Mommy's Blog: Mid-October...

It's mid-October and time for a little catch up here on the blog. Two weekends' worth of pictures in one! Get ready to scroll...

Last Sunday. A strange south wind blew out over the lake during a visit to Edgewater. Kite-flying was more challenging than normal ....

... but the preternaturally calm lake was bewitching. Corydon was more calm than usual, without the waves to jump and bark over, and we all found ourselves just relaxing, drawing in the sand, staring out at the blue of it all...

The yellow-gold cast of the trees was the only sign of October on this 70 degree Sunday in the CLE...

We spent quite a while on the end of the breakwall, drawing with graphite, sunning, jumping...

It was hard to leave.

Luckily, we had Soup to look forward to. We spent the afternoon cooking and shining up the house...

Ivy came up with the idea of using some old decorative paper napkins as placemats, carefully arranging them all herself...

.... to get ready for this...

A warm and lovely gathering of friends, not our biggest ever but plenty of chaos, conversation, and fun to be found. The children are getting so big! Large groups kept disappearing up to the bedrooms, and the living areas were often full of quiet conversation and adults with enough hands free to eat and drink a glass of wine too. Times have certainly changed since we began this tradition...

The golden glow of the weekend was one of the things that got us through the week, which was marked by some surreal anxiety when the Ebola outbreak, so recently arrived on US soil, raised a spectre in Cleveland via a Frontier airline flight. One of my co-workers, it turns out, flew home from Dallas on the same plane (though not the same flight) as the Texan nurse who was diagnosed the next morning. A robo-call at midnight on Wednesday informed me that my building would be closed the next day for cleaning, and that my co-worker would not be returning to work for the 21-day incubation period.

Needless to say, I didn't sleep much that night.

I'm prone to anxiety about illness in general, and Ebola, in all its gruesome glory, has always been terrifying to me. Low-grade anxiety has been with me since the outbreak in Africa hit the news over the summer. I've been able to keep things at bay since the end of September by concentrating on how far we are from Texas. And then the fear lands in Cleveland for a layover. Of course. Of all the cities... And I know, I know-- this is an incredibly low risk situation for all involved-- my co-worker who was on that plane as well as my family. And yet! If everyone else is freaking out, shouldn't I freak out too? I spent much of my day off on Thursday doing laundry and cleaning the bathroom and wondering if we should stop going to public places...

What is interesting to me, though, is that I don't seem to be able to sustain high-level, up-all-night anxiety for very long. Like my emotions have stretch-receptors or something, adapting to the presence of a threat and pushing it into the background until they sense movement.

Its still there, the fear, and I think it will be for a long time because I don't think this outbreak is ending any time soon. a little edge of fear is tinting my view of the world, making me a little less patient, a little more distracted, a little less present than I ought to be. But for most of the weekend I've been able to push it under the surface and concentrate on some lovely moments with family and friends. The good stuff. Epidemics and scary diseases are that much more terrifying, I think because what they threaten is so wonderfully good. I don't want anything bad to touch this life of mine, you know?

Because I've got friends like this...

( who take me out for Ethiopian food and coffee and all the cocktails and uproarious conversation and laughter...)

And my kids have real friends, who spend the night and play in their rooms, and they are making the memories that will define "childhood" for them, and it's looking pretty good so far...

And I have this great family. They come to visit and give us an excuse to go to Dewey's, they love on my children, they watch us march in dog costume parades...

Not to mention the fact that there are, in this grand world, things like Dewey's pizza and dog costume parades...

And I live in this great place-- a short walk from these woods...

...and a short drive from this view....

..and it is fall and the colors are glorious and the air is crisp and today we walked in muddy fields and made corn husk dolls and worked a plow and made apple butter and ate mini-donuts and played in a hay maze out in the sunshine.