On the Weekends

This weekend could not have been better. Today we carved pumpkins, and I love carving pumpkins, I love gutting them, squishing all their slimy guts and seeds through my fingers, scooping into their sides like ice cream til they're nice and smooth, and then drawing pictures on their skin. It feels like 5th grade, like falls on Frisco Street, and then David cooked up our seeds and made a tasty Sunday snack. David always knows how to make everything more fun. And earlier, we played Triple Yahtzee and drank hot chocolate, and then we saw Where the Wild Things Are, a real triumph, and watched football and baseball and all the right teams were winning, and then, in the long in between, I read books, I sat and read forever, I read some soul-expanding poetry and some of that awful writing that you just can't put down and some Native American memoirs and some stories from Lake Wobegon. I have been starving for books these days, and I won't say I got my fill, but I got a good helping, that is for sure. And the days were wide open enough that I could wander, I could stop to sing a song or dance with Bump or fold the laundry or write letters that I will never send.

And just now, I got to see 3 fellas whose music I used to love, long about the 10th grade, and they were just as funny and honest and beautiful and harmonizing as ever. I wore my new beret. I was a little self-conscious but maybe a little proud too. I can't believe they are still making music, 10 years later, it makes me feel like I am a true fan, that I have loved them for a full 10 years, but really, there were 4 or 5 years in there somewhere when I wasn't so much concerned with them. That's ok, though.

"I ain't cutting my hair til the good Lord comes." - Joshua James

And for once, though I let out a long sigh at the thought of Monday morning, back at the grindstone, I feel like the weekend has been medicine instead of a whirlwind, I feel a little more like myself, or a lot, and everything is not paralyzing, and I don't even know that I realized I was paralyzed before. But it is nice, it is nice.