This resonates so deeply and sweetly with me.

I read it in a quiet moment at work, and it moved me to tears. I have been struggling with my health, in small ways, for several years. The ankle that mysteriously waxes and wanes. The ache in my right knee and up my thigh when I drive too many miles in one day, a souvenir of that last trip to see Dad before he died (five thousand miles in five weeks with five kids in a Toyota hatchback). The persistent fungus which has been a thorn in my foot for much of the past two years. The current breathing issues. The leg broken while line dancing, the long rehabilitation afterward, and the discovery that a middle-aged woman with a cane is perceived as a crone, or else invisible to all but the saintliest of men (and to her friends and family, who already love her and/or are pretty well stuck with her).

It is crazy-making to be a Relief Society president who is allergic to her meetinghouse and cannot sit through the (extra) leadership meetings before church and the regular allotment of meetings that every Molly Mormon sits through, or preside over a Relief Society meeting. It is frustrating to feel frail, and weary, and sometimes nearly useless.

It is also frustrating to keep striking out in the romance department. I miss the excitement of dating NintendoMan. I miss simple human touch. I am a high-touch individual in low-touch circumstances, and I am (momentarily, at least) sick and tired of it. Which, I suspect, may be part of what is making me both sick, and tired.

And yet I know all these things, the little niggling irritations in my life as well as the greater disappointments, are all serving to purify and refine me, and are meant for my good. It is just difficult, much of the time, to immediately recognize the blessings which are present in the absence.

Here is some good news. Look at the sidebar on the Yarn Harlot’s blog. Specifically, look at the total donations that knitters have made to Doctors without Borders! What a way to represent!

Got a weird text message yesterday, from an unfamiliar number, “What are you doing?”
“Who is this?”
“Why are you telling Maria that I shoot up?”
“You have the wrong number.”
“Sorry.”

I went to the temple after work and brought that heavenly peace home with me. Picked up a hot chocolate on the way home. Sent a clarifying email to a certain man, who had sent me some [squeaky-clean] e-fluff via Facebook, declaring myself a fluff-free zone. Call me cranky, but I don’t want e-hugs if I’m not getting real ones. Substantive discussions, yes, or how-was-your-day emails, the kinds of things that friends do, or at least that I do with other friends. But none of this fluffy-stuff; he does not get to have it both ways. I’m respecting his boundaries, and I need for him to respect mine.

My name is Mammy Yokum, and I has spoken!