Sidetracked

Something I've noticed with falls is that no matter how badly your knees and hands are bleeding at the time, it doesn't take that long to get up on your feet and limp into the house, wash away the dirt and grime, pick out the bits of leaves or gravel, and marvel at the shallow scrapes. Surely, it had to have been worse than that--loose bits of flesh, a dire need for stitches, something like that, right? No. As I said, a thousand tiny heartaches, each a grain of sand scraping at my skin. The only reason it hurt at all is that they all came at once. One little trip, I lost my balance, and the earth rose up to meet me with such awful force. Yet with a bit of warm water and soap it washes away. You get on with what you need to do. You also wonder why you ruined your mascara in public.

Such is life. When things are going well, you do your various chores--getting the kids to school, running errands, planning meals, teaching lessons--and think nothing of it. It's just what you do. It's why I didn't have a post for every day in November, despite my ambitions. I was busy doing other things. I read books, I knit a pair (and a half) of socks, I pulled out winter clothes and put away shorts. I went to the library and the mall. I finally went grocery shopping. I earned a bit of money doing a couple different projects and treated myself to some gorgeous sock yarn. I'm not sure if all of it's going to turn into socks or if one or two balls will become a shawl, but that's for another day. I even found myself in another rite of parental passage--treating Elena for head lice. (By the way, even if you don't have any critters at the moment, tea tree oil--in shampoo or other products--both treats and prevents. I got referred to Lice Ice when I was at Walgreens and it seems to be working well.)

The thing is, though, it's, well... life. You get wrapped up in what you're doing and the next thing you know it's two weeks later and your out-of-town friends start to wonder about you. Honestly, it was only the second bad day in two whole months of shock and then recovery. These peeks inside my head are fitful and, like with the evening news, tend to come when something "interesting" happens, for good or for ill. I would like to say that I'm back to normal, but that isn't quite true. I think I might have found a new normal, though. I'll try to let you in on that, too.