Roll With Me: #1

The nice weather is making the trees bloom, slowly!

I hope one of my new fellow bloggers friends doesn’t mind that I’m kind of borrowing one of the things she does on her blog. Jenni Hearted does this “Walk With Me” posts on her blog and I remember seeing them and going, I would love to do something similar to that. So I’m giving her the credit, but  I’m not calling it “Walk With Me” since I use a wheelchair, I decided to go with calling these type of posts, “Roll With Me” instead.

This afternoon has been a good one! Despite spring being the season where your allergies go absolutely insane! Spring has its good features too! I’ve said before that I like autumn because of the changing of the leaves, but when you get to watch the slow process of leaves growing on the tall trees. It really makes you reconsider your favorite season. Sometimes spring gets a bad rap. I mean, the only reason we look forward to it is because we’re sick and tired of winter in general! Majority of us mainly look forward to summer more than spring. I hate summer and I’ve always hated it. The only good part about it that I like is July 4th. We have a fair here and we’ve had hometown singers play at the park. By the end of July and beginning of August, you start to get that small town feel and when the corn is ready to harvest, you really start to feel it. Up until recently, I never liked that feeling, but now my hometown is considered a city, I’m glad that feeling still lives on inside,

I spent probably an hour or thirty minutes outside. It didn’t seem that long. I think the more that I’m around the cats and around the trees, I feel like taking pictures of basically everything! That’s what I basically do everytime I go outside now. I really need to go through my phone and delete pictures, because I feel like my pictures that I take get smaller and smaller and I’m pretty sure my toes are not doing it. Of course, my phone is not like everybody’s smart phone. I guess I should be lucky I can even take pictures at all. I’ve found recently that (and it might be from all of the nature and places photography on Pinterest) I’ve been inspired by different things that I’ve seen. Two things that I saw while I was outside that I couldn’t get good pictures of were these trees. Our neighbors have, they’re either dogwood trees or cherry blossoms, but in the autumn they’re leaves go everywhere, but in the spring when they start to bloom, they get all white and so beautiful! A few days ago, they were completely bare and now they have little white leaves everywhere. The next tree is next door from us, as I was coming from the backyard into the front part, I got a very interesting look at the tree and I instantly thought, “it looks like my back.” It has a very noticeable curvature and I literally tried getting a good picture of it, but I didn’t want the houses in the actual picture so unless I can get a few minutes in the road one day and actually get a good picture of it, you’ll just have to imagine it for the time being. Sorry.

Something else I was looking at the entire time I was outside was the moss growing on the ground by the roots of the trees. I’ve got to say, I hate driving my wheelchair over the roots. They always make it a bumpy ride! Plus, my wheels tend to get caught int between them too! Before I went outside I saw this commercial on my TV that was talking about grass, how the roots will grow deeper underground, and you won’t have to mow as much. They also say something about you could have healthy looking grass, instead of it having little brown spots and takes out the weeds. I’m sorry, I like the natural grass the most, even if its unhealthy. If we had that then it would take away the little wild flowers that grow in different parts of the yard. Those little yellow flowers are a childhood thing for me. Dandelions are the same thing too! You can’t take those away just because they’re considered weeds! The last thing I was enjoying looking at was the little clovers everywhere in our front yard. I was having fun looking for four-leaf clover and I’m betting my dad was thinking I was weird and hoping I didn’t fall out of my wheelchair trying to find one.

When I first went outside, my mom came out with me to see if the dirt in our backyard was really as soft as what dad was talking about, and it wasn’t. I made tire tracks but I always do that! Mom brought out ChiChi and she got chases by Grumpy through the yard and poor ChiChi can’t go about her business without one of the cats wanting to check her out. Now she knows how we, the humans, feel on a daily basis. The cats seem to enjoying the nice weather just as much as I was. You can’t see it in this picture–because if I got any closer he would have run off–Grumpy has his first “battle wound” from being outside with the big cats. My mom thinks he got it from either Bootsie or Wren. They both have bad tempers and we can see it happening. Anyways, when it was just Wren and Stef, they would follow me from the front yard to the backyard. Well, this time it was Bootsie doing it. She kept following me everywhere until that is when a couple of my dad’s friends came over and one of them brought over his new puppy. I think, if I heard right, his name is Diesel. We used to have medium size dogs in my family, and now we have ChiChi. This dog is exactly like our old dog Chance, she was a pit bull and from the moment he came out of the truck I literally wanted to start crying. It’s been so long since I’ve actually been around a pit bull. The other part about him was that he looked like my grandparent’s dog Casey, white with medium size brown spots on him. It was like both dogs were reincarnated into this little guy and I was having a hard time containing myself and my emotions. I miss both dogs.

Don’t ask why both Grumpy and Midget are looking to the left. I was just lucky and literally holding my breath at the same time because I knew one false move and they’d move. All four cats seemed to be very lonely being outside. I mean, even after my mom brought them a half a cup of dry food for them to eat they were still at my wheels, rubbing up against me. I’m not saying it doesn’t bother me. After my dad’s friends left, I went back in the backyard and the only one who was around me was Midget. She was still traumatized from the puppy. The other three were nowhere to be seen until I went back to the front yard and there they were laying out on the porch like a bunch of bums. Weird though for you, I don’t know why and I was literally just discussing this with my mom, that everytime I go outside, even for five minutes, I get so tired! My mom said she does the same thing when she and dad ride the bike. The sun has weird powers or something. I’ve always had weird sleep patterns, but I tend to get my best sleep in the daytime. The sunlight has always made me sneeze and sleepy. I’m that weird. After failing to get the last pictures of the pretty trees, I finally decided it was time to come back inside and get the song out of my head. It’s not a good idea to leave to go outside in a middle of a song that you’re learning to sing out loud, because then you have about half the chorus and melody playing in your head and it just drives you crazy! So that was my afternoon. How was yours?

The “How-To” To Writing A Letter To Yourself

I originally wanted to do my Free Write Friday post right now, but I don’t have any ideas for the prompt at the moment. I’ll have to do that later on today! I wanted to do this yesterday after I had completed both of my letters to myself. I’ve got to say, I remember watching the episode of The Golden Girls where Dorothy writes a letter to her late father. She said she did it because she never really got to say goodbye to him and that it was really helping with getting things out in the open even though he’d never read it. I’m always dreading reading anything I’ve written in the last ten years, because I was so immature with my words and you can sense how my attitude was back then the more you go on reading them. I’m glad I waited to do the letters now instead of doing them earlier, although we did have to write letters to ourselves when I was a freshman in high school. It was our first day of school and nobody had homework in our resource class and so our teacher had us make these letters to ourselves and at the end of the year we’d get them back. Well, we never got them back and I’m thankful for that!

There’s two reasons of why I wanted to create a past and future list. I wanted one to be like an advice or a guide to my younger self. The future list was mainly an over-bearing question and answer list. I also have two reasons why I picked these two ages, I mainly wanted an age that was the start of everything going downhill. At age 14, I was basically at a standstill between being a middle schooler and going into high school. I was also going through things in my personal life that would kind of “get me ready” in a sense for the next several years of my life. For my future age, I wanted to pick an age where I think I’d feel at peace with, in a way, that’s also a bit of a standstill too. Everybody nowadays says, 40’s is the new 20’s, and I didn’t want to focus on a mid-life crisis or on that phrase, so I choose an age where it would be in the middle of an adult and elderly. Who knows, the world might get more complexed down the line and we may never die. Here are my guidelines into making a past and future letter to yourself:

The past letter:

• Pick an age that has three or more specific things that either at the time made you see the light or had gone downhill.
• When choosing that age, make sure you can remember everything well. While you know about a certain subject that happened at a certain age, as overtime you start to lose of what really did happen before it happened, as it was happening, and after it happened.
• Unless you have a very good memory, don’t select an age from 10 and under.
• Be as honest as you can, share and show us or yourself what you really can remember and how you really felt on that day/night.
• You can share as much as you want, but if you share it on a blog, I think you should censor yourself a little bit. Don’t go into full details in case there are people out there, who don’t like you very much and want to use it against you.
• When you go to give yourself advice for your younger self, I don’t know why I did it or the fact I’m telling you this, but try not to reveal much of what’s to come later on in your life. I might have Back To The Future stuck in my head or something and that’s why I’m saying it.

The future letter:

• I wouldn’t pick an age that’s five or ten years down the line, that’s too soon!
• Unleash any questions you might have bottled up inside.
• In case and god forbid this ever happens, share some memories of small things that you like that might put yourself at ease or make yourself happy that you were able to make it so enjoyable.
• Share what your fears are now but be a little bit humorous too!
• Be as vulnerable as you can as you write about asking about family questions, it might hurt coming out with it now and then too, but you might feel a connection between your two selves when you go to read it,
• Ask yourself one last question from now about how content you are and see if what you’re older says in whatever age you decide to give it to.