Tales from the Crevices of My Heart

Spring cleaning leads to some fun discoveries. A forgotten box of notebooks. These notebooks hold my life's story, told from the perspective of the person I was when I wrote the words. I wonder when I thought I would be a nice idea to notebook and write my journey down? I have a faint recollection of getting a small diary with a lock and key during elementary school and thinking that this would be the start of me recording all the important and relevant experiences I would have. I only started this journey for myself, to help me remember. I know during the years of raising a family, my writing was more sporadic and notebooks would take me years to complete. This Composition notebook seems to be the first intact notebook I have. Written at the tender age of 11, going on 12 - always going onto the next year. (I do remember as a kid, always excited for the next number - not like today, when at 57, I try to forget the increasing digit.) One thing I notice just from reading a few entrie...

 A piece of mail.  Something so ordinary that we often quickly flip through the stack, sorting out the junk mail for immediate recycling. This past week a piece of mail looked ordinary, yet it was not, by any means. Well it was ordinary in the fact that it served a purpose and was indeed from the USPS. This item was a change of address form from the USPS confirming that our daughter had indeed initiated this change.  I texted her the photo of this item of mail, which is what I usually do since she does live about five hours away. "Cool!" she says!  She had initiated the change of her permanent address. Hmmmm. Okay. I sit pondering how I got to this point and felt a bit of a void. So yes, she indeed is not moving back home. I knew that, but somewhere down deep inside, I needed this piece of mail to be in my mailbox to help me see that this is for real what happens when your kids grow up and move away, chasing their dreams as they go.

Pandemic fatigue is causing my deepening longing about so many extraneous things. I'm not sad, I've just got this gut wrenching, twisting, uncomfortable stretching inside me. In no particular order: I am longing... Longing for connection. Who can I talk to? Will someone please talk to me? Longing to reach out and touch my friends shoulder and pull her in close and hug her until we both feel like we made up for a year of being careful. Longing to feel the energy of four souls who inhabited a home together for 20 years to intertwine again in a space that's not quite large enough anymore. Longing for politics to never measure if a pandemic is real or not, ever again. Longing to know that soon my job will feel familiar again.  Longing for losses to lesson their heartache. Longing for company to ease my loneliness. Longing for rays of warmth on my face as I walk through the winding trails. Longing for my noisy neighbors to never play their loud club music again, forcing me to re...