autumn
Saturday, Sep 25 and I passed 86 times around the sun eleven days ago today. Tomorrow for SS my mind is on Esther, our Old Testament reading. Today for bloggersville I'm thinking about pictures. Why that shot of our front window came out all brown I have no idea, the walls are cream color, the shutters white; the pic is up because the living room is cleared back while work is done on the level above us to stop the water from coming into our unit with every significant rain since Hurricane Michael. Yes, we're still in recovery mode three years later, and I cannot imagine the nightmare of life in New Orleans, with their levee systems and, seemingly, storms every year and more, setting things back again and again and again; God bless them, what a mess. I remember that after Hurricane Katrina, several NO families came here temporarily, and we hosted at least one family's boys at HNES, tuition free. Brothers, they were from an Episcopal school in Metairie, really good kids, we tried to make them feel welcome and special. They'd be in their mid to late twenties now, I hope they remember us fondly when hurricanes come again.
As repairs and renovations went forward after HMichael, everyone at HV got new front doors, and new door locks and keys, with the assurance that, after contractors with all their master keys finished and cleared off the premises, everyone would be getting another set of new keys and the door locks would be re-keyed. Phase one of that happened yesterday when David knocked at our door, with new keys and a note saying the locks will be rekeyed next month, October 11th and 12th, appropriately an anniversary gift three years and a day after HMichael stormed ashore furiously ravaging Bay County and northward.
I'll get a key for Kristen and a key for Tass and a key for Joe.
The mental anguish, emotional trauma of the category 5 hurricane, along with our by then continuing and heightening nightmare of daughter Malinda's brain aneurysms, surgeries, and stroke; with the covid19 pandemic piling on top of it all, made for seriously trying times that will never be completely over and done. And ours was far from the worst of it, as locally and across America so many families lost loved ones to death in the pandemic. And now storms raising hell along the Louisiana coast again and promising no end of it.
My birthday. My tongue in cheek birthday Wish was to finish being 85 on September 13th, and wake up September 14th seventeen years old. The closest I came to that was the cover of The New Yorker magazine for my birthday eve, taking me back to seventeen, which, IDK, may have been what stirred the Wish.
But then, so far, Time goes only One Way. So far that is. There are several theories about how the universe will end, that scientists have postulated seriously.
ONE, the most sensible one, is that our universe will continue to expand until, billions upon billions of years from now, the expansion energy will have expended itself, everything will slow, stop, cool down, galaxies and their suns die, everything eventually chilling to absolute zero, at which state nothing material can exist, and the universe, all that is seen and unseen, will simply be no more. And Philosophically, because Time will die with the all rest of it, all that we were will "never have been".
That's Philosophically about Time: if, Religiously about Eternity, you're concerned about your sins, salvation, resurrection, and eternal life, you will have to figure out for yourself where and what will come of you at that point, because IDK, and the Church hasn't thought out that far enough to establish a dogma to cover it so we can know what is Certain. It may be that by then God will have long relocated to another of His infinite number of Big Bang creations.
But, oh, I'm wandering. TWO, another theory of how the universe will end, is that it will slow, stop, then contract, shrinking back into the infinitely heavy, infinitely tiny dot that the Big Bang theory says it all began with. Now, in that case, with Space going in reverse, maybe Time will also, and I'll have another shot at being Seventeen.
"When I was seventeen, it was a very good year", remember the song from 1961?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Was_a_Very_Good_Year
Remember Sinatra singing it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeDfgUvyKHk
Autumn Winter ...
What else? The box on the countertop:
well, I ordered, and it was delivered to 7H door Thursday while we were at the party, my favorite ham. Except this one is not a large whole bone-in kurobuta ham, this is a half ham. From SRF, my favorite, incredible ham. When the pandemic got underway, SRF ran out of hams for months. Then replenished and I ordered and we enjoyed, currently out of stock except for this half bone-in ham. It's already fully cooked, all it needs is warming up while my mouth waters.
Last in my picture album this morning, nothing spectacular, a low line of clouds hanging on the horizon far out beyond Shell Island, over the Gulf of Mexico.