OUR EMPTY CASTLE

It was a mad, mad, mad week here, full of FULL, full of hugs and giggles and screeches and running and endless, endless snacks.   The days were packed cram-bag with every game and toy and book and story and in and out the house had to offer, and I’m still brimful myself, with all the fun and the TIRED.

I cannot tell you how wonderful and exhausting it was.

I’ve slept fourteen-hour-nights the past two days, and feel as if I’m recovering from an ecstatic illness---sore to my bones and still without a thought to my name.  The house is in fair repair, for I made sure to have the dishes done, the laundry finished, and our bed made up fresh, for I knew I’d collapse the minute we got back from taking the children to their other grandparents.

Neither bedroom door upstairs has been opened, for I don’t intend to do any bed-changing or cleaning until this oppressive heat subsides.   Besides, if I don’t go LOOK, perhaps all those pillow-pets and snuggles and needfuls and dropped shoes will still BE there, and there will be more time, more time.

Looking around at the slight disarray---the few mis-matched bits of art and toys and cameras and sweets still on the dining table, the couple of dishes in the sink, the kitchen counter with its peanut butter and cereal boxes, I’m comforted in facing the let-down of the small, enormous absences.

I’ve thought a couple of times in the past few days of a house I saw once, and I don’t know why those images still crop up---I'd driven with a friend WAY down into MS to pick up her niece, for friend’s Mother had broken her hip, and needed assistance.    I’d only met the niece and her mother in my own territory, and so was astonished that two grown women could live in such a state as their house was in.

I don’t remember a scent, which would have certainly been expected, for such a chaos of take-out containers and fast-food wrappers attested to their days and months of casual neglect.   Trash bags ringed around the room to the windowsills, like sandbags for a flood.   I thought that since they knew we were coming, and it was about a four-hour drive, perhaps they'd had time to pick up/scrape up everything on the floor, either in our honor or for pride’s sake.

That still wouldn’t account for the dozens of Col. Sanders buckets, or five ashtrays overflowed into the dust under one long-legged bed,  or the extra-large-size pizza boxes stacked head-high in one corner, like a cardboard chiffarobe. 

  I’ll never know if the scene was better or worse than usual, and that tiny, haunting jangle of a memory still surfaces at odd times, when I look around at the messy state of my own home---by comparison, I guess my unkempt is Martha Stewart.

   So today I’m grasshoppering the day away, as I have since that last car-door slammed and we waved our goodbyes after such a full week.

I’ve wandered WAY off track, as usual---that's just the state of my jumbled mind.  Of our week and our doings, from towering castles and fruit stacks to sprinkle-yells and swallowed princesses, moiré non.