So now that is out of the way, what have I been up to? Jamie and I painted the service porch, but I won't write about that because reading about painting is like, well, watching paint dry! Here's how it looks all sparkling and fresh.:
Speaking of sunny days, we have had more than our fair share, I'd say we are experiencing a drought. So a good portion of my day is spent watering the garden. But that doesn't stop the binder and pig weed from growing or the purslane. I've never seen such an abundance of weeds. Oh well! At least the pig weed and purslane is edible, so if all else fails, we can always eat them. Between the weather and all the wildlife that makes my garden their favorite delicatessen, we just might need to do this! But the dry conditions haven't bothered or roses. That's my beloved New Dawn on the header picture and the one to the right is Evelyn that grows by the porch.The other day I received a strange package in the mail. It was a box of pictures from my mother. She's getting rid of things and she wanted me to have some of my childhood. I came to a sort of epiphany looking through those old pictures. One was a newspaper clipping from the time I won a blue ribbon at a fair when I was eleven. It was a group photo and I was trying to locate myself, but had to read the copy to figure out where I was. The reason I couldn't figure it out was because I was looking for a "fat little kid". I have three older sisters and to this very day they like to remind me that I was a fat little kid. I'm afraid my mother instilled in us a spirit of competitiveness (or is it jealousy?) that some of my sisters have never outgrown. We were always competing who had the most boyfriends, the thinnest, the most successful, the most popular, etc. It didn't help that my mother put a lot of value on appearances. So anyway, I always grew up thinking I was fat. I can remember clearly having an argument about the dress I was wearing in the picture because my mother wanted me to wear a fancy dress, but my 4-H instructor told us to wear a plain cotton dress. My mother told me I would look fat in it. She used the word fat a lot back then, whenever she was angry with any of us, she wouldn't tell us, but would start with the"you look fat" tirades. What I found in the picture was a very tall, healthy young girl with very nice legs. Didn't look at all like the image of the blob I had been carrying around in my head for the past fourty years.
This got me to thinking. Suppose you lived back in colonial times when there were no scales to weigh you and all your clothes were handmade, so you weren't aware of sizes and there were no magazines to tell you what a beautiful woman should look like. Would you be happy about your size and shape? I'm a tall, sturdy woman, that looks more like Jane Russell than I'll ever resemble a character out of a Jane Austen novel. I go out where I should go out and in where I should go in. My husband finds me attractive. I'm healthy. I can work hard all day. I have long legs that can swing easily over a fence or take long strides to get me where I need to go fast. So yes, I am happy with my body. After many years, I'm going to stop beating myself up because the scale no longer registers under the 110 mark or that I'll never have a twenty-three inch waist again. From here on out, I'm going to celebrate that I am a woman. How about joining me?
