After teaching my weekly class at the Ventura Post Acute Care Center I wrote:
Your pain and sickness
Distress my spirit.
Seeing you erases
The smile I washed and ironed Especially for our visit.
How do you manage
Prolonged exposure to grief?
I cannot store up enough cheer to last the journey.
** Anita Perez Ferguson, Santa Barbara, CA, young adult historic fiction author
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Been There Voices is about us, our lives, our successes and failures, our joys and sorrows, our lessons and our gradual, hard-won wisdom. We have survived and thrived throughout whatever has come our way.
The reasons are arbitrary and not intended to dismiss half of our population, however, this project focuses on the stories of women, and begins with fourteen women, well-polished grains of sand on the beach of life, tumbled by the waves of time until their light shines through, offering their stories, joys and sorrows, to the ocean of wisdom.
What a powerful piece to wake up to this morning. Your imagery of "washing and ironing" your smile, girding yourself for the visit really spoke to me. My mother was in a nursing home and I often think of those who were there, but not there. I admire those who choose this as a career. I don't think I could do it. Susan Larson
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