Anatomy of a Blog Post

I am amazed at the people who can post on their blogs every day (or every weekday and take the weekends off.) My three favorite daily bloggers are:

BooMama who makes me laugh every day with her Southern sense of humor and love for all things bacon. Her writing style makes me envious, and I find myself rereading sentences because they are so creatively written.
BigMama lives about an hour south of me, and represents the great state of Texas well on a daily basis. I laugh until I snort most when I read her posts most days.
(And Yes: Boo and Big are friends and often post a podcast together which is really like listening in on a call to your best friends.)
Lots of Scotts is written by a Southern mom of triplets who are now entering first grade. Her perspective is always God-centered, encouraging and inspiring.

I am just not able to do a daily blog, and I appreciate the readers who continue to check back with me until a new post is discovered about once a week. I have this week off before starting a new job and was pondering how I come up with posts on this blog.

This post began last Sunday over brunch with friends I have been blessed with since high school. One of the girls (and yes, we still consider ourselves girls, because I think we have maintained an internal age of 18 and where did these adult children of ours come from anyway?) was mentioning that she had read there is a section of your brain that is only stimulated when you are digging in dirt. God wired us to be gardeners back in the Original Garden, apparently.

This little factoid spurred me to actually take a good long look at my pitiful yard. I have let it go since D left, but this summer we have already had 15 days of 100 degree plus weather. Central Texas is hotter than Arizona at this point, and gardening is more of a survival sport than a creative outlet. Anyway, I decided to go out and dig a bit on Tuesday and started wondering how I did not notice how bad the yard had become. Part of it was the fog o' grief; but part of it was coming home after dark each day because I did not want to spend long nights at home alone. I popped the garage door opener and never gave the yard a backward glance. Now, however, I've decided to come up with a landscaping plan that will include a sprinkler system and a lot of rock work that minimizes the amount of lawn I will have to take care of.

Encouraged by the fact that I once again have brainpower and bodily energy (two-years in the making), I have felt like this is the week I will also tackle the garage (to sort through D's tools) and the study (to sort through the last box of mementos I have saved of D's). Taking the emotional temperature...and I am really ready to do this.The garage filled me with The Happy as I realized all that I learned from D like labeling paint cans with the room and date the paint was used, the careful sorting and labeling of boxes that contained tiling/wallpapering/painting supplies that I will probably need again, and the meticulously cared for tools that look brand new. It was a joke in our house that everything D had he had owned "since college". He never lost or broke anything, it seemed, and this fact led to my biggest laugh of the day.

The entire time we were married, D would always ask me where his triangular drafting ruler was. I assured him over the years that I never saw one, needed one or even knew how to use one. But he reminded me he had never lost one since his engineering classes in college. Well, as I cleaned, I unearthed NINE of those rulers in various locations. They are now proudly displayed in an antique wooden box in the study, and I will have to confess to a little loving and heavenward "I told you so".

So, my blogposts are just reflections that are sorted out and tied together...usually a week in the making. I will arrive at my new job on Monday with the last of the physical objects of D's sorted out. There is a verse that says, "First the natural, then the spiritual", and I am believing that God is at work spiritually healing me as I am cleaning out the final physical corners. We make a pretty good team, I think, and I'm glad that He is always right on time to finish His work in His timing.

And I'll bet He laughed about the triangular rulers, too.

(Ending on a slightly different note: I had a comment from a new reader in Alaska who said that my story of loss was almost her exact story. Except she is getting married in July. Alaska reader, I love to hear from you through email to hear the rest of your story.)