tiny celebrations

Loved this Louise Erdrich quote; I needed a reminder of sweetness and hope today. Life can be sweet even if it isn't so every minute. My reminders for today, yesterday, and tomorrow:

At UU today I learned that Opal Lee "the grandmother of Juneteenth" was 89 years old when she started the campaign to make Juneteenth (today!) a national holiday.

Last night when I called my dad to wish him for father's day, we talked for longer than usual, because he could hear me better than he has lately. That felt so lovely.

Big A will be back tomorrow, and we'll celebrate his Father's Day the day after that.

"An Evening In India"

Not sure if that was foolhardy or plain foolish, but in the midst of all the ongoing drama I decided to go ahead and host the "Evening in India" fundraiser anyway.

Honestly, I didn't have the energy to cancel it and communicate with the eight people who bid $80 to sign up, and then have to find another date that worked for everyone, and then I'd have that date looming on the horizon. It seemed easier to just go ahead and make the four-course meal I'd promised for today. 

So I did.

I was on my feet all day and didn't have time to think about anything but taste and temperature and coordinating time. (And unwrapping and arranging the desserts, which I got readymade at Swagath.) 

And then I had a blast writing a menu and talking to a room full of people I don't know very well. 

I'm so weird.

almanac of distress

I worship the day as a daily deity
but why don't we just... sub in 
one summer day for another

                  not think of the end of every day 
                  as completion--simply as 
                  some continuum

                                                    it's no surprise I'm trying to run
                                                    from this everyday exercise--
                                                    in my tired cowardice

                 my fear made entirely of words
                 molested by the logic of how

                 it could be worse

                                                  I contain multitudes--count them 
                                                  tally these heartbeats of loss
                                                  total up my to-dos 

downer alert

Nu was in the E.R. overnight again. This time Big A was home--I felt so thankful about that. Should I be thankful for anything when my child is in the E.R.? Is that stupid? We're trying all over again to surround Nu with the care and support he needs. 

Along with the roof ruckus, came the quick death of my garden--perennials like lilac, phlox, hydrangeas, hostas have all been squashed flat. All the annuals--coleus, begonias, geraniums--ditto. If they'd asked me to move my precious plants ahead of time, I would have found a way to do that. Somehow the peony bush seems to have survived. Yay? Friends think the perennials will come back next year... Yay, I guess. 

I keep thinking the garden looks like devastation and that I'm devastated. And then of all things, I worry I'm exaggerating my feelings. Things are worse in the world and could be worse here too. There's nothing to do but get through.  

Pic: My flattened garden. Just a few weeks ago, I was so hopeful about starting.

"all for freedom and for pleasure/nothing ever lasts forever"

I sang so much Tears For Fears as a kid--I got hooked on "Everybody wants to Rule the World" like everyone else and then got pretty lost in the deep tracks of their discography.

So when KB invited me to go see them in concert, I said yes. It was wonderful! I got to sing along to all my favorites, and Garbage whose song "Stupid Girl" I was near addicted to, once upon a time, opened. 

What I couldn't shake was the surreal sense of time and age--all around me I could see people like myself and I could see us all as kids when the songs first came out. We still loved the same songs, but were different people with different lives all these decades later. Curt Smith looks like an older version of the boy in the video, but Roland Orzabal (whose name I had to look up because he was the one I didn't have a crush on) looks like a completely different person. 

and that's (not) a wrap

I came home to the roofers hard at work with Tyvek wrap around the front of the house too. Older pictures I've posted show we've had that bright blue tarp up on the back roof for a long ass time. 

And while we've looked forward to this day for over three years, nothing could have prepared us for the all-day hammering, trampled garden, and glass from the skylights everywhere. (Thankfully broken skylight glass is clumpy and cubed like car windshield glass--not slivers.)

And now we hear the roof beams are rotted and need replacing ($$$). Plus they need to be ordered and that will take time. I know there's a crying jag coming my way any time now.

"it ain't over till it's over"

The end of the night came in the early hours of this morning. We were so tired and sweaty from so much time on the dance floor in the LA heat. The playlist was both Indian and Mexican (like my cousin the bride) and very... energetic.

Memories of our silliness and shenanigans are making me smile on this very long flight back to Michigan where I will resume my very responsible parental persona on arrival.

Pic: Photo booth with my baby cousins