My Papaw died a few weeks ago. He was almost 90.
I’ve written his memorial a few times over the last few years, mostly not realizing that’s what I was doing. It just kinda leaks out when you are reminiscing about the times when he remembered who everyone was and how to move around in the world. He was sick for a long, long time – lived way longer than the doctors said he would – and blipped out like a birthday candle one morning after my Mother stepped out of the room for a brief second to catch her breath. And that was that. After months of yelling for my Uncle Bo, who died last year, and more months of trying to scramble out of bed while his body refused to cooperate.
This was the punctuation on the paragraph after JD and I returned from our cruise to Alaska and were plunged headlong into selling her parent’s home up North, tying up about a dozen loose ends around the house, and introducing 2 brand new Xolo puppies to the household.
Everything always uncorks like that with us. It will be months of absolute humming drollery and then in the space of 30 days EVERYTHING. HAPPENS. Literally EVERYTHING.
We are planning a huge trip to Iceland at about this time next year so I’ve already told my wife that we probably need to prepare for another cork-popping when we return from that one.
I seem so boring these days. It’s work – school – work – home projects – family stuff – more work – grind – and work. Adulting. Nothing glamorous, just the every day life stuff that happens when you are maintaining a life. And I’m good with it – I don’t need a lot of excitement because I feel pretty alive even when everything is beige. Happy. Content. Still open for whatever but absolutely fine if the whatever comes in the form of a new dish soap or a new program to bingewatch on Netflix. I know so many folks who struggle against the rocks of “it all needs to be exciting” and they wear themselves out with looking for the Next Big Thing. Meanwhile the ocean tide that is their life keep flowing in and out and they miss the treasure brought to them by the surf.
I’ve been guilty of that too at times but I’m practicing a LOT of being present.
And look what it’s done.
There’s a shitty, awful part of me that looks at my life today and thinks about all the hell my ex put me through. How she wanted to “prove” to herself and everyone else that I was “nothing” without her and was capable of nothing…and I never really felt the need to answer to that because her existence speaks for itself. And the shitty part of me that hasn’t risen above the “I told you so…” looks at her tiny little life in a trailer in a field somewhere in North Carolina where she sits, mostly alone, smoking her weed and plotting her anger-spew and I think to myself “yeah, that’s about right”. And I don’t need her to know how well I am doing with my career or business or home or love or family to grind my heel into her face because life is doing that on its own. Still, I wish I could stop thinking “you are exactly where you belong, bitch” when anyone mentions her to me but maybe that’s Mama Morrigan reminding me that everything isn’t all glitter-shitting kittens and evolution.
I have no grand plans for the rest of the year. We are going to some wonderful events and I am going to be seeing some people I love. I’ll write a bit and tie up some loose ends on personal projects but no major movements – that’s ok too.
It all shakes out into a big October something.
Pumpkin spice flavors, even.