Shiny Days

The sun in shining in Seattle...and that makes for a beautiful day. You'll never be able to take the Idaho from my heart and soul - I'll love my home state until I die....but nothing in Boise compares to my new home on a beautiful sunny day. The green, the warmth, the water, the mountains...it just fills me up with such a sense of well being.

It's weird...sunny days here almost make me giddy. I want to strip off everything but the bare essentials and go running through the grass, dip my toes in the water, laze and lounge in the sun like a cat whose found the best spot for warm sunny rays. I sometimes wonder if I wasn't a cat in a former life....I so love to laze away my days in sleepy, sunny splendor.

I'm very much looking forward to this weekend - I'm spending a bit of time with some friends and I'm hoping to get a wee bit of gardening in the mix. But truly, the part that just fills me with glee is that it's going to be sunny. Beautiful, beautiful sunshine.

I have a particular uncle who is weaved so thoroughly though the memories of my childhood, he's inseparably, really. He is my mother's youngest brother and was always the uncle most involved in our day to day lives. This is not to say our other uncles were any less loved, they just had familes of their own. But this uncle was late to having children of his own and thus adopted us as his own. I've been thinking so much about him. He is so like the men in my family, fairly unemotional, fairly strong in his convictions of what is right and what is wrong, opinionated, strong willed....all descriptions that could be used to describe me. He had called me about three weeks after I miscarried and left such a sweet and funny message. I played that message over and over again. It was so good to hear him say he loved me. I hadn't heard him say that for several years. Not that he didn't feel it, he just didn't say it. I can't put my finger on it exactly...but it seemed that as I aged, we softly grew apart - were not as close as we once had been. That is natural, I am sure...this soft distancing. I grew up, took on a life of my own. He married a wonderful woman and had two beautiful children, whom I adore, and we got busy. Add into it we live states away and it's natural, no doubt. But a big part of my heart misses him very much. The little girl part that desperately wants the approval of the men in her life. I feel that way about all of my family. I wish somehow we could take ourselves back to the small town we came from - eat in the same restaurants, talk over the fence post, go to church together on Sunday, all one big happy family. That's idealized, I know....but it doesn't mean I don't want it.

So here I am, so many months later and I haven't called. At the time, I was still not in a place where I could talk to people. Writing about it on the internet is one thing; posting on a board, emailing, chatting via IM...all of that I could do very easily. But talk to someone face to face or voice to voice? That I just couldn't do. My parents can attest, I still cry very easily. And the first time I talk to someone I haven't talked to since Christmas, I'm a basket case, even still. So time has passed and each weekend I think - this weekend I need to call my uncle. But I chicken out and don't do it.

How do you breach that? What do you say when you call? Hello? I was an emotional basketcase, I'm sorry I didn't call? Hi, I love you, I really do - and because I love you so much, I can talk to complete strangers, I can go grocery shopping, I can do this and do that, but I can't talk to you? No matter how I practice the conversation in my brain, it just leaves me feeling like I'm a complete and total idiot, and a bad niece to boot.

I want to call....I need to call....it weighs on me, the distance and the guilt.

Maybe this weekend when I'm planting some flowers I'll pick up the phone. But I think about when I should...what time would be the best....how to fit it in with this responsibility and that...and I chicken out - again.

Ahhhh....procrastination and lack of gracefulness at it's worst. These are the times when I am embarrassed by my own emotions.

"Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air..."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson