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Paul and I used to trade stickers in 5th grade.
Going through the Back to Basics (without a gun) archives has been a strange experience. As you know, I hate nostalgia, but I hate disorder even more, and it was more appealing to have everything here at Quirky Nomads than it was to skip the reliving of past experiences.
(I want coffee. I’d settle for Denny’s coffee at this point. AIRPLANE coffee would be welcome. I thought quitting was going to be really easy this time, but, ugh. I had a week-long vacation, and now I’m obsessing over coffee like a heroin addict wants to see a syringe. Todd keeps trying to get me to drink decaf (i.e. caffeine methadone) but that’s how I backslid last time. Anyway. Back to the entry.)
In the summertime we used to wake up at 2 AM and by the light of the moon have a frantic sponge bath with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap just so we could stop itching for a few hours and get some sleep. That’s if we had hauled enough water to the yurt that day. Otherwise, we were out of luck.
The hardest part was reading about Jay, Cilantro, and Anita dying. I still miss them all. Let’s not even talk about Claire. I think there’s still a part of me that expects her to be home in Missouri when we get back there. Argh! Change of subject before I get all teary and can’t see the computer monitor.
It was also sad to realize how angry I can still get over things that happened years ago, things that have been resolved. There was a lot we were asked not to write about on the site, so there was a lot I was reminded of that didn’t make it into the entries.
I loved reading about Paul’s babyhood, though. So much of the time we spent at the yurt is just a blur in my mind, and I’ve never been able to think of Paul as anything but what he is right this minute. In my head, he was born walking, talking, reading and eating solid food. I bet Paul will be glad of this memory lapse when he’s 17 and bringing boy/girlfriends home.
And god, I know Paul nursed a lot when he was little, but reading those entries you’d think he was permanently attached to my nipple.
Next comes Coffee Shakes, which I have to read carefully in order to cut out the really mean family stuff now that I’m reconciled-ish with them. Pre-Paul? It seems surreal. I was talking to a friend of mine about the phenomenon of thinking your kids have been in your life forever – she said she was telling someone a story about hiking alone in the mountains for weeks on end, and then thought, “Christ! Where the hell was my son while I was doing that!?” before realizing her son hadn’t been born yet.
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