Came & Went

This blog's anniversary, that is. It's been a year, and this here brings my post total up to 49. An average of 4 posts a month, or 1 a week. Several times in the last week I've thought of shutting down the blog completely. I don't think I'm cut out for it. I'm reticent by nature, I hold my cards pretty darn close, and maybe the naval-gazing tendencies inherent in blogging just don't jibe with my Inner Me. Witness my "design week" intentions of posting pics of my house over several days. I made it through my bedroom and powder room, and then petered out.

Still. Here I am, for now. I think that after a year of blogging, I need to accept and recognize that I'm just not the type to post beautiful pictures of my freshly baked tarts, served up on my prettiest china. I want to be that type, of blogger and person, but it's not happening. I could, instead, take some pictures of the slapped together PB&Js I make several days a week, served up on our finest Dora & Diego paper plates.

I am still riding a pendulum of wild emotions these days. I found out earlier this week that my step-grandmother died, a bad death of lung cancer, in rural Oklahoma. I hadn't seen her in about seven years, but still. What I remember is being at her and my grandpa's house in Norwalk as she and her sister sat around the kitchen table, smoking and listening to country music. They both had big black bouffant hair-do's, even in the mid-'70s, and they sat before their hand mirrors and vanity cases and "put on their faces" and gossiped in their thick Arkansas drawls.

It was another life and another time, long gone now. And my paternal grandpa is still alive back there in deepest Oklahoma, ensconced in a nursing home, remembering none of it, not aware that his second wife has gone and left him.

Back here in my own home, things are good. Mostly. If I'd written this post yesterday I might've been all gushy with the thick bliss of our domestic life, and how fall is in the air and the cooler air makes everything seem rejuvenated and fresh. How we went camping with the kids for the first time this weekend, and how much fun that was.

But, I'm writing tonight, after the pendulum has swung again. There is always a flip side to it all, the dark side. Some nights I go to bed beside my husband and thank God and the heavens for our sweet, full, crazy days. And then there's nights like this, when I think of this song, and how it makes me want to lie down and die a little, because it's so true, and the truth hurts.

I said I know we don't talk about it.
We don't tell each other....
All the little things that we need.
We work our way around each other
As we tremble and we....as we tremble and we bleed.

Sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet. It should be required listening for all engaged couples about to take the leap. That, and reading Jane Smiley's novella The Age of Grief. Now that I think about it, perhaps that would be a better name for this blog, considering all the events of the past year.

Oh, don't worry. It won't last. The pendulum will swing back, as it always does, is arcing back over toward contentment and gratitude even as I write these words. Tomorrow afternoon will find me, and all of us, back at Disneyland again, and I'm not even being metaphoric, not one bit.