IN WHICH OUR HEROINE DECIDES TO GET...UP

Pardon me if I've told you this story before, but...

When I was little (Kindergarten, first and second grade) we lived in Athens, Tennessee.  My dad managed the Westinghouse plant there, and we lived in a really cool house that had white columns in the front and stone stairs to the basement in the back.

(What can I say?  I had never seen either one if those things in Lima or Bellefontaine, Ohio.  It was new to me.) 

Every year the plant threw a huge family picnic.  There was lots and lots of good food, rides, games, and general merriment all around. (My dad was beloved by everybody that worked for him, and my mom was a pretty spectacular corporate wife, so I can remember the feeling of warmth and love that surrounded us at those picnics.)

(I liked it.)

(I liked it a lot.)

One year, a photographer captured me poised with ball in hand in front of the dunking booth. ( In the event that this is a particularly American phenomenon...a dunking booth is a contraption in which a person sits suspended over a tank of water.  The objective is to throw a ball at a target lever that will result in the person's plunge.)

(Merriment usually ensues.)

Anywhoose...the little girl in this picture is captured in a state of complete...determination.  Her little pony tails are a bit askew, her striped t-shirt is a bit smudged from the shenanagins of the day (or maybe it was a pie eating contest), and her little hand is holding onto a ball the size of a cantaloupe with fierce concentration.

(The little girl is concentrating...not the cantaloupe, because that would just be weird.)

I don't know where that picture is, but I do know that I remember that little girl.  She has been awfully quiet these last few months, and I confess that there is a part of me that wonders if she is as brave and fierce as she once was.

But I'm gonna find out.

A few years ago I stood up to a bully and decided that enough was enough, and I walked out of his office while he sat stuttering to himself.  Thursday, I walked out of a meeting in which three people told me that I wasn't worth bothering about, and Saturday I ignored an email from somebody that said the same thing.

You know what?

They. Were. All. Dead. Wrong.

I've got a lot of stuff that I want to do.  This life that I have created for myself is a damn good one, and I'm done with feeling like I'm just an observer of it.  I still don't have any control over what's happening to me, but by God, I have control over how I decide to react to it, and I am even more surrounded by love and good will than I was at those picnics.

(I'm talking to you, boys and girls.)

I have to move out of my house?  Well, bring on the apartment!  I'll hang up that big ass pear picture, put my stitchy stash in the closet, throw the Happy Chair in a truck and be done with it.  

No kidney from my sister?  Why in God's name would a stitcher complain about having seven or eight hours three times a week to sit and stitch?  

Bosco tooting, snoring, and belching his way through the night smack dab in the middle of the bed?  That's why God made guest rooms.  

I'm all done now.  Break's over.  It's been interesting being flat on my back at the bottom of this well, but think I can see a few rungs of a ladder over there that just might get me outta here.  I'm not a very fast climber, mind you, but at least I am now...

Determined.