Window of opportunity part 2

As I come back out to the balcony, having refilled my coffee, there's a breeze that makes me shiver for a moment, but it's supposed to go up to the low 60s today before raining heavily tonight.  Now is the window of opportunity in the weather indeed, and there are times lately when it can seem like the exhilaration comes only a few hours per year.  It used to be I could walk out of my house and see stars galore in a winter night, and so not even mind the perpetual darkness, but that was when Jamesie and I were in our 20s, young enough to live in a fixer-upper of a house and deal with repairs as they came (skimping on them, it's true, as well as scrimping for them).  Now I know we'll probably never get those stars back because we'll probably be stuck here in this Third floor condo which, while it has nice sunset views, really leaves me craving a way to view time stars during long winter nights because we don't have a way to view them that is safe from traffic, and we're too near to the city anyway but this is where the job is that Jamesie will probably never be able to retire from especially now that we've got my medical expenses.  Hey if I wanted luxuries like views of starry skies and time for friendships I guess I really should have clawded and pushed harder to become a millionaire so I could have a yard - and yet we used to have a yard of almost a half an acre in our fixer-upper in Whittaker - a house which we bought - and sold - for a fraction of what this third-story space capsule with artificial TV perpetually on cost us in 2021. It never occurred to me until we arrived here that starry skies and friendship could be commodified.

I hate the way everything can be commodified, a thing that really hit me once we moved here from Michigan in December of 2021.  But had we moved at this time of mid-April (but after our taxes were in) I might have sat or walked outside early on, trying to get a sense of where I was.  Now I know that the place where I live is embraced by mountain ranges as well as by the city and all its industrial surroundings like the Port of Newark and the Ironbound. I was starting to get my weekly "driving through the mountains fix" before I got sick, shortly after Trump was inaugurated and I was still trying to find non-violent resistance movements that didn't require a $25 round trip into Manhattan. I can remember the day - five days after he retook the Oval Office, when I fainted, hitting my head on the hardwood floor. I must have come to a minute or two later to "Francie hit her head on the floor!". I was relieved to find I wasn't isolated after all, which I had been so afraid about when we arrived here in New Jersey not knowing a soul except one another.  Jamesie got me to the Emergency room where it turned out to be an unspecified stomach bug but where a CAT scan of my stomach revealed that I have a large kidney stone such that now I am getting used to having to wear a nephrostomy bag that at times creates a dull stabbing pain in my stomach.

Well, it's definitely chillier and grayer now than it was even a half hour ago, so I might as well go in. There will probably be plenty of opportunity to brave the cold and rain this Saturday if it's anything like the "Hands off" demonstration two Saturdays ago in Teaneck.  Maybe I'll make a cloth sign that will dry out if it does rain.

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