Kitty Action and Summer Musing
There's a lot of cute kitty action going on in our living room these days. The cardboard castle with the paper towel curtain and the paper bag tunnel is getting lots of use, as you can see. It works best when Ben goes inside, and some of his parts hang out because he's huge, and then he sticks a paw out and pats it around, and then Mattie runs around pouncing on the sticky-outy parts. This morning even further progress was made; they had a rousing round of ring around the rosie, as they took turns chasing one another all over the living room, around the boxes, and into the kitchen. It didn't last long, but it was delightful.
In other news,
zoe_1418 took my hand last night and led me down to my studio for a two-girl clean-a-thon. I've been unable to make myself go down to work lately, and it seemed like cleaning would be a good start, but no amount of self-bribing has allowed me to accomplish this for myself this week. To my surprise, and maybe hers too, I stood in the basement and cried. I just wept for, I guess, the loss of so much, including some of myself that I traded for time spent with Nancy and Mom in their last year, and some more of myself traded for the privilege of personally handling all of Mom's possessions and working on and in her house, and beside my brother and nephew, rather than just hiring a cleaning and organizing outfit to do it all.
There's no doubt in my mind that it was a worthwhile trade. I don't have much to regret now, and given how difficult my relationship with Mom was most of my life, I'd say that was worth quite a lot.
However, its telling that a year plus a little from Nancy's death, and a year minus a little from Mom's death, I still have to say that the major feature of my life is that I have just spent a couple years tending to family matters, cancer, death, grief, and a large house full of stuff. Its getting boring for the people around me after all this time, maybe, but I can smell pee-soaked sheets and cancer in the wet humid hotness of summer, and I can still feel the tenderness and careful stepping with which I tried to navigate a whole lot of difficult issues with my family, and how...complex it all was for so long. And that's mostly what's going on for me still.
But I do hear my work calling to me now. When I sit and read or knit or even dye (my favorite form of antidepressant!) I no longer feel completely satisfied. Sometimes I even feel bored. I need to reconnect with my studio, and that other part of my life and my self. So we made a start last night, and little by little, I hope to build new pathways to my creative life, and I hope it gets a little easier each time.