You were watching, weren't you?

You knew when the apartment would be empty, and when you'd have time. Time enough to empty the folders and the accordion file.  Time enough to find the key to the strong box so you wouldn't have to try and force it open like you did the front door.

Somehow you knew you'd have enough time to consider all your choices. Or did you have help? Many hands make light work, you know. You left a perfectly good credit card behind...and an unused book of checks. So I guess you're not into identity theft.

But it was identity theft. My identity. My mother's identity. My grandparents' identities.

To you, it was a carat's worth of diamonds shaped like a heart. How much will the pawnbroker give you for my grandfather's 50th anniversary gift to my grandmother?

To you, it was a bulky gold and silver ring with a small diamond in the middle. To my grandfather, it represented 70 years in the Masonic order. To my mother, it represented her hero.

To you, they were tiny rings with shiny red stones. Garnets, by the way, not rubies. And that's rose gold, not copper. And they belonged to my great-great-great grandparents. Matching wedding rings from 1883.

To you, they were just two gold rings with a few diamonds. To me, it was what my father could afford to marry my mother. She's a widow...has been for nearly 20 years. Those rings were supposed to be for my daughter. They weren't blinding in brilliance, but they were beautiful.

My mother has so little. Too young for Medicare, too old to be working the labor intensive job she has that helps her break even every month.

Do you work? Do you steal to feed a habit, or were you desperate to feed your family?

I should tell you - we're not scared. We're angry. I don't think you'll be back because you have no interest in taking the social security information and birth certificate of a dead man...or a perfectly good credit card. You took what you could pocket and pawn. And I hope you do pawn those rings. Because then we stand a chance of getting them back.

I'm not scared of you. Whether it's one of you or three. What I am scared of is that if your pawn broker, the guy who gives you money for rings with no questions asked, will decide a dinky rose gold ring with a garnet isn't worth squat. And you'll toss it in a ditch. Or that 70 years of respect and honor in the form of a ring is sitting on the table next to your crack pipe.

I want to feel sorry for you. But I can't. Not right now.

To you, it's just gold. A few rings in a box. To me, they represented love and family. Irreplaceable.

Hi, writers!  Thanks for the emails/messages.  I am really still breathing and writing - I had some computer issues and time management problems. And THEN I lost my password here and had to do a reset. But...I'll get caught up soon (on a month's worth of entries!).

Elizabeth

Sitting in the damp garden this morning, facing east, watching the sun break over the shadowbox fence, I admired the dew sparkling on the unmown lawn and dripping from iridescent purple balloon flowers.  I noticed strings of spider webs collected in the dwarf arbovitae, and hanging from the poplar...the sun sliding over the filaments.

An odd thought occurred to me.

"It looks like the spiders T.P.'d our backyard."

Twenty-eight years. That's how long I've been battling body image, weight, health, strength, eating habits, numbers on the scale, jeans size, and waistline measurements. I've analyzed their tactics, their manuevers, their statistics trying to find the strategy that will breach their defenses with minimal collateral damage.

I've fallen back to a safe, neutral zone. Retreated, as it were. I am tired of fighting. I told myself that two years ago and I decided I didn't want to fight with myself anymore. Yet I persist. Or maybe insist.

But instead of an all out battle, it's now guerrilla warfare. Waiting until I'm confident, certain of myself, or just not paying attention...then.....they confront me with temptations, rationalizations, frustrations, and depression.

And sometimes, there's a black ops team that sneaks in, blows up something and leaves me to pick up the debris. They have broken toes, twisted knees, messed up my thyroid to the point it had to be put out of its misery, and short circuited my brain.

I have patched, stitched, medicated, adjusted, cried, raged, adjusted again, fought, and most of all, persisted.

As with any war, if it lasts long enough people forget how it started, when it started, or why the war continues. What was the goal again? Fitting into a size 10? Having a 29" waistline? Being the one who does everything best? Capturing admiring glances? Was that before or after having children? Before or after the thyroid crash? Before or after the oral contraceptives and the anti-seizure medication that drained my energy and left me feeling useless and depressed? Did the battle start when my mother took me to a Weight Watchers-type group when I was 14 because she thought I was overweight, when I had never given two thoughts as to the size of anyone's clothes? Did it start during my second year of college when my boyfriend of three years dumped me and I tried to fill the void with food because I couldn't buy alcohol and M&Ms were cheaper than marijuana? Did I start to lose ground when my father died and I couldn't cope with the grieving process, and I sought solace in home cooking?

I retook the hill that was my health in my early thirties and lost 50 pounds but the casualty was my family because I was living to work out instead of working out to have a good, long life.

So I'm sitting in a foxhole, ten years later, looking at the weapons I have available. It's painfully quiet and I'm waiting for the next round of artillery. I'm losing ground again. I've regained 20 pounds over the last four years. The troops are getting tired and need to be rotated out. But is spite of losing ground, I'm managing to hold the territory...all tests and blood work and other intel have come back favorable to excellent.  So is the rest just propaganda?

I have three advisors. Two have said being perimenopausal and on meds that can cause weight gain are going to make losing weight difficult. An uphill battle that requires not only healthy eating (which, by and large, I do) but nearly an hour of cardio 7 days a week...not to mention strength training. But I have a finite amount of time each day, and minimal financial resources. And I won't sell out my family to gain two inches of ground.

What if the war isn't winable? What if it's just obsession? What if legendary warrior Geneen Roth is right - obsession just distracts from truth? Maybe there's a bigger battle to be won, and the last 28 years have been skirmishes.

Once more....into the breach. Lock and load.

My first grader named the trees in our backyard. George, Lily, and Steve - the fast-growing poplars - and Teeny, the slightly stunted but recovering tulip poplar. The first three were planted 5 or 6 years ago when we first moved in to provide some much needed shade in our south-facing yard. Teeny and an ill-fated companion tree were planted the following season.  Teeny seemed to battle a disease of some kind for the first two seasons, but now is making a glorious comeback. The one-foot twig is now nearly 6 feet tall with leaves the size of an adult's hand.

As for George, Lily, and Steve...billed as "fast growers," they didn't disappoint, shooting upward by feet, not inches, every season. The thick green leaves sparkled in the summer sunlight and turned bright gold in the fall, rustling like taffeta in the wind. In just 5 years, they'd reached their maximum height of 20 feet. They are the hot hangout for goldfinches, cardinals, grackles, robins and song sparrows.

But this spring, something was wrong with George. Over a third of his branches were dead. And though we hadn't noticed initially, he hadn't grown as much as Lily and Steve the previous season. He'd been healthy enough to produce buds on those dead branches, and the twigs that supported them were still pliable, but the larger branch feeding them was dry. Dead.

We debated whether to wait till fall or take care of it now, but we knew George had to come down.

The idea made me ill. I felt like I was betraying some sacred trust. I thought about how, for five years, I'd walked around our backyard, giving the trees pep talks  - encouraging the leaves to pop, telling them how beautiful their fall foliage looked, thanking them for the much needed shade.

As I walked around George, seeking a reason or hope for redemption, I noticed holes bored into the trunk, sap running down like blood from bullet wounds.  George was bleeding.

In a way, it didn't matter if it was the bugs or a fungus.  It was like having cancer and pneumonia. One of them was going to be fatal.

Over the weekend, George came down.  We'd explained to our first grader that George was sick and we didn't want Steve and Lily to catch what he had. But she did ask her dad to leave a stump so she would have a place to sit.

George's branches will have a second life as a trellis for our vigorous pink New Dawn climbing rose. And there may be enough branches left to build a rustic arbor for the clematis I got for Mother's Day. My friend Craig at AmazinglyRustic.com, a genius with a lathe, is loaning us a chainsaw to finish the work on the largest part of the trunk and in exchange, we're giving him some of George's best, which may have new life as pens, yo-yos, bowls, or boxes in Craig's workshop.

Below the top of the stump, new poplar shoots are pushing up. Time will tell. This could be the beginning of George Junior.