Many things have happened since....

our lives went ass over tea kettle.


 In short list form:


 * My brother Jeff and I stayed with our mother during her most recent MRI, earplugs in tight. We got lost in the drone. I laid hands on Mother. I prayed over and over in my head, "Help. Give her peace." Not very eloquent, instead practical, urgent, even desperate. Jeff checked her eyes to see if she was sleeping or awake.

 * My son has now had several sleep overs with his girl cousins and loves his Aunt Dana ferociously. At last, he has made up to her all the early years of snubbing her (and most everyone else) for yours truly. 

* I have attended, with a caravan of co-workers, the pre-funeral visitation for one of the mothers of children at our school. She was struck by a car very near school, and died. We are all deeply saddened keeping watch over the children by day in our hallways and classrooms.

 * As my fast talking three on the Enneagram friend Jo Ellen says -- I expected my job as a schoolteacher in an urban inner city school to be difficult -- Kingdom work. Goodness, love, mercy. Daily, I struggle and fall short of the peace inside I strive toward. I question myself and my abilities in a way that hurts. Still, I show up every single day and give the best I've got.

 * I missed the Holiday Luncheon at my boy's school. Again. Forgot that it was happening. Forgot to send funds. The boy reduced to puddles of tears on the second night in a row I came home late.... sometimes I get home after he is in bed, leave before he's out of it.

 * I am thankful for Katherine and Karen, mothers who mother my boy in my absence. Mothers who show up for the Parents Visit Music Class Day and make our boy feel just as special as their boy and girl, respectively, by loving him up and sending pictures and videos to my phone to include me on his experience. Blessings, they are, these other mothers so full of joy and love and heart-full friendship.

 * My husband, my friend, my man, my love, my partner. My Beloved Mister. With the time in, we're a better team then ever. I tell him that my siblings are concerned about my scatteredness, my repetition in telling the same things. He wisely reminds me that my talking about something is like most people thinking about something. It's how I process. And now that I've given up the Facebook time suck, which in many ways was a way for me to empty my brain, my verbal tics, such as they are, are all the more apparent. We have all had a good laugh over that.

 * Too, I have laughed (again, at my expense, but why not?) about my traveling road show. My cobalt blue station wagon crammed full of hiking boots, apples and clementines and thermoses of water, a box of clothing outgrown as a pass along for a friend's son, glass baby food jars for science projects at school, books and Legos and far too many fast food straw wrappers, extra coats and sweaters and random things piled or chucked in at the last minute on my daily commute, or the longer weekend version across the plateau and down into the valley and back..... My father says, "Hell, you could throw a pumpkin in the back of her car and she'd not realize it until the vine starts growing out the windows!"



Oh, oh. The mistletoe. The cancer. The lack of kid toothpaste in the house. The overdue library books and friends I don't deserve. Merry Happy Wonder.

Help. Give us Peace.

Our Quaker Oats Star, fashioned by me in the first year of our marriage, covered with aluminum foil and  painted with spirals, makes an appearance this year in its naked state..... at the boy's request.