The smell of rain in the air

It has been hectic.  It has been stressful.
The angst and anxiety of the past few months snowballed itself into a nasty ice chunk with rocks in it (have you seen those lurking around the mountain resorts when spring comes, blocking your hiking path with their muddy demands?), and then hurled itself down the hillside where it has been rolling, rolling, rolling, until it entered the valley of our minds in the past few days.

Without saying too much, shit has been going down.
This week has been hellish and we're only on day 2, and coming off of the most unrestful weekend I've had in a while (packing, cleaning, planning, driving 2 hours to get to a wedding and then nearly missing it, cooking multiple foods for father's day and then traipsing around the valley to see everyone for Father's Day and visit Eli's visiting family from Texas...) I am already out of the momentum I need to survive the week.

Eli and I have been getting about 5 hours sleep for the last few nights and there is a lot of drama.

The worst part of it is the foreboding.
Do you ever get those bad feelings?
It is like old people that get aches before it rains, only I get that ache in my soul.
Have you read Peyton Place, during the long hot summer when everyone knows something terrible is coming and the men are standing watching the dry hillside for wildfires?
I feel like a cowboy hearing a rumble of thunder on the horizon and squinting my eyes against the prairie dust to see the first streaks of lightning that I know are going to come.
Something is amiss.  Something not good is on the horizon, so I feel like I am constantly bracing myself for it due to this premonition of anxiety I am experiencing.

Good things are on the horizon too of course--after the storm passes (unless it is even further off than I am thinking, which I doubt) there is the sunshine of our home--our first real house!! and my best friend Victoria coming for her summer holiday to live with us. We have a countdown even.  I need those things.

I am holding them in my pocket like stones I can rub smooth for reassurance and cling to when the storm comes.

Can you smell that rain in the air?


Other stones in my pocket:

--Looking through the photos on Abandoned NYC. Hauntingly beautiful and a story in each one! It makes my imagination go a'whirling.

--blueberry jam.  I got the nice Maine kind from the market and eat it on my English muffins and am so happy!

--Reading crazy everyday tricks on Lifehacker.

--Watching Keeping up Appearances (though once Netflix did the search wrong and turned on Keeping up with the Kardashians and for 2 horrifying minutes instead of lighthearted British shenanigans I was subjected to shrieking and ass shots of some overly tan bitches).

--Reading this blog.  It is a regular person with depression expressing it in witty cartoons that anyone can relate to. Black humor at its (healing) best!

--Scrolling through these funnies.

--Re-reading Breakfast at Tiffany's.

--Donating clothes. It feels good.

--and this.  Most of all, this.

I had a dream the other night that Leo was trying to kill me.

He was a really terrifying killer too, but it was Leonardo. 
All in all, not a half bad dream to have.

And let me tell you, based on this dream (it counts as an audition, right?) he would make an incredible murdering character, like a taunting serial killer type? Yup.