chill, baby
2003-11-12 - 10:59 p.m.

When I was about 10 years old my parents were going out one night so Tanya and I decided to go with our neighbor to her grandparents house and swim in their pool. My parents said we couldn’t get into the water if no one was outside to watch us so we begrudgingly agreed and walked down the street.

--I’ve gotten bored to tears just rereading this so I’m going to cut to the end and leave the rest up to your imagination. We got in the pool and I accidentally cut off a good part of the two smallest toes on my left foot. My parents found out because I couldn’t walk home since my foot was bandaged up with a roll of paper towels so they had to pick us up. I got in trouble for lying. A lot if I remember correctly. The End

Tomorrow we’re making Jumbles. Jumbles are cookies from a family recipe that we’ve made for Christmas as long as I can remember. They’re kind of like a thick, doughy, cinnamon-y sugar cookie in the shape of our various cookie cutters and sprinkled with red and green sugar. I would always want to help, especially when I couldn’t. The dough was too hard to resist to sneak a few misshapen cookies waiting for the oven and the sugar always dyed my fingers. One year we tried to triple the recipe because it never seemed like doubling it was enough with three kids, but things just got out of hand. They looked too liquid-y so we added more flour, then more milk, more flour, milk, flour, milk, etc. We had so many Jumbles we were giving them away to literally almost anyone. Our mailman, our UPS man, our teachers… and still had more than our fill of the beloved cookie. Last year we decided that they’re so good it’s silly to only make them once a year so tomorrow we’re making pre-Thanksgiving Jumbles, then Thanksgiving Jumbles and then the annual Jumbles closer to Christmas.

My childhood is a comfortable place for me to retreat to when doctors and disability weighs on my mind. It’s the time in my life where I was most free and freedom is something my present day life lacks. Freedom in the physical sense. Its safe in couch cushion houses and shadow puppets on the big blue wall when you can’t sleep. Hide outs in the woods, catching fireflies, toads and lizards…being too afraid to touch the toads and lizards. Riding bikes, climbing trees, fishing in the pond in the woods, giggling whenever Clay was around, snowball fights, never being able to make the perfect snow angel. It’s just safe there.