The bathroom is sooo close to being done.

My contractor has been fitting me in around other projects these days. This one, with the mold remediation, old house surprises, and redoing the walls twice… he ain’t sending any kid to college on the profits from this project, that’s for sure. Functionally wise it’s been working for a while, so I’m not rushing him. Patience is a virtue and I’m not on the schedule for the historic district tour of homes with any set deadline to hit… so I’m a well of acceptance on the ever pushing timeline.

But 3/4 of the trim is now in. The linen cabinet is in, but not the doors, and the sink vanity is in and up on it’s legs, if not hooked up yet.

Everybody has a shower plant, right? This slightly Lovecraftian looking thing, when it peaks out from behind the shower curtain like that, is a brake fern in an orchid pot. One of these days I shall hang it from a hook in the ceiling that I’ll also have to install at some point (still in the shower, is the plan though), and I’m aiming to do that after the ceiling gets painted. So… I assume it lives on the shower head in perpetuity.

I’ll be mounting this 4′ wooden ladder on the wall next to the tub as my towel rack. I got this at an estate sale for $30 two years ago and always intended to use it for this. It’s finally getting done.

Here is the 1950s watercolor I am putting in there for some art, also got this about two years ago. The scene looks Italian, but the back names it as a town in southern France. I’ve always liked it, though the clouds are a bit amateur. And all my advice to base your room colors off of your art did help me decide between the two different pinks I has swatches of, as I chose the one that went with the painting better. (the color is off in that pic, the wall is less tan and truer pink than that. And it does match some of the highlights on the roofs in the painting, though I know even the highlights all look orange in that shot…)

This is my gilded wood antique Mexican mirror I bought online in the summer and then didn’t open for 4 months… so good thing it wasn’t broken. I paid over $100 for shipping. Lucas would have choked on spending that (not to mention the amount it like, cost) and so should I have… but that was in my “presents when you don’t have presence” phase so I was buying literally whatever I wanted the second I wanted it… mirror and floor tile included. My finances are okay. They took a hit, but they can just join the fucking club with everything else that is true for this past year too, you know?

The bathroom is (I guess?) super boho, style wise… but I just got what I liked; I wasn’t following any particular aesthetic other than I like boldness and color and using antique things here and there. And art. I like art everywhere. I knew the things I was going to combine were all things I liked individually and trusted it would come out. And it did. It’s just what I wanted.

I’ll tell you one thing though, I now understand all the outdated bathrooms I run across at estate sales. I had thought people just didn’t keep up with the changing styles of the day, or were stuck back in their glory days… no. It is absolutely not that. These people just lived through a bathroom remodel once and were like NEVER AGAIN, and so lived with their 70s brown bathrooms all the rest of their days.

Once it’s done this bathroom is staying like this until the day I die, so help me god.

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(I’m no longer doing paragraph or thought transitions… this handy little bar just divides topics. Sure yall have noticed.)

After the weirdness of the neighbor passing away last week, my cousin reached out (yo, Darshan!) and asked me how I was feeling… I guess I left that out almost totally when writing about it last week? Truth is I wasn’t exactly sure how it made me feel.

Like, you know the pain scales in doctor’s offices from 1-10… I think mine goes 1, 2, (3-8), 9, 10. The middle range is hard to differentiate… for both emotional and physical discomfort.

I know when I’m fine. I know when things are mildly uncomfortable (a 2), the next ranges blur together and all get perceived the same, and then there is 9 and 10 and those are when things fall apart and are excruciating.

It wasn’t a 1 or 2, and it wasn’t a 9 or 10 either… I was somewhere in the middle. Just death, overarching, yet again. So it was in the 3-8 range. I did make mention of it giving me weird dreams, though. One of which I wasn’t ready to write about last week.

In the dream my husband was driving his truck. We were supposed to be going to the coast, but then I noticed we were going west. When I told him this… there was no braking, he just threw it into the median to go the other way. Shock. Dust. Steep inclines. Hills. Flipping. Terrible crashing. We land upright. I am okay. So is he. I just turn to him and say: “You scared me! That was so scary! I was so scared! Why would you do that?” He looked at me and didn’t say anything. He understood though, I could tell.

And then I woke up.

And I guess they are words I didn’t know I had buried inside my chest, or even knew that I needed to tell him. Not really. All my hanging onto peace and capacity and managing everything that I have hung onto these past 11 months… all the writing and talking and writing and talking I’ve done… and look at that, there were still words that needed to be said and feelings to be felt.

Nor your mind or subconscious, either. It needed to be said and I said it. It was important.

And so, the Friday my neighbor passed away… it did crack some stuff open for me and things that needed to come out, came out.

I was okay with her passing and think she got a good death, but there is still the John Donne way we all mourn each others out here in the human collective. And that’s okay too.

And the thoughts it brought to the surface were different from the secondary grief that came up from things like my Mom’s death. Things happen when they happen, ’tis all, ’tis all. And I guess I needed to tell Lucas how scary it all was and has been. And admit it to myself maybe, too. And I felt better, later in the week, after it all processed through.

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Sunday I had some time to myself when all the girls were with friends, so I laced up my shoes, got a fancy coffee that was too sweet, and headed to the historic cemetery in town. It was cool and windy and I had to wear a sweatshirt and I was thankful for a hot drink, even if it was far too sweet. It was nice.

Later that week, after the girls were fed and the dog walked, I popped out to a local brewery and had a single IPA at 8pm and sat outside and looked at the stars. No one ever sits outside at night there, so it’s a nice private outside space I go to occasionally, to have an ice cold beer and mull things over.

The rest of the week I’ve spent a few hours, cumulatively, in the hammock. And walking the dog. Spent time with friends. And talking to my 16 year old about her own grief, and hanging out with my aunt and talking, and all the things. And I wrote on Friday too.

It’s all done me good and I feel better even if I don’t understand all of it, fully. Not fully. Perhaps sometimes we just don’t. For an understander like me that’s a bit of a hard pill to swallow, but I can do it.

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In other news I took off 3 days next week around our anniversary. I don’t have much anxiety around it yet (May is looming more), but I do know it won’t be the easiest. I’ve mulled it off and on this week and I think I’ll cook a good meal and watch a movie with the girls like I did for Valentine’s Day. And during the day while they’re at school I’ll go and hike around at Pace Bend Park in Austin.

I’m planning on painting a rock with our names and I’ll bury it at the campsite out there, on the cliffs overlooking the lake, where we met and where he proposed. May it radiate out some of the joy we had together to whoever passes by. May it mark the space, ever so slightly, as ours- past, present, and future.

I also got new photo albums, as some of our old ones are breaking and the pictures need to be reset. Maybe I’ll start that project, but it’s a big one. I know I won’t finish it on the 17th. And if I’m not up for it at all that’ll be okay and I’ll do it another day. I will see how I feel on the day itself and go from there.

I am not ready to watch our wedding video or our home movies yet.

I will play some of his songs though. All the music has been digitized now. And I know somehow, this will mark not the first one without him but 26 with him still, somehow. I am unsure how all that works too… but I know it’s true.

He always was, and remains, the best decision I ever made, so there is still celebration of that in there somewhere. I will find it.

It just came to me that perhaps I will invest in some new and nice champagne flutes to mark the day and I’ll toast him that night. That seems like an appropriate thing to do. I will get through the day and the night and the morning of the 18th will come after.

On the pain scale it will be somewhere in the 3-8 range. And I may not know how to differentiate that range perfectly, but I do know 3-8 is survivable, so I have a certainty that I’ll make it through to the other side.

It is hard to lose the person that knew you best and not have them physically beside you though. Don’t let me give any impression otherwise.

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It hasn’t all been heavy/ heavyish.

The flowers are still blooming. The weather is nice. I mowed the grass. My oldest is sick, but I made her soup and meals of rice and roast chicken and jarred up some iced chamomile tea for her to have at the ready and stocked her fridge and did some of her laundry and she’s starting to feel better and that’s nice to still mother her like that. The cats are soft and cuddly and my aunt is back in town and brought my cousin’s kids with her- and so my younger two and they have been hanging out a lot. They’re good cousins to each other, though I know the official term is second-cousins. I took them to the local crystal shop and they made fairy doors yesterday.

They had so much fun and look how cute they turned out!

Oh! And my favorite Carolina chickadee is back! I had given up hope and then one morning this week I was drinking coffee and I heard him and his unique little song that lets me pick him out from the other Carolina chickadees around here (he has an extra syllable… if that’s the right way to describe it). I am not too cool to admit I put my face in my hands and cried tears of joy when I heard him. I was so relieved and so, so thankful. Snatched from the abyss of this year, my little buddy was. I’ll take it.

I’ve been going through some clothes of my mom’s as well. My older girls have taken some of the 1970s jean jackets and boots. There have been some interesting finds too.

I totally remember her wearing that.

I bought some teeny tiny little carved rainbow fluorite crows- picture frame figurines are now a thing I’m pretty sure I need more of around here and they bring me joy.

I’m all set for Easter, so that feels good to check off the list.

And I’ve been cooking many a healthy breakfast and dinner too… so I have been eating well. And I just want to feel healthy and sleep well… that’s the focus.

Breakfast salad makes me feel so incredibly healthy and every time I’m a little annoyed at how awesome I feel because damn it… I like breakfast tacos too.

Breakfast salad and eggs.

I’ve been working on that a lot and am trying to not look too far ahead. Not in an avoidant way, but in a “being present and living in the moment” way.

Oh. And the Bradford Pear planted in the front yard and that is 6″ on the neighbors property is blooming.

If ONLY!

Catch ya on the flip side next week.