Moving on, it's time.

 I've not written many blog entries this year.  Some years are like that...but I'm glad the Google blogger is still available.  I remember when blogs were the thing to do. I recall back in 2012 reading a woman's daily posts from Sandpoint, Idaho...and I didn't even know her personally.  I wrote a reply to her and told her I enjoyed reading about her idyllic hobby rancher's life there with her husband.  They had horses, dogs, and since I had visited Sandpoint many years ago, we had something in common.  We were married to our husbands the same year, 1974.  I was 18 and she was 2 years older...but there the similarities ended.  Whereas she continued on her blissful married rural path, which I aspired to when I was a teen, I ended up back in the city and estranged from my husband, but enjoying the nightlife for awhile...perhaps too much.  Too much drinking and that's not what I had set out to do.

I've not had alcohol in 32 years and I don't miss it at all.  It's a good life without it, more like a child's enjoyment of good food and beverages, without booze mixed in.  It's weird to me to know alcohol is a toxin, not meant for our bodies yet the alcohol industry is huge and of mythic proportions...and it is all a myth.  Alcohol is a poison.  That's how I will lead into the next paragraph of white man and the North American Indians, because white man taught the Indians to drink and downfall, then the white man took the Indian little children and put them in residential schools, because the parents of these children were addicted to booze, many of them.  They should have given schools on Indian land to these children, the least white man could do...but no.

Now the residential schools are in the news all over the world because nearby where I live, in a city of Kamloops maybe 100 miles away ( my cousins live there currently and coincidentally they are teachers, retired - modern public school) the unmarked graves of 215 children were recently discovered behind the former residential school dating back to 1929. It's so sad.  Beautiful, gentle little Indian kids who were free and playing on their homeland, dragged away in the night...and dying one by one, diseases, malnutrition from unaccustomed foods.  Maybe some were killed intentionally.  It's just all too sad.

Coincidentally, I had already been planning to move from the resort here on Indian Band land where I've lived for 7 years.  I've been going to Kelowna, spending 3 or 4 nights per week there with my mother every week since November when we bought the condo in a 55+ community.  It's a beautiful setting and although the pandemic put a damper on things many residents say, almost apologetically, to us, we don't find it dull.  We met many new people, the buffet is back open on Sundays now, social distanced and I've discovered something about myself....

I'm reading J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, at my Mom's and my 3rd floor vaulted ceiling condo, at sunset, in the sunroom, each evening after dinner, in Kelowna.  I loved the Lord of the Rings series of books and movies.  I don't feel the author is totally aware of Tolkien's nuanced brilliance in subtle ways.  The author isn't kind in some ways I feel, although the history seems accurate.  Tolkien valued his family very much.  It wasn't a plain life, as the author seems to suggest, lived out in the imagination of the famous books.  Tolkien's was a secure, loving and kind life, with a wife and children.  He loved the countryside of his youth, and disliked people imposing on nature's beauty.  He lived through the combat of WW1, and lost friends in the war.

I don't want to be alone anymore.  The pandemic has brought out feelings of loneliness I didn't know existed within me.  I want to be with someone, or with people, like I was years ago all the time.  I'm through with this self imposed solitary life which I needed for awhile after the deaths.  I don't need it anymore.  I'm tired of going back and forth to Kelowna and living out of a suitcase since November, as my age is a factor now.  I just get tired, especially after the melanoma and during the pandemic.  So it's back to the city where I can be close to Mom in her final years, and I'm glad.

I wrote down the many pros and cons of moving, as I like written reasons in front of me.  The pros of moving outweighed the cons.  And now there's the residential school news every day.  Let me tell you something from my personal experience living on Indian Land.  White man here still doesn't respect the Indians.  If they did, whitie would try harder to include Indians in financial decisions regarding upgrading the resort. Our water plant needs upgrading, same with our septic.  The condos need painting, from strata funds.  We just don't have the leadership from white strata council and they are not quite respectful about the land we're on.  We are privileged to live here.  Instead, white man thinks they are doing the Indian band a favor by having the resort here.  It's too messed up, presently, and I don't see things progressing on this land.

Tomorrow my realtor is taking inside photos of my resort condo and I'm listing at the end of August.  I want pics now as the place is staged, and after pics I can start gradually sorting and boxing my stuff.  I have pink peonies in a vase near my laptop.  The fragrance is subtle and lovely as I type.  They grew in my garden out back.  I have dark pink roses in a vase on my fireplace mantle, and a  crystal vase of small coral pink roses in my bedroom, where the window view is the field with wild pink rosebushes in bloom.

I always sought and found beauty in my life.  I want a beautiful life.  And now more than ever, I want to share my life with those people, or someone, who wants the same things as I do.  Love, always.

Lu