Late

It's late.

Again.

And I'm morose, again. Maybe it's just the moon, or that school is starting and where I was ready last week, today....It's too soon.

Maybe it's the widow books.

Lost women widowed early, finding and falling in new love through their grief. Good, well written books. But what would it really be like to be them? Doesn't help that they are my age.

It was easier when I was into horror. Now it's women writers with well turned phrases, books set in the south. Well, except for 4 Blondes. That was a New York setting and I couldn't finish it. Bleah. Not because of the setting, but her writing.

And I'm reading voraciously again. Books devoured in hours, trying things from the library I wouldn't have read last year:

• Catsitters
• Good Grief
• Hissy Fit (really, really good)
• Little bitty Lies
• The Second coming of Lucy Hatch

So many books, all the same. Sort of. I really liked Hissy Fit by Mary Kay Andrews and the Second Coming of Lucy Hatch by Marsha Moyer. (Now I find out she has a second one that I have to find The Last of the Honky-Tonk Angels. Explains some of the set up in the first book now.)

But I digress. I'm morose today. The kids get older, a little more responsible, a little more independent. Somedays I'm just not ready for them to slip through my hands like sand. Others I can't wait for them to get older.

Arina straightened her skirt out the other day and instantly she was twenty getting dressed. Today she was swimming in the tub with a million barbies. Growing up is hard to do some days and hard to watch others. Beautiful, but hard to watch.

I miss the babies they were sometimes. Easy to hold and talk to too, today they're turning into people, doing the slow slide into puberty where they may come out liking me on the other side or I may never see them again from one ill-spoke, misunderstood word. I think I'm the one who grows more than they do. When did I get old enough to have a fourth grader? I remember being 9 like it was last year.

Enough with the weeping for tonight. Too many tears shed and I'll miss their littleness flying past me. Damn you unnecessary, ticking biological clock. I'm done damn you, shut up.