6 September, 2023
To everything there is a season. All good things must end. I was raised with this understanding. I have lived my life by it. I have touched on it many times in entries I have published in this blog. And now I have reluctantly to acknowledge that even the season for publishing the blog itself is coming to a close.
When I started blogging I did so mainly as a way to share what used to be called “plowin’ and preservin’ news” with many people at once. George and I were living the life we had planned for ourselves at Cold Comfort Farm and our days were charged with events and excitements.
In the many years since – just how many I could not hope to tell you at the moment – what had started out as a journal of my physical life became much more a celebration of the life of my mind: all the intangibles that have made my life worth living.
I have shared discoveries in genealogy. I have shared information regarding historical events about which I had recently learned, or just learned something new. I have shared thoughts on interpersonal relationships, and cartoons and aphorisms I found particularly apt, and pithy quotes from people I love. And pictures. I have shared a lot of pictures.
Essentially, I guess, I have offered up pretty much anything and everything that has caught my eye in some particular way that made me think, and learn, and grow, and want to pass these blessings on to those I love.
But George has been gone for more than five years, now, and in that time learning and growing and wanting to share have become much quieter activities for me; more particular and private and, from time to time, now, confusing and sometimes embarrassing.
Three Wednesdays ago, I fell in my house in McCloud and broke my left hip. The following day I had hip replacement surgery in Mt. Shasta. After spending that weekend in the hospital, I have come to live in a convalescent home in Weed, where I am receiving physical therapy, rehabilitation, and recuperative rest.
This is not someplace I very much want to be, and it isn’t much of anything I really want to be doing. But it is where I am, and it is what I am doing, because it is the season of my life for such things. It is incredibly hard for an old nurse to allow herself to be nursed, but I’m learning.
I am reading books. I am enjoying visits from people who love me. I am, occasionally, talking on the phone. But these days I am not able to sit at a computer and compose a blog I’d want to read, or to ask anybody else to try to understand. Time has turned, and the season for such things is over for me now.
I will miss writing these entries. I miss them already, just like I miss some of the people for whom I have written them, who are no longer with us to read. This has been quite a ride. I have learned a lot, and enjoyed my readers’ feedback, and felt like we were all involved in a fascinating series of ongoing conversations. I cannot help but miss that feeling, but I certainly treasure the memories. Thank you all, for all of them.
While I am sorry I can no longer hold up my end of those conversations as well as I once did, I welcome your cards and letters and phone calls. Please check with my sons John and Mark for current contact information: you can reach them via my post office box in McCloud or the phone number I have had for many years, both of which they monitor, or by emailing jsdibelka@outlook.com. I look forward to hearing from you.
But mainly, I want to make sure I have thanked you just for reading what I have written. I have had a great time with this blog, and I hope you have, too. Writing for you has been a pleasure and a privilege I would not have missed for the world.
It’s just that now, in the way of such things, it’s someone else’s turn.
All things are as they are and will end as they must.
Thanks for everything.
Blessed be.
To Life!
Love, Wilma
