The definition of the human experience encompasses the entirety of an individual’s interactions, emotions, perceptions, and thoughts through their life journey. It’s the subjective lens through which we perceive and interpret the world around us. 

I am six weeks out from having my right knee replaced. My journey through those weeks has been a bit of a rollercoaster, not to mention the years prior, when cortisone and gel injections became my best friend in moving forward or heck… just moving at all! I started writing blog posts many years back. As the idea of Life’s Patina manifested itself, I needed a way to both pen my thoughts that ran rampant through my head, sharing some of what was happening in our lives that I thought might be relatable to others, while balancing that with what inspired me in this little business that I was investing my days and nights in. All of it wrapped around and embodying the mantra of our business name…Life’s Patina, and its tag line…celebrating the beauty of life past and present.  In celebrating that beauty, I have tried not to shy away from the difficulties in life that we all experience. This blog post is no different. 

In the almost seven years since purchasing our renovation project, the Jenny Lind House or Life’s Patina Mercantile & Cafe as you might know it, time to continue to chronicle and pen my thoughts has became increasingly difficult to come by. In the beginning of that process, the excitement of what we were about to embark on was palpable. I penned posts on the building’s beautiful history, the years of neglect marring its facade and interior, yet imagining how I felt it could be transformed. As time wore on, obstacle after obstacle appeared in our path, derailing us “Time after time”… I felt like I was living in a replay of Cindy Lauper’s hit song. We persevered and finally opened up our dream in December of 2023. Upon its opening, I have learned more lessons than the entire 14 years we’ve been in business with Life’s Patina combined. I’ve been humbled, excited, exhausted, ecstatic, overwhelmed, underwhelmed, gratified, disappointed, blessed and more. Those emotions combined with the reality of being a small business owner caused not a blog post to be written since January of 2024. Tsk… Tsk… as writing these missives had become my therapy in a life that mirrored those aforementioned emotions. Gardening, my other form of therapy had also become increasingly more difficult to do as my knees wore out… partly due to the gardening and the litany of other physical activities I have partaken in the majority of my life, and the other part having to due with unfortunate genes, namely arthritis. So, time and my falling apart body had taken its toll on partaking in some of the most rejuvenating activities for my soul. 

How does all of this information connect to a knee replacement, blog posts and the human experience?  You see, when I scheduled my long awaited and once postponed first knee replacement for early 2025 , I had scheduled it for after our trip to Atlanta, which is an important buying trip that happens mid January every year, and during a period of time when I could step away physically from the business as I recovered. I have to be absolutely transparent in that I kind of looked at it like a much overdue vacation. I was tired, worn out from the pain and pushing past it day to day and the emotions that were heavy in my heart due to a plethora of reasons, along with being an empath and taking on the emotions of others. I had a long list of things that I was going to check off my To- Do list that didn’t require the physicality or the “in person” part of my life that usurps my day to day. I was going to be reinvigorated by this new gift of time. Amongst that list was to catch up with my blog writing. I should have known my plans might go awry when my “might go home the same day” prognosis turned into a two-night stay at the hospital. 

Any of you who have had a knee replacement probably could have told me that my optimistic non-deep dive into what the recovery would look like would lead to a bit of a shock once I was finished with the surgery.  Shucks… I already had brain surgery eight years ago and the pain had gotten so bad that this … this would be a walk in the park compared to all of that. Might the fact that I am eight years older now, approaching 60, popped into my head earlier, I might have been in a different place in the weeks after the surgery. That and the fact that I don’t walk on my head. I might think with my heart and make decisions from there too… but the knee… whole different story.  The lack of preparedness left me frustrated, tired, depressed and quite disappointed. The subject matter of my blog post prior to the surgery slowly changed and morphed into what it has now become, A Room with a Beautiful View. 

We live in an old house, one that has many stairs. In fact, our kitchen alone has three sets of stairs each in various places. Even though they are only sets of two to three stairs, the flight down and the walk made my journey down and then back up again once a day, at the end of the day, taxing. My second floor bedroom became both my haven and my solitary prison. You see, my office was down the hall as well so when I was rehabbing, I would hold onto my walker and make the journey back and forth. My dear friend and co worker Julie, even got me a little basket to put on front of the walker to hold my computer, any papers that I moved between rooms and my tea cup… very valuable materials indeed! 

I hate to be repetitive, but again, those of you who have experienced a full knee replacement or have been the nursemaid for a loved one who has know that the first two weeks are by far the most difficult, with each day after that becoming a little more bearable. For those of you who know me, I am not a sitter… ever. I became a sitter and a “lay downer” in the middle of the day, especially after I came home from a round of physical therapy. Imagine that! My movement slowed down out of necessity and I found my mood matching the short, cold, darker days of February. When alone for long periods of time, facing a monumental recovery that you have to dig deep to really maximize, the thoughts that swirl in that space and when not sleeping in the middle of the night become redundant. My brain became a little mushier from a combo of not speaking to people on a regular basis, the pain meds (which I soon discontinued) and not using my hands or my body to beautify things in the barn.  Every ounce of being awake was dedicated to getting stronger, doing the PT and getting back to feeling “normal”. 

Once formal PT out of my home started, my mind was slowly transformed from a place of “woe is me” to a place where I shared the human experience with others. The unspoken word that resonated with every eye I caught in the middle of a stressful exercise, every grimace that was made, walker races to the elevator and the silence that ensued in that room when every single patient was working their way back from whatever it was that had caused them to lose what they once knew as normal. 

Once back home from my PT visits, I would head up to my bedroom to ice my knee. During my recovery journey, I had often found myself gazing out the window that I routinely passed, at a beautiful view. Sometimes that view stopped me in my tracks as a sunset glowed a magnificent orange, the ducks called attention to their antics in the pond or the beautiful great blue heron, who called this pond their home would take flight from a nearby tree.  As I stopped, sometimes I just took in the beauty and counted my blessings for having a view such as this to gaze upon. Sometimes my thoughts moved to the parallel happenings of my dear friends and coworkers and their days spent wound around their mothers’ failing health challenges, or another friend and coworker who was facing her own experience with her sister’s passing from cancer.  And my peers who are smack dab in the middle of the sandwich generation, supporting and loving their aging parents while trying to continue to give their own children the wings to fly on their own, each experience in both arenas stretching the heartstrings to their breaking point at times. Why is it that when we feel low, we often turn to these challenges to compare ours with others, to remind ourselves how good we actually have it? My thoughts would turn to terminally ill patients and how they would feel if they were experiencing this room with a beautiful view. Life, death and all of the experiences that bind us can also separate us and make it hard to understand one another.  

The overused phrase but truly not overused action of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes became a deafening roar in my head.  It was the repeated texts from a friend, a vintage dealer who I had met at the Brimfield Antique show who had had a knee replacement less than a year ago whose support really reached through my brain fog. You see, he had been there, he could truly relate. But it wasn’t that fact that struck home but that he took time out of his busy day as both a high School teacher, husband, and a vintage dealer to reach out to me with little snippets, like “two weeks out, the tide is turning. It really sucks but you can do it. Be easy on yourself. Week five will really feel like you are turning a corner,” etc. etc. etc.. I felt supported and validated from those texts back and forth. It was a testament to the power of being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and truly understand. It was not cancer or an incurable disease, thank the Lord, but it was my human experience and when shared with another… the weight of all of it… the true level of the pain, the frustration…felt a bit easier to bear. That understanding from someone who had been in my shoes coupled with the caring nursemaid of my husband and just general support got me back up and at ‘em! Let’s face it… you CANNOT do it alone and you cannot keep a non-sitter down for long! 

Fast forward another year to January 2026… and the aforementioned material that you have just read still has not been turned into a blog post. Another year of life happening without taking heed of the plans you had made had just passed. The mothers of the friends I had mentioned above had passed, with my friends doing all they could and more to fill those last years, months and days for their moms with beautiful light and support.  My dear high school friend was a thriving survivor of breast cancer. Other friends had lost their precious daughter. Our family gathered together as we celebrated our nephew’s wedding. The human experience and all that it entails was raging. Our small business was growing and those growing pains, with a small team, caused me to eat, sleep and breathe the business for far too many years to count in a row. The newly replaced knee had caused the other unstable knee to become even more so and pain, again, became my constant companion.  

The habit that I had developed of stopping at that window to admire, contemplate, think, and reflect on the changing seasonal views had continued throughout the year until I now face the recovery from getting the second knee replaced as my New Year’s gift on December 30th, 2025. Happy NEW KNEE YEAR, my family has joked! The cadence of my days is yet again, being measured from my room with a beautiful view. 

There is not enough space in this post to go into the feelings and emotions that swelled within me the night before I headed to Jefferson Hospital at 4 am the next morning to do it all again. But pain is a motivating factor to make one go through something unpleasant to get to the other side. Those feelings, emotions and the capacity to experience them are integral aspects of the human experience, as well as helping those around us process their own. As I stare out the window today, marking the end of two weeks out from the surgery, I feel an overwhelming desire to understand others. To bring this world closer together instead of further apart. We are swimming in dangerous waters today and if I’m being 100% honest, it has taken a herculean effort to not get carried away in the swirling negativity of the happenings over the past few weeks while I’ve had more time to read, reflect, watch… and think. I have had to dig deep into reserves I am not sure that I have… and the grit and resilience that I have spoken of possessing in blogs in past years seem far removed. But the lessons that I have learned while watching and thinking  from this room with a beautiful view over this past year are powerful and they are moving me and this little business in a direction of change. While I am nervous and this has caused its own pain points, I am anxious to share these changes with you in the second part of this blog post that I hope to publish in the next few weeks. 

As those plans unfold, as always, I am so very thankful for this community that has grown over the last 15 years. I have felt so heard in this little community and the gifts reaped from doing what I love to do are plentiful. I am so very thankful for the women who have worked beside me, believing in our small works of change and creating beauty, and I’m even thankful for the people who were put in my path to challenge all that I have been striving for, for what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger! 

As we journey through this new year, may we hold the human experience in high regard and lend it deep respect. May we try and understand our neighbor’s journey while processing our own and learn from it. We know that we cannot walk in the shoes of everyone we encounter, for that would truly be a scary prospect. But we can imagine their journey when we are aware of it. We can acknowledge it and reach out to support them in whatever small gesture that we can muster. And if we all acknowledge that everyone is facing challenges that we might not be aware of, wouldn’t we be a little kinder, a little more gentle?  On our life’s journey, we are constantly growing, changing and evolving, but why should our journey be more important than another’s? Lean into the journey of your neighbors, friends, and even those of strangers. Listen to what your heart tells you that you could do to help carry their weight and their burdens, for all of us have them, even those who might be gazing from above in a room with a beautiful view. Imagine carrying those weights and burdens alone on shoulders from dark rooms with no windows and no view… 

Let’s see what we can do together in 2026!