It’s a rainy afternoon. The kids are with grandma for their annual camp supplies shopping spree. Josh is with the staff, as staff training started yesterday at noon. The cats currently inside are all napping peacefully. I spent the morning doing normal things such as tidying, sweeping, and vacuuming the upstairs. While I was sweeping, one of the girls who was in the office asked if she could use our bathroom. I did one of those split second things in my head where I wondered if it was rude or appropriate to tell her that there is a bathroom in the office, but simply said, “Yes, just let me make sure it’s decent first.”

I’ve been in kind of a bad mood lately. It’s not the outward kind where you end up being short or impatient with someone. That actually doesn’t happen very much with me anymore. This is more of a simmering beneath the surface, that makes me wonder how it’s going to end up coming out. I slightly raised my voice at one of the outside cats when I opened our back door to empty out the vacuum canister. He ran inside and I was fumbling around with him in the pantry saying, “No, you are not coming in here!”

Something very weird just happened as I was writing. (I literally just pulled a crawling tick out of my hair after typing that). One of the daughters of our staff members walked into our house and into the living room where I currently am. She was looking for her mother. That’s all resolved now, but again, there was that momentary ethical dilemma of wondering how I am supposed to handle this. Am I supposed to host the child until her mother returns? Josh ended up taking her back to main camp with the staff.

After that paragraph someone came to the door. I’m kind of over the point of my life where I want people to understand me. At some point it really is just time to grow up. One of the mistakes I’ve made here before is when I end up listening to younger staff members rant or share their complaints about something, I end up sharing my own complaints or negativity. I’ve always been a little confused by the blankness or lack of reciprocity in support when I do that. It makes sense to me now though. I’m the adult.

We had our Grief Share meeting at church last night. It seems to me to be going well. I mostly listen and occasionally add to the discussion, but yesterday I led the group since the DCE was unable to be there. Though I’ve experienced a bit of commitment remorse, it’s been nice to feel involved in something and like maybe people are being helped. Again I felt free to simply listen and affirm in the opening of space for common pain to be witnessed. This morning I was feeling a little revisited by the times of life that require from us more solitude than sharing. The nature of human pain is that we often feel alone in it.

Every so often I feel alone again and societally re-distanced by all the things that had to happen in order to get to the place where I currently am. I’ve also been a little annoyed with the ways I seem to repeatedly write, to where I don’t even want to engage the process. I’d like to start a summer reading project, but have yet to pursue or have the desire for any kind of mentally challenging book. It’s like I’m burnt out on the fantasy that any of this is going to be useful someday.

The landscaping rocks were delivered yesterday in two truckloads. Josh and the boys moved the rock into the front of the house. I was able to do some brief shoveling and moving around of the rock with the hoe, which I noticed and am definitely thankful for. There’s still like a hollowness feeling in the middle of my chest, where everything used to be that held things together, but was destroyed when the lightning blew everything out.