your heart is an empty room

Home's face: how it ages when you're away
Spring blooms and you find the love that's true
But you don't know what now to do
Cause the chase is all you know
And she stopped running months ago
And all you see
Is where else you could be
When you're at home
Out on the street
Are so many possibilities
To not be alone

my heart isn't exactly an empty room. but that whole 'death cab for cutie' album sings like the soundtrack of my life lately. a little.

angus the giant chocolate lab and i picked white violets for mom in grandma and grandpa's yard. except gramma and grampa are in a nursing home and mom is aching in the hospital. we skulked around the yards looking for spring flowers to bring to her room and i felt one of those lightning bolt flashes of remembering....

of being 9 or 10 and hunting down every white violet in our front yard, the woods, and grandma and grandpa's lawn until my hands were green with stemmy juice. presenting my cache to mom with a big grin and her "ooooh"s and "soooo pretty!!"s and rummaging around for a short jam jar to put them in.

i wandered back into the open patch in the span of trees and thought about how i always thought i would get married back there. some kind of white gossamer canopy hanging from the trees, white chairs, candles and peonies and lilly of the valley everywhere. angus plowed through the overgrown brush and trotted back towards the cabin my brother and his friends built in the woods. i opted not to follow him into the briars and sprouting poison ivy.

i'm not sad and i'm not afraid. i'm just looking for information about filling out the right forms and finding the right rehab and getting stuff in order.

the DCFC album is called "plans" and it's about death. and most of them are not even sad. they just are. like me. i just am. breathing in and out. like all plans - plans for the future, plans for your family or your life or your afternoon. and plans that you have to make when it looks as though those afternoons are numbered and the number is a small one.