STUFF

Have you noticed all the articles showing up on Facebook lately, warning we Boomers that our grown kids really don't want all of that stuff we've spent so many years accumulating? I especially liked the cartoon where an older gentleman rolls up the door on his rented storage space, which is packed to the brim, and tells his son "Someday this will all be yours!" The father is beaming with pride, but the son looks absolutely horrified!

It got me to thinkin' about all that "stuff". The kind so many people spend their lives accumulating, working to pay for, arranging, sorting, and protecting. My mom was a great collector of stuff -- to the point that it was the most important thing in her life. It was her identity, her claim to fame, her biggest accomplishment. Without it, she was a nobody. Which might explain why she was so dead-set against getting rid of any of it when she got older.  Eighty-some-odd years old, and never dressed or left the house except for doctors appointments, but she wasn't about to part with even one of her almost 100 pairs of shoes -- and their matching purses! These pictures below are from the final purge. The one that came after the one where we moved them out of their house, and the one where we moved them out of my sister's big house and into her smaller house, and the one after Dad died and we moved Mom into assisted living, and the one after she moved from assisted living to the nursing home.

This was all so odd to me, since all I want in the world is to be free of all this clutter. I really don't want to be remembered for my stuff. I just want to be remembered for all the fun adventures I shared with the people I cared most about. I feel confident that my kiddos, my hubby, my Muses and my lifelong besties have a pretty good store of those memories built up, so my main goal now is to create as many as I can with my grandkids, in whatever time I have left.

'Cause you just never know, do you, when that time will be up?

ONE MORE DAY

Last Wednesday we met this little tu-tued cutie when coming out of Hays City Store. I believe her name was LuLu.

Her mama called her The Ambassador of Smiles, and she was just what my hubby needed that day!

Not long ago, I looked at my calendar and realized that, early next year, Hubby will have gone Five Years without having to be in the hospital. Now, that may not seem like much to you, but for us it's a bit of a miracle. If you've been reading this blog for long, you might remember the string of bypass surgery, stroke, being life-flighted for bleeding in his brain, blacking-out episodes that led to a pacemaker - a pacemaker that came with a terrible staph infection, etc., etc. At one point he confessed that he didn't think he would live to see either of our kids married, much less grandkids, and it nearly broke my heart. But look at us now!

So why did Hubby need the ambassador of smiles? Well, back before Christmas he started having problems with constant drainage and coughing. Cedar Fever, right? Everyone gets it here that time of year. But when everyone else got better, he didn't. It just went on, and on, and on. I made him go to the doctor and he was put on antibiotics a couple of times for sinus infections, but the hacking always came back. Finally they did an MRI and referred him to an ENT, who told him that one of his nasal passages was completely closed, and he had enlarged "turbinates", both of which prevented proper drainage, which leads to sinus infections (and sometimes to sleep apnea, which he also has). The cure was a simple day surgery that only takes about an hour and a half -- a day surgery where they break your nose and rearrange it, ream out your sinuses, and leave you with a toothache in every tooth, dripping blood from your nose and down your throat, and unable to breath through your nose at all from all the splints and what-have-you that they stuffed up there, barely able to eat or sleep. For Five. Whole. Days.

At least he finally got to ditch the gauze-filled sling under his nose!

Four down. One to go!