We're like the Sopranos with red hair.

I finally figured out what Dan and I are going to wear while we hand out candy at Bec's this year.

I promised myself I wasn't going to even get in my car (never mind do any traveling) this weekend with all the errands and napping I need to catch up on having been away so much lately. So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself heading down to RI Sunday morning with Dan to enjoy a little birthday cake (happy belated b-day, Dad) with the fam. The whole fam. We were short a brother-in-law and a couple of nieces, but really the draw was having all four of my sisters in the same place at the same time. This rarely happens. (Katie J. and Savvy J. are in town until mid-November.) I was the lone holdout for the reunion so in an effort to make it a Very Brady Sunday Dinner, Dan and I schlepped down in the morning and got back to NH at midnight. Yeah, I want an effin' pat on the back.

The 'rents are selling the house (a topic I'm not quite ready to Spew about just yet) so it may have been the last time we were all under the same roof of the home in which we grew up. It was a good day despite all the driving. My dad had a fire going in a hollowed out tree trunk in the back yard which infused the crisp air with the warm smell of burning wood. The sun shone on the fallen leaves which covered the grass in a colorful sheet down the lawn all the way to the river. We had fresh banana bread and coffee around the kitchen table and Dan and I even tossed a football around. Later in the dining room we drank wine, ate my mom's spaghetti and meatballs and had inappropriate dinner conversation just like old times. (Dirty Chirl didn't make it until the end of dinner so the conversation waited for her arrival to really take its inevitable turn.)

At one point after dessert Cherie and I were sitting at the cleared table talking (she was trying to convince me to stay 'til Tuesday which couldn't possibly happen given my craving for my bed...I mean my husband), when my mom poked her head in the room to say how cute it was to see the two of us sitting there. Having my mom observe this interaction, sitting at the "adult" table drinking red wine with Cherie (and not having her sneak it from the box of Franzia), knowing my husband was in the other room with Cherie's husband watching the Yankees gave me this feeling I've been experiencing a lot lately; a new yet somehow nastolgic feeling of a different phase of life. It's like for a second I get to see a passing of time not filled with what-ifs and unknowns, but through familiar, home-colored glasses. I can remember sitting at that same table, chin in my hands, listening while my mom and her sisters (she too has four) sat talking. All we needed was a couple of packs of Carlton 100's (Menthols for Kath...I mean Chirl) and I would have sworn it was 1987.

I'm glad I went, particularly if it was the last time we gather there. But with all the emotion that is tied to the selling of that house, I'm glad I left too.

Plus, um, I think I have a deadline coming up or something.

Melliterary Spew

I Mellittered all day Friday which is why I didn't get a chance to Spew. I also had today (and have tomorrow) off from Molly duty so it's been such a treat to put in full days of work. (I never thought such a sentence would ever issue forth from my finger tips.) I've been getting to the desk before 9am and losing the hours until darkness. Friday I had to reluctantly pull myself away to head out to dinner in Portsmouth to celebrate Dan getting a raise. (Congrats again bud...I found out that he got the raise when I was still in Memphis and the news may or may not have been greeted with a joke about him getting 'Raise Head' upon my return home.)

(I just asked Dan if it was inappropriate for me to write about 'Raise Head' and he was more uncomfortable with my reporting his raise.)

(Is the dirty talk gratuitous?)

(This is really how my brain works.)

(One more thing---At Dan's celebratory dinner I had a Moroccan cous cous with tomatoes and shallots, nuts, and butternut squash all spiced up and served with the most tender leg of lamb I've ever eaten. I haven't stop thinking about it since.)

Anyway all the writing time has really helped move the Bookish along. I can't say that it has a clear spine yet or even a clear direction but I can say, and I don't think this is giving too much away, that there are many, many pages of it. (Pretty sure 'many, many pages of it' is how Virginia Woolf would have described Mrs. Dalloway---holla atcha VH---in its early stages.)

A few more days like this and the December 1 deadline will seem less terrible and horrible and awful (which isn't to say that the result won't be a hot mess because it most certainly will). Lately it's been more about organizing and scraping together pieces and bits of writing from the last couple of years that are scattered all over the place. I didn't realize how much I had written until I started doing this. Nothing is finished and I hate most of it, but every now and then there's a line that I like which is all I could hope for from a rough draft.

I'm still here at 9:15pm, writing now with a glass of wine. My vision of being a writer has always included evenings at the computer (in an upstairs and away from the world office overlooking^* the ocean) with a glass of wine, though I think this has happened maybe twice. A more accurate picture would be me in pajama bottoms at noon with no bra on underneath the t-shirt I wore to bed with a wool hat on covering a web of straggly red hair.

Part of the reason I'm still here (and not in fetal position on the spoffice floor sucking my thumb after so many hours at my desk) is because I snuck in a walk today shortly after 3 o'clock. This is my favorite time to take a walk in the fall. The sun is still warm but lower in the sky and everything takes on that golden hue of afternoon sun. If wisdom could show itself, I think it would look like afternoon sun.

If the product of horny hippies could show itself, it would look like this:

(Missing from photo: Bec and Jeff's teenagers, Sammy and Alex.)

*For my grammar club: I was going to have this sentence say 'an office which overlooks the ocean' but I wasn't sure whether it was 'an office which overlooks' or 'an office that overlooks' so I just avoided it altogether. I looked it up as I have many, many times before and it has to do with some business about a restrictive clause versus a nonrestrictive clause and it hurt my brain and I am still unsure. Any insight? If I ever figure it out, I'll let you know. (I'm pretty sure a restrictive clause is when Santa uses the belt and a nonrestrictive clause is when he lets the elves drink in the basement where, since they're gonna do it anyway, at least he knows they'll be safe.)