Tag: blessings

Ah! April!

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April is a month of celebration in my family.  We have two family birthdays, including mine, and I have several friends who celebrate a birthday this month too.  Three of whom celebrate a birthday on the same day as me.

I also got married in April.  I’m grateful I met my husband and we had a family.  We also enjoy a good relationship and have been able to co-parent without drama.  He is a good father to our children and they love and respect him.  I still appreciate his humor, at least, most of the time!  One cannot ask for more.

I survived a major traffic accident in April, many years ago, and given a new lease on life.  It is something I have written about in another post because it changed my life in many ways.  Years later, when it gets cooler, my movements are slower when I recall the accident in pain.  The upside is I was given a financial compensation that helped me buy my first home in the days when it was almost unheard of for a single woman to get a mortgage.

April is often a month of chocolates! What’s not to love about this!

For those in the Northern Hemisphere, April may signal spring.  For us in the Southern Hemisphere, it is autumn.  A time to look forward to the new.

Easter often comes around in April.  For those who celebrate Easter, it is a time to experience reflection, renewal and hope.

It starts getting cooler in the Southern Hemisphere around this time of year.  I always seem to feel the first chill in the Wheatbelt where the horizon hides nothing and space takes charge.  I know how beautiful it can be at dawn and I rug up and head out to get a photograph or two.  It is a time when I practice what I preach.

Until next time

As always

a dawn bird

 

Blessings

via Daily Prompt: Bestow

Today is the anniversary of my first date with someone.  It was decades ago but the memory as vivid as yesterday.  It was a hot day (40 degrees Celsius), unlike a cool 24 degrees today.  I was young and foolish.  I jumped on the back of his fast motorbike wearing just shorts, a tee shirt and sandals.  I had just had a pedicure and did not want my feet enclosed.  (Oh! the vanities of youth!)  We rode out of Perth to a small town less than 100 kms away.  We walked hand in hand and then stopped for scones and tea.  I spotted an antiques store and we lingered some more.  Soon the sun was waning, we decided it was time to get back to the city.  The area is teeming with kangaroos and we did not want to come across one at dusk.  Helmets on, we revved up and headed home.

As the sun slipped away lower into the horizon, the tree lined highway was dappled with sunlight.  He was doing the speed limit of 80 km/hour, when he failed to take a bend.  The bike slipped off the hard road into the soft gravel shoulder.  It bounced, twisted and danced in air.  I flew over his head like a stone from a catapult, skidding on bitumen like I was body surfing and then stopped with an almighty thud.  He held on to the bike for a fraction longer, before it bucked and threw him off, continuing for several hundred metres before a tree forced a stop.

He was also injured and could not reach me, but I could hear his urgent pleas, “Get off the road!”  Lying in the middle of a highway frequented by road trains that could not have stopped, his pleas became increasingly frantic.  My body moved in slow motion.  I lifted myself into a seated position and then bent over laughing at the slapstick comedy of it all.  I was obviously in shock.  Then I saw my right arm, or rather, what I could see.  The laughing stopped.

A nurse who lived on a farm nearby heard the crash and saw the smoke.  She raced across the paddock and approached the scene, all sombre, efficient and instructive.  She lay me down on the side of the road.  She fashioned support from the broken fairing and lay my shattered arm on it.  Being Anzac Day, a public holiday, the traffic, fortunately and unfortunately, was light.  Unable to leave me, the nurse waited for someone to come by.  A truckie finally did.  He was unable to call the local hospital.  This was the days before mobile phones.  He finally got someone in Sydney on the CB radio who phoned the hospital.  Being a holiday the staff were all on roster, enjoying a BBQ.  By the time the ambulance staff could be contacted, it was over two hours from the time of the accident.  By then the pain took over.  We headed into Perth with the ambulance wailing.  Still in shock, I complained bitterly about the nail polish being totally wiped off my nails on one foot that had dragged along the bitumen!

I spent months in hospital recovering from my numerous injuries and then another four surgeries and hours of therapy before my arm was functional.

Years later I married my date.  The father of my children.

Because of that day I have love and laughter in my life.  I have family.  I am mother.  I experience motherhood.  The best gift he could bestow.

As the years go by, I know one thing for sure.  I wouldn’t have missed that ride, for quids.

Until next time

As always

a dawn bird

 

 

 

 

 

Because I remember them …

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It’s International Women’s Day today.  It’s time to remember the single mothers who went before me, their footsteps creating a path.

Two sisters worked as home help in my family home for over 40 years, long before I was born, and long after I left.  The older cleaned the house and swept the yard, her younger sister was the cook.  With a national business to run, my parents, especially my mother, travelled frequently.  So, we considered both sisters as our nanny.  As was the custom of their culture, they married barely into their teens, one had two children, the other, only one.  Both were widowed before they were out of their teens.  Our family became theirs, theirs, became ours.  The women worked their respective roles, as employees and as parents, never complaining about what might have been.  They set the bar high for me.

Then there was the lady who came in to wash the dishes.  She had seven children, and a husband who was an opium addict.  She may as well have been single.  She did her chores, a toddler or infant welded to her hip.  She often found reason to throw back her mane of dark hair, and laugh.  The sound remains.  It filled the empty in her, and, now me.

A neighbour, we called Aunty M, was bedridden, the reason, never discussed.  She raised two children on her own,  a son excelled and won a scholarship to study overseas.  He is now a grandfather in Canada and a patriarch.  I don’t recall any curiosity about the absence of Aunty M’s husband, it was just a known and accepted fact.  Perhaps she was a widow.  Perhaps not.  It didn’t matter, from her bed, she still created a path.

I feel blessed to have these women grace my life without rhyme or reason.  They were there to guide me on a path I never thought I would have taken.

As is the memory of them, I am stronger for the experience.

Until next time

As always

a dawn bird