Monday, July 21 2014

It's been one of those three day stretches of grey and rain in Boone. I welcomed it. My sleeping schedule has been pretty erratic, and I'm likely to be taking a nap at any point in the day. Fading in and out of consciousness while rain comes and goes - thrush against pavement - fine and delicate. It makes the sound of wind in overripe dogwood trees.
                 Then spatterings. Sleep. Car wheels make tiny wakes in the road and I wake up.

all this rain makes me depressed is the topic of a lot of small talk. It used to be a bad habit of mine to use that template ( all this _____ makes me ______) as a reason to be less whole than was real.

Growing up - growing out - growing into -    shed         reworking our gumbee selves and trying to climb out of ovens that we stayed too long in and now we're hard and we have to twist and painfully crack our crusts so we can remember how to let things pass through us again

The hardest time of growing up (thus far) was when Melanie was 17, Savannah was 15, me 13, and Calvin 11. Three teenage girls, each with hormones that, when interacting, disrupted the earth's magnetic field. At one point, when we were all PMSing at the same time, my mom got so frustrated with our high pitched bickering that she tied all of our long ponytails together.

Blond, brown, and strawberry-blond curls wrapped and knotted.  We couldn't believe she actually did it, so we just stood still for a minute with our backs to each other, a thick mass of hair in the middle. My mom couldn't believe that she just did what she had always jokingly threatened. She covered her mouth with a hand to hide her smile.

Then our anger caught up with us again and we reached our hands back and yanked at each other. We were rotating in a tight circle, our heads jerking and bucking. But it worked. By the time we had figured out how to get our long, curly hair untangled, we were all friends again and laughing.

Poor, poor, poor, poor, poor Calvin.

Although, he is so far beyond his years in understanding girls. Your welcome, brother. And yes, I too am glad that the hellish fever dream of puberty is over.