When it rains, it pours...no shit.

Discarded No. 1, 8/9/2011

Discarded No. 2, 8/9/2011

Discarded No. 3, 8/9/2011

Discarded No. 4, 8/9/2011

First of all, thank you for your kind comments and emails to me, I really appreciate your wishes and sympathies...it does help in that quiet way, I did receive some sense of buoyancy.from your thoughts.  The month of August has been a very strange period in my life...the loss of my mother was the major, life changing event, and then three weeks later my poor father had an accident at home, breaking his right hip...not a good thing for an 84 year old man to deal with at this point in his life while still suffering from the heart ache of losing the love of his life...but perhaps the nasty irony is, he's now forced to think of himself in a different way. During the days following the funeral, he had been managing all right, being forward thinking, and learning that being alone at home with his new reality...my father is a very contemplative and curious fellow, and yet, has managed to maintain a sweet innocence about life that is very matter of fact. The good news is he made it through the surgery to fix the hip, the surgeon was please with how everything went together, but now the long unknown road to recovery commences. His long term chances are 50-50. His survival will rely on his spirit and the determination to return home...he's made it known that he hates lying around, and he wants to go home...baring complications, I believe he will go home. Now the hard part for me was leaving him to take care of me. Between the crappy FMS flareups and troublesome sciatic nerve pain because of that dang bulge in the L4/L5 disc in my back I'm quite the little pain-ball at the moment...most of it being my own fault for not being good to myself during this difficult time. Thankfully, being my father's daughter, it is my stubborn spirit and determination that will keep me going forward in spite of adversity...

Discarded No. 5, 8/9/2011

The photos are from my parent's yard in Lyons, NY...of all things, their compost heap. These are perhaps the last things that my mother clipped and tossed in there before she passed away... and as of yesterday, the lawn mower man came and has since added grass clippings on top of the discarded flowers from the funeral, of which I did not get to photograph before I left yesterday...