that's mrs. mediocrity to you

::

Imagine you will completely lose your memory of 2010 in five minutes.
Set an alarm for five minutes and capture the things you most
want to remember about 2010.

I feel like I did exactly that in the way I answered the wisdom prompt.
But here is today’s five minute synopsis.

::

I fell in love. With a kitten.

I felt the sun on my face as sweat poured off my body,
taking stress and frustration with it.

I spent a weekend giggling in the Thousand islands,
most notably when my niece dropped her glasses
in the toilet.

I held my husband’s hand many times.

I whispered my secrets to the moon.

I got rained on, a lot, but I did not melt.

I sat in my garden once and wrote about everything
directly in front of me. It was life.

I gave out a lot of hugs. This is new,
I never used to be a hugger.

I started two blogs. I wrote every day.
Every day.

I counseled my children. Sometimes they listened,
sometimes they did not.

I spent time at the hospital with my mom. She spent
most of her time asking questions of her caretakers,
remembering the names of their children.

I stopped my car by the side of the road,
more than once, to take pictures.

I drove for two hours to find the base of a windmill.
It was like finding the end of the rainbow.

Then I fell in love again, with the other kitten.

And it all went by in exactly five minutes.

{reverb10} check it out here

or, when life overwhelms, run away. And yes, I know these aren’t ducks, they are geese, but sometimes a girl gets to take a little poetic license, doesn’t she?

I seem to have depleted my batteries recently, and I just wasn’t running properly. I knew this, but couldn’t seem to break the cycle. So when my mother-in-law asked if I wanted to head up to the Thousand Islands with her and my sister-in-law and niece for a girls overnighter, of course my first thought was “I can’t do that, I don’t have time,” but then my second thought was, “Don’t be stupid.”

So I said yes and dropped everything, knowing it would all still be there, on the floor, when I got back. I never do things like that, but I knew that I really, really needed this one.

And off I went, and for the next day and a half I did only silly, relaxing, fun things. I giggled a little, I guffawed a lot. It helps when you have a silly eighteen-year-old with you and she does some really funny, crazy things. I also read a whole book. (Okay, I had started it the night before). It wasn’t even that great, but I lived within its covers for hours and hours anyway and that was its own little escape within my escape.

I never really used to believe in burnout, or at least I never believed it would happen to me, but lately I have begun to grasp the concept. Just in time, though, I am also starting to grasp the concept that no matter how much you have to do, every so often you need to simply stop everything and have some fun. Fun for the sake of fun.

They kept asking me what I wanted to do, and I kept saying, “I don’t care, I am just so happy to not HAVE to do anything.” But mostly I was thinking that I’d like to be sitting in a chair with my feet up, reading. We walked the little towns, we shopped, we ate, we went sightseeing. And then, finally, we sat in the hotel room and I read while they watched their shows  (there were a lot of them). Basically, I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do the whole trip.

Well, except pay $12 for a friendship bracelet that is essentially a piece of string with four beads strung on it. I almost refused, I thought it was ridiculously expensive, but we were all supposed to get one, together. So I bit my tongue and plunked down my cash, and now there it is on my wrist.

But it might just end up being the best twelve dollars I ever spent, because every time I look at it now, I think of how hard we all laughed at 11:30 that night when my niece went to take a shower and was scared by a tiny little spider and dropped her glasses in the toilet. And she was appalled and grossed out and there was some gagging and it was just so funny and we laughed until we snorted because she is the kind of girl who would rather throw her glasses away than fish them out of the toilet.

And then, of course, we were on a roll, and we laughed hysterically for the next hour and probably kept everyone in all the rooms near us awake, but we just couldn’t stop and we didn’t stop and we all fell asleep with smiles on our faces.

And during the night I dreamed silly dreams

while all those things I left scattered

at home on the floor

moved themselves back into place.