A Letter to My Readers

Today, I have decided to write a letter to my readers, in lieu of my usual post. I want to say Thank You so very much for your ongoing support, especially those of you who send comments or donations! It means a lot to me, and keeps my writing flowing.

I thought I would be traveling cross-country with a tiny off-grid camper while writing this week’s post, but the Universe had other plans for me, and I am still at home at my desk. August has brought with it a lot of challenges and shifts, which I will share in more detail when they come into a coherence worthy of writing about.

Since my travel was delayed, I was home in Florida to experience Hurricane Idalia, less than a year after Ian’s devastating destruction. Unlike Ian, which had a very unpredictable path until right before landfall, Idalia thankfully kept to a steady path, and made landfall quite a bit north of Englewood, as predicted. Nevertheless, the PTSD leftover from Ian, and the concentration in time of these two monster storms, meant at a minimum a few stressful days for most people on the Gulf Coast of Florida. And once you have directly experienced a natural disaster of this magnitude, it becomes extra difficult to witness it happening to others.

Due to a bit of bad luck, my house actually sustained more damage from Idalia than from Ian (a hole in my roof), but the debris on the ground is insignificant compared to the mess Ian left in our community. I think one reason is that Ian gave our whole region a huge pruning and cleansing! I can’t help but make the comparison to our own health - a detoxification and cleansing process of the body can be messy and uncomfortable, but once it’s been done the next illnesses will be profoundly less severe.

By the time you are reading this, I will have flown to my former home-turf of Michigan for a couple of weeks, to enjoy the abridged version of my summer travel plans. My roof is miraculously getting patched just 3 days after the damage (it sometimes helps when you drive to the roofers’ office instead of filing by phone or online with the post-storm masses, especially when the roofer who knows you from previous repairs walks in on his lunch break).

Here is a photo of my creative temporary patch-job, which I did between squalls as the storm was retreating. The super-heavy bag of play-sand is over the hole, and the dense plastic boards form a diverter for the rain-water flowing down from the roof-peak. While the power company guys were on my property sawing the fallen tree off of my power line (and my roof), one of them took the bag of sand that I could hardly carry, and casually slung it over his shoulder and cruised up the ladder to toss it on my roof for me. Thank you, FPL!

And here is a picture of the unfortunate storm-surge damage to the road along our key that connects our local beaches.

It’s been a tough month, for me, ending with a very challenging week dealing with the huge storm. It will be a welcome and refreshing reprieve to play with my 7-month old adorable grandson, who knows nothing yet of the piles of stresses we adults have to manage. He has his own stuff though - he is in a spurt of brain development so rapid and so exciting that he often wakes at night and has trouble getting back to sleep because he is so engrossed in all his new revelations about his body and his world, and his fervent desire to learn it all! And, he is teething again.

I wish you all a beautiful rest of your summertime, and I’ll be back soon with new material. Over the next three weeks, I hope you will enjoy another article from Don Bennett about dealing with conflicting information, and two more that I wrote years ago - one about raising children, and one about the process of living our passions.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you!

Blessings, love and light,
Ellen