On the last day of school the teacher brought me a piano. He was getting rid of his unused instruments and asked if I’d have use for one. We have two pianos already, but I was happy to take it. It’s an electric one and used to be in the campus chapel before a student sat on it and bent one of the legs. You just have to prop up the leg on one side. We used to have an electric piano that the kids broke by hitting on the keys too hard.

The boys are doing a good job practicing on their own. As a mom you really get tired of the nagging and I don’t have it in me to be in charge of making sure they practice. Of all of us I’m the one who practices the least. I haven’t quite found my groove with it yet, but I will if I decide that’s what I want to do. I was actually practicing earlier this evening and one of the songs started playing a lot easier than I expected, like I could learn it.

It feels hard to talk about my family right now. You spend all these years trying to create a home for your family and doing what you can to provide them with a stable, nurturing, stimulating, and loving home life. It’s the most incredible work I’ve ever done or will do. These past couple of years have contributed to me missing out on key parts, held up somewhere in another dimension, while in the meantime time has continued to pass.

No pictures are good enough
No words are true enough
for me to come through
and let things go

No lines make sense enough
No rhymes with fence enough
for scenes to be real
enough to know

So pick up your mat
and walk God says
But I say, Lord
I can’t today

This woman I follow on Instagram went to a Taylor Swift concert last night with her daughter and posted like 18 videos of it in her stories. I think it’d be fun to go to one of her concerts. My sister tried to get tickets to the latest Eras tour at Soldier Field but they sold out almost instantly in the pre-sale. The resale tickets are thousands of dollars.

This weekend actually wasn’t too bad. The boys had a home game they lost 2-15. The player performance was this weekend which is where I saw the kind woman I mentioned yesterday, who when I thought about it more, I was almost certain I had somehow hurt her feelings. I texted her to say I was sorry for not being with it when we talked and for thereby not engaging with her very well.

I’ve noticed that people tend to overthink their social interactions at times. In the past several weeks I’ve had two moms text me apologizing for some kind of thing they deemed as an awkward encounter or something they messed up regarding what they did or shouldn’t have said. Neither time had been hurt or offended, or even thought much myself about the incident they were mentioning.

But I know what that’s like, so you try to reassure them that really everything is totally fine. On other occasions, however, people really do make legit mistakes and missteps. They’re not always easily determinable, and it really depends on the effect your action or inaction had on the other person. Sometimes you have no idea you did anything to anyone, and those are the worst in my opinion.

Because they usually end up coming out later, and you’re blindsided. The most painful experiences I’ve ever had in a friendship are when they pulled away and I didn’t know why. It happened before I realized there was any kind of problem, and by the time I did, the cut had already been made that to this day I think I will always be more reserved with myself and with my personality than I once was.

That’s not to say there haven’t been positive outcomes and growth. I learned personally from that experience and realized with them how unthoughtful I’d been and was assuming that just because I was having a blast that meant everyone else was too. That just because I felt perfectly free and comfortable being myself that they were also having the same positive experiences that I was.

This woman did not go out of her way to provide me reassurance, maybe that’s something they don’t do anymore. We learn to be honest and upfront about our feelings, even if it’s only acknowledging them to ourselves. Even now, 70+ years in, she has reasons it’d be nice if someone were kind and thoughtful toward her. It’s something very true of people all throughout their lives.

A kind and sweet older lady asked me what I was going to do to refresh my soul now that my school was out. I normally have no problems talking to her, but tonight I just stared, like she’d asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to but should have. Laughing in her face would’ve been just plain rude, as would’ve answering with some passive aggressive comment about all the busy things.

“I haven’t thought that far”, I said, when I finally found some words. People don’t normally ask me questions having to do with my soul. What I had been thinking about was how tired I was again, what I needed to be doing to rest and “listen to” my body who’d said “that was too much”. I haven’t really felt well for much of the week. Resting seems the main way of bringing energy back.

This isn’t the first time she’s mentioned it, the doing something for refreshment. I’ve got a note in my Bible that she wrote me several months ago, maybe a whole year ago by now, saying something along the lines of finding something that brings joy and refreshment to my soul. She’d sent me a note, a deep pink flower in a vase, and instructions on how to harvest the seeds to later sow in the wild.

The boys made a bench using two metal end pieces they found in the woods. I could hear them drilling through the bedroom window. When I finally saw it I was very impressed. The rusted screws blended perfectly with the laminate floor pieces they’d taken from I’m not even sure where they found them. They didn’t ask me, and I maybe could’ve used those floor boards for something.

You can’t really sit on it, or at least you wouldn’t want to sit more than one person. But they were satisfied with their work and so was I. The kids have found very strange things in the woods. On the corner of the road before you fully turn into the camp property, there’s a curve where the woods drop off into a sort of ravine. This is part of camp property too but not a part we frequent often.

One day while we were all taking a walk we saw that someone had dumped two leather recliners over the guardrails. Another time at that same corner somebody dumped a garbage bag of deer legs. If the recliners had been left up at the corner, someone could’ve picked them up from the road and probably used them. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do though with a bag of deer legs.