TheBanyanTree: The Winds of Change

[Margaret R. Kramer]

5/13/05
Hi Love:
 Have a safe flight home and see you when you get here. Nothing again to do
at work, so I left at 12:30pm. I bought some sweet corn at work, it was only
6 for a buck. I figure with you home we could eat it.
  Tell me some Ideas for me to get you for your birthday, I thought and
thought but came up blank. I thought maybe flowers but then you have some
here ALL READY. SO THINK UP SOMETHING FOR ME .YOU ARE A HARD PERSON TO BUY
FOR.
 SEE YOU WHEN YOU GET HOME GEORGE AND I love you!
 Ray and whats'name!

The lowest temperature on my thermometer this week was –23.6 degrees
Fahrenheit.  That’s cold.  Bone chilling cold.  There’s cold and there’s
bone chilling cold.  You can do things in the cold, like go for walks or ice
fishing or sledding.  But bone chilling cold, man, you can’t do anything
outside, because if you expose any part of your skin to the air, within
minutes you’re in extreme pain, ready to get frost bit.  Ouch.  So you keep
your trips outside very short and you wear about every garment you own just
to stay warm.

So we hunker down in Minnesota during these bone chilling times.  We stay
inside.  We play board games.  We cook a lot.  And then we get cabin fever,
because we’re sick of being inside all the time.

The worst part about bone chilling cold is that when I drive home from my
second job at 10:30 pm, the roads are very dangerous.  We get black ice,
which forms from the exhaust from cars and then freezes to the surface of
the roads.  You can’t see it and when you hit a patch, you can spin off into
a ditch or hit other cars.  I had a few white knuckle drives home from work
this week, almost tip toeing down the freeway.

The best part about this bone chilling cold weather is that I finally feel
like my brain is thawing out.  I feel like I’m coming back into myself
again, although not exactly myself, because a huge chunk is missing, but I
feel more like ME than I have since February 25, 2008.  I’m more on top of
things than I have been, like work.  I seem to be able to actually
concentrate at work (my main job) again.

The bad news is that I changed my tax filing status from married to single
in 2009 and my payroll tax jumped up to $113 a paycheck!  Good gracious!
Now I understand why Congress wanted to keep people married by making
married people pay less taxes, but I didn’t ask to be single, so why not a
widow/widower tax that’s the same as what married people pay.  I’m barely
making ends meet as it is, and now I get $226 less dollars a month.  Do I
have to work THREE jobs?

Another change, which is not monetary, but emotional, is that I decided to
stop going to grief group.  When I first started going to grief group almost
a year ago, it was my lifeline to sanity.  Each week represented one more
week I was able to keep my wits about me without Ray standing by my side.
And I made good friends through it.  But now that I’m further out from Ray’s
death, I don’t know.  The group doesn’t have the value it once did. Now it’s
more of an irritant to go as far as time is concerned than a necessity.

Sometimes I think they need an advanced grief group.  A grief group for
people who are still mourning, but don’t need to meet every week, but maybe
once a month or so, just to touch base.  I don’t want to dwell on Ray’s
death all the time and I don’t want to dwell on what it’s like being without
him, but I do want to concentrate on the positive things in my life, even
while the hole in my middle is filling up and healing.

I need my Saturdays.  I need the time, and it was so good to get up this
morning, and not have to rush through my housework in order to get to grief
group on time.

So what did I do with my first grief group free Saturday?  I had breakfast
with the boys and Asher.  I cleaned up the house and picked up dog poop,
because now it’s just cold, instead of bone chilling cold.  I went for a
walk around Lake Como.  I paid bills.  My heat/electric bill for December
was $418.  Wonderful.  I did laundry.

And finally I made the biggest change of all, I wrote up a profile for
match.com.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
margaret.kramer at polarispublications.com
www.polarispublications.com

You can clutch the past so tightly to your chest that it leaves your arms
too full to embrace the present.
~Jan Glidewell
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