Psychic Seventh-Inning Stretch

"And just like that she was human again. Almost."

That's how the children's story version of the past four days would have ended. Before that would have been chapters devoted to the various flavors of crazy I've been, starting with Depression-Nut Crunch and moving on to Compulsive-berry and Insomnia Swirl. Holy God I've been in the trenches, but it's looking like it might let up. I'm blaming most of this on curious tidal shifts in my hormone levels courtesy of the military's little experiment with my fertility, but it's hard to intellectualize things as abstract as hormone levels when you're busy scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing! And wondering why your kitchen suddenly looks like a New Delhi slum! The dust! The dog hair!

Of course, I'm also reserving a significant portion of blame for our evil mattress, which has become officially intolerable. I'm sleeping on the futon in the living room most nights, which is actually quite comfortable, except for the part where the cat, distressed that I am Out of Place, paces back and forth across my throat. We actually went to Sears yesterday to try to sort things out, which was risky because I was irritable enough to rip someone's ears off at the first sign of resistance, but the saleswoman was helpful and reassuring and it appears that we can trade out our Guantanamo Bay Special for an actual mattress. (<-- that was horrible. Sorry.)

Things continue to deteriorate with my grandmother and I'm finding that I dream about her at least every other night. Last night she came and sat down next to me on an airport bench. She was smiling and she had a shopping bag from a gift shop with her, but she didn't say anything, just reached down and squeezed my knee and settled back to wait with me.

Last night she looked like she did fourteen years ago, the summer we went to visit her and my grandfather in Utah where they were volunteer park rangers at Flaming Gorge. It was a great trip. I must have been about 13, and the presence of such geographical hyperbole-- soaring cliff faces! bottle green rapids! Martian landscape canyons gouged deep in layers upon layers of orange and red rock!-- shook me out of myself for a while. It seemed like a whole different world, and there were my grandparents, running the precariously placed visitor's center at the top of the gorge, presiding over the whole canyon like accidental monarchs in their brown Park Service uniforms. I'm not sure why, but it really seemed like it was theirs, the whole place.

In other news, the Big Finishing Deadline for my husband is finally over. He's completed his first stage of training and now we're just waiting to see what the next stage will be and where it will take us. He's done quite well, but I believe our combined adrenaline output over the past month would kill an elephant. We're both having a hard time tapering off, and my uterus and our mattress aren't helping. Here's hoping for more serotonin, firm back support, and some cheap Mexican beers...