Thoughtful Wanderings

I pushed the match along the thin black strip of the match box, rip.  It’s hard to say when the flame starts.  I try to see it, watch it, sort of like the opposite end of watching water boil.  The flame just happens.  Eyes wide and fascinated I watch as the flame bursts to life, hanging above my carpet, a breath from the tender flesh of my finger.  The heat rolls to the tip of my finger, once I even burn my finger nail.  That’s one memory that is crystal clear, the way the fire ripped into my nail, slithered behind it and left dead painful skin behind and a blackened nail to remind me of what I had done.  Did I tell any one about this injury?  No way

How many times did I repeat this ritual?   Several.  So many that all the memories combine together to create one meshed up  multicolored reality.   Have you ever tried to watch a flame burst into life: catch a glimpse of that first yellow or red? It’s so tempting.

The flame catches, I watch it for a split second, pushing my limit each time I work this experiment then pop, drop that baby down the round hole of the pepsi or coke bottle (my memories not that good) watch as it floats to the bottom, slowly dying, until it  rests  up against the bottom of the glass.

Poof  circles of smoke twirl upwards then expand into a cloud.  The bottle fills with smoke.

I repeat this again and again until several used up matches crisscross each other at the bottom of the bottle.

The taste of molasses for some reason goes hand and hand with these deviant experiences.  Was I suppose to sneak the molasses out of the fridge when no one was home?

Once my mom found the burnt up matches and scolded me.  I can only imagine the jolt of fear she must have felt when she discovered that her daughter was playing with matches when she was at work.

Yesterday I walked into the kitchen and smelled a familiar burning smell that I couldn’t quite place.  I tried to ignore it but the smell persisted, never disintegrating but building.

So me and my nose went snooping, following the smokey like smell until I discovered the source.  Curious George (aka my 10-year-old son)  had plugged in the small crock-pot and turned it on high.  Who knows how long it had been like that but long enough for the plastic measuring cup to cake itself onto the bottom of the pot into a black melted gooey mess and for the basket meant for steaming vegetables to turn its corners over and head in the direction of liquid form.  The smell was horrible, burnt plastic on the verge of smoldering into a mini flame.

I scolded my son much like my mother scolded me and I thought:  holy crap what if he would have pulled something like that when we were sleeping?

I was reading some of my old journal writings about my husband. Ben and I met selling pest control a little over 13 years ago.  During the day when I was out knocking on doors I would write on the back of Orkin’s flyers “The World’s Best Pest Control” with please call Alicia stamped on each one.  I always feel a little better if I can just get a few words down on paper.    Any way just to show you what a nerd I was here’s a quote from the back of one of those flyers “I am tired but I am mostly distracted.  Hopefully Heavenly Father can help me get focused.  I have been thinking a lot of Ben lately.  I am really starting to like him.  I can’t explain exactly why.  I think we are a lot a like in many ways. Mainly in the way we think.  I like the way I feel when I am with him and who I am.”

So I have who knows maybe 100 or more of these fliers all tainted with my “feelings” for Ben and my struggle to stay at the top of our pest control selling team.

I think I would have made a butt load of money (lol for college student standards)  if it hadn’t of been for the way I was so distracted by new love.  Even after Ben and I were engaged and maybe even married he had no idea about all of the feelings I had been harboring for him all summer long.

I was always worried about what he thought.  I was nervous around him that whole summer.  I loved the first time I saw him.  When I went up to his apartment to meet him I expected to find a really young guy freshly off of his Mormon mission but when I walked in I saw Ben, my age, and his eyes.  His eyes woke up as soon as I walked in the door and me well I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

I went down stairs to my apartment right a way and called my good friend and first roommate from college, Julee, and told her all about him.  Of course I never let on to him how freaked out I was about him.  How much I liked him from the very first time I saw him.

Last night I had bad dreams.  I don’t remember most of them.  One guy came into my house and ate all of my favorite cereal.  LOL But one dream haunted me the most.  Around this special time of month every month I have a strong negative dream about someone important in my life.  Last night it was about Ben.  He had given up on me.  We were done and there was nothing to fix it.  My heart broke.  In that dream I felt so lost. It was as if it really happened.

Today is the  9^th anniversary of 9-11.

I remember 9-11 well.  It was the day after we came back from a trip to Canada.  We were living in a comfortable apartment then, one that we only lived in for 6 months.  Life seemed scary at that time but looking back wow, were times simpler.

That morning Conner had an appointment with a speech therapist or something.  I called and cancelled because I was feeling nauseous, really ill.  When I called the therapist she asked me if I had seen the news?  No.  I hadn’t.

I turned on the tv and just as I did one of the planes crashed into the second building.  Oh my god.  Ben and I sat there stunned.  Life turned on a quarter that day.  It was one of those moments that I am sure many shared.  When we thought we lived in this safe protected world and then bam….the mail service was down, people were scared, life was unstable, boundaries shimmered and dissolved.  We become a little bit more apart of the wider world that we were so sheltered from.

After the news settled a bit into the pit of my stomach I pulled myself up and drove to the grocery store where I purchased a pregnancy test.  I went home and took it, maybe my hands were shaking.  Life was scaring me.  The test was positive.  I told Ben the news and his grin was huge.  His eyes lit up just like they did when he first saw me.

Me of course I was excited.  I was also scared.  I was no longer living in a sheltered cocoon where hurtful things happen to other people. Our first son wasn’t quite one-years-old yet and all ready had a few minor surgeries and close calls.

The whole first year of parenthood and experiencing 9-11 sort of catapulted me into adulthood.  It was like bathing in a nice warm bath where you keep nodding off then being yanked from there and dunked into a river of ice water.  A shock to the system, painful yet clarifying. Bitter bitter bitter, death and of course sweet-life.

Life was uncertain but I had Ben right by my side and something about that brought a sort of stable solidness to my life.  He was real and solid and right there.  Not that he was my protector but we were in it together.  Side by side.  Oh I miss seeing him so much.  During those days he spent a lot of time working from home.

A hiking trip we took up badger mountain last week.