Heal Today...Gone Tomorrow

Fort McHenry cannon looking toward

the Francis Scott Key bridge

where my uncle took his life

Pss. 30:2  “O LORD my God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast healed me.”

Heels today… gone tomorrow

You ever have one of those days where everything is going along fine. Then you see something and reality smacks you upside the head? We’re doing some fall cleaning here; we get to the cluttered closet and there sits a box of shoes. Heels that I’ve never worn. 

I said, “I have to get rid of that entire box.” 
He replied, “Well when you can walk again, we’ll pull them back out of the box.”  

Tears filled my eyes and kept on filling. The reality is…I’ll never be able to walk normal again. Just thought I’d share that with you all as I release some of this anguish I’m lugging around.

I used to love wearing high heels, not real high, just a classy kind of heel with jeans or a skirt; then about four years ago, with too many Omaha trips (eight hours round trip) high-heel wearing came to a screeching halt. I remember going to the doctor and she sent me to the hospital for some x-rays and a day later it was explained that I had lower lumbar facet joint arthritis. Sure, some meds and a highly paid chiropractor could offer some relief, but that's just it, a false relief, not a healing plan.

Here I was, still enjoying my youth and am told that I have arthritis and as many of you know, that is a chronic disability that doesn’t just go away. I had tried to wear my lower heels and even they were awkward to walk in and the limp in my stride didn’t sync with a low heel. I was relinquished to tennis shoes and even they were getting uncomfortable mainly in the summertime heat. I did buy some comfy sandals by Earth Spirit (yes, WalMart brand) but don’t ya know, I can’t wear them in the winter now can I? 

I have my up and down days where I feel sorry for myself and the me I once was but have to learn to accept that this is the new me and whom God created.  But when we were cleaning out the closet and the box with my heels in it passed me by, I cried. I admit it, it hurt to see a part of myself shoved in the basement never to be seen again. I think my husband was trying to make me feel good when he said the words, “When you walk again.” The reality was and is, I’ll never walk normal again.

My dear friends try to comfort me, “there is Hope,” they say. My first thought was yeah when I get to heaven and can run free! They mean well, they really do and I won’t for one minute minimize the love I feel for them or from them, and the comfort they bring to my life but understand, I was one on the go woman all of my life. You don’t fit into the same jeans you wore twenty years ago by NOT being an overly active woman. Then yesterday…

Heal today… gone tomorrow.

I don’t know what the universe is trying to tell me when yesterday I answered my phone, thinking for one idiotic moment it was my sister calling to tell me about her daughter. No, it wasn’t her, it was an old friend who called me last year some time (he got the number from my mother) and wanted to rehash the past just like he did last year when I stopped answering my phone because I AM NOT ABOUT MY PAST!

I told him last year that I didn’t want to talk about that stuff but he just kept going on and on, “Do you remember…” You name the memory, I remember it with all its hurts and pains that I let go of, in vivid painstaking detail. His call started that way this time in asking where my ex-husband lived (they were friends) and talking about my abuse until I finally said, “I’m really busy right now.” (Joni is a terrible liar! Luckily I WAS busy!)

He said, “I better let you go or I’ll keep talking and talking.”
My instant reply was, “yes you will but call me when I have FREE minutes, like the weekend.” I seriously was trying to hang up without hurting his feelings because that’s just the way I am, then and now, I don’t like to hurt ANYONE. I just wish he had shown me the same consideration because I know I won’t be answering the phone this weekend. 

For thirteen years I wrestled with my pained past. When I first left Baltimore and left my family and past behind, I got caught up in a tornado of healing as memories whizzed passed and choked me into anxiety attacks where running off alone in the rain on darkened streets were my only solace. I would lie in bed cradling my pillow as tears soaked the very sheets where I slept. I was in a better place but it was a place of healing that had to be measured by agonizing sickened memories of the past.

Haunting is the only way to describe the lingering past. A ghost that would appear out of nowhere when I least expected it and scare me into a non-drug induced panic attack. I don’t take drugs for my pain and dealing with what I’m dealt in a meditative God loving fashion is all I’ve ever known to do. 

A close friend once told me that I needed to just let go of those memories and the people who hold those memories if all they’re there for is to hurt me, why hold on? Yes, that meant family and old friends who think rehashing an excruciating pain-filled past is what the future is all about. 

My now and my future is all about healing. My pain is washed away with every rainfall and I release the past as if it never existed into a tornadic funnel to be released wherever it may go. I will not allow thirteen years of healing to be scrubbed by one phone call of the bitter past. I face my tomorrows with the prayerful meditation that I have known to grow me into a hopeful tomorrow.

I woke this morning only to be hit with news of an earthquake where a dear friend lives. I prayed. The universe will leave something in my life called HOPE, LOVE and COMPASSION; he arrived to let me know he and his family are well. 

Praise be to God!

Atmosphere

The wishbone will never replace the backbone.
- Will Henry

In writing, it is all about atmosphere. When you have a story to tell you’re not going to have the setting in a grassy knoll and just leave your characters there, no, you’re going to give them an atmosphere.

An atmosphere lends to the story what milk lends to cookies. And a good atmosphere lends what cookies dipped in milk does. Can everyone say, YUM? As a reader, I want to walk through the park with the writer, I don’t just want to see grass, I want to smell it and taste it.

If we can’t paint a picture for our reader then we are missing our mark. Even in our non-fictional tales there has to be an element of atmosphere where if the reader is sitting there with cookies, his one hand is seeking out the milk to dip it in as he is reading because he is so enthralled with your words.

As writers, we know that the very first sentence will lure the reader in like Lucifer to Eve. It will be life altering if you can hold your readers attention and give to them a story that will keep them reading page after page. I wonder sometimes if God knew of this concept and that is why he made the bible so atmospheric. With the very beginning, “God breathed life into the void.” To the powerful ending, “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly.”
 
I mean come on, there is power in those words and every reader is moved. And every writer wants to emulate that power of the written word, so that our readers for many years to come are still wanting more; loving our words and tasting them years down the line.
 
Atmosphere..it is what spills into your readers hearts, and no one is left there to clean up the mess except your hero or heroine. I myself like to give my readers little bits and pieces to nibble on throughout the story; a leg to stand on so to speak. I like to give them an entrance into the unexpected, then deal the unexpected, make the words do a ghostly dance in their minds, then I go for the cha cha cha...and boom, the story gets completed with a bow.
 
One of my favorite fictional tales is The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. Not only is the story good, but the atmosphere is well, you guessed it, haunting. From the opening scene of Eleanor and her paranoia, to the entry of the supposed haunted house to the banging and rapping of ghosts to the climactic ending where all the characters are consumed with the final showdown.
 
This is just a well written story and can really give the novice writers a new perspective on the inverted check mark that we read about so often. What are you going to do writers, open your story with the same old same old tried and true...or lend your tale a handful of atmosphere to kick it in the rear and get it moving?
 
Write Right...most importantly!