Dearest All,

Welcome to post #88.

Sometimes I think one of the great miracles of my life is just that I’ve been able to put my fingers to keyboard to type out these small essays every other week. Like most of us my life is a convoluted mixture of the mundane and the significant. Even so, I have still jittered out a piece every other Tuesday, with the regular and rhythmic rat-a-tat tat of a Morse code tap, eighty-eight times in a row. I am never sure I can do it. And then somehow I do.

I do because I need to write. I write as a respite, to jump off the merry go round for a bit and actually think, even if I’m never quite sure what I’m going to think about. I write sometimes simply to bash back fears. I write because I’m not terribly brave and in some ways it’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done.

But today’s post is written for a different reason entirely.

Today’s post is to say thank you.

If you’re reading, and especially good at reading between the lines, every single post relates to something that has actually been happening in my life at the very moment in time each piece is written. Most of those connections are a bit obscure. This one however is very straightforward.

It has to do with winter house terrors involving freezing temperatures, freezing pipes and being frozen with fear about the anticipation of what will happen next.

But I will tell you exactly what happened next. A whole series of people who came and helped: Dawn, our broker from Caldwell Banker, a woman who thought to call with cold weather tips that helped protect us in a house she helped us buy over a year ago, our friend Ralph, the apartment superintendent, who dropped everything to stanch a veritable waterfall in my basement and was at my door before I could sharply exhale breath, and the Robison 3 AM boiler fixers who went above and beyond to help us figure out a water piping system in our basement that resembled nothing less than the snarl of most of my knitting efforts.

Leonardo DaVinci said “Water is the driver of Nature.” I completely agree. But I’ll be honest. I would never have argued the point anyway.

So on this scheduled blog day Tuesday I want to thank all of the kind people above who are so very good and so very decent. We are beyond grateful for your help. And I would like to take a moment as well to thank you, Dear Readers, for your kindness reading along with me, for connecting me, for thinking along with me. You’ve created a bit of a miracle yourselves. What you’ve done is make me feel not quite so alone in the world.

Thank you very much. Until next time then.

As ever, C

Photo: Casey and Annie Rose waiting out the weekend storm.