~considering all bad habits, I guess there are worse~

The waning crescent moon is shining brightly in the sky in these very early morning hours of Saturday, the 17th of January.  It's going on 5:30 here along the Western Slopes and save for Crosby the cat, I'm the only one up.  Even Sally, the little heeler dog that is Mike's "best friend" went on back to bed after her early morning "going outside to the bathroom" ritual.  The little city of Montrose is still fast asleep, at least it would appear from the vantage point of our house atop a slight rise in the road.  In an hour or so the sun will be thinking about coming up and a brand new day shall begin.  What shall we make of it?  Each of us.  Any of us.  All of us.

One of the goals on my "list of 60 things to do before I turn 60" this year is to sort through all of the many photos I've taken over the years.  With the advent of the digital age and cell phone cameras,  I've found myself taking quite a few of them.  OK, OK a LOT of a few of them.  Right now my camera phone has more than a thousand pictures on it and good sense would dictate that's probably too many.  Yet I continue to take photos of anything and everything I come across.  It's the only way I know to capture and attempt to slow down this elusive thing we all call "time",  something that has a way of flying by faster each and every day.  

So last evening I began the process of going through a few of the ones stored on my camera phone, deleting the ones that were exactly the same.  I eliminated about 50 of them that were all of the same types of sunsets, only taken a few seconds within one another.  I was doing pretty well at taking care of a few of them, you might even say that I was on a "roll", until I came to the one shown below.  When I saw it, well I just had to stop and smile a bit as I remembered the story behind it and the loving gesture that my good husband Mike provided before we snapped the final photo.  It's the one shown below.

We took this photo of our left hands together in late June of 2013,  just a little over a month after we were married.  It was the last shot of about a hundred of them that were taken of the very same thing.  Each time that I would check the photo out to see what it looked like, I would become quite dismayed at the appearance of my left hand.  After my accident in 2011 in which "old lefty" was encased in a long cast for the better part of 9 months, my arm and hand just never looked the same again.  To me, my left hand now looks about 20 years older than my right one does.  The muscle tone is gone and instead of fitting semi-close as the skin over the right hand does, the skin on my left hand now pretty much just sags, looking old and withered.  After nearly 4 years now of it being that way, you'd think I'd be used to the way it appears.  Accepting of it, you know?  But I'm still self-conscious of it and most times I wear a long sleeved shirt to cover over the scars and what I perceive to be the abnormal appearance of it now.  Silly I know but it is what it is.  

But that night during the first summer of our lives together when Mike and I were trying to get a photo of our wedding rings, he reached over and did something very special and kind.  It was in a most loving manner that he said to me "Wait a minute."  With his right hand he reached over and pulled up the loose skin that always wanted to fall down, creating its own set of wrinkles, and held it tight while I took the picture.  By so doing, he sent his new wife a message that said~

"Hey, I do understand.  Let me help you.  I know what to do to make it better for you."  

I never forgot that loving gesture and the kind spirit that was behind it all.  It was one of those "for better or worse" type of moments as I look back at it now.  Kind of like when we acknowledge that BOTH of us snore in our sleep at night but that's just part of being married to one another.  No need to wear ear plugs or sleep on the couch for crying out loud.

In the recovery process for "old lefty" I had the occasion to take a lot of photos, ones that I will never delete from any camera.  They are the proof of what I went through and of what I survived. The scars, the disfiguration of what used to be a normal appendage on my body are reminders of an unfortunate and spur of the moment mistake in judgement that I made one early August morning in 2011.  When I am even older and more gray than I am at present, I can tell my grandchildren all about the time that their grandmother decided to jump a curb while riding a bicycle very fast.  The pictures will be my proof :)

After the external fixator device was removed in Wichita.

The surgeon who saved my wrist.

2 months into the recovery process, right before the third surgery.  It was all the farther I could turn my left wrist over.

Coming home from the hospital in between the first two surgeries at the scene of the crime, my own front yard.  I'm pretty sure the dent in the ground that my body made is still there.

Hey, I survived.

It's a given that the process of weeding through photos is probably going to take a while and I'll be pretty dang lucky to get through them all before I turn 60 in late October.  But the way I figure it, I still have 280 more days to go before I reach that magic number.  Should be plenty of time to get through them.

In the whole scheme of life, there is one thing that I know for certain.  There are way worse habits than taking too many pictures.  

Way worse.