No Ordinary Days: Totaled

I've noticed that when I pull the encroaching weeds from my garden, my intentional plants flourish and fill in the empty spaces quickly. Nurturing the good...paying attention...being mindful creates positive change. Stanley Swansen, the wise farmer who taught me most of what I know about living on the land, said to me years ago, "Ruth, like all things, it takes patience. The best fertilizer is a (woman's) footsteps."

Stanley Swanson

This has been a year of weed pulling and waiting and it has been a year of new learning and planting seeds. Many endings and some exciting new beginnings. Mountains climbed, hurdles jumped, puzzles solved, and solutions found.

Symbolic of the journey of 2014 is the car crash. In the middle of the night, while parked on a relatively quiet street in my Portland neighborhood, my beloved Jetta TDI was totaled. Like all problems, it took some time to figure out what had happened and what to do about it. Here's a brief summary:

Surprise: My car was not where I had parked it, but detivework revealed bits and pieces of glass and metal and oil spill....the remains of a bad wreck. A woman, going about 70 mph in a 25 mph zone shortly before midnight crashed into my car and totaled it. (Trial to be scheduled in the near future)

The Welcome Sign at the Junk Yard

Her Car

My Car

"Total Loss" started the challenge of what to do about a car. In Portland many people are going carless. I thought about that and decided I wasn't ready for that. Getting a used car made sense, so I went down that road as well. But after a frantic couple of weeks, I ended up getting a great deal on a new car.