last year, I fell and hurt my ankle. (emergency room on christmas eve!) this year, just a cold. but it meant another christmas of mostly sleeping.
(not that I was too well prepared even without the cold. I used to love christmas, now it fills me with dread: too much to do, and I’m always behind the game. someday I will be as prepared as mom used to be. honest.)
today I feel tired; still not breathing too well, and I’ve been plagued with sinus headaches. not something I usually suffer from, so it kinda freaks me out. I feel like my brain is running extra-slow, too.
one very nice thing on Christmas Eve, though; I called Shelley on seeing “her request for places to get pictures”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/connecting/lighter_than_air.htm — when she said she was taking a southerly route, I thought of the beautiful places I saw with Grandpa &/or Grandma Nelson, back when I was a teenager. The one that I thought she’d get the biggest kick out of was the “Chiricahua National Monument”:http://www.nps.gov/chir/ (somewhere around here I have photos I took as a kid).
it felt strange to call her, like breaking an invisible wall. I’m not a big fan of the telephone, generally speaking. I prefer either the full-context experience of time in person, or the precision (relatively) of the written word.
but I’m glad I did. not that it was a deep or particularly serious conversation, but it was a connection where there hadn’t been one before.
“she said she didn’t think she’d be able to go there”:http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/adventure/now_this_is_a_doorway.htm because of the weather, so I went through my drawer of old photos and found this:
I took it in 1987, when I was thirteen, on a visit to my grandparents…the three of us girls used to take turns visiting them each summer. I think Grandpa and I went through the national monument on our way either to or from (maybe both) a church where he was filling in for the local minister. It’s not a great picture, but it brings up good memories.