When I finish putting together our latest “YES WE’RE FOR REAL AND HERE’S YOUR PROOF” package for Homeland Security I’m gonna mount everything on etsy-esque paper and bundle it together with tiny clips and bows and turn it into a scrapbook. My. First. Ever.

We prepared for all of this before, when we had our interview at the embassy in London. I remember telling him “You’ll probably need to know my birthday.” Because we’d been together for four or five years by then and he still relied on his parents to remember the date, i.e. he knew to buy a present when they called to asked what I wanted. But I digress…

Speaking of presents….yesterday I got a package from my mother in law. He keeps saying “I wonder if you can wait that long to open it…have you ever waited that long?” And I keep thinking he’s fishing because he’s forgotten what day your birthday’s on.

In the lead up to our first embassy visit I told him to have a look at my bathroom and bookshelf. Just in case. I only use Decleor skin products and I like Mark Twain. A lot.

On the day of the interview they only ask him one question. “When were you married?”

He gets it wrong.

When I get stood-up tonight, because I’m pretty confident I will be, I’m gonna add a bunch of wedding pictures to this post. Partly because they’ve been password protected from most of the family until now, mostly because It makes me feel good to see how much weight I’ve lost. That’d sound shallow if I didn’t have so many diabetics, heart attacks and strokes hanging on my family tree. But I do, so it doesn’t. See.

A few months ago I wrote about the wayfaring stranger. I’ve heard it all my life but it wasn’t until the White Stripes’ Jack sang it in Cold Mountain that I fell for it. I’m listening to The Raconteurs right now. But I thought I’d post a little video of their lead boy singing bluegrass. Live. (AND VERY LOUD)

People have been preparing for the end of the world since the beginning of time.

These words caught my attention tonight as I stood microwaving tuna, hard cheese and my grandma’s chow chow.

Survivalists. Learning how to live off the land. Stock piling food.

People are calling them fanatics. I don’t see a thing wrong with them until they open their mouths.

It’s a shame really. How ill prepared we are. I’m not suggesting we should sit around praying for a natural disaster to prove our purpose, but when did self sufficiency become so radical?

Growing up I ate organic because that’s what my mother grew. Not because it was good for us. But because there was space and dirt and air to grow it with. Natural springs were tapped up the holler and piped into the house. Because they were there. For using.

I remain…remain…traumatised by the sheer number of blackberry bushes that ripened around this time every year. I hated…dreaded until I was blue in the face….being sent out into the acres to pick those little black buggers.

The apples that fell from the trees that I’d rather eat than lug home. The greens that grew wild and shriveled down from a bucket to a bite and made me wonder why anyone ever wasted their time in the first place. Warm milk from a stripped cow called Jersey. Eggs, when my mother wasn’t going crazy at the chickens. (I hate chickens. Almost as much as my mother does.) And all those poor little bulls and regular sized hogs who always arrived home in butchers paper with “Beef” and “Bacon” stamped on the side.

I’d live on a farm again if I didn’t have to live there. If I had someone else to do all the work. To catch the pigs. To clean the barn. To corner the cows and deal with those little green worms on the corn.

I like the idea of it all. From a couple thousand miles away. Maybe when I’m older I’ll warm to the reality.

As long as it doesn’t involve squirrels.

“…If he stood on the bottom rail of the bridge, and leant over, and watched the river slipping slowly away beneath him, then he would suddenly know everything that there was to be known…”

- A.A. Milne (Christopher Robin)

————

Alongonquin-ette Dorothy Parker once criticised A.A. Milne for using Pooh to dumb down children. I really don’t know what to say to that.

So that’s the thing. No one told me I was dead. Just like no one told Red and no one told Sarah and no one told the Man from Manchester who died beneath a baler. I just knew. Worse still, I knew what we were and how we came to be that way before most of the people around me knew and that, oh that, is the most annoying thing in the world. In this life or any of the ones that come before. Having people around you galloping about in circles thinking the things they do matter when, really, it’s all just a way to pass the time.

Monday nights are his studio nights. My night to engage in aimless wandering. Alone.

We seldom do anything apart. Lea once questioned the benefits of this. “The danger of always being at each other’s fingertips,” she said, “is that one day you wont be, and where will you be then?

I said it works for us because we know what it’s like to be apart. Really apart. Four thousand miles apart. We once went an entire year without seeing one another. And, until last year, being separated for six weeks at a time wasn’t that uncommon. So we have a lot of seconds and minutes to make up for.

But I digress.

Tonight I’m listening to Simon & Garfunkel. Playing with a plastic dinosaur. And reading Oscar Wilde in the interim. Fitness Bootcamp starts tomorrow, so I may order pizza as well. Normally I don’t do things that counter-productive. But it’s a Monday.

I’ve just spent six hours doing laundry.

In six and a half, you can fly across the Atlantic.

Just sayin.

It always happens around 3:00am when I open my eyes and catch the light from the street lamp throwing itself onto the shadow sleeping beside me.

For a split second I go completely out of myself. I’m startled and even a little angry because I have no idea who this person is! **

My heart is pounding and my voice is caught and even though it just takes a moment to remember, a moment is enough. I’m wide awake and just really annoyed because I’m never gonna get back to sleep and why do I keep doing this?

I’m not sure what this says about me. Chaz will say it’s a boundary issue and I need to get it sussed out properly. Clare will tell me I just need to stop eating Bengali before bedtime. But I’d like to think it’s only this: I’m use to a California King. Not the proximity of a Queen.

When I told The Euro about it he just rolled his eyes and said, “Well, an hour before you do that, you wake up singing some freaky Victorian nursery rhyme in a really scary little voice. Sometimes, I have to get up and leave the room. You’re that spooky.”

At least he can’t say I’m not an interesting bed buddy. (My grandmother will NOT LOVE the way that sounds.)

—

**To the 5 (FIVE) family members who have already written to ask ‘What happened to your husband?’….Good grief, it IS him. Otherwise, there’s very little point to the story. Comprenez-vous?

I just googled ’sister quotes’ and was bombarded with purple prose. Sunshine and solace all over the place. Save it for the love letters because, lets be honest, sisterhood isn’t so much a Hallmark card as a Lifetime movie. And I mean that in the very best ‘Help Farrah Fawcett Cage Her Evil Ex Up In the Fireplace’ sort of way.

Seriously though, I think this quote from Toni Morrison probably sums it up better than anything:

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double. ~Toni Morrison

Though I have a sneaking suspicion, if my own sister were asked to pull a quote from her hat, it would be this one:

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life. ~Charles M. Schulz

Anyway…I just found these photos floating around in cyberspace. So I decided to steal them. She has 24 hours to request a retraction.