I’ve been keeping busy around here.

I’ve also been reeking havoc in human interactions (i.e. being a bitch to my kid and a coworker then apologizing for it to both of them) and I just constantly feel like I don’t know what to do with my hands while in social settings, so keeping more to myself is probably a good thing, right now. Or… the exact wrong thing? Being a human is neat!

It’s weird because I sometimes just go: my nervous system is shot and I need to reset. And that feels like a mature and in touch thing to do… and then I don’t get to enjoy it because I worry the whole time that I’m turning into my shut-in of a mother, so that’s neat.

And yet this week I talked to multiple friends and family on the phone for over an hour each, went to a lecture series with my oldest, had breakfast a couple times with my dad, went to the farmer’s market, had my in person therapy appointment, worked for 3 hours moving stuff out of my storeroom with my dad, had a contractor at my house all day Saturday, was busy being a parent every second of every day, had coffee with my aunt and uncle, and then worked all week at ye ol’ full time day job with multiple meetings with coworkers and customers… so like… “shut-in” is not really a concern?

What is a concern, I guess, is I’m not being nice to myself about it all… so I should probably work on that.

Also if that list I just wrote out is me “going underground” I guess I see the issue here…

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Knowing all of that, what did I do instead?

Start painting my floors.

So our 1910 farmhouse has original longleaf pine floors- but the people who flipped it just painted it all with porch paint- a choice we wondered about at first. As that original paint slowly wore off over the next 9 years we realized the front room had 7 layers of paint underneath the porch paint they covered it up with, and the living room had multiple large scorch marks and stains, but no previous layers of paint. My husband and I were going to pull everything out of the house and sand and strip the floors to restore them (a project we talked about for at least 5 years), but we all know how that turned out.

And sooo… I just did some research and bought new porch paint and at least now they’ll look clean. I have a couple of friends who said they loved how the floors looked before, in a shabby chic way, but that’s never been my aesthetic and also they for sure were lying.

It looks so much cleaner now.

I also moved my daughters craft desk into her room and realized there was a huge pink marker stain on the roman blind that was behind the desk. Those shades are discontinued. There are 9 windows in that front room. It’s always goddamn something, man.

I’ve been doing it in sections and have the front room done and will do the kitchen and living room today. It’s a fast dry paint and I fence off the area I’m working in with 3′ plastic to keep dogs off of it- and it’s been going great. It also, interestingly, does have a calming effect on ye ol’ nervous system because the visual chaos is reduced once it’s painted (and because that fucking craft desk is hidden away now) and the room is reset. I immediately undo this nervous system gain with two pots of coffee, but still.

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Oh I also hurt my knee (this blog is fun).

Not sure how.

But I gardened for hours and hours on Sunday last week and then woke up Monday and had to hobble around. It didn’t really get better… it actually started to get worse. I got a knee brace on Wednesday. The front foundation bed looks better though, and I got the entire brick patio area weeded and mulched.

(Side note Alabama always walks around all stompy like that. He acts very tough for a cat that gets his ass handed to him in every fight he’s ever in.)

Yesterday the knee was feeling better, but I probably overdid it getting boxes out of the storeroom as it hurts again today. (That has a deadline to move out of that thing by the 5th… so not sure what was to be done other than muscle through.)

I tell my therapist about my knee and she’s like- uhhhh… show me how you sit while painting floors if your knee is hurting?! Pfft. I’m not kneeling. I’m painting sidesaddle- it’s fine. I demonstrate. She shakes her head and says I’m probably okay but like jeez.

She reminds me to be kind to myself.

I mostly remember I should be.

I promise I mostly do.

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In other things: I took this picture this week, after a restock at Wild Birds Unlimited.

I used to be cool, I tell myself, loading up the car with birdseed… and then laugh and shake my head. I know better and it’s okay.

But the birds are good for the soul and the goldfinches are still here and the titmice and cardinals are both raising families in the surrounding trees so here we are.

I used some cheap birdseed on the last bag I got- which had millet and attracted the fucking cowbirds, but on the plus side I now have millet plants coming up a couple of places and I had sunflowers come up too. But no more millet in bagged birdseed and no more cowbirds… I am resolved.

The outside sunflowers are so pretty that I buy some for inside and immediately regret it.

Oh nooooo.

These ones unfortunately and immediately remind me of my husband’s funeral flowers.

I won’t be buying them again.

The outside ones are okay, though.

File it away, the mini lesson on okay flowers vs not okay flowers.

I go back to painting the floors.

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In other, other news: I got my first Zuri dress back from the seamstress and I’m SUUUUUUPER thrilled with the results. I love this dress and can finally wear it again and so do, almost immediately.

It was still longer than my fingertips before, but it seemed indecently short to me when actually on… I’m much more comfortable in it now.

I also had the belt made long enough so I can double it around and tie it exactly like a karate belt. A small detail that makes me smile. Why the fuck not. It’s my dress after all.

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Perhaps it’s all (gestures around) an echo of the unhappiness of last summer. If so I guess it is spiraling upwards at the same time as it’s circling back… as I am not as unhappy as I was last summer and I try to remind myself that that fact is a win in its own right. Perhaps it’s just the heat and the children being out of school and all of that maybe tripping some kind of an alarm bell somewhere in the hypothalamus as it’s a reminder of the same time last year. And while April and May were very “grief over my husband” focused, and I was aware of it, this is different.

This, I think, is not the unhappiness from losing my husband (though of course that is still there). No no. This feeling in summer… I think this feeling is grief from the death of the old me. A loss that is different and devastating in its own way, and which I very much became aware of last summer… so makes sense that the start of summer this year would echo that back. Makes sense.

I will work on it once I figure out how.

The solve is (I bet) to first figure out who I am now. Which is easier than the next step of figuring out who I want to be in the future. This is understandable and sounds like very hard work.

But who am I to shy away from hard things?

I’d say I’ll sleep when I’m dead but honestly my husband’s ghost seems to be quite busy so I do wonder…

I bet the floors get painted before I figure all of this thing out, though. I bet they damn well do.

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Also my MIL is in the final stages of battling a very, very fast cancer and yet refuses to go on hospice and it’s all very hard on my brothers-in-law and extended family who I’m trying to be there for as they do all of the care-taking. And it takes managing with the kids… and is it’s whole own thing of “more death” in the immediate orbit. Her service (which she refuses to discuss) will, when it happens, be in the same place as my husband’s. This already fills me with intense dread.

I am trying to be supportive to the family and to her and yet feel nebulously judged because she and I pretty famously were not fans of each other. I am worried someone will lash out at me in their grief about it. I look back a our dust ups over the decades and try not to second guess some of them. I remind myself that setting and holding boundaries didn’t and doesn’t make me a bad person. Sigh.

The past is the past.

So that’s another layer here in early summer that I haven’t really talked much about but that’s been happening for a few months now.

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The floors look good though.