I Have Lost My Friend!

My sister-in-law, Kristen, has four children under the age of seven.

Last Friday she picked me up and the six of us went off to the Farmer's Market. We wandered up and down the crowded bustling aisles comparing prices on carrots and Brussels sprouts and finally decided on one booth close to the entrance.

I stood to the side with the stroller and Kristen's three oldest children as she wandered around the booth collecting what she needed. Her youngest, Enoch, was following her around and "helping" her get some corn on the cob. He held onto one side of the bag and she held the other, but since he's so little, it was more like a leash for him. She filled the bag and guided Enoch back to the cashier.

But then she took the bag away and handed it to the lady behind the till and Enoch decided to prove, right then and there, that he is indeed, two years old.

He stood behind Kristen, arms limp, completely still, head thrown all the way back, and bawled. "WaaaaHa! WaaaaHa! WaaaaHa!" Each wail a carbon copy of the previous one. He had lost his friend. His eyes were squinted shut and he seemed completely oblivious to everything around him. This was in its truest form, a cry for attention.

The girls behind the counter, and some of the ladies in line, were giggling, and I, still off to the side with the stroller, was standing there nearly doubled over with laughter. Kristen just shook her head.

As soon as she had finished paying, she turned around and touched Enoch's shoulder, holding out the bag of corn on the cob. He slowly opened his eyes and tilted his head back down, still wailing, and took one side of the bag again. Almost instantly, the crying stopped. Kristen let go of the other side of the bag and started to walk away, leaving Enoch there to follow her back to the stroller, dragging the bag of corn behind him, his face streaked with tears. This kid has "pathetic" down to an art.

Two-year-olds: making the world a more complicated, dramatic, and entertaining place.

Goodbye Again

Written on my last visit. At the airport.

I can't quite figure out why, but I feel like my heart is breaking, like the love of my life is being left behind as I sit here waiting to fly away to a place not so far but far enough to be termed "foreign" by your heart.

A great love is in this place and for some reason I never opened my heart to it this last time. I was too afraid, too fragile maybe, too tender, worried that my entire being would split into two if I let myself give in to this place even in the slightest, even for a moment. It is the most equisitely beautiful, most heart-wrenching place I have ever been. And why??

I grew up in this place, my heart learning to break as I grew older, as I learned to understand that the pain and the screaming and the tears weren't supposed to be a part of my childhood. Once I finally learned that everything was wrong, I learned how to break down and fall to my knees, unable to cry hard enough to stop the pain, unable to mold it into something I could understand or measure. I learned to curl into a ball with my forehead on the floor and sob until my body forced my heart to go unconcious and pushed my mind into sweet sweet sleep.

I'm leaving this place, after a short visit, and I'm wondering as I sit here in the airport why my heart aches so intensely and why the back of my throat is harvesting a teetering gag reflex. Why do I still love this place?

The trees were waving goodbye to me as I drove down the highway to the airport, all their leaves moving and flowing together like a wave in the see, or a flock of birds in the air. That was really the moment I opened my eyes to the beauty of this place. I finally let something in and now I'm cracking in all the most painful places.

The potential stabs at me, sharp and exquisite. This place could have been such a wonderful place. I could have learned about love, instead of having to wait years and years to discover the precious beauty that comes with sincerity and kindness. I could have opened my mind to the beauty that surrounds me. We could have been a happy family. We could have. I could have. The "could have" ... what sharp and striking, bitter words.

And now I sit here, leaving it all behind once again, closing the doors to the potential and shutting the blinds to what could have been. My heart aches for it, reaches out to it, and I deny access, turning my face toward my new home and the love of my life and more happiness than I ever learned could be possible.

Brain as an object

I've been married for nearly two years and I'm starting to realize that everyone who ever said that men and women are from two different planets, or speak two different languages, or have two different brains, was right.

My husband and I have the classic argument that goes from one of us trying to tell the other something, to arguing, debating, voice raising, anger-ing, and finally: realizing; realizing that we were talking about the same thing all along.

My husband works construction and the other day he told me it would be fun to have all his co-workers' significant others come to work and have them do the job for a day.

I asked him why he thought it would be fun: he said because it would. I asked him what would be fun about it: he said it just would be.

He told me I was over-thinking it and I told him I was just trying to understand how he got from one thought to the next. How did he go from "significant others at our job for a day" to "fun"?

He told me that I think differently than he does, that all my thoughts are clear and laid out and 'sensical'. I told him he was wrong.

All of my thoughts do connect to each other, each paving the way for the next, but they aren't in any way organized. I can go to thinking about oranges to thinking about the day I was in grade three and for show-and-tell told the class about my uncle with the lazy eye. Why? Because after I gave that presentation, my teacher told me that when I do show-and-tell I often have no direction; one moment I'm talking about apples, and the next I'm talking about oranges.

So there's the common thread that linked my thoughts together: oranges.

Speaking of thread, I told my husband that my thoughts are like a ball of yarn that's been unwound. The one long thread crosses over itself over and over, there are knots that are beyond un-knotting, some of the thread has worn away and ready to snap (theses are the moments in my thought-process where I forget what I'm thinking about) and all other sorts of travesties. But it's all connected.

He turned to me and said, your brain is a bunch of thread, but mine is a bunch of bouncy balls.

I thought about that for a moment and realized how true it was. We're pretty sure he has ADD so bouncy balls made the most amount of sense, especially since he's also a very bouncy person externally. He bobs his head with each bouncy ball thought, entertained until it dribbles out into nothing and rolls away, then he turns around quickly to find the next one and watch it bounce around for a while.

He says that none of his thoughts are really connected, but I think there must be SOMETHING similar between each thought. Maybe it's the color of the bouncy balls, or their size, or their proximity to each other that causes the link.

In any case, we're still a "newly-wed" couple, we're still in love with each other, and we're still trying to figure out how to get our yarn and bouncy balls to play along.

Cheese Sticks

When I was small, my Gramma would always shop at the same grocery store. Sometimes I'd go with her and one time she took me to the bakery afterwards.

The first time Gramma took me was the first time I'd ever been to a bakery. I fell in love the moment I walked in the door. So many wonderful smells filled the room and numerous delicious-looking treats sat behind the glass compartments. I wanted it all. I wanted to live there and wake up every morning to new smells and new breads and cookies and everything else a bakery had to offer me.

I had such a hard time deciding what I wanted that my Gramma had to decide for me. She chose cheese sticks. Soft, skinny loaves of bread covered with baked-on cheese. It was wonderful! Whoever got the idea to put bread and cheese together was a genius in my eyes. I wanted another after I'd finished mine but Gramma said the rest were for the others who would be home for lunch.

I always asked my Gramma when we went grocery shopping after that if we could go to the bakery and she always said "we'll see" with a smile. We never did go back and I haven't a clue which bakery it was.

When I was in my first year of college, I moved in with a spunky girl named Jessi. We would go grocery shopping together and ride home on the bus with our backpacks full of food. On one of these ventures we decided we'd only speak to eachother during the trip in English accents. We probably made complete fools out of ourselves but we were thoroughly entertained.

We came to the bakery section and Jessi spotted the cheese sticks and started loading them into a plastic bag. My long lost love! I'd forgotten about them. We started devouring them on the way home, careful to save some for later, and chatted to each other on the bus in our faux english accents.

Just before we got off the bus to go home and eat more cheese sticks, some teenaged girl who'd been sitting behind us asked Jessi if she knew Harry Potter. Without skipping a beat or pulling a face, she simply said, "no", and we went on our merry way, giggling and immitating the girl on the bus.

Oh, cheese sticks; how I love thee.

Hot Spring Bliss

I grabbed my little notebook from my purse, the one that has my memories, and sat down to start writing. But then I looked down and instead of my notebook sitting before me, I found my wallet. Why did I grab that instead of my notebook? I guess that's for review on another day.

Two days ago I was looking at a friend's blog and decided that I love how much she uses photos. I think I'll start using a picture or two in my little stories.

Forward! Memory Lane: trip two...

When I was younger, my twin brother and I would go visit our Dad and step-mom on the weekends. In the summer we'd spend an entire month with them and they'd take us camping for a week or two.

One summer, when I was 9 or 10, they took us to a hot spring. I was nervous when we first arrived, wary of how hot the water would be. It wasn't regulated by civilization afterall, and mother-nature could be so unpredictable. How was I to know if she'd had a hot flash that day, a really hot hot-flash, that would boil my skin right off?

At the mouth of the hotspring were two sets of stairs. The one on the left led into the hotspring. The one on the right led into "the glacier pool". It was a tiny round pool that could seat about six people. It was an ice blue colour and had a picture of a polar bear and the temperature listed on the wall behind it. There was a burly old man sitting alone in this tiny tub, arms stretched out on the wall behind him, leisurely, almost relaxed. I just knew he'd freeze to death and come out stiff and purple.

Was I going to take a dip in this icy "slice of heaven"? Not a chance. But I was a little worried my Dad might make me.

But before I could worry much longer, I watched in horror and awe as my step-mother walked straight down into the pool, as though she were walking down the stairs in our own house, held her nose, submerged, came back up again, and wiped off her face as she ascended the stairs, all in one smooth movement.

Well if my step-mom could be so brave, so could I! On the hot side of things anyway.

I poked my toes down onto that first little step of the stairs into the hot water, and had all my suspicions confirmed, and yet was also pleasantly surprised.

The water was hot. Really hot. Hotter than a hottub. But it felt like nothing I'd ever felt before. It was soft. So soft it was like every part of my body that was in the water was being gently moisturized by billions of tiny unseen bubbles.

It was the most awe-inspiring experience I'd ever had in "the wild". Here was nature's own hot tub, complete with ledges to sit on, like little seats perfecftly formed to your backside, bubbles, and even a cave to wander around in.

I haven't been to a hotspring since, but now that I'm thinking about it, I'm going to find out where the nearest one is.

Memory Lane

For months and months I've been jotting down memories.

Every once in a while something will remind me of a time when I was younger and I'd reminisce for a while and then the memory would be gone. I didn't like the thought of losing my memories, so I started jotting them down with the intent of writing them out.

So here I go, the first trip down memory lane:

My sister-in-law went to England last year for a week and while she was gone I took care of two of her four kids. One of them, Enoch, was only a year old and he was the easiest to take care of. I had to check up on him every few minutes just to make sure he hadn't pulled the bookshelf ontop of himself or discovered that our toilet was just as magical as the one at his house. But other than that, it was easy-breezy!

My fifteen-year-old sister was living with us at the time and she came home one day from school a little pink in the face from the walk home. Enoch was standing in the living room doing who knows what when she walked in, and when he saw her he paused for a second as she smiled and said hello to him. Immediately, he ran to her, literally ran, smiling with his arms outstretched and she scooped him up, just beaming, and hugged him and said hello.

She just loved it, and I loved watching it.