Big Old Yarn Ball

One of the big problems about not really posting for ages is that I have too much to write about and then when I do sit down to write - which I have done, several times - I find myself staring blankly at the screen, unsure of where to even possibly start.

So I'll start here.

Hey, I got glasses last week! It's been kind of funky. I wasn't AWARE that I needed glasses - I mean, I'd noticed that my remembrances of what things used to look like were sharper and finer, but I'd just credited that to The Cruel Wages Of Time. Then I went to see the optometrist for the first time in YEARS and she kind of freaked out. Glasses ahoy!

What else is new? Well.

A dear friend's son was nightmarishly injured last week, the poor kid. The Baby is wearing a holter monitor for the next couple of days, horribly enough. She had a scheduled appointment with her pediatrician and then a little unscheduled appointment with the holter monitor lady and welcome to Hell, me!

We also went to a family reunion on the weekend, a reunion of my mother-in-law's mother's people. It was held at a lodge that some of my mother-in-law's cousins have owned since the 1940s, and we were given a cabin for the weekend. The Boy and The Baby came with me but The Girl was left behind with my parents because she suddenly got very sick, and so we get there and OF COURSE there was another sole 11 year old girl cousin. That's the way these things work.

The property was gorgeous and rambling and full of winding streams and weeping willows and beds of shale and I was so totally disoriented, thanks to my new glasses. A few months ago, I'd looked through an old stereoscope and was baffled - what were they trying to accomplish with everything all lined up like that? - and now I realize that I've been seeing the world oddly flat for YEARS. So now I suddenly have to carefully pick my way through this bizarrely 3-D environment, with the ground looming up menacingly at me.

I managed not to break my neck.

The Boy showed me his new rock skipping skills and then we discovered that practically everyone of my husband's first cousins once removed had very thoughtfully ALSO had eight year old sons, so he took off in an enormous pack of young cousins, much like lions.

The next day, the Boy and the Baby and I walked out to a very miniature peninsula, this small thread of land stretching out into the massive lake, and everything was vividly in front of me, the trees and the fish silver in the water and everything suddenly so shockingly, dizzyingly clear. I could barely make my way and meanwhile the kids ran up ahead, ran over the bridges and past the spot where the woolen mill once stood and were gone from sight.