Turbulent week ahead

Front porch flowers

My beautiful flowers are looking good for the last week in August. I didn't realize how much I would enjoy pink, but everything that is flourishing seems to be that color. It wasn't intentional: sometime in late June I realized I had some gaps in my flower beds, and I bought a few petunias to fill them in, and they have not only thrived, but in some cases taken over. I'm not at all unhappy with the results.

When I write in here next week, it will be September, ushering in my favorite time of the year. Well, fall doesn't actually begin until the end of the month, but the weather changes from our usual cloudless skies to more variety, sun mixed with gentle rain and lots of pretty fluffy clouds. I think clouds are fascinating and lovely. I'm one of the few people who can say that they know what it feels like to be inside one. When I was a skydiver, although it isn't actually legal to jump through them, it happens occasionally. There are perhaps a dozen cloud jumps that I will never forget. When you are above the cloud, you can't see the ground or what might be underneath (such as an airplane), but once you're in freefall, there's not much you can do about it, so you just go right on through. Sometimes they look solid, but they feel soft and cool in relation to the surrounding air. I love clouds.

The coming week will be rather disruptive, for several reasons. The first one, most on my mind, is a long-scheduled colonoscopy. Most of my readers will have been through at least one of these procedures. It's not the event itself that is difficult, but the preparation. Sitting on my desk are all the ingredients to get my bowels completely cleaned out: laxative pills, some kind of awful liquid that I must drink, and magnesium citrate on top of it all. And for the whole day before, I can only consume liquids, no milk in my coffee (but at least I can have coffee) until after the procedure on Wednesday morning.

It all starts with the consumption of laxative pills at 11:00am Tuesday, and from there I take a break until 5:00pm with the first drink of the mixture, then another at 8:00pm, and last of all, 4:30am the following morning. I don't expect I'll get much sleep, since I'll be up and down going from the bed to the throne. I had one of these in Colorado maybe fifteen years ago, and I thought I'd not have to have another one of these, but I actually requested it from my doctor when I went in to see her for my wellness visit. I've been having some changes in bowel habits, and figured it would be a good idea to have this uncomfortable examination one last time. At my age, unless they find some suspicious growths, it should be my final time enduring this.

And to top it off, the YMCA gym, where I've been going almost daily for the entire time I've lived in Bellingham, will be closed for the whole week, opening up again on September 3 after the Labor Day holiday closure. They will be resurfacing all the floors and making some other changes that are more easily done when the users of the facility are not there. It's a real nuisance for me, but once it's done, we should be happy with the results. Other than the smell that bothers some, the resin they coat the wood floors with, it will be nice to have it all done at once.

I decided to sign up for a week at a nearby athletic club, which cost me about as much as a nice dinner out. Other than probably not using the facility on Wednesday, I'll make use of it the rest of the time. Some friends frequent it instead of the Y, and some prefer it, but I've been going to the my favorite gym for so long that it will be a disruption. They have exercise classes, too, which I might try out, and before I know it, this turbulent week will be behind me and things will return to normal. At least I hope so. I have not been looking forward to it at all. Next week when I write my post, the colonoscopy will be a memory, but I still won't have returned to the gym. That won't happen until a week from Tuesday.

A week from this coming Monday is Labor Day, which is the unofficial end of summer in the United States. It was another Labor Day, back in 1990, when I made my first skydive, not knowing what a change it would bring to my life. It changed the entire trajectory of my life, right up to this day. My dear partner came to me through the sport; we met in 1992 and married in 1994 (in freefall), and the sheer volume of jumps I made every year after add up to more than 4,000. One year (1998) I made 401 skydives, the pinnacle of my skydiving career. That's more than one a day on average!

I just looked up that year in my logbooks, which I still keep on a nearby shelf. Every single jump is chronicled, and looking at the one covering that time period, I remembered that I also kept track of what I did on each one. Once I became an instructor, instead of paying for skydives, I made a small amount ($30) as well as the jump itself. The extra money meant that I could afford to play with my friends in the sky quite often, when I was not working as an instructor. That was more than twenty years ago now, but that period of my life is still alive in my memory. I'm glad to have the logbooks, too.

When we moved to Bellingham in 2008, I managed to keep skydiving a little, not as an instructor, but an hour-long drive to Snohomish gave me a chance to still "get my knees in the breeze." Gradually I jumped less and less, until in 2015 I made my last skydive and sold my gear. For more than 25 years, it was the center of my universe, but like almost every other part of life, one day it became time to move on.

Sometimes I miss it, but having moved to the Pacific Northwest from Colorado was the beginning of learning about wonderful hikes and trails, and the enjoyment of being outdoors in the wilderness has not yet worn off. It was an old skydiving injury in 2000 that still reverberates through to today, and I am still in recovery from a fall I took more than a month ago. One day I will have to stop my current level of activity, but I feel quite confident that I will find a way to enjoy every single day until then. And the next phase will open up. Who knows what the future holds? It's an exciting prospect to consider.

Do the one thing you think you cannot do. Fail at it. Try again. Do better the second time. The only people who never tumble are those who never mount the high wire. This is your moment. Own it. —Oprah Winfrey

I remember when I was learning to skydive, and then to teach, that I felt I would never achieve my goals. And now here I am, looking for the next thing to attempt and conquer. I've been on the high wire, and I have survived to this day. My dear partner still sleeps next to me, and I know my day today will take me out into the world to find new adventures, and I will hopefully be with you, my dear readers, again next week. Until then, I wish you all good things.