Just Write ~ the 15th

{Note: Just Write will take a break next week, December 27 and return on January 3rd}

Ryan is way on the other side of the house and I can hear him on the phone. He’s a loud-talker, my husband. He’s right by the boys’ room but they don’t wake easily at all. Mike and Molly is on and Elsie is sleeping, too. We can’t loud-talk near her though, she’s not such a solid sleeper yet. Maybe she won’t ever be, like her mother.

There are little piles everywhere. Teacher gifts, bows and wrapping, bags with gifts in them and then the usual suspects, like bills and other grown-up paperwork. Sometimes I look around and wonder who all of this belongs to because I don’t very often feel like a grown up. 36 and a half years have gone by and still I’m a kid.

I was driving to another store tonight, looking for one particular thing and I turned the car by a house I always notice. It’s the one that I’ve taken a photo of Miles and Asher in front of the last two Halloweens. It’s always so festively decorated and the lady that lives there reminds me so much of an old client of mine, from back when I was a social worker. It’s been almost ten years since I’ve seen her. I wondered tonight if she’s still alive, that client. She was so thin, didn’t like to eat, and she wore the same wool black outfit year-round. It could be ninety degrees and humid and she’d still sweat it out and even slept in it. The skirt and blouse with a blazer. She was scared and hallucinating, smelly and suicidal. And I could make her smile and sometimes even leave the house. The house that was falling apart all around her while she shuffled and sighed.

And now here I am, not a social worker but a worker in my sleeping house with all of its piles and in my clean change of clothes. I am this grown up girl here with memories of old careers and the people who I miss in them. Aside from my children, they were the ones that taught me the most about grace in the small things, like smiles and getting out of the house.

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This is the 15th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.}  I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page. There are really no rules, besides Just Write! (Then link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.) (Any links not following those two guidelines will be deleted.) 

Also. Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word?