Towards the end of my shift at the library this morning, I came across a lone reference book on my cart of fiction.
“Hello. What are you doing here?”
Turned out to be a knitting book. I raised an eyebrow at it and turned a few pages. One of the advantages of shelving books is the cool stuff that literally jumps into your hands begging to be borrowed.
I put the book on an empty lower shelf on my cart.
“You can follow me home.”
T-minus ten days until Christmas. We sloshed through rain and mud yesterday to acquire a Christmas tree. I’m dreaming of a wet Christmas. Luke and I decorated the tree last night while Shawn and Ana made tacos. It smells like home.
As ironic as it may seem, this post has little to do with Pearl Harbor Day, not that I mean to belittle the day, or men and women who died. But Pearl Harbor Day reminds me of the 7th grade, and not for the obvious traumatic and war-like reasons that you might infer.
Seventh grade was the beginning of middle school in the district in which I grew up and the beginning of middle school ranks high in my list of worst years of my life, with one grand exception: Mrs. Weeks.
Here we are, one turkey fatter (two in my case), past the first of the holidays and on to the next. Black friday is not a mall day for me; you couldn’t pay me enough. But fall has to scoot over for winter and at the DeArmond home, Friday was the day. We scooped gutters, raked leaves, and combed the lawn. The removal of the detritus from the front yard revealed the first tips of the winter bulbs making their way up. i got the leaves into a pile on the curb just in time to miss the green waste collector from city. Yay me.
Morning. Alarm is blaring. I realize that it has been doing so for awhile. Green glowing numbers on the display out of focus. I blink. Shit. I'm late.
Weird dreams. Can't quite place them now but the flavor is still there, like that taste in your mouth before you brush your teeth in the morning. I lurch out of bed and stumble to the kitchen. On the counter is the tea kettle.
"Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
The kettle just looks at me, sitting heavy on its base.
"Some day I'm going to live in a world where that works," I mutter.
Coming into the house this afternoon with my car keys in my hand and Luke in my arms, I hear a bump. Like the sound I routinely make when tripping over the laundry basket on the way to the bathroom in the dark of the night.
I freeze.
Shawn and I met up with some friends at The Tech museum in San Jose to check out the Star Trek exhibit they’ve got going on out there.
“Excuse me, you drove all the way to San Jose to look at Star Trek stuff?”
Shawn was making dinner and I was knitting my way through a difficult cable row at the kitchen table. Luke runs in, demanding my attention.
“Mommy, come see this!”
“I’ll be there in a little bit, honey,” I said with a cable needle clenched between my teeth. “When I’m finished knitting. I’m almost finished.”
Shawn laughs. “What?! You’re dying?!?”
“Very funny.”
I dread this part of the year. Christmas, you say? Thanksgiving? Nope. I dig the holidays. My favorite part of the year starts when the leaves to begin to turn colors and ends right after New Years. I love the holidays. What I don’t love is divvying them up.
Sigh... Here we go again.
It’s rough, you know? Everybody wants to go back and sit around that same Christmas tree they had when we were all kids, to shake that little silver sleigh bell and hear it ring again.
As previously stated I’m a pod person. When I’m not chugging through audiobooks, I’ve got my podcasts to keep me company.
