How did I get here?

    Snap-snap in the saucepan go the green beans. While my hands methodically prepare the vegetable for dinner, I stare through the kitchen window above the sink and acknowledge a similar ritual of my dear husband; straight-turn-straight as the lawnmower paves parallel lines across the backyard.  What is HE thinking?  I know what I'm thinking:  how did I get here?  I'm standing in my dream home. . . really.  George and I designed it; we saw the lot before it had a house; we said, "We want a quiet neighborhood (check); privacy (check); we want lots of light, lots of windows (check), no worries about electrical wiring that would meet "code" (check); kitchen floor that could actually be cleaned (check), plenty of room to play for our two daughters (check).  2 Niko Way was. . . and is everything I hoped for.  I have my home.
    I'm thrown off balance, though.  Even as the lawnmower makes its steady progress across the lawn, while I'm "snap snapping" the green beans, my iTunes playlist betrays me; "Spirit in the Sky" by Norman Greenbaum expands to fill the air, and - just like that - I'm catapulted back to my high school days.  Of course it was me who PUT that song on my playlist, but that was a while ago, and I must have been in a sentimental mood when I did it.  Excuses, perhaps?

     So... I'm now feeling like that same teenager who - in the early Seventies, striving to mask a million insecurities, couldn't help but close my eyes and sway with the music.  Yes, that's what I did with no inhibitions then, and, yes, that's what I still can do without inhibition now (if no one is around). 

    Life promises and provides no script.  You can never be so sure-of-foot; sometimes you're here and now. . . and then - just like that - you're there and then, seeing the world as if it were 1970. . . 1974.

Somehow you just knew, right?

After "one of those days", I sat down tonight in my makeshift office to attempt to re-imagine the events of this doozie of a day that had my head spinning so ridiculously out-of-control that the left and right hands had little purchase when they acted on my orders to stop the nonsense.  Suffice to say, I knew enough this morning to step back when the work emails became personal.  I appealed. . . I lost. . . I accepted.  The work world can be cut-throat, and as much as we'd like to say "it's not personal, it's business", our sensibilities reflexively scream right back at us and say otherwise.

The world became right again because my baby sister just happened to call me after I arrived home.  We meandered down the right path, finding ample reason to laugh, to support each other, to love each other; essentially, we sidestepped (with remarkable aplomb, I must say) the bullshit that on any given day can most effectively and convincingly reduce us to reactive, puny people.

One could say, my dear sister, that we behaved uncannily like Mom and Aunt Marie.  We understand, don't we, why they spent so many hours on the phone together. . . laughing. . . ignoring us. . . shoring each other up.  If they had tried to explain to us back then the medicinal nature of their conversations, we wouldn't have understood.  We do now, don't we?  Somehow, Marg, you just knew, right?

I feel great tonight - thank you!