Everyday Threads

When I think about July, I remember lake water, smoky campfires, and children running until the light began to fade. Back then, freedom meant long summer days with nothing planned except swimming, playing, and being outside. Those memories still make me smile, but I've realized something over the years. Freedom hasn't disappeared. It has simply changed its shape. At sixty-five, freedom feels different than it once did. It isn't about having endless choices or escaping responsibility anymore. Instead, it's found in small moments that remind me this life is still very much my own. This week alone I can count a few moments of freedom that quietly shaped my days. These days I rarely need to ask anyone for a ride. If I want to visit one of my favourite places, I simply head out the door. I may not move as quickly as I once did, and some days my body argues with me every step of the way, but I can still get where I want to go. As long as I'm willing to lace up my shoes, t...

June has been such a strange month, full of routines and surprises. Strangely enough, until I sat down to look through everything that happened and everything I accomplished, I hadn't realized just how busy it had been. June felt almost ordinary. Looking back, though, I can see that it was anything but. Some months announce themselves with big milestones. June didn't do that. Instead, it quietly filled itself with moments that mattered. Looking over my notes, these are the things that stand out most. One of the happiest moments was having my daughter and son-in-law join GD#1 and me at Aquafit. I've been going since January, and it has become an important part of my routine. The fact that they wanted to be there with me made it even more special. Not every memorable moment was a pleasant one. I had two adrenaline-filled experiences this month. The first was when someone started a fire outside my apartment window that could easily have become much worse. The second was witnes...

This has been a good week in some ways and a lousy one in others. On the plus side, I walked nearly 10,000 steps and did not collapse into a fibro flare afterward. In fact, this week has been harder mentally than physically.  Thursday was nearly a perfect day aside from getting lost on the way back from getting my sugar checked. Even that turned into a positive because I ended up walking over 9,700 steps and used my bus pass for the first time in a long while. But that was also when the bad luck for the week seemed to begin. When I got home, my key would not work in the front door, so I had to use my phone to get into the building. I assumed it was a one-time problem and just sent a message to Ruth to let her know. Friday I stayed home and did food prep using what I had left in the freezer. I managed to make enough dinners to get me through to Thursday, which felt like a small victory in itself. Other than being tired from all the walking the day before, it was not a bad day. ...

Bit of a shift this week. I’m experiencing SAD symptoms even though it’s no longer winter, which is making today’s writing difficult. I did manage quite a bit after hearing from the radiologist that there is no recurrence of the cancer. Even so, it took me about a week to return to most of my usual routines. During that time, I spent a lot of it working with ChatGPT on pins for my Pinterest boards. I uploaded Awakening and Becoming Visible from Currents of Becoming a poetry book I’ve been planning and added a couple more lists to “Things I’m Learning.”   I also started a new board that I still can’t name in any coherent way. It began as Grandmacore (Grammacore), inspired by a set of pins that felt connected to the values I grew up with. An article called Grandma’s Rules really sparked things, and I spent time turning those ideas into pins and building the board around them. When I stepped back, though, I could see it had drifted off brand. I tend to prefer soft watercolor...

Tests, quiet fear, and the small ways I kept going while I waited.  The type of adventure I have been on this week is a little different than the others. It started with a pain in my left shoulder. I assumed it was just a simple rotator cuff issue and didn’t think much about it. I worked around it, took something for the pain, and carried on. I do regular self breast exams after my run-in with breast cancer a few years ago, and I noticed a strange texture along the skin that connects my underarm to my breast—on the left side, the side that was operated on. I noticed it, but I didn’t really notice it. I told myself it was probably just skin changing with age… but only on the left side. I didn’t go to the doctor until I put on a bra and saw the swelling on the outside of my left breast. That was the moment it shifted from something I could ignore to something I couldn’t. The doctor didn’t seem too concerned, but he sent me for a mammogram. The next day, they called and said there ...

 Doing what I can. Letting that be enough. As this month begins, I am doing well. I go to the YMCA once a week. I walk every day—no less than 2,000 steps—which, if you know me at all, you’ll understand is a big step forward. I’ve gone from 250 steps at the end of December to 2,000 now. My weight is finally below the 200 lb mark, coming in as low as 196 lb, but mostly around 198 lb. By the end of April, I hope to bring that to a steady 190.   How I’m going to get there is fairly simple. My plan is threefold: Continue my weekly Aquafit class and add some chair yoga at home Take a daily walk—sometimes as an adventure, sometimes just to enjoy the sun Prep and eat only what I prepare (no takeout), including a weekly trip to the local farmers’ market I’ve created a system for food prep, a realistic budget, and a journaling structure that allows me to be both practical and artistic. That part feels steady now. So this month, I’m turning my attention outward—mainly toward my ...

This is the last post for March, and spring has started to show up in small ways. I saw a robin at the beginning of the month. This week, the geese came back. Now I’m waiting for the buds and the dandelions.   It doesn’t happen all at once. And I think that’s what this month has been like for me too. When I started this series, I didn’t expect it to be this hard—or this revealing. I thought I would see progress clearly, something I could point to and name. But what I’m noticing instead is quieter than that. The days don’t feel quite as heavy. There are moments where my energy lifts just enough for me to notice it. Not a big change. Just something beginning. This month didn’t go the way I planned. I thought I could handle more—two Aquafit classes, a couple of studio classes—but it didn’t take long to realize I wasn’t there yet. One week of that was enough to put me out of commission for the next. So I adjusted. By the end of February and into March, I was down to one class a week. N...

🌱 Steady Growth I didn’t think this week was steady. After effort, I expected steadiness to feel clearer. More structured. More predictable—something I could recognize right away. I had a plan for this month: one class per week, a 5-minute minimum movement rule, protein after classes, prep day consistency, and a weekly reflection entry. Small inputs, visible progress. And in many ways, those pieces were there. I showed up. Not perfectly, not in a straight line, but often enough to count. The 5-minute rule held, even on the harder days. I made it to class. I moved regularly. I followed through in small ways that don’t look like much on their own, but add up when repeated. What steady looked like, it turns out, was not dramatic. It looked like writing things down so my thoughts didn’t loop endlessly in my head, and paying attention to what I was thinking so I could understand it, and then returning to the plan after a rough patch instead of letting everything fall apart. It looked like ...

Living with Fibromyalgia changes how endurance has to be understood. It isn’t about pushing harder or going farther. It is about learning how to move through everyday life in a way that respects the limits of the body while still allowing room for growth. Gentle endurance is built slowly. It shows up in small choices: pacing a walk by time instead of distance, leaving an activity before fatigue turns into a flare, and returning to things again and again until the body gradually adapts. The progress can be quiet and sometimes almost invisible, but it is still progress. This post looks at what endurance means in day-to-day life when energy is limited. Not heroic effort, but steady resilience. The goal is not to prove strength in a single moment, but to build a rhythm of activity and recovery that allows life to keep expanding, even if the pace has to stay slow. Training With Limited Energy To understand how this works in real life, it helps to start with the question of what my current b...

March has a theme for me: Recovery is not a reward. It is part of the program.   That idea sounds simple when written on a page, but living it is something else entirely. For a long time I treated recovery like a break you earned after doing the real work. Push hard, finish the task, then rest afterward if you had to. That approach worked well enough before fibromyalgia entered the picture. With fibromyalgia, it doesn’t. What I’m learning slowly is that recovery isn’t something that happens after the work. Recovery is part of the work. Protecting it is what makes everything else possible. Since January I’ve been experimenting with what recovery actually looks like in my real life. Not the textbook version, but the daily version. The one that shows up when I’m deciding whether to go to class, whether to walk to the YMCA, or whether today needs to be a heating-pad and stretching kind of day. Some patterns are beginning to appear. Learning to Read Pain Instead of Fighting It For most...

  I have begun to notice that if I create a plan sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. When it works it includes space to breathe and rest. When it doesn’t, it’s because there is absolutely no structure — or very little. For a long time, I thought the problem was over-planning . I assumed that needing structure meant I was trying to control too much. But what I’m starting to see is the opposite. The plans that fail aren’t the structured ones. They’re the vague ones. The hopeful ones. The ones built on the assumption that I’ll “just manage.” When I leave my days too open, I drift. I underestimate fatigue. I say yes without checking tomorrow’s cost. I end up reacting instead of choosing. But when I build in shape — not rigidity, just shape — my days feel steadier.   Shape looks like this: A recovery hour placed on purpose. A walk measured in time instead of distance. Meal components stored in a way that protects future energy. Evenings that are intentionally simple. ...

1. The Currency I Didn’t Know I Was Spending I used to think time was my most limited resource. Lately I’ve realized it’s energy. The shift didn’t happen in a doctor’s office or during some dramatic health scare. It happened in the middle of making lunch wraps. I had everything laid out on the counter — tuna mixed with Greek yogurt, sliced turkey, steak, spinach, tortillas. I was assembling them automatically, thinking I was being efficient, when I stopped mid-roll and wondered: Will this still be good in three days? Should I freeze it? Should I store everything separately? It wasn’t really about food safety. It was about tomorrow. If I assemble everything now and it goes soggy, I’ll have wasted both food and effort. If I freeze something that doesn’t thaw well, I’ll feel frustrated and start over. If I store the components separately, I give myself options. I reduce friction for a future day when my energy may be lower than it is right now. Standing there with a tortilla in m...

  At 4:50 a.m. on Sunday, I learned something new about my blood pressure This week was not about transformation. It was about steadiness. Which, when you’re managing chronic illness, fluctuating blood pressure, blood sugar, and a nervous system that apparently believes in dramatic entrances, is no small thing. Clearing Space (and Not Just on My Screen) It started innocently enough: deleting old chats and managing digital memory. But while I was clearing out old threads, I found myself wondering how much emotional clutter I carry around the same way. Archived. Saved. Revisited. Not everything needs to be stored for future reflection. Some thoughts can be acknowledged and gently released. Some seasons don’t need replaying. There’s a quiet relief in deleting something and realizing the world does not collapse. Maybe the same is true internally. Energy Is the Real Currency I used to think I needed better time management. Now I know I need better energy management. I can have an entire...

Why I Keep Showing Up at the YMCA Even When It Feels Hard I want to start this honestly I have already gone In January I attended one Aquafit class one meditation class and one Chairfit class That matters because trying something once when you live with disabilities takes effort courage and a fair bit of mental negotiation The YMCA is slowly becoming a place I am willing to return to and that says more than any fitness goal ever could For about 30 dollars every two weeks the membership feels manageable and realistic especially on a fixed income Pricing can vary by location but the value for choice and accessibility feels solid Aquafit My First Yes Aquafit was my first class and it felt like the safest place to begin The water supported my body in ways the floor never does My joints complained less my balance felt steadier and I did not feel rushed What surprised me most was how normal it felt Nobody was watching Nobody cared if I paused or modified I just moved and that was enough Th...