Good morning! I hope your weather is as beautiful and crisp as mine is this morning. I've always been a huge fan of autumn, and, living in the South, I love the cooler weather.

I have some tentatively good news this morning.

You may recall that the surgeon gave me a pretty grim prognosis after my last surgery. He said it would be at least a year if MAYBE I would be able to walk without mobility aids again. Too much damage had occurred to my foot and ankle, and a full recovery was unlikely.

I had grieved, accepted it, and prepared myself for a life of limited mobility.

Well, now that I'm about a month into physical therapy, it's as if a miracle has occurred. It started with 3 steps, then 5, then 10, then 15, until suddenly, I was able to walk unaided for limited amounts of time. I began counting it by time instead of by steps and I'm now up to ten or fifteen minutes a day.

So, I overshot the surgeon's expectations by 11 months.

Now, before you get too excited, I still need crutches if I'm going to be on my feet for any real distance or going over rough terrain. I can't walk very far, or stand up and wait very long. And I'm far from speedy or graceful.

But, I can go into the kitchen and unload the dishwasher. I can make my coffee. I can cook a meal that requires attention. I can go to the bathroom and back. Inside my apartment, at least, I'm slowly returning to a more normal life.

For people with good mobility, that may not sound like much. But with every step I manage, I'm filled with gratitude because I was told I might never be able to take them.

I still have a very long road to recovery ahead of me, and I'll probably have some awful arthritis in my foot and ankle. I still need to move to a place with easier access and no stairs. I may never go out hiking over rough terrain again, but I should be able to take an easy path through a woodsy area, and that will be a delight when it happens.

But those limitations mean so little for someone who has been completely immobile for a very long eight months. I'm incredibly grateful for every bit of mobility that I regain.

I really want to thank you all for bearing with me for the past two years and for your prayers and good wishes.

Having something to eat isn't guaranteed.

We're facing threats to our food supply from many different angles: supply chain breakdowns, drought, food facilities being ravaged by fires, skyrocketing inflation, and outright shortages. No longer can we live in the comfort of unthreatened abundance. We're learning exactly how delicate the system really is.

Prepping and putting back supplies is incredibly important but what we're seeing now goes beyond that. You have to be able to produce and acquire more food. You have to be able to put back your harvests to eat during the winter. You have to be able to prepare items that once were as convenient as popping open a can or little plastic container.

You need a paperback copy of How to Feed Your Family No Matter What, our Organic Prepper anthology with ALL of our content about food. You'll get more than 500 pages of content that are all about food when you can't just go to the store and buy whatever you want.