Falling Back, Revisited

This is what I meant to write yesterday, had all of my brain cells not been coated with birthday cake.

Photo courtesy of
Rachael Sereday Photography
check out her shop, Pink Pink Moon on Etsy!

Falling back,
I find you here.
With arms,
with heart,
with silence,
without question
to catch.

Falling back,
and back and back.
Through smiles,
through shadows,
through softness,
throughout years
to find.

Falling back,
we stop, regroup.
We, with gentle winding of clocks,
we squeeze the lightness of our days
and find another minute.
Our own space in time
to spend in the elegant equation
of two
equals one
and four of seven and five.
We were never good at math
or time
but this, we do:

Falling back
we find us here.

Falling Back

I'm a bit chronologically challenged. My internal clock just doesn't tick at a steady beat. Time expands and contracts around me in relation to what I'm doing. For example: I have fifteen minutes to walk out the door. Plenty of time to get my keys, put my shoes on and get out. But then, as I'm stepping out the door, a quick glance at my pocket watch (a.k.a. my phone) confirms that I am, in fact 10 minutes late. What happened? Did I just black out for some indeterminate stretch of time? Did I slip through some sort of mini wormhole that speeds up time in 5 minute increments? I don't know. I can't even blame my kids for this. Granted, the whole getting out the door thing is exponentially complicated when you have 6 shoes to locate and put on, but I do this even by myself. But then earlier this week I went to a preschool Halloween party that was at least 6 hours long, except that the clock said it was only an hour and a half. No way in the world.

Blame this guy.
G.V. Hudson, inventor of modern DST

So it should be no surprise that daylight savings time always weirds me out. How can you just change time like that?! Even more mystifying are the certain states that just simply choose not to do it. (Or, in the case of Indiana, only part of the state does it, but I digress.) Compounding my little circadian rhythm problem, I willfully ignore almost all "news". I don't read news websites, I don't watch news on TV, I rarely read anything in the newspaper except for restaurant reviews. (I have some polka-dotted reasons for all of this, but again, I digress.) So, "Fall Back" is known in our household as "The Weekend We Are An Hour Early For Church" and "Spring Ahead" is known as "The Weekend We Suddenly Realize We Are Going To Be An Hour Late For Church, Should We Just Go For Doughnuts Instead".

But aha! I caught it this year. I don't remember how I caught it, but I did. So today I have what every busy person on the face of this planet wishes for: an extra hour in the day. Wouldn't we all be so much more productive if we just had that extra hour? I would be a better housekeeper, I would finish all the projects I've started, I would write the next great American novel, I would work out, I would give myself a pedicure, iron shirts, get my PhD. We all spend so much time running from this to that and back again. There are 27 fires that must be put out rightnoworelse. It seems the more time we spend organizing and scheduling, the more we have to do. I read countless articles about "penciling in" free time, or down time, or time with your kids, or me time. The very premise of that is a ridiculous notion if you think about it very long, but sadly, in a lot of our lives it's necessary. So we all long for that elusive extra hour. That golden Neverland where things get finished and our hair looks good. Well, today's the day, folks. By some calculus of agrarian time math, we get an extra hour. What will you do with yours?

What am I doing with this extra hour in my day? Well, pretty much what I would do on any typical Saturday night: write a blog post, eat some Cheetos, work on a knitting project, hang out with the Chief Lou, and listen to my monkeys snore. It's a crazy, madcap life I live.

When Words Fail

Words are my medium. The ability to construct sentences and string them together and convey some sort of message is kinda my thing. Sometimes I'm quite good at it. It is often soothing for me to sit and write. My preferred method is good old journal and pen, but the computer works, too. I've been recording observations about people and life ever since I could hold a pencil. I can't really remember a time in my life without my journals. My silent friends that beckon, open leafed with blank pages for me to fill; or that sit patiently where I left them, never complaining if they're neglected. My empty space to let off fumes, make lists, think in ink, to doodle, rhyme, jot, scribble, store important scraps of other paper, to bleed. These reams of playgrounds for my words, where I can make them twist, jump, spin, climb the monkey bars and slide. But sometimes, as soon as I get to these magical play lands for words, the words just sit down and pout. They don'wanna come out and play! [Insert stomp and pout here]

I get pen-tied for any number of reasons, most of them mundane. Regardless of the cause, the effect is always the same. The words are swimming for their lives in all directions, just churning the murky waters of my brain. It's like a shipwreck in there. All screams and bobbing body parts and splinters. The lifeboat's gone mysteriously missing, so the only sensible thing to do is to let them all drown and then pick over the carcasses later for treasure. 

Today's one of those days. But it also happens to be Day 4 of NaBloPoMo and I'm determined to see this thing through. I've been rendered speechless today by the nattering of a thousand things that will not wait their turn for my attention. So while I wait for them all to settle down and stand still, I'll let the Brothers Avett do my talking for me. Those sweet boys from North Carolina hang out with me in all kinds of weather, but they really came through with flying colors on this otherwise gray day. Here's the song they sang for me a lot today. 

"Decide what to be and go be it."