Life is good ...

Update that doesn't read like a to-do list, I hope ...

Yesterday I visited my daughter and her partner and delivered the happy cat chair ... a convalescence gift. She lay on the couch with her huge orange cat looking absolutely beautiful ... serene and healthy ... for the first time in a long while. I suspect it is a combination of not working, finally getting enough rest, and feeling surrounded by love. The cancer has been removed and the worst fears have been faced and eliminated by competent medical care. She is still in pain because of her back, but the pain killers are helping, and we all hope that she will get real help for that soon.

On my way to and from her place I stopped at garage sales where I bought a doll's crib, a child's rocker, a dark green sweater for felting, and a huge comfortable maple chair. I also dropped in to the Parkdale market for veggies and bought maple syrup at a roadside stand.

That's about my limit for any one day, but when I got home I brushed Kenya, slung my camera around my neck, and set off to deliver fur to a neighbour who uses it to discourage animals that like her garden produce. Rowboat Flo was working outside and asked for some so I gave her half. Enroute I visited with Claire and Tom who were swimming (Tom, doing the length of the lake and back, and Claire, wading up to her waist with a floatie, getting exercise). Not too long ago, before her cancer, Claire would have been jogging miles for that exercise. After the delivery we visited with several other neighbours we met on the road and then came back home to swim. Playing in the lake with a dog who loves water, watching the Merganser family leave my shore with great squawking, and just breathing in the sense of peace and neighbourliness on this lake was wonderfully therapeutic.

I have decided that I am less likely to meditate while doing yoga than by staying home and swimming, painting, knitting, or just looking at the lake and sky from a deck chair, so I am not going back to yoga. I would like to find an aerobics class for older people though, one like the morning class I attended when I lived in Cumberland, easy on the knees and other joints, non-competitive except with yourself, and fun. It was the only place I felt a sense of community in Cumberland ... and it is far worse now with all the development that has scarred the landscape. Everywhere you look you see the facelessless of identical houses sitting on muddy lots, your ears blasted by the roar of noisy earth moving machinery. Almost all shopping is done in the atomized anonymity of box stores except for the bagel shop run by the Kenyans, and I bet the Ray Friel Centre is still providing its dose of neighbourhood.

Today I will finish arranging books in the bookcase that once housed the DVDs, and then it is back to painting chairs (and that table for beside the couch).

On Wednesday I may receive a passel of household pets for five days ... two Black Labs and two cats ... that will be a first ... and I suspect I will have my hands full. But I also think it will be fun to have such a houseful of loving creatures. Don't know how much painting I will get done ... but maybe that will give me a chance to do more sanding outside with the dogs, and then base coating in the porch to escape from their demands. Have to remove the winter windows first though or I will succumb to heat exhaustion and paint fumes!