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Holding patterns

    Lately everything is on "hold."  My garage is filled to the brim with appliances and tile waiting to be installed for the updated kitchen.   We have a new front door ordered, windows sitting on a loading dock somewhere and lightening ready to be installed.

    We are waiting on our contractor to finish one job and start ours.  

    I started a new position at work in late August, where I am working nearly exclusively with "high touch" customers and agents that need to have their needs fulfilled yesterday.  I feel for them, I've been an insurance agent for eight years now and have owned my own independent delivery company (one of those jobs that I fell into - much like insurance) for roughly 15 years.  I've spent nearly my entire working career in sales.  You always want to under promise and over deliver. Due to 1001 reasons a lot of those requests and desires simply can't be fulfilled.  

    Holding patterns. 

    A long overdue vacation is also planned, although we will not be heading far from home.  A vacation that was placed on hold twice due to work commitments. 

    We have two tons of wood pellets ready to be moved into the dry storage of my garage, but we can't because my garage is full of appliances, tile and flooring.

    Holding patterns.

    Everything is on a holding pattern.

    My father, who is 90+ years old has been in and out of hospitals these past several weeks.  He's finally gotten to a point where he is refusing further treatment.  He's not in hospice but we have a nurse on call 24/7 to keep him comfortable.  It's only a matter of time before that 3 AM phone call comes.

    Everything takes time...and time is everything.  Holding patterns.

    Growing up I wondered why my father stopped his travels, his skiing and other things he loved.  I realize now he put those adventures on hold so he and my lovely mother could raise two snot nosed kids the best they could.  They didn't put their lives on hold, they just changed the priority.  

 

    I know that winter is still officially far off, but there are subtle shifts in the wind that foretell of it's coming.   A few leaves have already started changing here in Western Pennsylvania.  The nights are cooler, and the light dims a few minutes earlier each day.  Now and again we catch a glimpse of a lovely sunset.   

    September, it occurs to me, is Autumn's holding pattern.  As the month itself is caught between the last sweet days of summer and the pleasure's of autumn.  September has also been a time of change for me.  September seems to be the month when I started school growing up and it always seems to be when I start a new job or leave an old one, of marriages and divorces, of buying a new home and selling an old one.  

    It is a month of transition.  

    Change is never a bad thing, we grow by change, by either having it forced upon us or accepting it willingly.  I've been thinking quite a bit about change.  

   I've been thinking about how this lovely little community I find myself in is going to have change thrust upon it soon enough and how badly prepared they seem prepared for it.  

    I've been thinking about how I am ready - so ready - for retirement.  However I'm not quite there financially.  How, when my father passes the last link that I had to my youth will be gone...and how much we take after our father's and mothers and how much we fight to not be like them at all.

    

    Finally I've been thinking about how I want to hold on to those precious moments.  How, maybe, being in a holding pattern is not that bad of a thing sometime. 

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Location: Stoneboro, PA 16153, USA

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 6, 2022 at 8:48 AM

    Priority is the word. Patience is next. Oh how we seem to not have any at all. If we leave this hurried, frustrating world today, everything would still be a stand still. Relax, we have only one life. Enjoy and appreciate what we have today. Several years later, what gets done, gets done.

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