On this day, I wrapped up a package filled with love for someone who needs it.

Those of you who follow along know that the past few weeks have been a bit…rough….for me. This box contains a project that took hours of my time, and helped me maintain an even keel through the things that were going on. The phrase “it could always be worse” totally applies here. Pretty sobering, right? Kinda like Fee with her gratitude knitting. (Yes, dear, I still remember what you said about that.) It’s a bit like energy auditing for your mental outlook–where are you spending your real self?

It must be time to pay the bills. And also blog.

Tuesday is my day off, so if I don’t have too many appointments, I get to pay bills and blog. Some day off, right? But at least the blogging is fun. I didn’t get to blog this week because I was slammed, and I missed it. And also, you get real short entries, which isn’t as much fun for you, either. Sorry, guys, I’m dancing as fast as I can! But at least you are now getting more descriptive titles. That’s worth something, right?

This is an addiction:

I spend entirely tooooo much time playing this game, but where else can I be in control of entire cities, plus outlying areas and have a huge army at my disposal? See, addicting!

And no, it’s not a screen shot. I actually used the camera.

On this day, I washed dishes. Now, that’s something I do with some frequency, but I took a picture of it so I could tell you a story.

Well, two stories, the first of which is fairly boring. My dishwasher is broken AGAIN, and so we are doing dishes by hand. All the kids hate dishes, but none of them mind cooking, and they dislike the other kitchen chores less than they hate dishes. So, I don’t cook anymore, but I do all the dishes. I divided the eight kids into four teams, and one team cooks each night, and the other three take care of the miscellaneous kitchen tasks. The thing is, I don’t mind doing the dishes. I just mind doing the dishes and the cooking and the sweeping and the clearing and the….. yeah, you get the idea. I find standing there at the sink with my hands doing a job that my mind doesn’t need to be involved in to be a great time for reflection, and a good way to wind down from the day, so the system works for all of us. It was a moment of sheer genius, I tell ya!

Ok, onto the other story. You will note that my right hand appears in that picture, and that on my ring finger is something that looks suspiciously like a wedding band. That’s because it is a wedding band. The engagement ring is there, too. These are Grandmother’s rings, and some two years after she died, I told my mother I was ready for them. I had to tell her about eight times before she believed me, and even then I think it was because That One was standing behind me and confirmed it.

Now, this is not the first time I have owned these rings. I had asked her for them many years ago, while she was still healthy and active, and she agreed immediately that I could have them when she was no longer needing them. And then, after she went into the nursing home, but was still leaving to visit us now and again, she gave them to me, because they no longer fit her. My uncle asked for them back so he could have them resized for her, and I handed them over without hesitation, and she wore them for a couple more years. After she died, though, the rings came off and Mama kept them for me.

I calculated a couple weeks ago, that Grandmother wore these rings while she washed dishes for about 55 years. And now I wear them, and I wash dishes in them, and so the legacy of love continues. I think roughly the same thoughts whenever I work on my flowerbeds or sew or make fried chicken. I want to be the kind of woman she was. Oh yes, I do.

She had a way of smiling at you when you walked into a room that made you think she’d just been waiting for you to show up to make her day complete. A big huge smile, and she continued to do that until very near the end of her life, even after she no longer recognized people for who they were. (Thankfully, that stage was intermittent, and didn’t last very long for her, but she often thought I was my mother near the end. I could tell by the things she said.) Lately, I’ve been told by my bffs and my kids that when I am not smiling, I look angry, no matter what my actual mood is, so I’m practicing smiling a lot more, letting the people I love now it with my face, and not just my words and deeds.

Yes, I miss her still. No one has ever loved me like my grandparents did. I think……of all the memories I have lost, it is not being able to remember more of them that troubles me most. I want to be able to remember being loved like that. It hardly seems fair to be able to remember the absolutely shitty things in my life (and excuse my language, but there is no other word for it) and to not be able to remember that.

It occurs to me that doing the math to keep up with my titles is going to be a little more difficult here shortly. Lord help me. I think I can, I think I can. January 27th was my sister’s birthday. Not that I saw her, just noting it for the record. We don’t see each other very often. She’s busy and so am I, but in recent years we have come to enjoy one another instead of merely tolerate each other, and I like that. She’s a fun gal, my sis.

The 27th was letter day for me. I mailed one that took quite a bit of intestinal fortitude: it was an edit of this post. I wrote another of the same caliber that I mailed the next day, and it contained most of the story here, plus some other things. A week later, I am still glad I did both of those things.

Interestingly, I have already had a conversation this morning in which I referenced my purpose this year to be a lifegiver with my words. I didn’t think that I would be breathing life into my own self with that, but I’m finding that by sharing with others things that will comfort them, I am doing good things for me, too. Kinda like using commercial fitness equipment leaves you sore for a bit and then you are amazed at those new flat abs.

So, the 24th was a Sunday. And instead of a SPS, I once again chose to depict the major activity of the day. I stayed home from church to make a little hell of my own.

Back in December, I got a wee visit from code enforcement. Now, I have a fair idea who called them, because the lady seemed to know, or at least think she knew, some pretty intimate details of my life. Stuff that only someone close to me or stalking me would know. Her letter was waiting for me when I got home from work on Saturday. Good thing I had taken all those antacids, huh? I need to clean up the yard and I need to do a few repairs to the house that were already on my agenda, so there were really no surprises.

Except that I had thought That One would be bringing a trailer to haul off most of the trash, as we had previously discussed, and he recommended burning it instead. GULP. I had never done a trash burn before, or a burn of any kind for that manner, but he assured me that I could do it, and so I said I would. And I did. If you are my friend on facebook, you may remember this set of status updates:

# Big party at my house today, complete with bonfire. Ya’ll come on. Bring marshmallows and weinies. 9:38 AM Jan 24th

# Arson is more difficult than you’d think. 11:05 AM Jan 24th

# Thank you grapevine wreath from 10 Christmases ago! We now have flames! 12:12 AM Jan 24th

# Remembering the last time I sat around a fire at night. It was at Boy Scout camp, and it was most pleasant. 5:46 PM Jan 24th from txt

I tell you, I was scared to try it, but I did and I am glad. There is just one word for learning to do stuff like this and it is “empowerment”. I dread the stretching, but I love knowing I can do new things.

Apparently, I have an ulcer, because on this day, Mount Vesuvius erupted in my belly. I’d had horrible stomach pain on the 2nd, and then it had tapered off to a low nuisance. It flared again at work on Saturday and I ended up needing all three of these meds to get it under some sort of control. It was horrible. Absolutely horrible. I avoided writhing on the floor, but only barely.

Someone is going to the ball! On this day, I stopped by the thrift store and fell in love with a dress. And then I tried it on and it was perfect. So my mom gave me ten bucks to buy it. Gotta love her, right? She tells me that this picture does not do the dress justice.

Now, I am going to this ball with That One, and I guess now is as good a time as any to tell our story, or at least as much of it as I remember. Back in the day, I was a cheerleader for the local high school, and That One cheered as well for his school. The first time I saw him, I was a sophmore and we played at his school. I remember seeing those blue eyes of his from across the court, and nudging Ronnie in the ribs and saying “Look at that boy over there! He’s so cute!” I did not speak to him or even learn his name that night.

My junior year, Grand-dad was diagnosed with cancer and had part of his lung removed. He had a wonderful nurse, whose name was Miss That-One’s-Mom. She was one of those nurses who gets to know a patient’s family, and not just the patient. When she found out I was a cheerleader, she mentioned her son cheered too, for NHS and she would bring him out to meet me. I think I probably told her that I had seen him the previous year. Anyway, she brought him to the hospital, and he waved from behind her with those blue eyes and that shy smile. It was the same smile and wave he had when we met again 25 years later, btw. So, he spent a couple days there at the hospital with me and we hit it off very well. And I invited him to my junior prom. I remember very little about the hospital or about the prom. He remembers it all, for better or worse, and he has told me quite a bit, but those are his memories and not my own, so ….

Anyway, after the prom, we never saw each other again. We talked on the phone a couple of times and that was it. I thought he dumped me, and he thought I dumped him. (Keep reading, I’ll explain.) But I kept his picture in my wallet, along with the index card on which he had written his address and phone number. And after Pat and I split up, I was surfing the yahoo personals and saw a picture, and thought, “oh, that looks like That One”, except that really, the picture doesn’t look like him much at all. Not like he looks now, and certainly not like he looked back in the day. I looked at the rest of his profile pics and pulled out the one I had and compared it, and I was pretty certain it was him, so I thought I would call.

And then, I signed up at match.com, and his was the third profile presented to me that first day, and I thought “WOW, maybe I really should call”, and then the same thing at plentyoffish. So, I called and left a message with his mom. And he didn’t call back. And so I let it rest for a few days, but it kept nagging at me, so I called again. No answer. By this time, I had found his myspace and I left a comment, but I knew he wasn’t getting online much and probably wouldn’t get it for awhile. So I called on the way home from work the last Saturday in April, and we talked for a couple of hours that day, and I invited him to come up here to the movie in the park that we had here in Bittyburg that night. And he accepted. And I really thought that we would just spend an evening catching up and that would be the end of it. After all, he dumped me back in high school, right?

So he came, and we had a great time. And he came back the weekend after that and the weekend after that. And in between, we talked on the phone for a couple of hours every night. And some time in one of those long conversations, I got up the nerve to ask him why he never called me back in the day. And he told me he had called “but when you get told enough times that someone isn’t home, you get the message that they aren’t home TO YOU.” And I told him, I was so sorry, and I never knew he called, and that if I had, I would have called him back. And I asked my mom about it. “Did That One call me back in the day?”, and she assured me that she didn’t think so, and that she would have told me if he had. So there it was. I was seeing this guy who I liked a lot. I knew I’d liked him back in the day, cause some things I just know even if I can’t remember, and he said he had called. And all I was able to say in response was that I had spent a great deal of time away with home, because I had a job and also, it was bad at home, so I tried to be away as much as I could.

And then one day, this past fall, I was in the bathroom putting on my makeup and I remembered this thing my dad used to do that made me fairly aggravated. He got this habit of telling me when I got home that “some boy called.” And he told me this several times over several weeks or months (how long it went on, I don’t actually remember), and I realized that That One was Some Boy. Do you know how hard it is to return a call to “some boy”? We don’t think much about it now, with caller ID and all, but this was 25 years ago, yk? I tell myself now that we were young and stupid and would have wasted it anyway, because my heart can’t stand to think about the what ifs. But I know that what happened between us started a bad spiral for him and wasn’t really whoopie for me either, and so.

I am going to the ball in a dress that makes me feel like Cinderella, and I am going with Prince Charming also known as That One and Some Boy, and this time, I think the story is going to end a bit differently.