Susan has switched her clothing from the boots and sweaters of a seemingly endless ice age to the flats and skirts of a budding spring. A portion of her well worn closet ended up getting tossed into the donation bag, or directly into the garbage.

After work one day she walked around a local department store picking out some clothes. Susan went to the dressing room where she hung her selections on the hook and started getting undressed. First she removed her necklace; a long gold chain holding the husband's wedding band. She doesn't wear it all the time, only when she has the proper neckline, otherwise it sits in a small ceramic dish next to his picture on her dresser. Her little altar

Susan has looked tired since the husband died, plus the end of the day was not her most attractive hour. She tried everything on, then rejected it all. Enough with clothes, she would go look at jewelry.

Susan walked around and touched everything. She ultimately fell in love with a gigantic blue beaded monstrosity of a necklace. She took it off from around her neck and headed toward the cashier when she realized she was not wearing the husband's ring.

Gasp! She had left her precious relic in the dressing room!

She did not panic, but walked with singular focus toward that destination. En route she contemplated how she would react if it was not there. Would she just suck it up like an extreme grown-up or would she hate herself forever like the total asshole she was?

Mercifully, her question would not have to be answered that day.

Susan personally witnessed Spring busting out all over the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens on Sunday!
She saw fields of daffodils, forsythia, plump and perfumed magnolias, Japanese flowering cherry trees and all manner of little green buds awaiting their turn to pop open and make a spectacle of themselves.
She even saw a bride or two.

 
During their visit Susan established a few guidelines for casual travel;
Don't rely soley on GPS. Susan would have benefited from a teeny bit of prep work to know exactly where she wanted to end up.
Don't make fear-based decisions. She doesn't have to jump into the first available on-street parking space.
Bring snacks. She knows this, she just got lazy.

On her way home Susan's daughter suggested they stop by an awesome seventies vintage store where Susan purchased a super fab tie dyed wrap skirt* that was representative of what may have hung in her own closet circa 1977.

 
*Editor's note: Susan's closet did not contain tie dyed anything, ever, but she did own a number of long, Indian printed wrap skirts which she wore into the early eighties.

Every night before Susan goes to bed she gets her food ready for the next workday, this preparation includes a green smoothie.

Susan threw a banana into the blender, covered it with soy milk, a fistful of spinach and an over sized spoonful of frozen orange concentrate then blended the sh*t out of it for a few minutes. She sliced up an elderly mango and threw that in too.

During the cleanup Susan saw that a scrap of sticky mango skin had adhered itself to a plate. She banged the plate against the garbage but the mango skin hung on.

Susan was determined to enforce her dominance over this defiant piece of fruit skin.

She took the plate in her right hand, turned it upside down and smashed it with extreme prejudice over the garbage. She did this two or three times in rapid succession. Unfortunately, one of her fingers was in the line of fire.

Susan was smashing a dinner plate against the thumb of her left hand.

It took a few seconds for the pain to reach her tiny dinosaur brain. She stuck her thumb underneath the faucet & turned on the water. It didn't come out cold as she expected, but blazing hot and burned her almost immediately. She burns herself at least once every other day because she has been lazy about figuring out how to turn down the water temperature.

With finger burned and throbbing Susan calmly hit up the secret stash of Vicodin left over from the husband's dental surgery and ate a pill.

The she went to bed.

Saturday morning and Susan started crying even before she had her coffee.

Her priorities are all messed up.

Since she's been in the habit of crying for the last four months she has developed an involuntary pattern of covering her eyes with her left hand as soon as she starts. It's immediate, the hand just jumps up there. She assumes it started for privacy then just developed into the thing she does. It's when she really breaks down, not just for a quick sniffly thing.

It's her move. 

The move is not done in front of anyone, she hates an audience when she cries. But, in the shower, staring out the back door, sitting at a red light...

Susan attempted to reenact the move for a pal at work & couldn't. She doesn't really know where her hand goes. 

The hand knows but Susan doesn't.

She finds this interesting.

Doctor's Orders

Susan pinched this from the awesome Nick Holmes and has prescribed herself to watch it three times a day.
Doctor Susan has written down on her fake prescription pad that you MUST WATCH IT too.
Now.
She's not kidding.

Four months today, Susan has been without the husband.

Susan has reverted to thinking of herself as a normal person but she's really not. How can she be normal when there's a big hole in her universe where the husband used to be? She doesn't even know where he is other than in a cardboard container in her bedroom closet. She sat his talking George Bush doll up there to keep him company, she likes to see them together.

Susan watched the husband get sick and die in two months, shouldn't she be mad or something? Or be flinging herself around screaming and tearing her hair out? Wait, she already does that when she can't find the nail clippers.

She's recently gotten a handle on the crying. She still does it of course, but can go longer periods in between.

That first day back to work after burying Cousin Lisa Susan took crying breaks in the toilet. At the end of the day she barely cleared the front door before she broke down, then sat in her car sobbing. Every morning she cried all the way to work then sat in the parking lot, sucked up her tears & went inside.

The car is crying central, it's her little privacy bubble which inspires thought and emotion. Same thing with the shower.
Alone + thinking = Bam! She's crying.
Thinking about sex definitely makes her sad, all that trust and intimacy is just gone. Plus the husband was funny. He'd strut around the room all full of himself like a wrestler in the ring, grandstanding for his audience. Who else is going to act like that for Susan?

No one.

Susan is going to get up, go to work, pay the bills, count her blessings and keep moving toward the future.

She misses her cousin Lisa every day.

She misses the husband every minute.