Careful and Surprising Steps

•  I can open and close cupboard doors, answer and talk on the phone, go to the bathroom, rattle a pot lid, fart ( who? moi?), drop a piece of paper — all without a major episode — without explaining what happened, without getting trapped in never never land about what I was doing, without having to say It’s OK,  I’m alright. The freedom is still slowly expanding in my head.

My mother had a blood clot on her brain and when they took it away (because they had to; it was huge) her brain expanded so fast she had a disastrous stroke. Gotta to be careful with this freedom stuff. Don’t want to lose what I am gaining by going too far too fast.

• I realise I am siding out of the bedroom, glancing out of the corner of my eye at where he used to lie, and I don’t want to think — or write–about it.
• There is a green canvass bag of mine that Don used, successfully, for a few years as a man bag that helped keep his things, the ones with a tendency to get lost every couple of hours (sic) — wallet,  Ipod,  handkerchiefs, glasses,  together. It was lying in a corner. I picked it up and tossed it in the garbage. Later I thought, oh I could use that again, but visualising it, decided, No. I don’t want to carry all those memories on my arm every day. The bag stays in the garbage.
• Listening to a song about love of the coast, the trees, the sea, I was surprised and relieved not to feel the familiar tug of guilt when I thought of how much I love this land, which was not my beloved’s place of heart, that being the Madawaska Valley of Ontario.