Life Gets Crazy, Pause and Be Grateful

Sometimes the speed of life seems to increase suddenly.  You are moving along, trying to keep up and do good things every day, maybe even thinking you might soon catch up with things so some extra good things might be able to happen and then…life speeds up even faster

This spring when so much was going on, it finally stopped snowing, we were late with the garden, we were finally getting somewhere with Second Daughter’s migraines, there was a trip being planned to Tennessee to get a puppy for her to train as a psychiatric service dog, it kept raining and raining, grandbabies to play with, and so much else to do, then it was that the flooding started.

It wasn’t flooding like many other folks around the world have experienced this spring, it didn’t affect our living quarters, it didn’t endanger our lives in any way, it just flooded the septic system once again and flooded our basement/crawl space .  We spent Mother’s Day pumping water off the lawn so we could take showers and pumping water out of the crawlspace under our house.

Under our house is a foundation dug 4 feet deep with concrete walls but a dirt floor.  The original owner covered that dirt with plastic sheeting and carpet pieces so for the 20+ years we have lived here, we have safely stored our “treasures” down there with no problem.  It has always been the perfect storage space because the humidity and temperature levels remain pretty constant summer and winter.  It is vented and there are fans for airflow so it has worked pretty well up until this spring.

So what happened?  Well, our neighbors all had floods in their basements as well and the water level never would go below a certain level, so we have concluded that the water table rose to that level and stayed there for several weeks (it seems to be receding somewhat now, we don’t have to pump water every day anymore). Don’t forget our clay soil doesn’t allow water to drain away very fast.  There’s really not much that can be done about that but to wait for the drying out period that is part of every year here.

It meant that we spent several days hauling all of our belongings up from down there to outside to dry or be thrown away.  H.H. took several days of vacation to lead us in this “little” project.  We were exhausted and sick of the swampy smell.  We got a dumpster and filled it twice before we managed to stack what was left in the garage.

Life still seems to be whizzing by like looking out of the car window at 120 mph.  We still got the garden planted, our plants are all still growing fantastically as well as our abundant weeds, we drove from Montana to Tennessee to pick up the puppy and back in 5 days.   We still have jobs to go to and people to care for but when I look at the pictures I have taken, I see times when I stopped to see some pretty great blessings.

I chose this photo for this blog because this is Gramma’s garden.  Remember that H.H.’s mom lives in an apartment attached to our garage.  This is the first time in 2 years she has felt like cleaning out her gardens.  One day as I hurried to tend the chickens so I could get back to cleaning up flood mess, I stopped to look at her progress and realized what a blessing it was that she is doing well for now.

I found a picture of a beautiful rainbow after a horrendous storm, pictures of 4 generation family picnics, the dogs peacefully coexisting, new scenery from our trip, a butterfly, the blessed rain, and more pictures of my wonderful family.  Every time I pause to look at my blessings, I find them in great abundance and it makes for a great rest stop as I speed along.  It gives reason and purpose to the insanity that I feel. I hope that there are such times in your life as well.

God Bless you all.

For anyone interested Second Daughter has started keeping a video log of her progress with her new puppy and you can check it out on youtube with this link.

Psychiatric Service Dog training