She's got her Catherine Wheels on

A snapshot from my six day trip upstate from which I just returned. The blurry stuff in the picture is not rain, or sleet, or low-laying clouds, or fog creeping up on Mr. Xavier and Splodey Girl's back porch (who were kind enough to invite me to stay and where I took the picture). Nothing earthly and interesting like that. It's just ghosts. They sort of hover around whenever I go home.

See that one on the left? That's my grandmother, the only reliable thing I ever had in life, my best friend, who died suddenly of an inoperable brain tumor Christmas before last. She's right there in front of my maternal grandparents who died of natural causes at reasonably advanced years, more or less (the ones who took me in at six month's old when my mother decided that a guitar player/heroin addict named Fred, marijuana, and fronting a rock and roll band were infinitely more interesting than her husband and child). They're almost obscured by the ghost of my truncated youth, but you can make them out, grandma's the one in gardening gloves, grandpa has the pipe. Next to them is my failed marriage, my ex-husband, and a fully restored victorian-colonial house we finished six weeks before he left for good. Just below the house are the two children (siblings) we were in the process of adopting when we split, see them right there? right beside their truncated youths (at the time of my last inquiry that had not yet been adopted, were wards of the state, had been separated from one another, and were doomed -- because of their age and race-- to be shuffled from one temporary foster home to the next). The puff in the corner are the cats I had to leave behind when I moved to New York, the business I ran with my father which I also abandoned when I moved to New York, a few ex-lovers, several friends with whom I've lost contact, innumerable misplaced goals, and the ideal of what a family should be; to each other, for each other.

But believe it or not, apparitions and all, I had a good time --thanks to my friends. But more on that later. Now I will unpack my things and make some spaghetti and hug my dog and wait for my boy to come home.