I Dream of Jeannie, bell bottoms, casseroles and hanging out at bars with your Dad. I choose to remember those times fondly and I remember feeling really loved. So I guess that pretty much sums up this day. I know the pictures make it look like I live in Siberia but really it is just upstate New York in March. The month of gray. Gray pavement, gray trees, gray water, gray skies and sometimes gray people. I know that the sky is an eternal blue under that gray and I know spring is coming. I can feel it. The cool thing about this time of year is that for many months you can't really smell anything outside because your nose hairs are frozen together, but starting in mid March we will have days that the earth begins to thaw and there is a smell that I wish I could bottle. It smells like dirt. Dirt smells really, really good in this part of the world. I mean really good. It reminds me of my childhood. It reminds me of swimming with my cousins, eating popsicles, swinging on swings with plastic bags on my feet and drinking Shirley Temples with my Dad on Saturday afternoon. God, how I love my Dad. Thank you for my childhood with all of it's perfect imperfections.
Here's to childhood - we survived it.
Love,
Kimberly
Quote of the Day:
"When the solution is simple, God is answering." Albert Einstein