Energy & Optimism

It is, no doubt, a glaringly vivid generational trait in which Grandma, Sarah and I are hard on ourselves, constantly driving ourselves to perform better for ourselves. My nearly 80 year old mother has put in six more blueberry bushes in the last year, hauled pine straw, wood chips and wood dirt from the woods surrounding her gardens, and coaxed an amazing poundage of produce from out second year in an extreme drought.

Why?

Because she can.

Just as I adopted 38 children rather than 8 or 28, it was because I do obviously relish a challenge.

Being bored would rock my world is such an unpleasant manner. I might have so much time on my hands that I might have married for a third or fourth time, and then driven him bonkers with my unbridled energy.

Sarah blogged about what she's done with hers. It hit me, reading her post, that she's just like Grandma and I, even though my mother and I claim we had later starts in life, in regards to our unbridled energy outputs.

I see it in Yolie also, as if it can be transmitted via love, Carolina possesses a good bit of this, as does Monica. Monica? My once labeled failure-to-thrive daughter who needed 12-15 hours of sleep each evening?

Yes, her too, because life stepped up to the plate and bopped her upside the head with a challenge after she married her husband, now she's also raising a step-daughter.

Jonathan cleared his troubled mind long enough yesterday to traipse after Grandma in the woods, listening to her tell him that wooddirt, one word in her lexicon, after decades and eons of being untouched by civilization, would provide her blueberries with nutrients, and so they hauled and hauled until Grandma was happy with the results.

The rest of my children sprang up into a mass of cooperation and we made trip after trip and corralled Yolie and Chuck's possessions, transporting them to the new house and absolutely trashing it up. Tools all over the front yard, boxes everywhere, my own five yard dogs running up to Yolie's house in alarm, no doubt wondering what the heck was going on. One of them jumped in front of Yolie's car, forcing her to slam on the brakes and tend to the dog's anxiety that must have been palpating as we took what seemed to be family stuff from Grandm'as basement up to this new abode.

I fell asleep late last night reading Rudy Giulani's Leadership book that I'd bought at a yard sale for less than a buck. My final thought was, besides supergirl energy, I do also have a gift for unflagging optimism, not unsagging apparently, as I've drooped lately, but in spite of Paloma's emotional meltdown last night over nothing when she sprang into unreasonable anger at Tabby over nothing, I need to choose to be happy and sunshiny today as autumn encroaches unpleasantly, my least favorite season because it brings the dread of winter.