COME HOME

You left, You saw, You conquered.  Now come home, please.


 Missing The Bean.  The holidays are coming and nothing feels good this year.  A warning - this will NOT be a chirper entry!  I had strange and unsettling dreams all night and woke with a grievous and despondent attitude.  My family feels disconnected - my father is dying, my mother is depressed (that's putting it mildly) my son is insulating, my sister - I don't talk about her.  And as you know, my daughter moved about 1500 miles away in January.  How can Christmas arrive without The Bean here?  I know, this is the talk of a selfish mother.  But I miss my oldest child in ways that words cannot express.


I woke to the sound of rain on the roof.  All of the leaves are on the ground.  Grey skies.  As I sit here, I am fighting the impulse to pack up the car and head north toward Cooperstown where my cousin lives.  There's an open invitation waiting for me there, that, and her good heart, her wicked sense of humor, and multiple cups of tea.  We can walk the dogs for uninterrupted miles and she will point out the old Huron burial sites. We can ride the horses, or go to her husband's multiple gravel pits and look for fossils (it's fun, really).  There is always an astonishingly eclectic auction to attend where they practically GIVE the goods away - really, you'll keep looking over your shoulder as you walk your treasures out of the building!  We can walk along Glimmer Lake and pretend that we are Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook (no one wants to be Wah-to-Wah because of her unfortunate young demise!).  We can do what we always do when we are together - dream of creating some unspeakably beautiful and valuable art that the entire world will recognize and embrace and pay millions of dollars to view.  And then we'll skip off to Nantucket or Block Island to fill our days with art and kids and dogs and the ocean.  All of this involves wearing great hand-knitted sweaters.  Of course.


Cancel that order.  I have a weekend unfolding in front of me.  It was what I waited for, what kept me going at the day job all week long.  Escaping is not in the plans.  Maybe another cup of coffee and upstairs I go.  I'm pretty sure that I hear the Christmas Tree piece calling my name.  If anyone is out there - how do YOU combat the seasonal blues?