Years ago, let's say about thirty, my family and I lived right beside the Flint River in a two bedroom, single wide trailer. Now I know that I have told the story of this lovely home before but for those that didn't read that one, let me paint the picture again.
My dad bought the trailer for $500.00. He hooked it up to a tractor and pulled it to it's resting spot where it was put on cinder blocks. It was actually very unstable and when my brothers would start fighting my mom would yell, "stop fighting younguns before you knock the trailer over!"
We did have well water that we tapped into via my uncle's well but there was no septic tank. Just a pipe that ran for yards and yards that only the Good Lord knows where it ended. I never looked for the ending because I figured that's would be just another shitty ending I really didn't want to see.
As you can imagine, this trailer had no central heat and air. In the summer, either a box fan in the window or a window AC unit was used for cooling off. And during the winter we had a wood burning stove/heater for keeping us nice and toasty.
That wood burning heater could really put out some heat. My mom also cooked a meal or two on that heater during a snow storm or power outage. Yes it was just like something out of Little House on the Prairie. At night time the heater would often burn out because we would all be sleeping and there was no one to put wood on the fire. For these times we would utilize electric blankets to tie us over until we could stoke the fire back up the next morning.
One winter my mom started complaining with what she believed to be heart issues. Day in and day out she would tell my dad that she felt like something wasn’t right. She would say, “ole man every night when I lay down I hear a buzzing noise and then I have this weird feeling come over me.”
As with all matters that my mom would bring up to my dad, he quickly told her she was losing her mind or in his words, “you are crazy as hell woman.” But then it finally happened; my dad laid down one night and caught exactly what my mom had been hearing for weeks. He started laughing uncontrollably and then he said to her, “damn ole lady that ain’t cha heart, that’s the electric blanket and it has a short in the wires.”
What my mom thought to be her heart buzzing was the electric blanket. The weird feeling she was getting was from the anxiety she had thinking it was her heart.
Moral of the story: we are all going to have a moment in our life when we feel discouraged and we feel like our heart is no longer in it and we feel weird because we have let anxiety about not knowing effect us. (Whatever the IT is) Maybe it isn’t our heart that isn’t in it any longer, maybe it is our minds allowing outside elements to affect our thinking and that negative thinking is changing our heart.
A positive mindset goes a long ways in all things in life.
I never went looking for the end of that poop pipe but I bet at the end of it the grass was super green. Sometimes a shitty start can have an amazing ending. It is all a matter of perspective and mind set. The grass can be green exactly where you stand. Stop looking for reasons to not be happy and instead spend a little time daily looking at your blessings.
