Kathy's Cadre Love handle is Speak Wonder and her favorite topic is Harbor Pilots. Today is caregiver day and I am experiencing my cuckoo clock. In the midst of winter, I needed a splash of yellow and I remembered I had these daffodils in my closet.
This year has tested our spirits and strengthened our wills. It's okay to experience deep emotion or to feel nothing at all. We have become mood surfers, riding the waves of despair and hope. Someday the world will gain momentum and a tapestry of color will unfurl.
Kathy Joy the daily encouragement Friday, August 7, 2020 for my workplace. Caregiver day is about those we love and support. It's also about us as caregivers. So be good to yourself, float yourself some grace, whatever that looks like.
Life. Life is heartbreaking, energizing, galvanizing, intimate, raw, and sometimes even beautiful. But it does not resemble anything we've ever known as normal. Good morning. It's 11 o' clock east coast time. I'm Kathy. My Cadre Love handle is Speak Wonder and my favorite topic is Harbor Pilots. Today is caregiver day and I am experiencing my cuckoo clock. Yes, in my tiny little apartment that I share with my corgi named Gracie, there are birds at my window. Overnight we had about 6 to 8 inches of snow and we're predicted to have about that same snowfall.
Today it is lake effect. Living here in Erie by Lake Erie, and I am very appropriately sipping a cup of hot cocoa with a scarf around my neck. Do you love my scarf? Have a friend, Diane, who makes these out of repurposed old sweaters. She just patches them together into these lovely scarves, all different colors. In the midst of winter, I needed a splash of yellow and I remembered I had these daffodils in my closet because they're not real. They sure do look real and I love them, so they will live beside my kitchen sink until I can get some real daffodils.
My favorite flower. I have a birthday at the end of this month and my mom, whom I caregiver to over the years, would often buy cut daffodils for me at the end of January. Unbelievable. She always found them. Always. And we talk about it and I will probably buy some for myself and bring them to the nursing home and share the splash of joyous yellow with mom. Back in 2020, I was given a task which became a joyful occupation for me, really. And that was to write a daily word of encouragement to my co workers and I sent it via email to over 200 recipients.
I keep reading Human Beings on this Planet. Dani Shapiro. She has a podcast, the Way We Live Now. Honesty. I like her ability to place loss and beauty side by side, to speak sadness into a landscape of lavish trees and green grass. It's weird and wonkily outrageous to spill regret onto a picture perfect postcard called Summertime. I mean, we have this glistening lake to visit with sand and gulls and splendid sunsets. There are white sailboats. There's the laughter of children. Why then is there a blanket of gloom over everything?
Shopkeepers are unlocking their doors yet still tethered to the news and the culture that is Covid, still tentative like joy with no texture, soda with no fizz. It's an odd mix. Our faces struggle to show expression behind mandated masks. Our voices are muffled and muted. Our voices are muffled and muted, weighing heavy under the effort of feeling understood. Someday the world will gain momentum and a tapestry of color will unfurl. We will laugh from our bellies again and hugs will no longer be withheld.
For now, though we comply, we keep each other safe by maintaining our distance, all the while longing for that six foot gap to be a thing of the past. We shuffle through grocery stores confused as to which arrows go which way, circling the cereal aisle a dozen times before finally getting it right. It's exhausting, and still we're finding we are up to the task during this surreal swirl of adapting, adjusting, relinquishing, reclaiming. Some days are easier than others. Many days are numbingly the same.
Others are radically different. We have become mood surfers, riding the waves of despair and hope. We are learning, listening, grappling, coping. If we can't do it for real, symbolically, symbolically, we can link arms and hold each other up. It's okay to know joy. It's really okay to experience deep emotion or to feel nothing at all. This year has tested our spirits and strengthened our wills. The birds already knew about this, and maybe that's why they sing with such wild abandonment. Kathy Joy the daily encouragement Friday, August 7, 2020 for my workplace.
As caregivers, as caregivers, we are always learning, listening, grappling, adjusting and coping. And we are mood surfers riding the waves of despair. And then hope going down that despairing wave and then it rises in hope. What a symbol of what it is to live day to day. Whether it's 2020 in the middle of COVID or whether it' post Covid like we're enjoying now and still having challenges, still having difficulties, but not doing it in some kind of isolated bubble. Cadre for me is my blanket for to run to and find solace.
It's also my launching pad. It's also a place where I gather courage and put my my superhero cape on and step out into the world knowing you've got my back. Jules is here. Good to see you Andy Joyful Good morning junk food. Hi. Oh good morning. Everybody is here. Jennifer Raleigh and yeah, good morning sunshine. Thank you for listening to my little essay. I kept this big thick blue book on a shelf collecting dust for a long time. And my mama who I talk to on the phone every night from her. She lives in a nursing home an hour and a half away.
I'm her emotional support now and also her POA and all the things there's a lot of heavy Lifting being the administrative caregiver of your parent. Maybe somebody knows about this. We get to talk and encourage each other. Used to be in the evening, but now she has what is known as sundowners, if you're not familiar with that term, that is an elderly. She's 94, 95 years of age. She will be in May. It's when a person has kind of a break with reality, and they call it sundowners because it seems to happen after dinner or in the evening before bedtime, right around that season of the day.
And there's a lot of confusion, disorientation. So in order to have less confusion from her and more of a conversation she's really tethered to, we now talk in the afternoon. About six months ago, she said, where's your big blue book? You know, the one you wrote during COVID And put. Put all your essays in. Would you start reading those to me? And it's always an honor for someone who's a writer to be asked to read their own work. And, you know, mamas ask for that anyway, don't they? Because they're a bit partial.
So I've been driving through the book and I read this one tapestry to her yesterday in the afternoon, and I got thinking. That's a good one for this week. About paying attention and being aware of what's around us, Absorbing it, echoing it, avoiding it, whatever it is. Taking good care of ourselves in the mix. Caregiver day is about those we love and support. It's also about us as caregivers. So be good to yourself, float yourself some grace, whatever that looks like. For me, it's a cup of hot cocoa.
I have a Keurig and I have Starbucks K cups. Oh, yeah, Starbucks hot chocolate. And for me also, it's a nourishing, nurturing splash of yellow. Yeah. I love you and leave you and I hope you are blessed. Mind, body, spirit, Go and be human. Join the Cadre. Many things coming up today and in the coming days. My favorite onion is Shannon Paul Comedy in the chaos. We call each other onions because life is an onion and you peel one layer at a time and sometimes you weep. I'll see you again in the Cadre.
I didn't mention much or anything at all, really about Harbor Pilots, although I made a reference to the lake. I just think you're fabulous. Be safe, be well, and I'll see you next time either in the chat or on the replay or in our conversation stream. And yeah, Bye for now. Sa.
