Slight Detour: Saturday Slight

We strive for posey perfection.

Perfection, it ain't.

This poor sunflower, which was really pretty when Bill brought it home for me earlier this week, is losing at least a petal a day.

I suspect that some critter has singled it out for strategic petal harvest. Who knows if it's for a meal or material for a nest.

All I know is that every morning when I go outside, there are fewer an fewer petals on the sunflower. I was happy to see that the plant has different heads, so all is not lost.

In other news, my phone fell out of my pocket when I was trying my darndest to make my way to feed the horses.

All along the way, I encountered people who wanted to visit. Soon I realized that it was two hours after feeding time and those horses were probably whinnying, so I left the last crowd and began walking toward the barn with my friend Michelle. She's a local veterinarian.

Off we went, and the next thing I knew Michelle was no longer with me, and I was sitting on a bus which was not bound for the barn and the hungry horses.

As I looked out the bus window, I could see tall buildings, bigger than any in Sandpoint. So I knew that I was now a long way from the horses.

I quickly concluded that it would be important to get off the bus and did not look forward to the long walk to wherever home was to feed the horses.

Then, I realized that my iPhone had fallen out of my pocket. It was nowhere to be found.

That's when panic began to set in: how was I going to let anyone know that I had not fed the horses and that I was somewhere in some city?

Talk about losing your mind---that's pretty much how it is if you've lost your iPhone.

Then, I awakened, feeling very very relieved to know that it was only a dream and that my phone was in the house and that it was also too early to feed the horses their breakfast.

BUT it was 20 minutes later than I usually wake up, so the morning exercises went quickly, as did the shower and dressign, but I did make up for lost time.

Since then, the horses have gone to pasture, and my watering is done and, by golly, my phone is in my pocket.

That lavender spray from the Flower Farm does enhance my dreaming, but I'd prefer not to have another dream quite like that one.

Finches finally arrived and stayed a while at the bird feeder yesterday, probably while the squirrels were napping.

Seems like our resident squirrels have dominated the feeders.

Squirrels are cute, but I'd prefer to see more birds.

One never has to worry about oregano crops or Virginia Creepers.

Regardless of weather, they come on strong every summer.

It's Saturday, so I decided to include some fillers. It's a bit ironic what Ernest wrote in this piece, especially because he didn't exactly "hold on" at the end. He committed suicide.

Still, I find the words in this piece pretty typical of life at this or any stage. I also like the simple advice in the piece below.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote: The hardest lesson I have had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how broken I feel inside.

This truth is raw, unfiltered, and painfully universal. Life doesn’t stop when we are exhausted, when our hearts are shattered, or when our spirits feel threadbare. It keeps moving—unyielding, indifferent—demanding that we keep pace.

There is no pause button for grief, no intermission for healing, no moment where the world gently steps aside and allows us to mend. Life expects us to carry our burdens in silence, to push forward despite the weight of all we carry inside.

The cruelest part?

No one really prepares us for this. As children, we are fed stories of resilience wrapped in neat, hopeful endings—tales where pain has purpose and every storm clears to reveal a bright horizon.

But adulthood strips away those comforting illusions. It teaches us that survival is rarely poetic. More often than not, it’s about showing up when you’d rather disappear, smiling through pain no one sees, and carrying on despite feeling like you're unraveling from the inside out.

And yet, somehow, we persevere. That’s the quiet miracle of being human. Even when life is relentless, even when hope feels distant, we keep moving. We stumble, we break, we fall to our knees—but we get up. And in doing so, we uncover a strength we never knew we had.

We learn to comfort ourselves in the ways we wish others would. We become the voice of reassurance we once searched for. Slowly, we realize that resilience isn’t always about grand acts of bravery; sometimes, it’s just a whisper—“Keep going.”

Yes, it’s exhausting. Yes, it’s unfair. And yes, there are days when the weight of it all feels unbearable. But every small step forward is proof that we haven’t given up.

That we are still fighting, still holding on, still refusing to let the darkness consume us. That quiet defiance—choosing to exist, to try, to hope—is the bravest thing we can do.