It's Quiet...Too Quiet

So I’m sitting here in my living room. It’s quiet, except for the distant booming buzz of some high school students’ woofer, and the sound of cars intermittently whizzing past. I still can’t get used to working from home. My husband and child are here, yet they are not here. I feel as if S.O. is hunched over the laptop at the rectangular folding table we call a desk. I see where A. has lined up her chairs in the middle of the floor like seats in a movie theater, her cd player and strawberry shaped cd case laying in wait on the kid-size folding table she uses for meals, “projects” (these mainly involve lots and lots of sparkly glue) and putting together puzzles. It seems like she’s just upstairs napping.

But they are not here. S.O. is in the southern part of this Southern state sitting in on a deposition of a man dying of cancer. A. is at school, at this moment probably right in the midst of a blissful nap.

She’s been having trouble sleeping the past couple of nights, ever since I took her with me to the emergency room, where her local Grandma was being treated for a poisonous spider bite (thank God for spell check—I first wrote that “grandma was being treated for a poisonous spider butt”).

A. turned her head away while the nurses struggled to get an IV started for Grandma’s antibiotics, but then asked if she could look. I told her that she could if she wanted to—so she did, asking me questions and me answering the best I could. Later, S.O. told me that he disagreed with what I’d done, saying that I shouldn’t have had her looking at that (needles and blood on gauze, etc.). My thought at the time is that we should try to make this as non-weird as possible (who knows what could happen in the future, and she may have to come back to a hospital)…but now I’m second guessing. The night before last, as she was laying in bed, she asked me to tell her about the time when daddy was bit by a spider and had to go to the hospital—she’d gotten confused (I’d told her that daddy had to come to the hospital to have his belly button [hernia] fixed). Then last night she told me she was afraid that she would have bad dreams and we thought about all the good dreams she might have. She told me about one that involved monkeys jumping around in an inflatable trampoline-thingy. But then her story dream got weird and the monkeys fell out and bumped their heads and there was a lot of blood. I told her I thought her dream of being at her other Grandma’s beach with all of her friends was much nicer, and that she should try to dream of that.

There’s no way I’m telling S.O. that maybe he was right. But maybe he was.

In the meantime, I’m still trying to slog through this governmental work I should have had done two weeks ago. The way it's going, I MAY have it done by the end of the week.

As for today? With the time I have left before picking A. up, I must (1) rub my turkey legs (the OTHER turkey legs) with spices and put them in the oven, (2) start the field peas and snaps cookin’ (3) put a payment in the mail for one of the only bills we have managed to consistently pay on time (4) put clothes in the dryer and (5) email people I should have mailed three weeks ago—in addition to the people I should have emailed two weeks ago. I'll put off the one-week overdue emails for another week.

And for some reason, I can’t get picahn pie out of my mind…I keep thinking: It won’t be as good as you think it will. It won’t be as good as you think it will. It won’t be as good as you think it will. Mouth: I command you to cease watering, right now...

Ahh, the perennial battle between a woman and her sweet tooth. ...Second only to the battle between procrastination and perfectionism.