this imploding heart

Or is it someone else instead

My weekend was filled with moments that scooted up next to me on the piano bench and muttered under their breath "This was your life. This is what makes you who you are."

My nephews won their football game by 41 points, and my sweet, younger, nephew (who recently grew several inches taller than most the other kids, and thus is a bit clumsy yet) made a tackle all by himself in the last few minutes of the game and they announced his name over the loudspeaker and everything. It was awesome. (He's number 55 below, and my oldest nephew is standing next to him, number 64)

We stayed the night at my sisters house in Central Washington. She lives in a town with a population of 300, and they all have their yard sales on the same day. We got up in the morning and set to one of my favorite activities of all time: Looking through weird, cheap stuff that people have had in their houses.
There's a beautiful house in the town that was built in the beginning of the century. The entire third floor is a ballroom, but the previous residents were so poor that they used all the hand-carved wood from the pillars and balconies to heat the house. Breaks my heart in so many ways, I can't even tell you.

We headed to Idaho in late afternoon and arrived in the early evening to stay with my dad's long time best friend and hunting partner. He was butchering a moose on the kitchen table when we arrived and I thought to myself "I don't think most of my friends ever expect to walk into a house and see a gigantic bloody ribcage on the table." It was strange to sit and watch the familiar process of cutting the meat away from the bone, inspecting it for any hair or dirt, cutting away the tendons and excess fat, placing those in one bowl and the meat in another to be wrapped.

Mom and Dad and I changed clothes and drove over to the church for my nephew's baptism. My dad did the baptising. I sat in the 2nd row for the service and my mom lead the music with 18 family voices singing out behind me. Some of them cracking into adulthood, some of them voices that taught me to read, some of them making up their own words for the verses and singing loud during the choruses since they're not old enough to read themselves. Chocolate cake in the gym afterwards. Tooth fairy stories, all the smallest ones blurry from never standing still. We went to a buffet afterwards and I overheard my oldest neice explaining why a comment my Jr. High Aged nephew made was racist.
Sunday morning at my oldest sisters house with the puppies that've adopted her family.