New Seasons

Some of the Easter and Spring decor at this time of year cracks me up.  I offered to dye Orca a nice pastel color to give her a break from the black-and-white, but I don't think she's interested.

I'm ready for a new season, and I don't mean the weather.  It's funny; the past almost-year of my life has been a new season, one desperately needed, one of transition.  It has had its share of stressful moments, and now that we are finally getting settled into a normal pace of life - together - and adjusting to a new city and a new home, I want to breathe a little and enjoy it.

I really am not one of those people who thrives in a continually-shifting environment.  I like to wake up in the morning and have a fairly solid idea of what the day holds.  (Side story:  For a time I taught Critical Thinking to Army soldiers.  It was one of my favorite jobs but the travel was too much for me so I eventually moved on to something else.  Anyway, during that season, so many people asked me if I had served in the military!  Um, no.  They always seemed surprised!  I know and admire so, so many people in the military, but it was never something I was drawn to.  My personality is just not cut out for it.)

Back to my original point:  At the same time, in the midst of a routine, I crave novelty.  And at this point in life I'm trying (1) not to eat everything in sight, and (2) not to buy new things, or anything really, if I can help it.  So the novelty, the subtle changes I crave, have to come from somewhere else.

There is an internal part of me that gets restless easily, and I seem to be fighting the same battle over and over these days.  It's not something I can go into, but it's one of those situations that causes me to roll my eyes at God and go, "just give me a different problem to deal with."  He rolls His eyes back and mentions something about Divine timing and bearing fruit.

The past two springs have been the most difficult seasons of my life.  So bad, in fact, that when Christmas rolled around this year, I sort of braced myself for January - May.  And you know what?  All of a sudden we're already at April!  I don't even know where the past couple of months have gone; for the first time in what feels like an eternity, the long winter, long beginning of spring just...passed.  And the non-ending, never-changing, exhausting mental battle of mine didn't drag me completely down this time.  So that's something.

I think of that when I whine about wanting a different problem.  Because the truth is, as hard as things may be (and we all have our hard things), I am sort of, kind of, almost ok with the unique problem set tailored to me.  Know why?  Because it's almost April and we still start and end every day wrangling Orca up to the table for her meds.  I didn't even think she would be here to see 2013, much less to hop her way through the first quarter of it!  Because G is out here, finally.  Because we both have good jobs and can pay the bills and can plan a vacation to Hong Kong and Singapore.  Because we have good friends.  Because the days are beautiful in Denver, and we got to move out West.

So I'll take my same old battle, and I'll put on the armor and sigh as I walk onto the field.  Because this is my battle and apparently someone wants me to fight it until I win.

Which has, of course, already been done for me in Easter itself.