Go Easy On Me...

There ain't no gold in this river

That I've been washin' my hands in forever

I know there is hope in these waters,

But I can't bring myself to swim when I'm drowning in this silence. ~Adele

 

There comes the time of year here, when the leaves are more absent than rustling in the trees.  When the cold sets in, and the green retreats underground to hibernate for the winter.  While Fall is the favorite of all seasons for me, the dark sets in so early and the chill through the 75 year old house can't help but make the walls creak, as well as my old bones. 

There are many happy things in the Fall.  My birthday.  Oldest's birthday; he's 21 this year. Thanksgiving.  The Holidays. The smell of cinnamon, pine, and spice throughout the stores and shops. Gratitude. Togetherness. Yet, every year it comes.

The weight that falls upon my chest, stifling the breath I desperately need to rejuvenate myself, anxiety that falls heavy in my soul.  I am no stranger to depression, having battled through severe postpartum with both boys, barely emerging on the other side. But the Seasonal depression, is something different.  Not crippling, but just enough to impact my everyday.  Not enough to require medication, but enough to take notice.

I take solace in the fact that Oldest will be returning home after Christmas for a semester.  His internship is downtown, with little travel outside of our town. It will be nice to have him home again, an unexpected upside to his new school schedule. He's dependable, even keeled, and the dog really misses him.  

Youngest has made some clear decisions about his path going forward, he's actively taking his medications, and becoming more of himself.  Despite his old life is trying to pull him back, he is determined to move forward.  He's finishing his 3 weeks of school and for now, has decided to not reenroll.  It's just not for him. He's looking for a full time job, and is making more of a point to be involved with the family. As Hubs and I watched the Adele interview the other night, she was asked what she wanted for her son as he grew older.  Her reply was for him to just be a good person, that she had no expectations for him, just to be happy and good. It resonated with me because since Youngest was born I believed that he would do great things, but perhaps I need to accept that he could do great things, and for now just be okay now with him just being a good person, a happy person. We can see small glimpses of that now, and that in itself is no small feat. 

Work has been not as bad as it could be.  We have had more sunny days than rainy, and the chill thus far has been manageable. In years past I have, with some help, organized and spearheaded the shopping and wrapping of gifts for several kids in the foster care system. It became such a burden and headache that last year I stopped it completely. While I did my own thing, gave when I could, where I could, it just wasn't the same. This year I decided to take only 2 kids, and myself and 3 coworkers are splitting the list and making sure they get a good haul from Santa. A small thing, but manageable, to bring joy to our day and theirs. 

I am finding joy in the small things.  Going to lunch with a friend. Napping. Breathing when I can. Really tending to my plants, growing life inside while I can. Saying no. Stepping back. Counting the thirty five days to the darkest point, until we regain 2 minutes of sunshine daily, 15 minutes a week. But still, the anxiety, the depression is there. While Youngest and I are familiar, Hubs just doesn't get it. It's hard to explain that I just can't snap out of it, that even through the smiles and casual conversation, the weight and sense of impending doom is still there, lurking. 

Thirty five days.

Until then, go easy on me. 

Every Storm Runs Out Of Rain...

And wind...

And Power...

This is the sun over the fall foliage at the pond by the house. Pretty, no? It was especially pretty because this marked the first day after 3 of overcast rain and high winds that knocked out power for our area for days.  Nothing beats a good 'ole Nor'easter.  No names to our storms, they are just remembered by the aftermath they leave in their wake. This particular one was marked by most residents being completely unprepared, getting all their weather from an app on their phone, instead of turning on the actual news to see what was going on. The lines for gas were hours long.

The neighbor's house was hit by half a tree.  She doesn't live here during the week and despite the multitude of friends and family she has on the street and in the area, I was the first to tell her she had a tree on her house. She was panicked.  Knowing the whole neighborhood was out, and the lines weren't live, we cut the tree off her house and electric wires while we waited for Eversource to restore power. Thankfully, aside from her electrical conduit getting destroyed along with a small piece of the gutter, there was no actual damage to the house.

Trees blocked every street in the neighborhood.  The other side of our road had trees down on both sides making it impassable. So we took a walk with the chainsaw and cut one of them apart so people could get home from work. 

My beloved pond has some new obstacles to play on.  It may not look like much, but that's two trees nearly 70 feet in length. That green structure to the right is a large industrial swing set. The odd part about this storm is that nearly everything that fell was Oak, which of course is good to burn for the winter.  Needless to say many people, chain saws in hand, have already started foraging down trees.

The transformer boxes and grid for the neighborhoods were blown wide open for days...

This is the neighbor's house after we got the tree down.  We also foraged the big stuff for our Brother In Law to burn next winter...

This is perhaps my favorite picture though.  Since most of us didn't have power we do not know for sure, but we suspect there were many micro bursts in the area.  This tree (seen behind the telephone pole) was literally twisted off 50 feet up leaving the pole untouched, spun the crown of the tree up into the air, flipped it upside down and landed it like a hand. After assessing it we deemed it too dangerous to attempt on our own, and are waiting for the town to take care of it.  To get an idea of how massively unsafe this is, look at the car in the picture... It's going to be there for a while I suspect.  We're calling it the tee-pee.

We also helped the backyard neighbor cut up his trees that missed his cars by 5 feet. And we cleaned up the neighbor's tree on the other side of us, as his pear tree snapped on our lawn and was dangling.  

Did I mention we don't have a single tree in our yard and yet we spent 3 days hauling wood that wasn't ours? Yeah, good times.  But it's what you do when you live in a neighborhood. I delivered mail every day, and I contacted one of my customers who was away that a tree had fallen on their house as well.  Again, you would have though SOMEONE would have called her before day four, but no. 

Any hoo... we were without power for 3 days.  Which while unusual for us (we are on the circuit with the firehouse, church, and school, all of which are emergency havens) but according to my Facebook memories seems to happen every three years or so. We did have the advantage of having a generator, that neither of us knew how to use, but in an effort to save the freezers, we learned quickly. We had only 12 hours worth of gas, and little chance of getting more (see mass hysteria at the gas station since no one was prepared) but we managed to save everything but the milk in  the fridge.

We've also discovered that our other neighbor that weekends here is an electrician and he's agreed to hook the generator into our electrical panel so we can safely run nearly everything in the house next time. And I got an extra gas can so we'd have more than 12 hours of gas. It's the learning curve of adult hood, ya know?

So that's what's been going on here.  Wielding chainsaws, dodging tree branches whist delivering mail, icing my knee which has been horribly overworked, and trying to enjoy the sunshine as the chill of Fall settles in.