How time flies.

In six more days I'll be celebrating my exodus from high school.  Sixteen years to be exact.  Kind of hard to believe it's been that long ago.  I'm not sure when I made the transition from 17 year old kid to 33 year old wife and mother of three.  What I'm really curious about is who the hell the grown up is staring at me in the bathroom mirror every morning.  She really needs to do something with her gray hair and crow's feet.  Bless her heart.  

I still see my mama the way I did when I was 6.  Young and thin and the picture of all that was good and right in my world.  She always smelled like Chanel no5 and cigarette smoke....I can get a whiff of that combination now and I'm taken back in time.  A time when I was still mama and daddy's kiddo von skido.   When the best thing ever was watching Circus of the Stars with my daddy while he supplied me with saltines with grape jelly and Duke's mayo....Mt. Dew too.  Or backbone as I called it.   Ghost stories about the Wil-O-the-Wisp or the Ignus Fatoose when the power went out.   Getting tucked in every night and being reminded that when I woke up, Mommy and Poppy wanted to see my prettiest, biggest baby smile.    Nobody asks for that one anymore.  Which I guess is a good idea....at least until I've had my daily ration of coffee.

My oldest daughter is the same exact age I was when my daddy died.   I'm 3 years older than my mama was when she lost her husband.  I can't imagine losing my husband like that.  A divorce is one thing...which I have been through with flying colors I might add...but a death.  It's abrupt.   It's messy.  It's painful.  There are no good byes.   At least not face to face.  Maybe it's best though....if you knew that this morning, when you kissed your sweet baby good bye that it would be the last time....it's doubtful you'd let them out of your sight.   I'm not sure if I honestly miss my father or miss the idea of him.  Time has a funny way of softening the edges of your memory about certain things....most of what I remember of him is more like snapshots than 8mm footage.  Sometimes I don't know if I'm really remembering him or if my mind has added the family photo collection to my memory and made up stories to suit.  What do I really remember and what is an urban legend...so to speak.  How sad is that?  On a lighter note, want to know what's even worse than that?  The third eye you grow when your granny introduces you to people by saying...."This is my granddaughter...her daddy's dead".  THANKS GRANNY!  Every time she did that I felt like I should apologize to people because instead of donning my shroud I was wearing fucking jelly shoes and a Frankie says RELAX t-shirt.   That really was the beginning of the end of my childhood.  Cabbage Patch Kids, Barbie Dream houses and a Goddamned third head.  As an added bonus....by the fall of that same year I had tanked.  In the south, "Neighbors bring food with death, and flowers with sickness, and little things in between." ( To Kill a Mockingbird)....So from that point on I was convinced that if I had a little taste of cousin so and so's chocolate pie or a nice fried chicken leg or some of Grandmother's mashed potatoes I'd feel better.  Yeah.  As I said...THE BEGINNING OF THE END PEOPLE!!!   Now, depending on how upset I am and how rattled my cage,  is a bowl of my mother in law's banana pudding or a pan of Sister Schubert's yeast rolls can just about raise the dead.   

I've done a whole lot of rambling on a whole lot of nothing tonight....to get to this one simple question....why does life have to move so quickly?  Tomorrow we'll be celebrating my granny's 79th birthday.  I'm lucky to still have her and paw-paw and even luckier to have them in such good health....but I have a bad feeling that in what's going to amount to the blink of an eye I will be taking their place....and I'm not ready.   

I've included this link because sometimes music can take you back better than words.  My mama would clean on Saturday mornings....the sun rises, the sun sets, she cleaned.  Yellow shorts and a tank top  and a bandanna holding her long dark hair back.   Pine Sol was her weapon of choice and John Conlee, Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers and Ronnie Milsap kept us company while poppy was at work.  This song is my childhood.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjxFGbToVFM&feature=related

Random thought of the day:  Humidity sucks.