The words just are not coming tonight.  I mean, the words are, actually.  Sort of.  But they’re kind of All The Wrong Ones.

I really enjoyed being out of school for two weeks and was quite content to not have the evening ritual of making the next day’s lists in the five colored notebooks stacked beside me right now.  I know we need the structure and the routine, it’s good for our home, but I liked the break.

My One Word for 2017 has not been firmly decided but I’m afraid I keep leaning toward a word like “discipline” and that just feels rotten and I’d rather pick a word like “fun” or “spontaneous” or “overeat”.  (Has anyone ever chosen overeat?  They should.)  Of course, I’m not sitting around struggling to be spontaneous over here ya’ll.  I’ve got no spontaneity issues in my life.  That trait is aptly covered.  But that other uglier word?   Yuck.

Also.  I seem to have completely forgotten that regular exercise was once a sort of part of my life.  It’s been almost a year since I ran a half marathon.  You guys.  I finished a half marathon!  For.  The.  Love.  Now, a year later, I’m just sitting here in the semi-darkness finishing chocolate pudding.  Hannah says she has an extra FitBit type apparatus to loan me to see if I think that would help spur me on to action.  I think all it might do is spur me deeper into depression.  “Oh, look – you only walked twenty-two steps all day long today you lazy slob!”  (I think that’s what my FitBit would yell at me.)  I told Hannah I was afraid I might become obsessed with it.  She laughed.  “You don’t really get obsessed with things, Lacey,” she told me.  She’s probably right.  And that lack of obsession is probably why I will never run an entire marathon (nor probably another half marathon) and maybe why I’ll never finish and publish a book and why I can’t keep the times tables consistently memorized in my brain and why I would rather choose words like “spontaneous” over words like “discipline”.

Right now I’m looking at a stack of nearly twenty overdue library books and I’m still driving around on that spare tire from the night of the Prince Caspian play but tomorrow is trash day and my youngest son and my only son-in-law pulled the trash can down the driveway together in the mucky rain and mud of this foggy evening and that was a really good bit of sunlight in a grey week.

Today I opened a business bank account and that’s a bit of story I’ll be sharing in the next week or so and I’m being steadily reminded that it really takes so much money sometimes to try to make money and that’s a weird bit of grown up economical truth for us all.  Additionally, health insurance is a beast for the self-employed – or for the human being really I guess.  But the free dryer we acquired this summer (was it this summer?) is still running even though it smells a little like fire on some days and I keep a steady rule of never running it when I’m not at home.

Last week my friend-from-seventh-grade drove down from Virginia and what a delightful gift it was to spend a twenty-four hour stint with a friend so comfortable and true and safe and although we didn’t take a single genuine photo (what was wrong with us?) it was the exact distraction and blessing that I needed right then.  And a bonus to the whole thing was that she was able to meet so many of my dear friends here and they were able to meet her.  All gift, that was.

Yes.  There are those pesky library book fines and my kitchen table is buried under markers and notebooks again.  The closed grocery store Sunday put a kink in my weekly routine and we were forced to make a dessert without flour for a dinner we were invited to and we cranked out some cracker, butter, brown sugar, chocolate chip creation that was surprisingly a big hit.  We had a fun dinner with that sweet family. Last week I had more than thirty kids in the woods beside our house to celebrate Mosely’s birthday with a massive “Town” afternoon and although the kitchen floor was wrecked, we all survived and all thirty of those kids received a decent enough dinner and a reasonably good time – or so they implied.

What I’m saying is what I keep saying – this week, and all the weeks.

There’s good happening here.  In my life.  In yours.

And if you think I’ve been heavy on that topic of forcing my eyes open to see the good in the space in which I live, you’d be right.  It has been – and it promises to continue to be – a season for me personally in which I am in desperate need of Eyes That See.

I have zero desire to blindly ignore the muck and the mire shoveled around my doorstep.  I can’t avoid the knee deep poop I have to walk in these days.  But I am confident that I don’t want to eat and drink the sour parts all day long and all night through.

It has been, and I think it might always be, the writing that plays a part in rescuing me.

So, thank you for bearing with me as you routinely stand witness to the means of personal survival and hope that are sometimes these rambling words and shifting sentences.

At least today I added pictures.

_____________________________