Pumpkining

Renee and Ben came to Auntie Am's scary house to carve pumpkins last week.

Like all good babies, they abandoned the carving process and left that to their aunt, but when it was time to blow out the candles, we couldn't lure them away, even with M&M bribes. We must've relit the candles a dozen times, and they'd count and blow them out again and again. Renee would count to 3 most of the time but sometimes she'd go to 8, huffing and puffing all the way.

Pretty much, it was adorable. And just one more thing to make me love Halloween.

It's getting scary in here...

I am not blogging because, in case you haven't noticed, IT'S FREAKING HALLOWEEN!!!

Also, we went to the lake house last weekend. And I had a test today. And tonight I'm carving pumpkins with two of the best babies in the entire world. And I've been very busy putting spider webs on everything with a sharp corner. And it's horror movie month on SyFy. And something happened to Billy Bell and he isn't on So You Think You Can Dance and I want to know what illness he got exactly...

To tide you over until next time, ponder this.

Changing Perspective

Several years ago my mom got a print of the painting Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth and gave it to Shannon for her apartment. I really liked it, and in a yard-sale gift from the universe, my mom found another framed print of it and gave it to me. I'm not sure exactly how, but Leiah also ended up with the print.
Christina's World is like an artwork thread that keeps us all connected. I can't help but think of my mom and my sisters when I look at it, but I also like it because it reminds me of being at my Grandma Scott's house growing up, looking back at her farmhouse from the distance, a tether to safety. In the suburbs you couldn't get too far away without losing sight of your home base, but in the country, especially the flat fields that make up the country in Indiana, you can wander far away and still feel like you're in the front yard. Leiah said it reminds her of the times we used spend afternoons laying in corn fields trying to trick the buzzards into circling us, being out in the middle of nowhere, trying to maintain the same stillness that Christina mastered for the painting.

Turns out, we're both clueless.

Dr. Mack came home the other day and schooled me on the painting. Apparently, as his teacher told it and as I later confirmed on Wikipedia, Christina is not looking back on her home in quiet reflection. She has not tried to run away and is lurking on the perimeter to see if anyone notices. She is not trying to trick the buzzards.

She is paralyzed on the lower half of her body due to an undiagnosed muscular deterioration and she is dragging herself across the field to get home. Because that's how she gets around. By dragging herself.

Wyeth, whose summer home was across the field from the house you see in the painting, was friendly with the real life Christina and her brother and used them as inspiration for many paintings.

It's kind of cool to know the truth behind the painting, the one that hangs in our bedroom, but it's also kind of a bummer. I mean, the fact that it has a twisted secret matches our artwork tendencies pretty well -- I was recently told some of my favorite pieces are "morose" and "bleak" -- but I actually liked that it wasn't as cryptic as my other stuff.

For instance, Christina's World does not have a single stick figure in it, something Mack claims is in most of the artwork I buy. And it's of a girl who has clothes on. And there's no blood or obvious anguish. And there is a natural space just waiting to be planted with thoughts. And it, technically, could qualify as a landscape, and I actually don't like landscapes in art all that much (I much prefer the real things).

But I guess it's just not meant to be. If something really was all sunshine and rainbows, I probably wouldn't like it. Unless it was an UMBRELLA.

The Bright Side

I had to walk to school today because riding my bike in the rain leaves me more soaked than just walking, and since I don't have a big gay umbrella, I was in a bad mood from the minute I walked out the door.

There was just too much cold paired with too much wet. Which is also the definition of miserable.

Halfway through the walk, my toes were frozen, my nose was running and my middle finger kept shooting out of my pocket in a blind rage. Then I realized I was below a canopy of the most beautiful color orange I'd ever seen, something the color of pumpkin mixed with the electricity of wet grass and dusted with yellows of sunshine from a couple days ago. I felt myself soften with appreciation.
And after class, Mack picked me up and we bought a Wii. Take that, rain.

Homecoming

Five years ago, Shannon decided, in the span of about two months, to get married and move to England.

We were living together at the time, and by we, I mean me, Shannon, Mack and Charles, all of us in a 2-bedroom house with one bathroom and a shotgun kitchen. Outside of our childhood, when we shared a room until she was 14 and I was 12, I have lived with Shan twice in my life -- once in 1997 for a couple of months and then again in 2003 when she came back from her first experience in Cuba . That time when she came back to Cuba made me fall in love with her as a person, not just as my sister.

She would leave little bits of half-noshed snacks laying on an end table or on the counter. And she would go into marathon baking sessions and whip up 5-6 blackberry cobblers. I would leave to go to work, and when I'd come home, the surface of every wall would be covered with Charles' artwork, like I had my own private art gallery.

Shannon dives headfirst into things I'd like to do but that my Taurus need for control doesn't allow. Also, I am a fraidy cat and don't have the courage.

She is as fearless about living abroad as she is about plastering walls with paintings, and for our entire lives, she has blazed paths for me that she has no idea about. When she was 14-17, she had a best friend named Krista... and I had a Krista's little sister Erica as a best friend. When we moved to Kentucky, Shan worked at the dollar movies... my first job (which I kept for nearly 2 years) was at the dollar movies. Then Shannon worked at Billy's BBQ... and so did I, and she worked at Atomic Cafe... and so did I.

Her global pursuits, living in Spain and France and England and Cuba, made me more comfortable with the world we live in, comfortable enough to travel to places that are "scary." Those experiences have shaped me more dramatically than all the years I've lived the suburban American dream in this country.

When Shannon left, with her new husband who I also love, and went to England, I got her out the door, waved good-bye, went into our kitchen, and fell apart on the floor. I physically collapsed, broke down, broke apart. The pieces of her that I needed, the bright spot in my daily life was gone, and I would never get it back. I was never going to discover an abandoned snack or come home to any dramatic surprises like an enormous garden in the middle of the yard. I was never going to wake up to an enormous hand-made banner of encouragement when confronted with a professional challenge. I was never going to watch her pull up in her rinky dink car after a long bike ride with a 40oz. in a paper sack. There would be no more Summers of Abandon or arguments about who has the tightest ass.

She was married and gone, and the bond that allowed us to simultaneously and intensely love and hate each other, reinforced by constant physical proximity, was uncertain. We'd never been through long distance, like the kind where an ocean separates you, for a long time, and I just didn't know what would happen. I mean, I knew I would love her fiercely and miss her every single day, but I didn't know how hard it would be to call each other, how easily our conversations would go. Without her lead, I didn't know what I was supposed to do.

So I followed her. I decided to grab life by the horns and move to Los Angeles... and I loved it. I missed my family, but I had Mack's family to bridge the gap between trips home. And I missed out on birthday parties and little weekend events, but I was always home for the big stuff... the stuff Shannon and her clan come home for. We were both missing links in the tangled chain that is the Hensley family, but it seemed easier to miss out when you knew someone else was missing out too.

Well, in less than 12 hours and for at least the next 4 years, none of us will be missing out. Shannon and Charles are coming home, bringing their sweet English rose Renee back to her kindred spirit Auntie Am, and putting roots down where the rest of their family tree is. I can't wrap my head around how happy I am, how full I feel, how perfect this is, how grateful I am to be in Kentucky right now, how much I love my family, how special I feel to be one of us.

This Little Piggy

A couple of nights ago Mack decided it was time to go to bed and I absolutely was not ready. There were several episodes of the 2005-06 season of Grey's Anatomy on the Tivo and I am on fall break from school and I just felt like staying up retardedly late and flexing my "I'm a grown up and can do what I want when I want" muscle.

But he was not having it. In physically dragging me to bed, he also dragged/drug/dragguged the sofa and coffee table into the hallway.

And then, during the final hoist of his far-from-waiflike wife into the bed, my not-quite-baby toe hooked on his lobster claw toenail and... bad feelings happened.

He did emergency bandaiding, and I figured it'd be better by morning. But then last night I had volleyball and ground my ouchie in the sand for an hour and then today I put on socks and tennis shoes and went for a jogalk. Now my not-quite-baby toe is really made at Mack's lobster claws.

How can I somehow milk this situation for this...

Hallo-freaking-ween