September

Since the first or second of this month, we have had:

Three serious E.R. visits:
One for my husband's kissing the face of death with C02 poisoning

One for my married daughter's oxygen sat issues down in the eighties due to asthma, and I drove her to the E.R. at 3 a.m. or so, reminding me of many frightening trips of a similar nature when she was a wee tot.

And one for my dad.  He was up wandering around at o'dark thirty, as he is wont to do, which is why my mother locks the doors from the inside.  He fell down and couldn't get up again.  He has done this before, although mostly he's just fallen out of bed and not been able to get back up.  Partly it's a mobility issue, but mostly I think it's a confusion issue.  This time, however, he also smacked his head and cut it when he fell and he wasn't quite himself, whoever himself is these days.  He wasn't talking, nor was he very responsive.  My husband and son-in-law got him off the floor and into a bed, but then it was decided the ambulance would be a good call.  They menfolk went to work, assuming the ambulance workers could handle it.

The ambulance service sent two women- middle aged, says my mother.  Old, says my 15 year old.  Whatever their ages, they were unable to operate the gurney and get my 6'3" or so tall father out the door and onto the ambulance.  I will add that all the doors in my mother's house are wheelchair accessible.  And my 13 and 15 year old went next door to help and managed to get the 'broken' or 'caught' gurney uncaught (because, they say, there was nothing wrong with it but operator error).  At the hospital they determined he has a concussion, and sometime Monday (today) they will do another CAT scan and maybe an MRI, or some other alphabet soup test.  The doctor thinks it's time for Mother to consider other housing arrangements for him, because he is very difficult to move, maneuver, and manipulate into doing things he has no desire to do.

So, three E.R. trips, three weeks.

Furthermore, in the realm of personal health, the flu visited all of us except, and this is no small mercy, the Cherub.  It seems to have hit the HM and me twice, which hardly seems fair. Also, my mom reports she believes my dad began to display signs of the stomach bug in the hospital, which is also no small mercy as it's better for my mom to have the hospital staff have to clean up that mess.


I've had five doctor appointments and/or time consuming medical tests (compare this to usually not visiting the doctor that many times for the whole family in a *year*) and Pip had two or three, mostly because we changed doctors and this one takes his job more seriously than the last.


I seem to be fighting off the start of one of those nasty head colds that makes your head feel like it weights fifty pounds and all you want to do is lay it down.

The van died and had to be towed. We had to fix the tires as well. And our married kids each had car trouble- one just got her car into the shop and the other just got it out and is selling it. Plus Shasta's truck is making funny noises.


Then there was a major upheaval/rearranging of the upstairs. I would not list this but it was M.A.J.O.R. and necessitated Jenny's swain having to rebuild some shelves for us and the full rearranging took something like three or four days to finish, plus my husband and I had to have our perennial, er, *discussion* about how his speakers trump any other furniture arrangement I have in mind (at the moment we compromised, which means each of us is dissatisfied and feel the other one won). it also involved sorting through several hundred books, looking them up at Amazon to see if they worth anything, listing those that were for sale, sending those that were not out to the garage for later removal to a thrift shop. This really is one emotional blow after another to a book lover, you know? Say yes.

We had a singing at our house, and we had company-company (the kind you have to clean the house for) twice. No, wait. We had to cancel one set of company-company because of the flu, but not before we'd cleaned the house anyway. We did have the Striderling and his parents over for an overnight stay, which was fun, and we had a friend out to help rearrange the house, plus the swain came for two weekends, plus several of the young folk stayed the night after the singing, plus the little boys a couple of times, plus the apple orchard/pumpkin patch trip combined with thrift shop and grocery store shopping.. I don't know how many extra people that means we fed, I used to try to count them, but I gave up a while ago.

My fifth child turned 21. Yes, this is traumatic.

We had one more set of overnight company come stay with us last night or at least, I assume they did, since I am writing this on Sunday afternoon and they are not expected until late Sunday evening.

We also had the gospel meeting,  an overnight camping trip for the guys,my son went hunting on his first realio, trulio hunting trip (there was one practice run previously, but this was the real deal) with my husband's boss Saturday morning at 4 a.m. so then of course I thought cheerful thoughts about hunting accidents until I fell asleep and was still in bed when he got back without having seen a deer until they were driving back home and spotted, oh, I don't know, four. They went out again several hours later until long after dark and again saw nothing.

I'm writing this on Sunday afternoon and I leave for a week long camping trip with my husband, our two youngest, and about 300 Christian homeschoolers that I don't know all that well, but I'll be sharing a cabin with a dozen of them.   I am not packed for camp and I have about six seven eight nine loads of laundry to fold on my bed, and I am not exaggerating. I have a huge writing project I am one month behind on and there is no internet at the camp. Plus, I am so not a social person and the entire trip fills me with angst and in the wee hours of the night anguish for reasons we do not discuss so about that laundry... My husband and I slept in the guest bed two three nights in a row because I did not get to the folding of the laundry, unless I don't get to it Sunday night, in which case it will be four nights, so naturally, because I have so much to do I decided to go ahead and clean out my closet and do some rearranging of the contents.  Plus, write a blog post.

Also, one of the medical tests I had this month reveals I have a low functioning thyroid and thus no energy or stamina to speak of and another reveals I have arthritis in lots of places and thus lots of pain (neither were really a surprise and I'm still waiting the results of the rest of the tests).

And actually, I feel pretty good about all this, mainly because it puts the unfolded laundry in perspective and explains why, no, thank-you very much, years of *no* energy were not a sin.

Also the torn achilles tendon the previous doctor diagnosed is just a bone spur. On the achilles tendon. So it still hurts just the same. Plus I have bone spurs on my knee, but not on the one that hurts the most, go figure.

In the month of September I have also listened to you-tube videos of Old McDonald had a farm at least a million times because my grandson the Dread Pirate Grasshopper likes them,although as his mother points out I have nobody to blame for this except myself and I plead guilty, plus  we have sung all about the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, the Farmer in the Dell, the lady who sailed away on the crocodile, the five little ducks who did not obey their mama, the doggy in the window, the monkeys who jumped on the bed, the monkey who chased the weasel, and the monkey who drove his grandmama crazy with Old MacDonald had a farm but of course that one isn't really a folk song it is autobiographical and I made it up on the spot.

And the clothes on the bed? They are not folding themselves, nor are my bags packing themselves, nor is my writing project writing itself (because this, o best beloved, is most assuredly not it).

But there were cookies in the oven when I started writing this, and Jenny made Nutmeg muffins and banana cake, and there are grandbabies I have snuggled with and I sold nearly 100 dollars worth of books this month most of which Pip kindly mailed for me including one at the very last minute on Saturday morning when she really wanted to rest.

Also I am arguing with my husband about where his speakers go instead of burying them with him, a blessing of which I am more acutely aware than most, and a grace I do not deserve.

And my 21 year old took my beleaguered mother out to lunch and my 15 year old volunteered to babysit for the young marrieds at church tomorrow night and my son may bring him a deer for the freezer this month and if he doesn't, he is having a wonderful time and I am quite sure when he came home Saturday morning he was two inches taller, and I picked delicious crisp apples with Blynken and Nod,  and God is good, no matter what.In fact, I often ponder if my dad's dementia isn't a mercy as well.  Like King John of the great big India rubber ball in A. A. Milne's poem, I have to say my father was not a good man, but perhaps it is a mercy to him to be in his second childhood.

Backward, turn backward, Oh Time! in your flight
Make me a child again--just for tonight!

Was never a poem to which I could connect, and no doubt his childhood was worse than mine, but maybe getting a second childhood is what he needed after all.

It's September, and my husband is alive, and I am richly blessed.  It's September, and the days are polished with a morning haze.


It's September, and the Equuschick has new prescriptions for new asthma medications (which she cannot currently afford, but it's a step in the right direction) and she can breathe.  It's September and:

The goldenrod is yellow;
The corn is turning brown;
The trees in apple orchards
With fruit are bending down.

It's September and I have see all my Progeny step up and pitch in with blessed acts of service.  It's September and The scales have tipped and the days have more of early fall than early summer in them.

It's September and we are blessed with and by so many good friends whom we do not deserve.
It's September, and summer's a step behind us,
And autumn's a thought before...

It's September, and we can sing, Jenny has a swain we all love, we had an emergency fund to take care of the van,  The Striderling, oh, the Striderling, how much hard work he and his parents have to do and yet how he thrives.  How we have been richly blessed by perhaps dozens of wonderful women sharing the bounty of their own human milk with him (we're picking up several hundred ounces this week, delivered from donors in several states..

It's September, so let us, for his golden corn,
Send up our thanks to God!
 

I wish I had the gift for poetry, but I must be content with the gift of poetry. Which is also no small mercy.