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Monday, June 06, 2005 If the sensational weather of the last few days is any indication, full-bore summer has settled itself in here. Perhaps in an attempt to balance out the extended combo ice age/monsoon season that hung about forever, wearing out its welcome in ill-mannered fashion until just over a week ago. Beach weather. Picnic weather. Hiking/biking weather. (Bring bug goo for the blackflies.) Cool nights, warm days. Perfect, pretty much, and I am appreciating the living bejesus out of it. The kind of weather that means you can walk in and out of the house in the same skimpy clothes, turning indoors and outdoors into extensions of each other. One big living space, or at least it will be once the blackflies die off for the season. Could be this early high-summer will turn out to be a tease, an aberration that will give way to more typical, more moderate early-June fare. Or it could be the real deal. Time will tell. In the meantime, my recent combat with the tidal wave of dandelions has given me a good, goofy look at myself dealing with the essentially uncontrollable, something that's gotten me thinking about certain changes I've noticed in myself in recent years. Among the lessons I picked up from my parental units during the years our lives overlapped were a few that made exceptionally deep impressions on me. Imparted inadvertently, all of them. Role modelings that showed me what I didn't want to be -- a kind of instruction given indirectly, indirectly revealing two vulnerable humans behind the layers of emotional scaffolding I interfaced with, scaffolding pieced together over time in an effort to hold things together as their ability to deal with life became more tenuous, more erratic. Good souls, both of them, each slowly walling themselves in, in distinctly different ways, developing belief systems and behaviors that whittled down their connections with the outside world. My mother -- from a dirt-poor family, deeply affected by the Great Depression (man, does that make me sound ancient or what? she was in her teens in the Depression and had me in late in her child-bearing years, okay?) -- became, with time, a world-class packrat. Not to the point of having towering stacks of newspapers everywhere, but impressive nonetheless. She didn't get rid of much because, after all, you never knew when you might be able to use [insert item here], but her genius for finding a place for everything kept the clutter from spilling over into all-out chaos. One of the last times I saw her, she'd begun to lose her grip on controlling that, had decided she wanted everything spread out over all available surfaces so she could get her hands on [insert item here] should the impulse to do so strike. Attempts to consolidate clutter to open up a square foot or two of usable space on the dining room table were rebuffed ("I know how I want it!"), and what the hell -- it was her living space, she got to have it exactly as she desired short of creating an immediate threat to health/safety. [continued in next entry] Madrid, te echo de menos. rws 7:39 AM [+]
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