I was lolling around on the bed in the wee hours with Mike drowsing in and out of sleep. I was telling him about my childhood on my grandparents farm and all the things I remembered about it between tears and grieving.

As I was talking, I realized I remembered a lot of details. Details make for good writing, so I think I'm going to write the stories down for my kids. I think they don't understand working from dawn to dusk every day. I have always worked like that, but I've lived on or near a farm my whole life and that's just how you do things. You get up early and feed and water the animals in the barn before you eat, so you don't forget to feed them. You do the same thing before dinner each night, too.

For example, I remember tromping everywhere around my grandparent's farm. On the right hand side of the house, there was a garage that the roof had long ago fallen down on. The roofs were made of slate a lot back then. I remember my brother and I sifting through the rubble of that garage looking for large slate tiles to use as chalkboards and taking them home to use chalk on and playing school with them.

I also loved to fish. Mind you, I hate eating fish. I can only stand tuna if you cover it in mayo, cheese and other stuff, so it's a relatively secondary ingredient. I just enjoyed the process of looking for earthworms under rocks and logs in the woods. I enjoyed the accoutrements of fishing, a kreel, a can of worms, and the quiet.

I used to go straight back from my grandparents' house to a dam on a small river there. The pool under the dam was about 10-15 feet deep with boulders around it -- a good place for fat brown trout to hide under in the heat of the afternoon. And there was just not a good, safe way to get to the top of those boulders and the trout could clearly see me, and just ignored my wiggly pink worms.

I once caught a small brown trout, but I had been told it'd better be as long as my forearm, if I were taking it home because otherwise it'd be too small. And this one was more like 6-7 inches long, so not worth keeping, but I remember being fascinated by the difference between that brown trout with its brown speckles and the shiny colorful rainbow trout that I'd occasionally caught other times, and throwing it back. I often went with my brother or my cousin, Harold, and we just played in the water, fished, and hung out.

If Harold hadn't had a motorcycle wreck in his 20s, he'd have been a year older than me. His grave is near my grandfather's and soon, my grandmother's.

So maybe stories are a good way to record a sense of family for my children. Also, I think Mike often doesn't know a lot of this stuff from my life. Even for me, it feels like I'm talking about a movie I saw.

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Today, we have been working on cleaning our bedroom. Russell's room is spotless, Genny's grounded til hers is about the same. And Mike and I've been plowing through ours.

Mike found out something new about me today, as we dusted off an old wooden cigar box. It was full of my harmonicas in every key. I showed him my box and said I hadn't played in years, so didn't even know if I could any more. I sounded out a few keys from blues songs on the radio and picked up parts of it. I was embarrassed as hell, but my ear is still pretty good, even if my mouth is out of practice. He just watched me with this bemused stunned look. I haven't played since before Russell was born. I used to play with the radio and just play when I went camping.

Maybe if I can clean up my house, I keep thinking that maybe my life will get into order, too.

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I discovered today that I do better if I take an extra dose of glucosamine. I was standing up and discovering that I was experiencing no pain. It's weird, but you get used to wincing and it was weird bracing for the pain to wince at it. And then, it didn't come.

The side effects of glucosamine is that it can raise your sugars and make you retain water, which might explain why my ankles have been comparable with elephant legs, recently. I took extra metformin to cover for it and am enjoying the absence of pain for a change of pace. It's weird to be pain free and not loaded up on painkillers. I still have swollen ankles, but it's 97 and I took extra glucosamine, so I'm willing to ride this one out.

Imagine that.