It's been one of those days. I could hypothesize that one of the reasons to blame for my recent lack of writing is because I no longer allow myself to smoke in the house. There is something much more cathartic about writing with a butt hanging out of my mouth. It gives natural pauses to words as you ash the cigarette. It adds pensiveness to the moment of creation instead of just an outpouring of words.

I think that I'm switching from LJ to here. I like LJ for keeping up with other people, but I always end up feeling a bit inadequate with the frequency and lack of content of my posts. Going through my grandmother's papers today made me realize the importance of keeping a diary while things are actually happening. She only started writing within the past ten years and it's wonderful what she remembered but I don't know if it has the feel of transcribing moments as they actually happen. It's more the retrospective way of looking at her past.

There have been so many changes around here these past two weeks. We moved the campground office up the to the top of the hill. Mabel had her stroke. I took on my shoulders the responsibility of running the campground and keeping everyone happy, with delegation of duties as fitting. Mabel died. My daughter turned eight months old, cut her first tooth, and has learned to scoot around. We went to get Mabel's ashes from the funeral home. Blues Festival weekend started. The dispute about the dispersal of her estate began. We've started to go through her things and clean for the "celebration of her life/ninetieth birthday party. I couldn't make it to RZ's wedding, but had a long conversation on the phone to him regarding the death of our respective grandmother's and how it is something necessary to box grief up to deal with it later. He wants to talk to me after I've had a chance to take the grief out of its box and examine it. Lee, Bill, and Cy started to dig her memorial garden today.

And how am I? I don't really know. I haven't let myself mourn yet; I haven't found the time. How can I deal with her passing when I'm still surrounded by her every day? The office is in her house. I still see where she spent her last moments before we took her to the hospital daily. Looking out the office window, I see the view that she saw most of the days of her life. Every day I wake up and my name is her middle name.

Lee and Bill want me to help design the memorial garden, to help pick out what flowers we put in it. I can't. It feels lately that if I get emotionally involved with anything it will grip me and never let me go. That keeping distance is the only way that I can cope and try to remain competent. I don't know if it the anti-depressants talking or if it has been this way for a while. I do know that the feeling is not unfamiliar.

There is so much that is good in my life but so much that is difficult. It feels so hard to wake up in the morning. I feel constantly exhausted and constantly harried. I feel that I am always responsible for something, that I always should be doing something and that if I take time for myself I am being bad and should be more responsible, more take charge, less lazy. Is this what growing up is supposed to be? Being an adult is equivalent to never having a chance to do anything that you really want to do because you are responsible for everyone else. Or perhaps that is just the stress talking.

And my husband is reading this over my shoulder, reading the words as I type them. He thinks that I can't see him but I have very good peripheral eyesight, despite the damage that my eyes sustained from the brain surgery. It's a good thing if he chooses to read my words. I've been awfully negligent lately in letting him in to what I'm feeling, what I've been going through. I've always been much better at communicating through words. It's how I taught myself to be when I was younger. Reading novels for companionship. Learning what I could of people through novels and not through interaction. It's only fair that I should choose words as my best medium of living then. After all, life is just a novel and you are your own hero or heroine.