I haven’t really written lately but that’s ok. It means things are happening.

I recently went to see a friend that I’ve not seen in about 10 years. We used to stay in a women’s shelter together that was located underneath a church. It was one of the better shelters. You could stay until 9 in the morning, unlike other ones where you had to leave at 6 a.m.

We were also able to come back in at 6 p.m., where other shelters check in time was 9 p.m. There were about 16 of us that spread out in the gymnasium with mats to lie on. We also were allowed to keep one storage bin of belongings that were kept in a closet. However, that bin was not guaranteed to be there all the time.

I am not sure how she wound up in a shelter. But she did. So did I. Life circumstances threw us some hard punches. But we both pulled through. She got housing, as did I.

I asked her how she got her housing. She told me because she turned 62. She’s 72 now.

She qualified for a special kind of housing that helps seniors. I am so happy for her. She now has a cat named Gloria Rose…. named after a rose bush. And a garden that she maintains at a church.

I got my housing because while I was homeless I suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). I was getting out of my sleeping bag when it twisted around my ankles and I fell head first into concrete. Broken nose, brain bleed, concussion…. Ended up with plates in my head because I had 4 hematomas (sp) on my brain that made me unable to talk.

After that happened, all of a sudden I got housing because I was deemed a “homeless in need’ – or something like that. I had been applying for housing way before that happened for years but nothing happened until my brain injury.

I had been doing everything that I could. It took me to get a brain injury for expedition into a housing. I’ll write more about my TBI later. It’s definitely a game changer.

Anyway, I started this post because I saw my friend that I’ve not seen in about 10 years. We were joking around and doing some ‘show and tell’. She showed me her pink hair highlights, along with her garden that she is growing at the church.

My show and tell was to pop out my bottom teeth and exclaim, “Hey…look, I’ve got dentures….”

Her reply was, “Yes, I was wondering. I noticed them because you used to not have bottom teeth.”

???? I used to have bottom teeth. I don’t anymore. Are my dentures that noticeable?

I don’t know…. I just found the interaction kind of funny.