The Zen Leaf

The Children’s Home, by Charles Lambert (audio)

Posted on March 11, 2016 by Thistle

Morgan is a disfigured recluse living in a large manor home with only a housekeeper, Engel, for company. Then the children begin to arrive on the grounds, their origins mysterious, and they are welcomed into the home. The family grows with more children, and the taking-in of a local doctor who cares for them all.

This all sounds like a pleasant and homey kind of story, from that description, but this is misleading. This book is strange. Surreal. Think “Children of the Corn” meets The Supernatural Enhancements. There are kids who don’t act like kids, wax statues that are too realistic, masks that may or may not be real, and the strange warping-the-air ripples that Morgan suspects is related to how the children arrive. Mixed in with this is the horror of Morgan’s childhood and disfiguring, the extreme isolation of the manor, and the bizarre visits from government agents that don’t exactly seem to align with modern-day agencies. In some ways, the book is a tale of family and trauma. In others, a dystopia. In others, something supernatural. There is mystery, and horror, and definite creepiness with a fairy tale edge. The GoodReads description says that the book defies genre, and I would have to agree.

I had no idea, when I began this, that this book would be perfect RIP-season material. The audio, read (wonderfully) by Todd Haberkorn, gave me chills all throughout. You know that delicious spine-creeping feeling of watching a doll in the background of a movie-room turn its head slowly toward an unsuspecting character? That. That’s what this book was all about. However, it wasn’t just a horror book, or something to read for thrills. There were deeper themes, with very real (if strange) characters, making it a lot meatier than I would normally expect from this kind of book. It was also completely spellbinding. I started the audio and didn’t put it down until I’d listened to the whole thing. It was so very good!

I highly recommend this one, though if you’re a RIP fan, I definitely suggest holding off until you start feeling those autumn winds coming on. I might just revisit it myself come September!

Posted in 2016, Adult, Prose | Tagged atmospheric, audio, circus horror, RIP-worthy, speculative, WTF moments | 4 Comments

Wellness Wednesday #24: Run 4 Hope 5K

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Thistle

This year for my birthday, I wanted to do something a little different. Instead of having a party or gathering, and instead of getting gifts, I asked my friends and family for something a bit more interactive. Since 2013, I’ve participated in a 5K that supports the local Rape Crisis Center. Every year, I’ve run or walked this with friends or family. Last year, I even flew to San Antonio from Boston to participate. I asked all my friends and family to either come out to participate, or sign up as a virtual participate to support the Center, in lieu of gifts.

Jason and the boys were the first to sign up with me, and all five of us ordered superhero shirts (the Run 4 Hope 5K theme is superheroes). Ambrose’s Gandolf shirt, sadly, didn’t come in by the race, so he wore the race t-shirt, but the rest of us got ours. Thundercats, Daredevil, Watership Down, and Space Ghost. Some more obscure than others, ha!

The three friends I’ve walked this with for the last two years – Sarah, Zach, and Stephanie – also signed up. We took our traditional four-of-us picture, Zach making his “facebook face.” Yes!

My dad and stepmom also signed up, and my cousin Jen as well. We all set off at different paces. Morrigan was hoping to finish in 22 mins, despite not having run for years (heh). Laurence wanted to walk/run the 5K. Jason and Ambrose planned to walk together. My dad and stepmom were both going to run the whole thing, through at different speeds, as my stepmom has been training and my dad hasn’t. The other five of us were going to walk together. That was the plan, and some of us stuck to it, but others changed plans partway through. Long story (kinda) short:

1) Morrigan finished in 27:19, which he was a little disappointed by. Despite the fact that he got first place in his age group. 2) Laurence and Ambrose came in 7th and 8th in their age group, respectively, only two minutes apart, because Ambrose kind of jokingly ran his way through most of the 5K. Jason eventually let him go on ahead about two miles in, because he hadn’t been planning to run and was getting tired. 3) Jen and I split off from some of the others after about a mile, because we both wanted to do some jogging sections. We ended up coming in at 49 mins even. Woot! 4) My dad and stepmom both jogged the whole 5K, and my three friends, whose goal was to finish under an hour, came in over seven minutes faster than that. Yay!

Really, though, the best part of this whole thing was the group of eleven of us all hanging out together, all these people who came out to support the Center with me. It felt like being in a big hug, and had me smiling for the rest of the day!

ETA: Some of the official 5K photos were posted this morning, and I found this lovely one of Ambrose as he crossed the finish line. I just have to take a moment to tell you all about this lovely child who had no interest in running, making a good time on the race, or anything competitive. He began running as a joke to motivate a little girl, and then continued in the spirit of, “Wouldn’t it be fun to tease Mom by passing her?” “Do you think we could pass that dog up there?” Etc. He enjoyed himself the whole time, never pushing to where he felt bad, and finished the 5K with characteristic flare because he knew they were taking photos. I so rarely see anyone, much less a nearly-14-year-old boy, approach life with such a sense of enjoyment and fun and happiness.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged fitness, health, race report, running, Wellness Wednesday | 3 Comments

Classics That Fooled Me

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Thistle

It’s been awhile since there’s been a Top Ten topic that I could really participate in, so I thought I’d do a book-list of my own this week!

While I’ve not really read many classics over the last few years, classics are really the foundation of my reading. For years, I didn’t read anything at all, and then as an adult, I discovered classics and fell back in love with reading for the first time since childhood. Still, there were certain classics that I avoided, for one reason or another. When I finally got to them, I discovered I’d been so very wrong. So here goes – the best classics that totally fooled me:

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – Back in 2008, my book club chose this one, and I was not looking forward to it. I’d avoided it for years. But then I started reading, and I sped through it in less than three days. I couldn’t put it down. It was like reading family history! My family came from Oklahoma, and so the cultural mindset is super-familiar to me. Love this one!

2. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo – I was terrified of this book, and had been told about all the long side-chapters that had nothing to do with the book. Everyone always mentions the Paris sewers. You know what? I loved those chapters. The sewer chapters were extremely interesting. Yes. I never once got bored here.

3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – Very wary going into this one, because I’d hated Wuthering Heights. In the end, this became one of my favorites of all time. And I’m still impressed that somehow, despite being almost 29 years old, I’d never been spoiled on this book. I’d never heard of Rochester, or the madwoman in the attic…

4. Middlemarch by George Eliot – I had reason to be wary of this one. Silas Marner, while a good book, was very difficult for me to read. But Kate Reading – my favorite audio narrator – read the audio, and so I decided to give it a try. At first, I suspected I wouldn’t like it, because the beginning is a bit of a slog. After awhile, though, it picked up, and I loved it. Glad I stuck it out.

5. Germinal by Emile Zola – I have to laugh knowing that I expected this one to be dull as sticks, and that I would give it up after fifty pages and say oh well. This book is funny, smart, exciting, scandalous in places, and is literally one of the only books I’ve ever read that has made me involuntarily react by screaming out loud at a character while I read.

6. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier – Jason suggested I read this one all the way back in 2000. Boring, I scoffed. Then, through RIP, I began to reconsider. Ten years after I scoffed, I ate my words. This book is one of the best pieces of atmospheric writing I’ve ever encountered!

7. The Good Earth by Pearl Buck – This was another book club selection, and I worried that it would be excruciatingly depressing. I cringed as I read, just waiting and waiting for it to get worse and worse and worse. Instead, it was balanced and beautifully written and powerful and fantastic.

8. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson – Different kind of fooling this time. I read this book back in the late 90s, after seeing the movie based on it. I was hoping the book would be better, you see, and was disappointed. So many cliches! So predictable! Fast forward over a decade, and Ms Manda discovers that Shirley Jackson had written this book 40 years earlier. Ms Manda had thought that the book was new, recent, current. Those cliches and predictable twists? Well, Jackson invented them. I went back to read with fresh eyes, and discovered the awesomeness within. Perspective. It’s important!

How about you? Are there classics you love that you thought you’d hate?

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged classics, lists | 11 Comments

Sunday Coffee – All Too Disturbing

Posted on March 6, 2016 by Thistle

Everyone these days seems to be reading You by Caroline Kepnes. Reading it and praising it. And this book…I just can’t read it. I tried. I picked up the audiobook and began to listen, but it wasn’t long before I had to turn it off. I tried the print version, thinking perhaps it was just the audio. Nope. I shut the book. In the end, the narrator was just too disturbing for me to continue.

I admit, I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to certain kinds of disturbing books. I can handle something like Lolita just fine, when I know others have the same squeamish reaction I had to You. But some books are just too much for me. Even when I really want to read them. Like Sandra Brannan’s Liv Bergen mysteries. I love Brannan – she’s an awesome person and I’m super happy to have met her at BEA in 2010 – but every time I’ve tried to read through the first in that series, I’m so disturbed that I have to put it away. Brannan, like Kepnes, just writes so frickin’ well that the creep-factor shudders right through me!

This is totally a recommendation of both the above books, btw, even if I can’t make it through them…

Do y’all have books that are just NO!!! books for you, because they’re disturbing or something similar? What are your creep-boundaries?

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged Sunday Coffee | 15 Comments

Calamity, by Brandon Sanderson

Posted on March 4, 2016 by Thistle

I won’t give any summary here, so as not to give away any spoilers for this book/series. Calamity is the third in the Reckoners trilogy, following Steelheart and Firefight.

Let me start this review with my emotional/engagement thoughts. I’ve had mixed feelings about this series. When I initially read Steelheart, I adored it. However, it faded from my memory quickly – likely because it was a real page-turner and I read it super fast. By the time I opened Firefight, I wasn’t nearly as excited for the sequel. Then, it turned out, I didn’t really like the sequel. The setting and world-building was awesome, and I enjoyed the plot, but I found the narrator (David) downright irritating in ways that I hadn’t noticed at all throughout Steelheart. I was therefore not exactly excited going into Calamity, fearing that it would have the same annoyances, even though I really wanted to see how the story ended. (Especially after listening to Sanderson’s story about where the premise for the series comes from.)

Turns out, the book was really good. I still found David annoying in places, especially in the beginning, but once again I was caught up in the world, setting, plot, and other characters. Not once in this entire series have I guessed a twist correctly, and Calamity was full of twists. Honestly, I didn’t even bother to try to figure them out this time. I just went along for the ride. Likely, I read this one too fast, like Steelheart, and so it will also fade from memory, but I really enjoyed the reading. Plus, there was the added bonus of some deeper-thoughts:

Outside of my person emotion/engagement reflections, I noticed a thematic element going through Calamity that echoes throughout other Sanderson books I’ve been reading lately. (I suppose that’s inevitable, when you read a bunch of an author’s works all in a row…) Without giving away spoilers, I started making connections between the mindset of a character in this book and a character from Words of Radiance. They aren’t the same person – no world-hopping here – but both say a few very similar things regarding the juxtaposition of intelligence and compassion. Paraphrasing it concisely here, there’s the implication that extreme intelligence or mental prowess can cause a person to lose touch with their humanity and compassion. This is a theme often explored in classic literature (in addition to wealth, power, or status causing a person to detach from their humanity/compassion), and seeing it echoed in multiple Sanderson books makes me want to discuss-discuss-discuss!

End thoughts: While the series might not be something I will love forever, I enjoyed the way it concluded, and I’m still mindboggled at the imagination and detail that went into the Reckoners’ world. I’ve read that there may be a future series set in the same world, with different characters, and yes, I do believe I look forward to reading that one, too.

Posted in 2016, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged POC, psychology, speculative | 2 Comments

Library Palooza 2016

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Thistle

It’s no secret that Brandon Sanderson is one of my favorite modern authors, and I’ve been sort of obsessed with rereading all his books over the last few months. My friend Karen (Books and Chocolate) noticed this, and asked if I’d heard he was heading to San Antonio for an event called Library Palooza. I hadn’t. When I looked up the event, I saw that not only would Sanderson be there, but Leigh Bardugo and four other YA authors. Boom. Sold.

I was supposed to go to an event to meet Sanderson last year, in Boston. The meeting-Sanderson part thrilled me, but the idea of trying to drive my way to an unknown area on streets filled with ice and snow when I had anxiety so severe that I could barely sit in a car (much less drive) did not thrill me. When his Boston stop was canceled due to blizzards, I was both disappointed and relieved. Now, I’m so glad that I didn’t go last year, because this year, I got to head out to Library Palooza with my good friend Stephanie, who is also a huge Sanderson fan (plus a Bardugo fan).

The two of us headed out early, got in line early, and got seats near the front center of the auditorium. Eventually, the authors arrived. In addition to the two mentioned above, the panel included Michael Grant, April Henry, George O’Connor, and Kiera Cass. While I’ve never read anything by these four authors, I enjoyed everything they all had to say during the morning Q&A session. They were all so funny! I wish I had a recording of the whole thing.

After the Q&A, most of the rest of the day was split into “breakout sessions,” where each author got their own room to present however they wished. There were three breakout sessions during the day, and of course, Stephanie and I first went to Sanderson’s, then to Bardugo’s. Once again, I wish I could have these whole things recorded! These authors are so smart and funny and engaging.

My favorite part of the day, however, was the signing. You know, the part where I actually got to meet Brandon Sanderson. (Unfortunately, the line was too long to go to the back of Bardugo’s signing and wait, so I didn’t get to meet her personally…) Stephanie and I were fairly close to the front of Sanderson’s line (of course!). We’d both brought a handful of books – the limit was five – and I was just about out of my head by the time it was my turn. Stephanie took a picture while I talked with Sanderson. I’m not sure all the things I said – I was babbling – but I did get to ask him the question I’d been dying to ask: What is his Hogwarts house. He was signing when he answered: Slytherin! I was totally not expecting that to be the answer, and I let out this involuntary squeak of excitement (because hey, what’s a fellow Slytherin to do?). He misinterpreted the squeak at first, and started to say, “Now, don’t judge,” but looked up halfway through “judge” to see me with my hand raised for a high five. He high-fived me and said, “Oh, are you a Slytherin too?” Yes, Mr. Sanderson, I surely am, and I cannot tell you how happy knowing that you are, too. Even if you Hufflepuff in your books so very well.

Stephanie got her books signed after me, and I moved around to take a picture of her as well. Only Sanderson noticed that we were taking pictures this time, and looked up to pose at exactly the right moment. It was the perfect, perfect moment and the perfect, perfect picture, and totally captured how wonderful and exciting and happy the whole day had been. I really couldn’t have asked for anything better, and now, several of my Sanderson books are signed, including Words of Radiance, which says “Bridge Four!” across the title page. Woo-hoo!

Posted in Book Talk | 9 Comments

Hello, 37!

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Thistle

The loveliest thing about having a birthday on the first of the month is the double feeling of newness that comes with it. Not only is it a new year, but a new month. A double beginning. And just like with the first of each January, looking toward a new year, this kind of first tends to bring about a lot of reflection for me.

Two years ago, I was in a really good place. I was healthy, and I felt good about myself for the first time in a very, very long time. For my 35th birthday, I splurged on a spa-party for me and a few of my relatives (above), and we all went and got massages or pedicures. It wasn’t long afterwards that life took a distinct downward plunge. I barely remember my 36th birthday, the only one celebrated in Massachusetts. My pictures from it (below) show how haggard I felt at the time, mostly from severe anxiety and insomnia, but also from poor nutrition, too much alcohol, and extreme loneliness. It wasn’t the worst things had been, but it was close to it.

Now, a year later, I am in a much better place (below). No, I am not all the way recovered. My health (physical and mental) have suffered a lot. My family has suffered a lot. Our children are trying to recover from losing the only home they’d ever known, moving cross-country twice, and starting over in a new place. They all have mental health issues of their own. My marriage strained nearly to the cracking point and we are still recovering from that. Things were bad – but they are finally on an upward path, for all of us.

I start this year with tentative hope. After several really terrible years, I want 37 to be a good one for me. I want my life, health, and happiness, as well as those of the people around me, to improve. I want to blossom in this year, to go from being smothered by worry, depression, anxiety, and fear, into a place of peace, calm, happiness, strength, and confidence. I’ve made some personal (private) goals for this year – nothing like my 36 in 36 list from last year, which I nearly finished – to help along that path. My word for 2016 – healing – still applies, and my new goals (should) lend themselves in that direction.

Posted in Personal | Tagged goals | 11 Comments

Sunday Coffee – A Short But Explosive Month

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Thistle

Well. February was a brutal month here. I think probably half a year’s worth of happenings was stuffed into these few short weeks. To give you some idea:

Social
February began right after a whirlwind trip to Dallas to celebrate my nephew’s second birthday. The next weekend involved shopping for wedding dresses with my sister, followed by a Super Bowl party I held for my cousins, and Jason’s dad arriving from Wisconsin for a few days. There was, of course, Valentine’s Day celebrations, then a giant birthday celebration for one of my uncles, and then a few other health- and book-related events that will be discussed below. Beyond all that, I think I spent half of the month heading out for one doctor’s appointment or another (the five of us had a total of 21 doctors appointments this month!!), and the other half running errands. By the last half of the month, I couldn’t even fit in time for my daily walks!

Construction
We discovered mold behind one set of kitchen cabinets back in November, and have been saving up to replace them (saving up more in time than money – we have been BUSY!). With Jason’s dad coming in from out of town, we thought it would be a good time to work on them, since he and Jason often did this kind of project. Ambrose is also interested in this kind of thing, so Jason took a few days off work, and the three of them worked on ripping out the old cabinets, killing off the mold, and putting in new stuff. It’s not entirely done yet. We have a few little touches (like handles for the drawers), and in all the construction, we discovered that our soffit cabinets were held up with finishing nails, with no studs to attach them. So we had to pull those down, too, and are still trying to figure out what to do with the damage left to the ceiling and wall. Not to mention the loss of a lot of cabinet space. Sigh.

Health
I already talked about all the health stuff I’m going through, but you know how I mentioned those bajillion doctor appointments above? Many of them were Laurence’s. The poor boy inherited from his mother the tendency to get badly ingrown toenails. He already had surgery on them once, back in the fall, but it was through Urgent Care and they didn’t do a good job. We had to shuffle through several podiatrists (really, if you don’t treat children, you shouldn’t make appointments for them and then call an hour beforehand to cancel…), and then we had to make three different attempts at surgery before it actually happened. Laurence is still recovering, but he’s doing much better than in the beginning, and thankfully had no poor reaction to surgery/anesthesia!

Books
I didn’t read much this month – or rather, I read a lot, just a lot of the same book! My book-world wasn’t suffering much from this, though. Book Blogger Appreciation Week and my eight-year-blogoversary kept my blog busy, and I had a couple big book events outside the blog as well. I hosted a book club to discuss Howl’s Moving Castle, which was awesome, and I hope the group continues to grow and flourish. I needed a book club again! The second was an event called Library Palooza, where I got to meet Leigh Bardugo and Brandon Sanderson!! More on this in a forthcoming post of its own.

So it’s no wonder that a big chunk of my brain just wanted to read/listen to the same books over and over and over again, often while crocheting! Those were sometimes the down-moments I got! I’m looking forward to this month being over, to my birthday on Tuesday, to having a fresh (and hopefully less stressful) start to a new-to-me year!

Posted in Book Talk, Personal | Tagged house, Sunday Coffee, travel | 11 Comments

Project: 2016 Blanket (Crochet)

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Thistle

Not long before Christmas, I got the crazy notion that I should learn how to crochet. Honestly, I couldn’t say why. I’d learned how to knit twice in my life and I’d never really enjoyed it, giving it up both times. I’d been briefly taught how to crochet twice and never really picked it up. Some part of me wanted something to do with my hands, I suppose, and so I picked up some yarn and a hook. A couple youtube tutorials followed, and I made my first projects.

These were simple, and I hadn’t learned any complicated stitches or how to read patterns. I’d pretty much made different kinds of squares! The new year approached, and I was unsure if I would keep going with crochet. Then an idea popped up in my FB feed and I got excited.

This is (supposedly) a crocheted blanket based on temperature, one line per day of the year. If you study the picture closely, it’s really nothing of the sort, using far more colors than indicated by the gauge on the side. However, I liked the idea, and as usual for me, I decided to complicate things a bit more. Not only would I use color to represent temperature, but I would use different kinds of stitches to represent different kinds of weather, plus I’d use specific patterns (holes, ribbed lines, etc) to represent different moods. My goal was to make a blanket to represent the year, with all the bizarre artistic swirls that would be brought in with mood, weather, and temperature. Kind of like those sand-jar thingies.

I decided my stitches and patterns, assigned colors to different temperature decades (different from the above “pattern”), and got to work, one line a day. The blanket is 200 stitches across, to be slightly larger than twin-sized, made for one person. However, I quickly discovered that if I did a line for every single day of the year, the blanket would end up around 16 feet long. That’s twice as long as needed! Oops! I guess this is what happens when you’re winging it, haha.

My solution was to chop the year into four quarters, roughly corresponding to the seasons (starting a few days after the each new season begins). I’d crochet my lines until I reached almost two feet of blanket, then crochet in a cream-colored border to mark the end of that season. For winter, my last day of the (crochet) season was Feb 20th, so almost two months of recording. I imagine each season will vary in number of lines, depending on the height of the stitches chosen by the weather patterns. You can see, however, how volatile the last two months have been around here. We’ve had everything from highs in the 40s to highs in the 80s, five colors represented. It’s been a really hot winter around here!

I’m happy with how this has turned out. And honestly, I’m glad to be taking a break from the blanket and moving on to new projects. My enthusiasm for this hobby hasn’t died out yet, and I’m excited to make a few things that are more useful than squares, and useful sooner than sometime late in the year when this blanket is finally finished!

Posted in Crochet | Tagged I made a thing., Yarn Art | 17 Comments

Wellness Wednesday #23: Tests

Posted on February 24, 2016 by Thistle

Yesterday, I had nine vials of blood drawn at my doctor’s office. The good news: The nurse working with my doctor caught that they misscheduled the time of my tests, making one of them invalid, and called the day before to rearrange so it would all be done properly. Yay for on-the-ball doctor’s offices! Additional good news: Despite needing nine vials of blood, the nurse taking it was fantastic, and I only felt the barest prick at the beginning and end of the ordeal, not a thing in between! Now, for the bad news…actually, there is no bad news. Only more good news. Huh.

I saw my doctor last week to follow up on my new anti-depressants. We talked quite a bit about not just that, but the other health things that have been frustrating me. For those of you who followed my original weight loss journey, you might have seen signs of this. I committed myself 100% toward that journey. I was on-plan every day. I taught myself to eat produce. I cut out all processed foods. I tracked calories. I exercised almost every day, both cardio and strength training. I drank tons of water. Etc. I didn’t have “fall off the wagon” time periods, and yet, it took me 3.5 years to lose 100 lbs. It took me over a year to lose the last 20 lbs, and once I reached the very top of the healthy BMI line – or sometimes not quite there, depending on the scale – my body said nope, no more, not happening!

(July ’09 vs Feb ’13)

This is very unusual. People who commit the way I did, with sensible eating and exercise habits, usually lose that amount of weight in a year or just slightly more. Weight loss always seemed to be much harder for me than for other people. To bring it to the present, it is now impossible. I’ve worked my butt off for the last two months – not to mention working my butt off about 75% of the time for the four months before that – and I just keep gaining. I am not okay with this!! So I brought this all to my doctor last week. Already, I’d talked to my OB/gyn in January, after she questioned me for a time about the symptoms of PCOS (which she believes I have). Originally, we were scheduled to have tests for both doctors in April, but due to last week’s visit, all the tests were moved up.

My nine vials of blood are providing answers to extensive tests in all sorts of places: hormone stuff, metabolic stuff, thyroid stuff, glucose stuff, lipid stuff, cortisol stuff, and more that I can’t remember. Some of it is so specialized that I won’t get the results back for a month, but the tests for my OB/gyn should be here within a week, and I follow up with her next Thursday to see if, indeed, I have PCOS. If I do, that will explain a lot about my body’s resistance to weight loss, as well as many of my other symptoms. It will also give my doctors a path to follow to try to help my body regulate itself properly, in a way it currently isn’t doing.

Ironically, after all this started happening, I heard from one of my sisters because her doctor has started to suspect PCOS for her, too. Our other sister has a history of ovarian cysts as well, so this is a real possibility. A real possibility for an answers to WHY. I can’t tell you how hopeful that makes me. I’ve fought and fought and fought to do this on my own for years. I’ve been locked in this battle with my body, thinking that if I could just do things RIGHT, I would win. But I can’t. This is not a fight I can do alone. It has been a very humbling realization, and difficult for me as someone who clings to independence, even from doctors and medicines. I’m putting my health into their hands now, scary as that is, and I hope that they will find the answers to help me.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged health, Wellness Wednesday | 15 Comments