Well, how can I complain NOW....after complaining for five years that I'd like to finally see/experience some severe weather? I'll miss this part of my tree.

There are things to which we are called that are not possible by our own nature or our individualistic aspirations.

While I am currently experiencing blog mania, I'll try this too (though I am wanting to forget)....

HOW TO END YOUR VACATION TIME.....

What do you do when your mother.....who is having to navigate her way through the tangly details of settling her mother's estate......tells you your younger brother has just been arrested for arson- the same drug-addicted brother on a progressively self-destructive path who had dropped out of his "Christian" high school a month before he was to graduate to get married? The same one who has an infant child.....who has been homeless a few times, "disappearing" for weeks with his druggie circles and showing up in homeless shelters all by age 18? And all this in the last year?

This saga with my younger brother has been going on now for the better part of a year and it doesn't get any more bizarre (well, I guess it could on second thought). It is quite eerie to be awakened to the panicked voice of another mother of a wayward child in your own mother's house early on the morning after my Granny had passed. My mother didn't need to have this upon her. I knew that this unfortunate chance encounter between these two women had my brother to blame. This crumpled stranger imploring about the whereabouts of her daughter to my mother could not bring her daughter back- wherever she was.

This is only one cog in this still-rolling, still slipping gear that is my brother's young and downwardly-mobile life. The stories are numerous, but this episode congealed it's crazy reality in the most macabre juxtaposition to an equally paramount transition in our family. And it really doesn't take much to vibrate the indented strands of pain already embedded in our family. It didn't have to get to this, thank you.

Being this far removed had its obvious advantages of course. But you are never really unaffected....one can just live under any such delusion if they choose. But I really want to know how I enter into this.

My brother didn't start just any old fire on any old place, it was the trailer his teenage ex-wife and infant daughter lived in (incidentally, I don't believe they were in the structure). I- we- really want to know how to simultaneously love a person and despise an action so tied to a person. I can get over not being able to see my mother because she had to visit with estate lawyers and communicate with her son's jailers. I'm not sure I can rightly categorize the memory of having to tell my mother to leave his ass in jail and not bail him so he can begin to decide if this is the life he wants. My mother is "there" and ready to do this, but I know I'll never understand the connection between a mother and child nor ever fully appreciate the stamina it must take to submit one's flesh and blood to the dire consequences.

Maybe the next time I see my brother will be in prison. Maybe that is the way it should be.

For now.

OF MIRTH, LEVITY AND HUMOR.....

Do you ever wonder if you push the limits in your relationships?

Ever try to step outside yourself to try to see if you are really the buffoon you suspect you can be at times?

Can the "class clown" syndrome of one's youth ever appropriately carry on into adulthood?

Do you ever fear if you are exhausting to people sometimes because you enjoy them so much?

Are funny people liked and are desired to be around mainly because they are funny and make others laugh?

Ever wonder what it is that people really see in you?

Is acerbic wit detrimental to a kingdom mentality?

Is comedic prowess simply the obverse persona of a true melancholic?

Here in Tennessee......on the last leg of our vacation to the North Carolina mountains. The camping was excessively wet (it rained 2-3 times a day- no kidding), but enjoyable with my father/stepmother joining us. Stayed in a bed/breakfast the last day there in Franklin,NC and found some cool eateries and local dives. And the annual drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway was windy, foggy and rainy and you couldn't see nuthin' (presuming said nuthin' was there to be seen).

Kinda ready to be back home tho. We still have to see some pipples still yet.

BTW, my blog seems to be loading kind of funky-like with my pic at the bottom of the page and no links (could be my momma-in-law's puter). Any one else getting the same?