New Adventures

Ok, this may sound silly, but here's some major triumphs from the last few months.

People tell me all the time how brave I am.  It actually drives me crazy because I don't feel brave.  I always thought that brave was a choice.  You know, you are in a certain situation and you choose: either be chicken shit, or be brave.  So what I'm doing now, facing life, I don't feel that I'm being brave, but I'm also not being chicken shit... so it's just confusing.  I don't feel that I ever made the choice.  Yes, this is going to be hard, but I'm going to be brave and do it anyway.  I don't know.  Maybe I need a better definition of brave.  I'd like to let that be a word that I used to describe myself.

But I digress.  There have been a few small, seemingly silly things that I can own that I have bravely conquered.  This is something that I choose to think of as the adventure of my new life, and meditate on that, rather than thinking of these things that I have to do now and how bad life sucks.  Sometimes the adventure thoughts win out.  Those are the good days.

I mowed the lawn.  I bought a condo when I was single.  This was a very intentional choice.  It had a huge balcony, a pool, and someone else was responsible for snow removal.  The big thing was, though, there was no lawn to mow.  I had no desire to have to take care of one.  I stopped living in the condo when Sawan, my husband, died, and rented a duplex with *gulp* a yard.  I'm responsible for mowing it.  I dreaded it and dreaded it and finally bit the bullet and just did it.  I called my dad for a refresher course, I hadn't mowed a lawn in 15 years, give or take.  Then, I went out there and mowed it.  Honestly, it just wasn't that hard.  The hardest thing about it was grieving for the husband that I wished had been mowing it for me, but I can still do it.  I see women mowing their yards all the time and they can't ALL be widows.  I cried a little, but at the end of my sweaty chore, I couldn't figure out why there wasn't a band playing or a ribbon to cross at a finish line...I had done it, I won!

I pulled the meat off the bones of a whole chicken.  I am totally sicked out by this process.  Sawan always did it for me, and somehow he always did it really cleanly and perfectly.  I thought that I would never have to deal with it in my whole life.  Not quite how it turned out.   So anyway, I needed some chicken.  I bought the rotisserie chicken from Safeway and brought it home and pulled it off as best I could.  I gave myself lots of grace to throw away the stuff that I couldn't handle, but the fact that I was doing it instead of having Sawan do it for me was a big fat deal.  That chicken never tasted so good.  It tasted like triumph.

I replaced the handle on the toilet.  Now, this is actually something that our landlord should have done, but that would be a whole other blog.  At any rate, the toilet handle had gone un-fixed for way too long and I thought I could figure out how to do it, so I replaced it myself.  Once again, would have loved for my handy husband to have done it, but I'm learning that I can do things myself.  And it mostly works, too, you just have to jiggle the handle after every flush to make sure it won't run.