Eye of the Storm

I forgot! I am not writing on weekends anymore! Now I can take tomorrow off to make up for extra Saturday post. Just kidding. I actually feel like writing (this is a good thing, right?), so I will, a little.

When I was a kid, I developed a theory that there were two kinds of families. There were families like mine, where most of the time it was just us, and sometimes we had friends over, or a party, but there were not people dropping by at all times of day or night, running through the doors to the backyard and back in again, making themselves at home and feeling as comfortable as we did in our house. And then. Then there were the kind of families that mostly existed in some of the books I read or television shows I watched and occasionally encountered in my actual life. These families were part of large and lively, fluid households, households in which when whoever had cooked called everyone to come to the table it was a mystery who would actually appear in the dining room. 

I had a friend in middle school who had three brothers and lived in a large, rambling house on a very populated street with a barn set up for the kids, a pond for swimming, and an expansive lawn with a trampoline. I loved being at her house for the night or the weekend: children running in and out, dozens of them sometimes. People were always spilling out of the guest bedrooms, curled up in sleeping bags in the den or the barn. There were tents and coolers, outdoor radios, even an old-fashioned player piano. It felt like being in a novel or a movie, in fact, and every time I drove away from her house, leaving behind as much commotion and activity as I had found upon my arrival, I felt wistful, knowing that I was headed back to the relative quiet of my own home, in the woods, five acres from the closest house, where the loudest anyone ever got was to yell down the stairs to the basement to ask the person doing laundry to remember to turn off the light.

It's funny; I can barely remember my friend's mother in all of that chaos. I do remember one scene: pre-dawn on a morning we were all going skiing. Eight or nine kids sat around her enormous kitchen table, as she doled out bowls of food, smiling at one child, patting another on the head. I don't remember if she had any help with those four children, although I don't think so, and I do remember that she was very young. Even then, I thought she seemed young.

As a child I wanted that kind of chaos. I wanted a home where if somebody dropped by, music would be playing and something would be cooking on the stovetop, children would be running in and out and all over the furniture, dogs barking, bells ringing, voices calling, everything and everyone in motion. I didn't know enough to want stillness and solitude. I had it when I needed it, and that was plenty. The funny thing is that even in these days when I am so rarely alone, so rarely peaceful and still, I still crave that chaos, and I still love it when I stop moving--just for an instant--and realize I am standing in the middle of what I hath wrought. In these moments, I suspect my ten-year-old self would be particularly pleased.