Last week, I sat down on Monday and wrote a post in a state of overwhelm after a good, but crazy, few days. The busy weekend had merged into a disjointed beginning to the week.
This past weekend was quieter and more reflective, and I wanted to save the good parts for posterity.
The weekend started with a work shift Friday night. The out-going nurse gave me a great report – informative and unapologetic, just the way I like it. Over the course of my shift, I had unexpectedly meaningful conversations with a patient and a doctor, and a pretty deep phone conversation with a patient’s significant other.
I came home feeling grateful for the opportunity to connect with other human beings about the meaning of life and what comes after.
I slept like a rock that Saturday when I got home, until 6 p.m. It was the day before my birthday. When I woke up, I came downstairs, still in a bit of a fog. The kitchen was a hive of activity as my family worked to make my birthday dinner.
Today has been a bit of a crazy Monday. In fact, the past four days have been pretty nutty. So I have pics of apple picking, but I don’t really feel like talking about apples. Except for I ate one of the apples fresh from the orchard today, and it was amazing.
Until this year, every fall brought a feeling of anticipation. Crisp air, cool evenings, new school supplies.
As long as I didn’t linger on nostalgic thoughts of easy friendships, endless potential, and running with my college cross country team – a couple of aspects of younger me that I sometimes wish I had back – I could dive into the possibilities of a new school year. I would try not to pay too much attention to the darker mornings and the briefer evenings. As summer closed, I would frenetically finish house projects so they wouldn’t tempt me once I started the homeschool year.
Then came this year. This summer, the Chaplain and I poured so much into our relationship. I estimate we covered about 270 miles this summer walking together in the evenings. We wore out the Chaplain’s shoes and got into shape. We finally, finally got some ease back into our relationship.
We went on adventures this summer. A trip to the beach. Trips to Grafton Lakes. A camping trip. All these little moments of family time, all the time outside, had put me in touch with the world in a way I haven’t been in a long time. As the days were getting shorter, I noticed.
When we had been living in our house for a few years, our next door neighbor greeted me over the fence, Wilson Wilson style. “Did you know you had a skunk living under your front porch?”
No, I didn’t. But we smelled skunk with some regularity, so it didn’t surprise me.
When I was a kid, we had a skunk living under our front porch. It was a white skunk with a black stripe, which was in keeping with my need to be different. So I was a little enchanted to find that as an adult with my own home (a bungalow very like the one I lived in growing up) that I also had a skunk living under my porch.
I identified where the skunk was going in and out. We saw it snuffling around the backyard a few times after dark. Early one morning, I discovered that there were two skunks, one mostly black, and one mostly white (fantastic!). One of them and I had a very uncomfortable stand off, with tail raised on its part and terror on mine, before we were finally able to break the tension and make a run for it.
