Ghosts Appear and Fade Away

Here is a weeping willow we saw on our hike while on vacation.

Maybe it's the time of year. I'm always weirdest in August. I seem to go through a kind of emotional molting every year about this time in order to gear up, or more accurately, brace myself for the Fall and Winter. Don't get me wrong, I love Fall and the early part of Winter. It's just that it's when a lot of the bad things have happened to me in the past.

I had a friend who had cancer twice in his life. The first occurrence was in high school and then later in his twenties. He was one of the first bone marrow transplant patients in Iowa, and he's still alive and kicking and stirring up shit in his forties. But once we were working and he was telling me he was feeling kind of sad and anxious and couldn't figure out why. He came up to me about an hour later and said, he finally figured it out. It was because it was March, and both times his cancer had occurred in the Spring.

It's like that for me too, but it always takes me a bit to figure it out every year. Duh. My mom died and Coadster and I got into our accident in October. Stinky had meningitis and my mom's birthday were both around Valentine's Day. So, this has always been a reflective time for me. It's not bad at all, it's just like everything is a little tinged with sadness. I'm not all morose, and contemplating going Goth or anything, I'm just more of my quiet, less social self this time of year. In some ways, it's probably good that I give myself (and those around me) a break for a bit.

That having been said, I had a lot of great experiences this week. The camping trip was wonderful. I'll go into more detail about that tomorrow. Then when we got back on Friday, I went to see Colin Hay at the Englert Theater with a friend of mine. The show was amazing and absolutely perfect for my frame of mind. "Overkill" could easily be my theme song around this time of year. I was surprised that he could still hit the high notes in all the old Men at Work songs too. His band kicked ass, and I found his wife extremely entertaining to watch dance around and whatever the hell else she was doing up on stage. If you get a chance to see him, I highly recommend it - especially if you happened to be in high school in the eighties and apparently remembered every song from a couple of albums. Ahem.

So, yeah. It looks like I'm back blogging and trying to sort out all of my shit in front of an audience... And how have you all been?