It's That Time of Year....

Unless you are living under a rock or a total unbeliever, you're aware that we are full into the Christmas Season now this year! What does this mean to you? Is it a Christmas tree, decorating all over the house, special festive clothes, shopping, or more than the usual number of excursions into the kitchen to produce many delicious aromas and great-tasting little goodies? Or are there other things that come into your mind besides all or many of those above mentioned things? For me -it frequently seems to put my brain into overdrive and especially so where the memory factors of my life to date are involved. These memory clips are not all related to Christmas though as some of them are just little blips here and there that slip and slide through my brain. Some of them last a bit longer as I mull them over again and again then, remembering so many things -people, places, positives as well as negatives too often come into my mind. Often, a lot of these random things -and some of them also then make my pea brain wander off in directions that some would probably be saying "OMG! How weird that you thought of that or in this or that way and why now, too?" Many of my strange thinkings come about when my brain is a bit on the empty side though -which generally happens when I am doing something really exciting, totally scintillating to my brain, like walking the dog! This morning, while walking Sam -before the rain came back again -the weather very much brought to mind the way the weather was on a Saturday back in time, in late April of 1991 -grey all day, rain off and on but mainly misting then, a little bit heavier later on but not a downpour. Temps that day were a little chilly early in the day for April but by that night, it was a lot more on the "nippy" side. And it was that evening when my life along with my kids' lives too took a really drastic turn! That was the night that my son, in his infinite wisdom and myriad of talents, managed to catch the upstairs of our house on fire! It was not a really devastating fire but it was bad enough to pretty much destroy the upstairs of the house -meaning the bedrooms but thankfully, not the roof. And it entailed then our living -one adult and two teenagers -in a motel room for almost 4 months after that while the house was being repaired. What caused that bit of a debacle I learned that night from the fire chief that it was started by a smoldering cigarette in my son's bed! Hmmm. So that's what he did when I had grounded him for the night? And today, as I looked back on that episode in my lifte -it dawned on me that I really should be thankful it was only a cigarette that caused that and not something like a cigar or a macanudo, to be precise.

Don't ask me how in blazes the idea of a Cuban cigar entered into my pea brain storm here as I have no clue and don't even know anyone today who even smokes cigars!

Maybe I'm reinventing my mind back to the days -almost 50 years ago -when I slaved for about 8-9 months at the cigar factory that used to exist near here at a job I hated!

At any rate, whatever brought that on, go figure!