I started writing this two months ago. That morning I left my house about 10:30 A.M. on my way to Lowe’s. Our mobile home park is located right by the freeway sound barrier wall so you barely notice the white noise created by the sound of traffic. The shopping center with the Lowe’s is just a short distance across the freeway bridge, so I can get there in a about 10 minute wheelchair ride so it’s very convenient.
I was shocked to see the store workers putting up a display for Halloween. My shock was verbalized “are you kidding me? I’m not finished with summer yet!” and his comment to me was “you know it’s only two months away from Christmas” “But it’s only the middle of August!”
When I got home that day, I turned off my computer and basically stopped dealing with Facebook until today. Facebook was the only thing that I was doing on the computer besides writing on my blog. The last thing that I wrote on the blog was the beginning of my travels to Peru many years ago. Taking an ancient, out of service, ambulance from my town of Rohnert Park, California to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The goal was to land the ambulance along with a 20 foot cargo container filled with medical supplies for a hospital, in a jumbo national guard transport plane. Rotary was building a hospital in a barrio on the outskirts of Pucallpa, Peru.
In my pre-stroke former life, a quick trip to Lowe’s would not be significant, but now, that’s a half day activity. And I suddenly realized that summer was almost gone and I had promised myself to get some things accomplished before the year was out. I’d already gotten one of my two containers emptied out and I had one to go. I knew I’d best get to work; time was running out. And details of my story about Peru were somewhere in that container. I had no business writing and spending time on the computer until the container project was finished. So my most important job this summer was to deal with the stuff that had accumulated in all most 45 years of life in Sonoma County. Not only did I have a complete photography studio including props, back drops, dark room equipment, and hundreds of negatives, few of which I wanted to keep. That meant going through boxes of negatives and prints.
Fortunately my wife has taken the time to download some pictures of our little trip to Sacramento to celebrate our grandchild’s fourth birthday. And other special events. We just celebrated my two year strokeaversery in August. (That’s what we call it.)
The result of that is that now, I have everything that I haven’t gone through in a 20 foot box trailer. Now I go through about seven boxes a week at my desk out in our closed-in front porch. So, for now, that’s my goal. Seven boxes a week and 500 words on my blog.
Tom Patterson – Photographer – Writer – and Seeker 