Weather Patterns and Cat Naps

Beautiful isn’t it? (This statement directed at my fellow beach lovers, my fellow ‘would do anything to get my butt on the beach at least once a year’ folks.) This picture was taken in Key Biscayne, Miami, FL. It’s quite a deceiving picture actually because the sky with the blue water and palm trees, in addition to knowing its Miami, makes one think that you could hop into the picture and experience 90 degree weather. However, it was not the case, it was more around 68 or 69 degrees that day. But temperature does not matter when one is walking through sand (well temp does decide whether shoes stay on or come flying off…). I was happy as a clam walking around that beach taking in all of the sensations that create my passion for the sea. The smell of salt water and sand,  the feel of the breeze, the sound of the palm tree leaves mixed with the sound of the waves… the beach and all of it’s sense tickling properties brings me into an almost hypnotic state.

Ignore the power cord running through the sign 😉

 

I found this sign in Key West and found it highly applicable to my life 😉  

The pictures above are also the reason my blog has been lonely for 2 weeks. My parents decided that this year they were not going to spend the winter months shoveling snow, putting on 8 layers of clothing, and avoiding their back twisty curvy roads they live on when the major snow storms hit. They decided to spend their winter months visiting beaches, sitting on their balcony, and visiting various bird/manatee/general wildlife viewing areas in Florida. *gasp* who would do such a thing? Perhaps half of the northeast? If I could retire now at the ripe old age of 25 and become the world’s youngest snow bird I’d be there in a  second. Now, one of the perks to being the daughter of a snow bird is winter VACATION!! My husband and I were able to spend 10 days with my parents touring all over Florida and soaking up as much vitamin D and warm weather as possible to bring with us back to, as Matt calls it, the frozen tundra that is upstate New York.

Our vacation looked something like this: 

Florida Jungle

All in all, it was a great vacation comprised of manatees, beaches, and wonderful family in the Tampa Bay area and beaches, pelicans, egrets, whales, and a visit to a wonderful Anglican church in Miami/Florida Keys. Successful Florida break!

But all great things must come to an end and our vacation ended with a blast of 5 degree air throwing itself through the jetway as we stepped off the plane and back into our beloved “tundra”.

I believe I’m somewhat unlucky in terms of weather. This year, as I’ve travelled back and forth across the state I’ve brought snow with me everywhere I go. Almost all of the snowstorms Albany has had so far have rolled in with my arrival to the city limits, including a snowstorm that hit the night before Matt and I had to board our plane (in Albany) to fly to Florida. We had a fun drive getting to my parent’s house that night… I hoped maybe this trend would cease but alas a cold front whooshed through northern and central Florida a day after we arrived and the first 4 days in Tampa were filled with Freeze Warning alerts blipping from my obnoxious weather channel app on my phone. Luckily, we left the cold (erm, “cold”, 55 degrees is NOT cold comparatively but it IS cold relatively) and went down to Miami. The day before we arrived to Miami it was in the low 80s upper 70s but the cold front followed and the 3 days we were there held upper 60’s and low 70’s weather, which resulted in absolutely no complaints. It was absolutely glorious. However, the day after we left Miami, guess what? The temperature shot back up to the 80’s. I feel I could forecast weather based on where my body is. And to further confirm my weather forecasting abilities, the days that we arrived back home happened to be the coldest we’ve had in upstate new york yet this year. Ah well, what can ya do? Keep me as far away from you as possible if you want to stay warm!!! 😉

As I stated before, we arrived in Albany in the 5 degree weather and trekked the 2.5 hours back to home. What we found when we got home was this:

Hallelujah, a miracle has happened!! My kitties cuddle! And bathe each other! And play! And share! And generally love each other 🙂 Here is a quote from my last post:

“Someday, oh maybe someday, this whole thing will blow over and I’ll be posting a blog about how cute they are when snuggled up together. Looks to be far from now but one can hope!”

When writing about the hatred felt between my cats just 3 weeks ago, I wrote this closing sentence with absolutely no idea this would actually happen within the month!

So, here it is, LOOK HOW CUTE MY KITTIES ARE WHEN SNUGGLED UP TOGETHER!!!! 🙂

Okay I blogged about it 😉

But really, this was a great treat to come home to. I will forever be indebted to my wonderful friend who house/cat sat as I believe she is the reason they snuggle. I don’t know how she did it but it happened and it’s beautiful. No more icy tension, no more constant surveillance. Just the occasional nip at the neck from big kitty to small kitty which is easily remedied by the appearance of a spray bottle.

For the next 3 months I will slowly pull out the stored Vitamin D and sunshine I bottled while in Florida and douse it over myself once a week just to get me through. And I’ll cuddle with my cats as much as possible. Winter may not be so bad after all.

Deathly Pine. Or a pinely death.

Today was one of those days where I really didn’t want to get out of bed.  I awoke to the sound of the rain pouring hard on the window, the cat gnawing on Matt’s feet (the movement of Matt kicking him is what really woke me up), my stomach and head angry at me, and the feeling that another half hour of sleep would make me feel that much more  rested. Seeing as Wednesdays are a day where I can get that extra half hour, I rolled over and sunk back into my pillow top mattress and fell back to sleep. It was quite, quite  needed today.

I’m allergic to pine trees. Sad but true. Real Christmas trees make me sniff and sneeze, gag and hack, and worst of all make me feel like my throat is closing up when it’s really not. All of this results in very sore sinuses and the feeling that my head has turned into a pressurized slow cooker. Growing up, the years that we had a real Christmas tree in my house were years that I woke up with fevers on the morning of Christmas. I now wonder if those fevers were allergy induced?

My husband and I went out and bought our first Christmas tree together on Saturday. I wish I could tell you that we had that spectacular moment of finding the perfect tree, chopping it down together, and lugging it home to put in a beautiful tree stand and hang all of our individualized precious ornaments and lights on it and then bask in the awesomeness of the day we just had. Well, in all actuality, I don’t wish we had that moment because if we’d had that moment my face would be the size of a house. Our Christmas tree buying experience went as follows: Matt and I piled into his parents mini van with his parents and 12-year-old brother in tow. We drove through Syracuse snow and parked in the closest space we could find to the halfway point of the parking lot (because of course the entire front half was jam-packed with people waiting in line for parking spots…)and then entered the mega-store known as Wal-mart. I scanned the massive room for the Christmas shop and made a bee-line in its direction. I carefully examined every tree they had for sale and asked my husband millions of questions, “Is this one too scrawny?” “Do you like white or multi-colored lights?” “Is this one too tall?” “Is this one too short?” “Will the cat try to climb this one?” “Is this one full enough?” My eyes fell on a tree that was perfectly shaped, the lights were dispersed perfectly, and it wasn’t too tall, too skinny, or too short. Just right. We grabbed the box and loaded it onto the shopping cart. Step 1 complete. Next step: ornaments. How does one who doesn’t own any ornaments decorate a tree? They buy 5 dollar box sets of ornament balls!!! Wal-mart has pretty much any color and design you could possibly imagine. We grabbed two boxes – one red and one silver. Step 2 complete. Step 3: Get pine scented candles so my husband could still feel like we had a real Christmas tree since he prefers them. We weaved our way through the Christmas aisles picking up random things like light up garland, a tree skirt, and amazingly scented pine cones. In the very last aisle we found the candles. And we were in luck! They were selling a 5 pack of pine scented candles for a great price. We grabbed the box and deemed the trip complete.

That night we put the tree up, watched the cat go berserk trying to figure out what the new thing in the living room was, and decorated it. All was well and lovely. The next night, I tapped into my inner-Martha Stewart and put the garland around various doorways, put the heavenly pinecones on display, broke out my red tablecloth and green placements, put up the advent wreath, and finally lit the pine scented candles around the room.  I settled into my couch under my heating blanket and started watching some tv. Fifteen minutes went by before I noticed that my sinuses were starting to hurt a little. Then my throat started to become scratchy. Then my eyes started watering. And then the sneezing started and I went into a full-blown allergy attack. My eyes couldn’t stay open, I couldn’t breathe out of my nose, my throat hurt, and my face felt like it was going to implode. I could not figure out what in the world sparked this… and then my eyes drifted to the candle glowing on the coffee table in front of me… pine scented candles… do they have pine?! I blew out the candles and started to speculate whether 9 dollar Wal-Mart candles could have possibly be made with real pine? Nothing else could explain the allergy attack, however. Nothing else in the house had changed. So now, we have 5 pine scented candles hanging around my house for looks and not for smell. And a very frustrated me, because of all things to be allergic to, why does it have to be something that smells lovely? I love my smells… but I don’t love it when they make my face rebel against my body.

As a result of this pine attack, my allergies have been going nuts. One piece of dander flies up my nose and the troops are all called in to fight it off, thus producing a sneezing fit, itchy watery eyes, an extremely stuffed nose, or all of the above. Duncan leaves his dander all over our house so the aforementioned sequence of events has been happening quite often which has been keeping me awake at night. Until last night… last night I slept great. It was a beautiful sleep. To tie this back to the first paragraph…because sleep felt so lovely last night, it was an amazing feeling to roll back over and sleep just a little bit past my alarm.

And my new goal of the Advent/Christmas season is: avoid as many pine scented things as possible thus reducing the amount of allergy attacks… hmm… I believe this goal might set me up for failure… oh well, more Allegra please?

Mmmm, nougat

The months of October and November are simply lovely. There’s the smell of leaves that are browning and falling which then crunch underneath your feet once they’ve fallen. It starts getting dark at dinner time so the lit candles and low kitchen lighting makes for a very peaceful atmosphere in which to cook. Heating blankets are now acceptable to use… and as a result, kitties are cuddlier. There is no pressure to be outside in the warmth so one can hole up inside and watch tv shows and movies on a Saturday and not feel guilty.

And last but not least: there’s chocolate. Uber and uber amounts of it.

So much joy.

Halloween day my husband and I had a couple we spend a lot of time with over to our house for some laid back friend time. They brought Halloween candy and Matt went out and bought some as well. This candy sat in a big red bowl on our breakfast bar waiting in anticipation for the monsters, whoopie cushion (seriously!), and mustard bottle (yep, it’s true) to show up to claim their loot. That being said, this big red bowl (which was filled and placed at 1 pm) was lonely because of the 4 hours it had to wait to empty itself. And it beckoned to us. It called each of our names one by one until this big red bowl was no longer lonely. Oh no, not lonely at all. It had visitors every few minutes for the entirety of the 4 hours it had to patiently bide it’s time. The result? Very little candy for the whoopie cushion and his friends. By the end of the night of the doorbell ringing, the Grimm Brother’s being paused, and the cat flying up the stairs everytime someone came within 30 feet of our door (he senses these things) the big red bowl had compeltely emptied itself save for a few butterfingers (blech). I was happy about this fact…. no more candy to gorge myself on!! I will have survived Halloween without too much sugar sickness and pounds put on.

Oh, but the thing about the weeks after Halloween is the candy is EVERYWHERE. Everyone is trying to give away their leftover candy… and I’ve even encountered some parents trying to give away the candy their children collected to make sure kiddo’s would sleep and not running on the ceiling! I walked into work on Monday and was immediately faced with a bag of temptation. This bag was sitting smiling at me on the desk where I work. It was a bag of horror and of dread. I say this melodramatically because of what this bag contained. This bag didn’t just contain candy. It contained chocolately, caramel, nougat. I’ll illustrate this bag for you.

Bag of dread and horror.

Those three chocolate  bars you see there happen to be my weakness. They are the candy I avoid at Halloween to save my stomach, my head, and my sanity. You see, when these candy bars are around I lose all sense of “good idea bad idea” and become a hand to mouth being. Candy bar enters hand, brain wonders “well, how did that get there?” and candy bar is inserted into mouth. This happens as many times as possible while they are sitting in front of me.

Luckily, the calorie cutting i’ve been doing for over a year now has increased my self-control and I’ve been able to sit here for 2 hours and only have 1 milky way bar. Woah! I’m now self-talking myself out of a 3 Musketeers Bar reminding myself that I have to fit into a bridesmaid dress in December that will not fit if I gorge myself on candy.

It’s proving to be quite difficult because nougat might possibly be one of my favorite substances on the planet. It’s so fluffy and delicious…. must not eat 3 Musketeers… must not… mmmmmmmm

Well, the chocolate that may or may not be on my face at the time being is in dire need of getting wiped away and the bag of doom with it’s oh-so-innocent seductively sweet smile must be forced into isolation in a place where I can pretend that it’s not. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day 😉

Opposite Extreme?

This morning I walked out of my bedroom and into a wall of hideousness. The wall then seemed to dissolve and travel up my nasal passages and right smack into the middle of my gut. This stench was not present in my stairwell minutes before. I considered the bathroom off the hallway and my man of a husband who I inhabit my dwelling with… but no, this was not a human smell. In horror, I looked down my stairs and found a trail of poopy litter leading from our guest room down the stairs and all through our living room. Now, we’ve only had Duncan for 4 months and he’s never pooped outside his litter box so i’m not all too familiar with the smell of cat poop. This would most likely be the reason why I did not first assume the rancid smell was what it really was. But boy, did I get familiar with it today. The reason for the poopy litter is neither here nor there and I’m not trying to hang my husband out for embarrassment but this story helps me introduce the purpose of this blog entry. The reason for the poopy litter was because my poor little sir could not go into his litter box without getting his paws full of dirty litter because the litter box had not been scooped in quite some days. And by quite some, I mean 3. Which directly leads me to the point.

When did I become so freakin’ anal??

People who knew me in high school knew that I would always be at least 10 minutes late to anything… (including school whether I was missing the bus or driving myself), I was not detail oriented in the least and would miss things that were very much right in front of me, and I would regularly knock things over and break them/spill them. I did not receive good grades until my junior year of high school and was fine with being mediocre. I had other things that were more important than my education. Now, really, I was not a bad kid. I just had a raging case of ADHD that swept through me on a daily basis and caused me to be a whirlwind of chaos that regularly lost objects like shoes, car keys, wallets and who couldn’t remember if the meeting was at 12 or 1 so to be safe should arrive at 1:30 instead. My best friends became the feelings in the pit of my stomach that said, “How dare you miss that!” or “I can’t believe you did that? How could you be so foolish?” and my favorite, “You’ll never get your life together, Sarah. It’s hopeless.”

My junior year of high school was the beginning of my turning point into the opposite direction. I was sick of the pit of unhappy feelings and my way to deal with said pit was to put things in my life in order. I started doing my homework on time and studying for tests. As a result, my grades shot up to A’s. The feeling of getting an A reinforced the feeling that if I kept going, my life would come together very nicely. I graduated from high school with a good GPA and got into the college of my choice.

College was a bit of a regression at first. I don’t transition well and college is a large change for someone who’s been living at home and attached to her parents for 18 years. I spent much of my 4 years forgetting to pay for parking tickets and letting the massive piles of clothing build up on my usually unmade bed. I became my own individual person and dealt with millions of emotions that marked the various experiences leading me to becoming a well-adjusted (who’s really that anyway??) adult. Through all this my grades continued to sky-rocket, especially by the end of my 4 years. The more A’s I got, the more I was able to squelch those feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

College ended and I moved home. Cue massive transition # 2. Graduating sparked the feelings of a need to be put together, not just in school but in all areas of life. I spent my first 6 months at home cleaning. My parents had just moved and because I moved back in with them, I had a new living space. This was glorious because the state of my room in the house prior to this new house was a nightmare to clean and move out of. Another reason I decided I needed to keep myself together. I cleaned and organized my life. I started finding joy in baskets and bins and decorations. When a transition would usually force me to fall apart and regress back to old habits, instead I organized with a frenzy that surprised everyone I knew. It also caused a discrepancy inside me. Consciously I was working on disorganized chaos prevention. Subconsciously I was still trying to cope with transitioning. I still lost things and would have emotional breakdowns as a result but instead of just moving on, I would internally punish myself. Instead of the feelings in my stomach coming along when I could not control them, my brain started creating more of them. Not only was I dealing with thoughts that tried to convince me that I’ll never be successful, never be able to maintain a clean house, or never live an organized life, I was also creating thoughts that said, “If you don’t do this, you won’t be succesful” or “If you let that go, you’ll start letting everything go.”  

Over the 2.5 years I spent in graduate school, I created in me the ability to live an organized, well put together, successful life. At the time I saw it as a healthy drive. But when I look back now, I see it as also a way to run away from the degrading feelings and thoughts that haunted me. I graduated with a 4.0 and one of the two Academic Honors Awards given to students from my program. I had a room that was extremely well-organized and was taking care of my money and important documents right as they landed in my hand. I would call a company immediately if I received a bill that did not look right. As a result, many times places like Verizon and USAA would give me the money back because of the mistake they’d made or the flub that happened in their system. This was not a money mooching activity. It was making sure that I was on top of things and wasn’t letting other people’s mistakes in the world affect my well-being. The fact that I almost always received positive results from these actions reinforced them as good and necessary to live a happy life.

Anytime those insecure feelings start raging, even now, I start creating a mental list of all that I have achieved. I’ve earned a Master’s degree, I received the highest score on the comp exam out of everyone in my class, I’m married to a wonderful, hard-working man, and I have a beautiful townhouse that I take care of and keep pristine at all times. This seems to work for a while and then a slip up happens on my part or my husband’s part and the world ends. At least, it does in my brain. The past 2 months have taken me on a quest to see what causes my anxiety and occasional bouts of depression. The matter I’m discussing in this blog was not even on the radar as a reason. I’ve wondered about going on medicine again, about keeping busy, about scheduling vacations and fun plans. But hadn’t gotten down to the real, deep reasons.

The deep, real reason is that I’ve awakened a sleeping monster within me. This monster’s name? Perfectionism.

I’ve also awakened his sleeping cousin: Control.

Perfectionism and Control have been in charge of the reins of my brain for almost a year now. Because it’s been over the past year that I feel I’ve gotten completely out of control in keeping control. If that makes sense? Basically, I’ve gone to the opposite extreme.

This enlightenment came from reading a book with my women’s small group. I almost never read the books that are assigned for anything other than classes and even then it’s rare. I’m a read for pleasure instead of necessity kind of person. But this book seemed to be different from the other “self-help” Christian books that I tend to avoid. And it’s proved to be true. The first chapter alone is what brought to my attention that Perfectionism and Control have taken my brain hostage and I’ve sat back in the corner and allowed myself to stay tied up and just watch as they’ve wreaked havoc and changed my ways of thinking.

Instead of relying on the One to be perfect FOR me, I’ve been trying to be perfect MYSELF. This is totally backwards and the reason I keep going headfirst into a wall, not a wall of hideousness but a wall of impossibility, because it’s impossible for me to be perfect, to keep everything in full control, and to prevent anything bad from ever happening. IMPOSSIBLE. And instead of beat myself up for that fact, I need to accept it and learn to cope with it. Rely on my always perfect Savior who’s the reason why I can live an imperfect life and not need to worry about true, eternal falling apart. My new mantra of thinking has become, “Learn from it and move on” or “Ask for forgiveness and move on” or “That might not have been the smartest choice but it’s not the end of the world, move on.” The common phrase in all of this is MOVE ON. I cannot keep a record of my mistakes… or my husband’s mistakes for that matter! We aren’t perfect and the more I come to terms with the fact that it’s okay to not be perfect, the more freedom I feel. The more I’ll be able to look at cat poop on the stairs and instead of pick a fight with my husband over the cleanliness of the litter box I can just say, “Hey, when you get a chance can you clean it? Looks like we left it a bit too long.” And then MOVE ON. No dwelling. No bringing up the past things that have happened. Who cares what happened?

Now, I embark on my journey of learning the balance. The line between healthy control and raging control. The line between cleanliness and neat freak(ness?). The line between keeping things in life orderly and overreacting when we forget to update the budget on time or overspend in one area. And I’m learning to walk around everyday with the knowledge that I’m taken care of and kept under control by my God who’s so much bigger than me that it surprises me why I haven’t given up the control yet. Amazing what types of things the human brain can come up with but also what it can totally miss and filter out sometimes. Even writing this blog post provided some enlightenment in other areas that were not totally clear yet.  If you’ve read this far, I give you props seeing as this is a long post and most of it was my way of sorting the thoughts and ideas that have been going through my brain the past couple of weeks.

And I can now say that the positive thoughts that were discovered today through writing this blog were partly the result of cat poop. I guess there can be positives to letting things go once and awhile 😉

Tonsillitis Wedding/Jamaica Day

So, a little known fact that’s becoming more known as I tell people… is that I had a minor case of tonsillitis on my wedding day and throughout my honeymoon. Another little known fact is the actual definition of tonsillitis. I used to think that tonsillitus was akin to appendicitus – if you got it, you went to the hospital and had surgery to remove said infected organ. But that is not true, the definition of tonsillitis is:

ton·sil·li·tis–noun Pathology . inflammation of a tonsil or the tonsils.

Hmm, that’s simple…

Let’s see another one:

— n
	inflammation of the palatine tonsils, causing enlargement, occasionally to the extent that they nearly touch one another

Okay, that’s a little more detailed, and odd… ouch. 

Anyways, the point of that is to make sure people aren’t thinking, “Right, like you really had tonsillitis and were actually able to get married…” Well, for reals, I woke up on my wedding day with a throat that wouldn’t allow me to swallow easily and looked similar to the starting of strep throat (white spots and all)… Although my tonsils weren’t touching, they were pretty dang swollen. All day I shoved it off to nerves and allergies. It worked for the most part in keeping my panic and pain down :-p

However, the point of this post is not to create a “pity me” attitude. It’s actually to talk about Jamaica. Random, yes. You’ll understand in a minute. But first, a visual:

Happiness

That is the view from our balcony on our honeymoon and I stare at this picture quite often when I’m not appreciating the New York weather. Like today. Today it’s rainy, very, very rainy. Rainy to the point where things will flood today and the weather forecast includes a number of inches of water we’re supposed to accrue by the end of the day. The other thing that’s running as much as the rain outside is my nose. I woke up today with a lovely head cold. Today’s the only day I work 9 hours so of course it had be the day that the cold my husband gave me had to hit full force. 

I was already considering deeming a type of day a Jamaica day.

Jamaica Day: A day where one would rather be on a beach in Jamaica with a drink in one hand, a novel in the other, and all worries stuffed inside the suitcase shoved under the bed in the lovely balcony ocean view room located 30 feet away from beach chair.

Seeing as today is rainy, cold, gross AND I have a cold and a sore throat that I can feel starting to creep into my tonsils, today is the ULTIMATE JAMAICA DAY. While on our honeymoon my throat was on fire often (certainly not as bad as i’ve had in the past but enough to be super obnoxious). The way I dealt with this tonsillitis was by visiting the extremely free bar (thank you all-inclusive!) as many times a day as possible and ordering the fruitiest, frothiest drink I could find. This usually ended up being a banana daiquiri (mmmm, would like one now….). And really, it’s hard to feel sick when the air is perfect, the waves are the main sound you hear, all you can smell is the beautiful combo of sea water, sand, and sunscreen, and there are absolutely no responsibilities or stressors.

I wish I could put a sign up on the receptionist counter that says, “I’d rather be in Jamaica” just to let people know exactly how I’m feeling today. Unfortunately, I do think that might effect the clients’ view of their day and thus it would effect my job. I am supposed to send them back to the therapists happy and content with life. If I, the person they see first when walking into the clinic, have an “I-don’t-want-to-be-here” attitude, I certainly don’t think it’s going to help them… but I digress.

Yes, today is a Jamaica day. I will continue to think about Jamaican warmth, drinks, rastas (? maybe not :-p), and palm trees as I sit in my overly air conditioned office, wearing 3 long sleeve layers (and still shivering), with my sleeve of tissues, anti-bacterial hand gel, and coffee soon to be dumped and turned to tea (it’ll have the same effect on my throat as the daiquiri but definitely not as delicious…). And perhaps I’ll put on some Bob Marley… that would certainly add a different vibe to the clinic! As I said, the senses can completely trick my brain sometimes. By the end of the day I’ll think I was in Jamaica all day long…… ….. …. maybe not.

Just for good measure, here’s another visual:

So much love.

 

And P.S. Instead of Bob Marley popping up to play, the Ghostbusters theme did instead. The looks on everyone’s face when that song played just made me smile a large amount. 🙂 Perfect way to end this post.

Insanity Kitty (Or “Whenever the cat doesn’t want to be picked up, he gives off a pooter”

Yes,  I did use the word pooter. My husband has adopted this word ever since we had the discussion last week of what word we would have our future children use when they flatulated (word…?). He told me he used the word “fart” and I said I grew up saying “pooter”. He gave me a glance that indicated he thought I was the strangest being on the planet and then continued to watch his oh so riveting Fox News (not going into THAT subject right now, but there will discussions in the future, of course). Anyways, back to the furry feline.

So we have this cat. His name is Duncan.

Sir Dunc.

But we’ve gotten into the habit of calling him Sir Dunc. Or I have at least. I’d say I’m the strange one in the family but really, all three of us (including Dunc) are absolutely  nuts. To give an example, last night we had our crew over to watch some movies and such (and such = the ladies crafting…drawing, cross stitching, etc.). But our friend who enjoys tormenting our cat and watching him squirm, picked up the cat, immediately dropped the cat, and exclaimed, “Ew Duncan! You smell so bad!” To which my husband responded, “Yeah, seriously, if he doesn’t want to be picked up, he drops a pooter.” Ie, our cat’s main defense mechanism is flatulence. Seriously?? What cat does that? Apparently ours. And really, if you have one similar, please tell me because I’d like to know what to do in those situations! And I find it absolutely hilarious and ironically ridiculous that this fuzzy ball of raging gas has landed into the family of someone who’s every thought, action, and emotion is effected by smell… again, I say seriously?? Seriously, my cat is a skunk.

Autumn Morning

This morning was one of those autumn mornings where the air was crisp and it reminded me of apple picking and jumping in leaves. As I was walking to my car, I sighed in dismay as I noticed the watery residue left on my car by an early morning frost that had just melted. Luckily, it was not actual frost and therefore did not warrant any scraping or the like. I got into my car, hit the windshield wipers, and rolled down both front windows so I could navigate out of my parking spot without hitting a car or the neighbor’s wandering white cat. The “heat” blasted cold air through the vents making it difficult for the water to evaporate off the windshield. Running late, I was unable to take time to wipe away the moisture and off into the street I went with windshield wipers on like it was pouring rain.

I was reminded of typical fall mornings where the world has quite possibly forgotten that school is in session and school buses populate the roadways. Or at least, those who are no longer in school forget. I fall easily into the swing of things during the summer where there are no school buses in sight and the flashing 15 MPH speed limit lights in front of elementary schools are dim and dark. Travel is easy with limited stops and only the occasional hesitant driver. This morning, however, was a different story. My drive to work was a reminder that school is, indeed, in session and that children who were once happy go lucky playing in their backyards at 8 in the morning are now loading themselves onto huge yellow vehicles and whisking away to 6 hours of sitting in front of teachers and being engulfed in information.

I parked in my usual parking spot in front of the medical office building that has become a familiar view the past couple of weeks, turned off the Incubus song I was greatly enjoying on my iPod, grabbed my beloved coffee, and made my way towards the front doors. As I was walking, the smell of the air caught my attention, as it so often does seeing as I experience the world through my nose. I was suddenly sent back to 9th grade. Memories flooded through my brain of experiencing this same smell every fall morning I walked from my house to the high school located in my backyard. What was also contained in this memory were the feelings associated with that dreaded walk. As I confidently walked into the medical building to my job as an Office Coordinator I suddenly felt the insecurity and paranoia that riddled my mind during those morning walks in 9th grade. Being a 5-minute walk at most, my parents never thought to question it as being the reason for my anxiety and uneasiness in the mornings. To an adult who has learned that the world doesn’t really care that they exist, a 5-minute walk down a road is really no big deal. But to a 14 year old, the same walk can feel like 5 hours of torture; as they so often did for me. I would walk down the sidewalk and the juniors and seniors in their “cool” cars and bus loads of students of all ages would pass by me, not even taking the time to steal a glance in my direction. I, however, would feel their non-glances all over me, permeating my every move and thought. And this idea would give me so much anxiety that I would stare at my feet, stepping on the multi-colored leaves and blackened chewed gum on the sidewalk, so intently that sometimes I would almost walk into the roadway leading to the student parking lot without noticing the speeding cars and then, oh definitely then, would I get some glances in my direction.

Memories can be extremely powerful. As I stated before, I see the world through my nose and some smells can pull me so far into the emotions and sensations of a memory that I have to yank myself back from falling completely into a different part of my life before I end up staying there and having to permanently experience it all over again. Or at least, it feels that way.

Autumn smells are potent compared to summer smells. Autumn smells pull me into more memories than any other smell and if I’m not careful I’ll start reliving most of my childhood just from a small whiff of wood smoke, dying leaves, or apples. This morning the smell was of an autumn morning. I can’t even describe the scent but it’s such a familiar smell that there are hundreds of memories associated with it. This morning was one of those mornings where I fear falling into the abyss. Stepping into the lobby of my office building and turning to go down the stairs to the Physical Therapy suite, feeling those insecurities and that anxiety more powerfully than I cared to, I yanked myself from the cliff I’d been teetering on and reminded myself that I am an adult, married, confident, and have no reason to hold the insecurities felt in adolescence. I’ll spend my 9 hours completing my job requirements and have the knowledge that no one is staring at me and judging my every move. I can say a witty remark and know that even if someone thinks it’s stupid, they’ll nervously laugh and move on with their life without giving it a second thought while I can sit and reflect on how silly the remark was and how much my husband would’ve loved it. When I leave for the day at 5 o clock, I’ll take the walk back to my car and more than likely will get hit with another smell that will bring on a whole new set of memories. Hopefully one that’ll be akin to, “Hmm, is that apple pie I smell…?”