For those of you who keep asking

if you missed my column on resolutions no, you did not, because I did

not make any. Not a single one. Didn't give New Year's Resolutions any

serious contemplation this year.

Yet, I am moving a new direction.

I am becoming more organized. And more than just a tad this time. But

the movement started last year. Though it has nothing to do with New Year's

Resolutions, it may have everything to with New Life Resolutions.

Following my surgery last August,

and the complications, and horrible depression that followed, when I really

wanted to die for a time, I kept thinking about how disorganized my attics

were. Yes, my attics. There's one on the front side of my house and on

the back. There's one on top too, but I don't use it yet. (I designed

our home, in Pagemaker, as an open floor plan with lots of hidden storage

space.)

My grandchildren refer to the

storage space as the hot attic or the cold attic, depending on what time

of year it is, and they love to explore every corner. Great storage space

is what these attics should be, but over the past couple of years they

have become stashing space instead of neat storage space.

When we moved into this home

in 1997, I declared I would never do that again. Just stash stuff, that

is. We had lived in the same home in Fayette County for 28 years, and

when we moved I discovered what a stasher I had become. I thought never

again, but that internal declaration just didn't hold.

There still may be hope though.

I am extremely thankful for

the faith and prayers of so many individuals who stood by me last year,

because I can assure you it wasn't my own faith that pulled me through.

About the only thing I did to keep me looking forward to getting well

was to occasionally think about all that clutter I'd be leaving behind

for someone else to contend with if I died!

I'm not kidding. I reached

a point where that became my only real focus for living. I didn't want

to leave a disorganized private world behind for family and friends to

deal with. When you are as spent as I was, as totally exhausted, as ready

to give up, you'll latch on to anything, I suppose, that will keep you

going.

I reckon it may have been my

love for others that prompted such a line of thinking. I remembered being

so thankful that my dad put all his affairs in order prior to his open

heart surgery, in 1988, that resulted in his death five days later. I

think that was such an act of love on his part to have crossed every T

and dotted every I. Yep, in a strange kind of way I still wanted to keep

on loving others, even when I wanted to die.

And now that I have begun ordering

my private world, I realize I just might live forever if I refuse to give

up and die before I have my life all neat and organized! I keep calling

it "my life" because the clutter consists of personal writings

and drawings, as well as art work made by my children, and numerous clippings

that mark events which have impacted all our lives. Those kinds of things

are stashed amidst tons of other "stuff" that I always say I

will think about sorting through tomorrow.

We say tomorrow never comes,

but we are wrong. It came for me last year.

When my tomorrow came, and

I began to explore my attic stash, I discovered all the prints I have

purchased over the past few decades and never framed. Oils and watercolors

of old home places with pretty quilts hanging on the line or across a

fence. Retired farm equipment rusting in the yards of a bygone era. Blue

birds singing on a fence post that has learned to lean with the passing

of time.

I wrote down the size of all

my prints and have started looking special frames. I cannot afford to

have all of them professionally framed, but I will frame them this year

and hang them on the wall in our play room. Shucks, there's no telling

where I might hang them. I want to see them! They have been hidden away

far too long.

So, though there are no New

Year's Resolutions, I'm happy with many of my New Life Resolutions. Life

is really good, it's hard to believe I wanted to walk out on it less than

six months ago!

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