Christmas is over.  The tree is put away.  The only things left are the wreaths on the windows.

I cleaned house today.  Scrubbed toilets, polished mirrors.  And I wondered.  What would I do with all the extra time if I ever hired a maid?  How did women in medieval times keep their castles clean?  I know the servants or slaves did the work, but did they ever roll up their sleeves and muck the rushes off the floor?  Did they take the same satisfaction from a clean castle that I take from a clean house?  Can a castle ever really be clean?

My husband is gone now.  The earliest I will see him is mid to late July.  So I am once again a citizen in that city called Limbo.  Waiting for life to pass one slow day at a time while trying to seem interested and here for my kids.  When he is gone for long periods of time everything is just kinda mediocre, like eating red licorice when you really want chocolate.

Oh well.

School is out and the arrows in our quiver are driving me nuts.  There are seven years between my two boys.  That sounded like a good idea when we were planning.  Seven years or so into marriage, pregnancy.  Seven years later, another one.  That way, there wasn’t two kids under five in the house and I would keep what little sanity parenting affords me.

The plan went off without a hitch, except the sanity part.  Oh, and the fact that there are very few things each child enjoys doing TOGETHER.  One of them is either too young or too old, and short of going to the pool, they have little recreational appetites in common. 

I’m glad Christmas is over.  I worry every year, needlessly, if my sons have enough presents under the tree.  My oldest is wanting more expensive gifts so they are getting to be fewer and fewer.  I guess because there were so many Christmases when I was a kid with nothing, I don’t want my kids to live it.  And yet I have to be conscious of not giving too much.  Ugh.

Sanity.  Sanity.  Where oh where are you tonight?  Why did you leave me here all alone?  I searched the world over and thought I was solid, but the arrows shot in and pfft you were gone!

A week before Christmas a local news report said some area homes were missing spruce trees from their landscape.  People were chopping them down and using them as Christmas trees!

So around 0530 last week I woke up because someone was hacking something in my yard.  I heard six good hard chops.  I looked at the clock and thought about getting up, but the noise stopped so I figured, hell they musta got one, getting up won’t bring it back, and went back to sleep.

I looked out a few hours later and all my landscaping was intact so I didn’t know what to think.  Until my doorbell rang after lunch.  The local news crew was out on my street wanting to interview me about the vandalism done to my mailbox.

Huh?

I declined the interview but went out to the mailbox at the street and sure enough, our two brand new boxes were totally trashed.  Seems someone went down my street with a baseball bat beating the snot out of all the mailboxes and a few windshields.  I called the cops who said they already have a suspect which doesn’t surprise me since this is such a quiet town. 

We have a teenage boy across the street.  He’s a mechanic, and a racer.  You know those stupid Fast and Furious movies?  Well there seems to be some type of subculture around here of racers who want to make the movie reality.  He is one of them.  He’s a good kid, respectful to me and my family, but he does drive fast and the neighbors stay on his butt about it.

Anyway, this subculture gets pretty competitive.  The car with the bat wielding vandals was a green civic, souped up with chrome and those neon lights under the car.  I didn’t see it of course, but the idiots didn’t do drive by hitting.  One of them got out of the car to do the damage while the other followed in the car so lots of people saw it.

How stupid was that?

From what I am hearing from the police and neighbors it was a retaliatory thing for a race “gone bad.”  They knew the kid who races lives on the street but not where, so they made sure to get everyone.

Crime is so low around here that this was the lead story on the local news.  Heh.

I wouldn’t mind it so much if Vin Diesel did the vandalism.  As long as he was wearing a tank top and a knife and said things like “You keep what you kill.”  Heck, I’d paint a bull’s eye on the dang thing.

The shadow on her lungs wants her life.

My Aunt Shelby’s cancer is growing.  She started chemo again and we’re praying it slows enough so we can take a cruise together this summer.  We’ll have to see.  We sure did enjoy Niagara Falls.  Christmas was a bust though.  She was too sick to get out of bed.

Only poison can keep the shadow at bay, and that only for a time.

Soon a new year will birth.

All things are old.

The trick to life is making them new again.