So much depends on a red cardinal
sitting on a leaf bare branch
in M & Ks back yard.

I was going to write a long entry about the screaming battle we had here on Thursday. But I don’t have it in me. I’m spent. Exhausted. Suffice it to say that it began as a hang up the picture that fell down project and ended as a screaming door slamming fit. I spent the rest of that day and most of yesterday sequestered in my room with a book. Since they are used to having battles, they are fine. I’m still aching.
It’s just so hard. These aren’t simple relationships. I love my Mom in a way that you can only love someone who you have lived inside. I smell her in my own skin. I love it when she laughs. We talk in baby talk to each other. But, I know that she doesn’t get me in really deep and important ways. And our time has been absorbed in caring for Ken. And Ken, being who he is, doesn’t make that easy. And they, being who they are, are a third character. I think they call it triangulation.
Today I was making sausage and biscuits and I reached up to turn the light on in the hood above the stove and the whole hood fell down. If I could bring myself to write out the story of the picture hanging debacle it would be clear how this moment affected me. Mom called the handy men that work for the place where they live and, fortunately, they were here on a Saturday. They fixed it in about ten minutes.
I’m tired.
I read Mike earlier today. Riffing on some interesting stuff posted on Wood_s Lot. I even had enough time to really read some of it but not enough to feel like I can respond directly. I miss Wood_s Lot.When I get home I'm going to sit at my desk and spend days reading all I've missed there.
When people asked me how I was going to take care of myself while I was here I said, “Well, I’ll have my blog.” And when I first got here it was so hard to find the time to read and write on line. It’s a little easier now. But I felt like the blog and my blog roll and email from friends were the threads pulling me back to myself. And it seemed odd to me that it was so easy to lose track of myself.
There’s a line in a Joni Mitchell song, of course.
“I see something of myself in everyone.
At this moment in the world.”