Family Ties

I've been sleeping late and watching HBO and eating delicious dinners and going to Walgreens as my primary leisure activity since our move ended last week. That move was awful, and when I say awful, I mean I cried 6 times in two days and if it weren't for those tears, I wouldn't have made it through.

At one point, while looking at an impossibly heavy and awkward piano and wishing my husband preferred the flute, Mack looked at me and said, "Go on, babe, cry it out." And that is when I experienced a cry-laugh for the first time in my life.

Looking back on it, I can hardly believe we made it through it all. I can't believe we got everything packed up, that we made the first storage unit work at all, that we made the couch fit in the second storage unit without taking out that fluorescent light, that when I broke out with a fever after moving for two days I didn't just go on and die. I can't believe we got on our flight and came back to Kentucky and I was able to collapse into people I love and needed more than ever.

In the midst of that move, if you had told me that in a week I'd be at the zoo with my best friend, her two boys, my brother-in-law and my delicious niece looking at baby elephants and watching monkeys swing around, I couldn't have imagined it. But that's what happened. One week since I left Venice, since I cleaned out my apartment and kissed my neighbors goodbye, I spent the day enjoying the sunshine and laying on my mom and dad's deck while Renee played in a bowl of water for an uninterrupted hour. Bliss sort of describes it.