Count my Blessings

Counting My Blessings
I am a collector. I will keep everything I can but I am learning to let go slowly. I will pick up stones or rocks on the ground that shine and sparkle or speak to me. I love stones. Polished ones also, I even have a stone tumbler to see what I have collected will look like cleaned up. The roughness removed for a smooth feel. I am excited even though I have had it for a few months and it still sits in the box unopened. I will fill it and start it tumbling today. Maybe I can use some of the stones for my fairy wands I am making. I have stones from everywhere I go. I learned about the tumblers with the agates on the beach in Washington State.

I had "arrowheads" in my mind to use for an art project but found some nice clean polished stones at an antique store this weekend. I guess they were meant for me to find as they were deep in a corner of the kitchen area. I loved the cabin, it was a true log cabin and just awesome to look around. It was kind of dark and full of antiques but beautiful to my eyes and soul.

I am lucky to have what I have and I cherish it but I have to let some go. Look at what the children and families in Haiti have lost makes me think and reflect. We lost a lot of material things in 2001 after 911 and we had to auction everything we owned because of my husband's job layoff and having nowhere to really go. We took our two Golden Retrievers and moved into an RV where we could go anywhere.

After losing so much, it was a freedom that I loved, living on wheels! It was strange having everything we owned in the basement of the RV, should we ever have a wreck on the snowy passes in Colorado or blow over in the Washington Olympic Peninsula winds. We managed an RV park in Joyce, a small city near Port Angeles, WA right on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It was a tree farm with a campground and very primitive. I loved it right from the start. After we arrived on New Year's Day in 2002 after going back to Alabama for the holidays and to drop off some collectibles I just could not part with(my Mother's hand painted china, quilts, photo albums, Christmas items precious to us) At least we were able to save some very important items to my heart. That is a lot more than these families in Haiti could do. They even lost family members. The children whose parents did not survive. What a loss they have to live with!

With the earthquakes last week in California and Haiti, so different! The Eureka, California reminds me that we had a similar earthquake when we moved to Seattle in 2001. I was still unpacking our belongings in our Lindal Cedar Home, it is so beautiful in the forest with the oh' so tall fir trees surrounding us. We had moved to Sumner, WA. Lake Tapps was within walking distance and Mt. Rainier was seen in the distance. I looked at it in awe every time I saw it! Just beautiful! The mountains , forests, Puget Sound, Ocean water and mountain streams, everything I yearned for was there. I even met my dragonfly there on my own
porch. I now have it has a rememberance tatoo on my arm. So many good things happened there.

But, we did have the Nisqually earthquake one day. It rocked the house like a train coming thru. It rolled like a big surf rolling through the house. I looked outside and the truck was rocking in the driveway. Oh my! I got on my computer on AOL at the time and my friend Ellen instant messaged me from Portland, did I feel it? She also told me to go make sure the park brake was on the truck. I went outside and the post office lady drove up, she asked me did I feel it?, then the UPS driver stopped also, what happened? They had been on the road by themselves when the road rocked. I told them my friend told me we had an earthquake. I had nothing to compare it too. It had sounded like the dogs running on the cedar deck around the outside of the house. But they had been in the room inside the house with me.

Well, I turned on the TV and followed it all day. My husband had been in a glass building in downtown Seattle and the glass had all caved in around them. He followed as everyone around him took for the street with panic on their faces,and when he finally got a cell phone signal as they were jammed he called to check on me. It did no damage at our home built in the 1970's. We were sturdy!

But, many brick chimneys collapsed around Seattle and glass breakage in buildings like the one my husband was in, an old brewery that was now Seattle's Best Coffee Co.
He worked in information technology and they were a client where he worked.

It was on the news, in Port Townsend, WA., a store had a pendulum that had sand in the bottom and the hanging point had made a pattern of a rose. It became the "Earthquake Rose", February 28, 2001, 11:00AM a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, 30miles beneath the earth surface at Olympia, Washington on the Nisqually Fault. I called the store and got the pendulum for my husband's birthday.( grins)

I don't know how I went from collecting stones to the earthquake but it was an event that helped change my life and I learn from it what is important, what we cherish and love, and that is nothing material. It is life itself, but we have bumps along the way. We have to make decisions right or wrong that control our being. I know know that losing my books and music was one thing I miss the most and maybe why I also collect them and it is so hard to let them go.

Some things cannot so easily be replaced but we have our memories and that is why I now say," Make Memories because no one can take them away"!

Smiles, Cyndi