January | 2007 | emylibef

Stop and start

Posted by ewsteen ⋅ January 9, 2007 ⋅ 2 Comments

Just let me say, for just a moment, that my life should and could be a sitcom.

There is an Internet shortage in my life at the present, so pardon my absence from posting.

However, know this and know the joy in reading that is to come:

Moving truck + bad alternator + houseful of boxes and furniture = using a pickup truck to move an entire house.

Discovering said bad alternator after first truckload of boxes had already been loaded = Priceless.

I now live with 2 kids, my husband, my cat, and my ex-husband. In the ex-husband’s house.

The house that we are to move into still has an undetermined amount of work to be done before it is livable. Interesting is all I can say about this.

Should I turn up dead within the next month or so, suspect the husband, the ex-husband, the dog, or the male child – or a combination of all four. The girl child and the cat are still on my side….I think.

Enjoy your home.

Boxed in

Posted by ewsteen ⋅ January 6, 2007 ⋅ 2 Comments

Today, with the help of my inlaws, I boxed up the pieces of my life. Our life.

I found things I’d forgotten even existed, things that reminded me of sections of my former lives. Pictures from college, from my senior prom, papers from junior high, discharge papers from the first, last, and everyothertimeinbetween jaunt to the hospital…

I realized, as I sorted through clothes, notes, cards, and pictures from every angle of my existence, present and past, that I fall in love with my life more every day. I hate it at times, and then I realize the parts that I hate are the parts that I can’t predict or control…and those just happen to be the parts that make a life.

So my house is being dismantled. Our lives are being splintered and split, and shall be reassembled at a point as yet undetermined.

As of tomorrow, we are officially homeless. It should be interesting. We are being taken in and cared for, and we will daily watch as our future home becomes closer and closer to being complete. When it is, I’ll show you.

It should’ve taken 50 more years…

Posted by ewsteen ⋅ January 4, 2007 ⋅ 4 Comments

I know what it’s like to be old.

I know what it’s like to search for a word and have it live on the tip of your tongue, to start a sentence and then forget the ending of it. To remember in crystal clear detail something that happened ten years ago but wonder about yesterday. To remember details through a fog and be reminded of second nature.

To use the backspace key more than the normal letters.

To depend on someone else for everything and to feel incapable of being your own….anything.

I bring up the same topics for conversation over and over and I find myself wondering how many times I’ve told whatever I’m telling to whoever I’m telling it to. I don’t trust my own memories or my own logic. I start a story in my mind and I think, “Hey, that’s good, I should write that d….where the hell did that shirt come from? That’s cute, I don’t remember that, I’ll wear it tomorrow.” Then I find, at the end of five or six days, that I’ve been wearing the same jeans all along.

I see a pale brunette in her own car with shiny hair, trendy glasses, and a smart peacoat and I want to grab her, scream in her face to GRAB IT, GRAB IT AND HANG ON, BECAUSE I WAS YOU LAST YEAR AND NOW IT’S ALL GONE. I want SOMEONE to have all that I don’t. All that I lost when I lost the ability to grasp exactly who I am.

Burdensome.

I’m sorry.

Weatherman

Posted by ewsteen ⋅ January 2, 2007 ⋅ 3 Comments

It’s hard to imagine a land – a life – where seasons fall as they should.

Here, Christmas Day smelled like pennies and the ground was mush.
We sloshed up to Granna’s house through gravel and clay. If the kids had been old enough, they’d have asked why Santa wasn’t stuck on the hillside.

Now, the new year has come, and suddenly everyone’s ready for summer. One day the cold is biting, the next you’re digging for flipflops and begging for a ceiling fan when the sun comes up. People breeze past smelling of tanning beds and fresh pedicures.

It’s January.

It’s insanity.

Every year about this time, I want to move away. Then, give me a couple of months, and I’ll never want to leave.