One of my first jobs out of college was working in a pet store. I had grown tired of waitressing which had been my part time job throughout high school and college. I was living in Nashua at the time. My boyfriend and I were renting a room from a local woman. She hadn't really been all that pleased about renting to a couple since the original agreement had been between her and my boyfriend's family while he was going to school. The move to our own apartment couldn't come quick enough for all involved. So I took the first job that came along that didn't involve waiting tables.

I have a very large, heavy box in the attic.  It has followed me from home to home over the years, but is rarely opened.  It is filled with a lifetime of letters and cards.  They are the remnants of my childhood.  They are a tangible connection to a part of my life that has long since passed into a realm I can barely recall anymore.  I'm not sure why I cannot part with these letters.  It's not like I open that box on a regular basis and reread the childish dreams and dramas written there, but getting rid of them would be like tossing out a part of something very important to my very existence.  It is perhaps proof of my importance in this world, if only for a small handful of long lost friends.   

It is often times easy to look in from the outside and make judgements. Case in point, the LeBlanc family. I don't know any of them, so what I say comes from the outside looking in, but it also comes from having lived the imperfect life inside an abusive household.

There is a car "warsh" (the New Yorker in me still puts an "r" in the darndest places) on Manchester Street in Concord that has a sign proclaiming "It's not how you go down the road, it's how you look doing it". Every morning I pass it and think "and there is the problem with the world today", then find myself swerving to avoid the idiot talking, or worse, texting on their cell phone instead of driving or the owl craning their head around to check out the sweet bike that just tooled by. I am thankful that I have become an observant driver who has learned the value of watching what the other guy is doing as carefully as I watch what I am doing while driving. It doesn't always save me from an accident, like from the guy driving on Loudon Road who slammed into me full speed a few years back, but it has helped me avoid a whole lot of other accidents. I learned a long time ago about the value of watching the other guy.

They've been on my mind since I heard the news. I have even dreamt about them. I didn't really know the women involved in the boat crash that occured early Sunday morning, but I had met Stephanie Beaudoin a couple of years ago at a mutual friends Easter brunch.  It's not that I can recall meeting her in detail, which I have tried in vain to do.  I seem to only be able to come up with a shadowy image of a woman who filled the room with laughter when she was in it.  Our friend who had hosted that brunch has been pretty shaken up by her death.  My S.O. seems to remember her with more clarity, and also knew the driver of the boat, Erica Blizzard.  Why they so permeate my mind has left me feeling a bit unsettled.  I can't explain it. I have so many other people to keep in my thoughts. 

My family lived in Dobbs Ferry, New York for the better part of my first 10 years of life. It was a good childhood filled with family vacations to Florida and the Adirondacks, chasing fireflies on warm summer nights, playing house in a mansion and knowing all the children in my neighborhood and school. It seemed like everyone knew everyone else. It was a community of children and parents who had known each other for years. My mom had grown up in this same town. My 4^th grade teacher had been her Kindergarten teacher.  

Early Sunday morning my S.O. went to the store to buy some eggs. On his return he proclaimed, "I bought something special for you". Thoughts of chocolate swirled through my head briefly. Instead he pulled a copy of the Sunday newspaper out of the bag. Perhaps it's not the most exciting and creative thing my sweetie has surprised me with (that would have to be the secluded lunch in a lighthouse for my birthday one year), but he wasn't so far off in my pleasure in it's offering. There is just something about sitting down to a big breakfast on a Sunday morning with the newspaper on one side of your plate and a coffee mug on the other side. I was still reading as he cleared the breakfast dishes and headed out to work on his new boat.

She acts like a jealous woman.  I'm not sure why since he's not hers to begin with, but I suppose that is telling in itself.  Although, if one were to delve deeper into the topic, jealousy concerns something one already has and is afraid of losing while envy concerns something one wishes to have but does not.  Either way, it has been going on for quite some time now, and only seems to be waxing rather than waning, as though her jealousy is feeding off of itself.

As some of you may already know from some of my other posts, my youngest child is ADHD.  He was diagnosed about 3 years ago, a feat that took me nearly as long to accomplish.  I knew before he even started school, that he was "different".  I had been mother and step mother 5 times over before my little one came along, I knew at least a little about raising children. Having lived with both the Alex before medication and the Alex on medication, I feel I've become quite good at knowing his needs and "quircks".  It doesn't take me long to realize when we've forgotten to take a pill. 

When I was younger, still living at home with my sister and folks, I hated winter.  I hated getting up early in the morning to go out into the wet, cold world to shovel snow.  On those mornings when I was expected to rouse myself out of my nice warm bed to help the rest of the family, I would dawdle just long enough to be putting on my gloves and hat just as everyone else was finishing up.  I had it down to perfect timing. My mom tried to guilt me into being more helpful by relating several times how her father had died while shoveling snow. Not that I wanted to see my father grasp at his chest and fall over, but I knew my sister, who seemed to love being out in the cold running the snow blower, would be there to save my father this horrible fate.  My folks tease me about it to this day.