Yawn.  The alarm goes off for the first time in months.  Ive gotten so used to sleeping i these last two weeks while my kids have been off this is no fun.  Between this, the menopause, the mid-life poor sleep, the snoring husband, the son home from college making a ruckus till all hours and the damned dog in my bed, I feel fatigued before I’ve even  begun the day.

There is nothing like breaking out of a routine.  Every body needs that.  And every BODY needs that.  But that lucious unstructured time at night watching movies with the kids or long luxurious meals with no one scooting away to do homework.  I miss it already.  I am mourning it this morning.

For two weeks I slept and ate.  I didnt worry about exercise or being somewhere exaclty at a particular time– most days anyway.  It was glorious.  This is what it must feel like to be Paris Hilton’s monther.  I hear donce that she sleeps till 11:00 am every morning.  Someone had asked if she could help with a school carnival and when she found out the early time required, she had to decline.

Maybe that’s one of those urban legends but it still cracks me up.

On the other hand I’d hate that.  As much as I’d love just a few more hours of sleep, i love my routine in the end.  I love being the first one up, the dark house, the early morning routine.  I love pressing the button on the coffee-maker and pouring that first, milky cup.

Vacations are vacations because they are a break from the routine.  They come just in time to rescue us from ourselves and to remind us why they are so special.

So forgive yourself this week and you ease back into the routine after new years.  And break a few resolutions– just because you can!

This article appears in the December issue of Woman’s Day Magazine:

The Best Christmas Ever

The kids were asleep, or at least faking it, as my husband and I pulled presents out of well-worn hiding places and stacked them under the Christmas tree. One after they other, out they came, wrapped in my cheap dime store paper. Some had my “Santa “ writing on little tags, others were designated with a black plain black marker.

I’m one of those Moms who buys Christmas present in July. But the problem with that is sometimes you forget how much you have. I had gone way over-board this year. There were lots of little things, nothing truly expensive. But by the time we finished unloading the stash it was an embarrassment of riches.

The next morning my kids’ eyes popped out when they spotted the tree. And as our slow, methodical way of opening them dragged on, even the younger ones lost enthusiasm for the pile. I snuck a few unopened presents away to stash for their birthday in April. So what if they were wrapped with snowman paper? I was practical and thrifty.

It wasn’t my kids who had asked for lots of stuff. This was me, trying to make it the best Christmas ever, hoping to add yet another wonderful remembrance to the family memory bank. “How did we get here?” I wondered, looking at the dozens of useless items strewn around the room.

When I thought back, my best Christmas ever had been the complete opposite of this past Christmas of excess. It had been the very first one my husband and I had spent as a married couple. Bob and I had just been married in the fall of 1988 and had moved to Beijing, China where he was teaching and I was working. Our “home” was a simple concrete dorm room with twin metal beds pushed together and no drinkable water in the bathrooms. We’d arrived in China with backpacks and had mailed a few boxes of other supplies by sea, which showed up months later. As the holidays approached, we realized we had no decorations, nothing in this communist country to make us feel like home. Both of us missed our families terribly. It would be the first Christmas each of us had spent away for them.

The week before Christmas, a box arrived from Bob’s mother packed with some practical items we’d requested like cereal, a warm vest and some tall flip flops to avoid the group bathroom’s filthy floors. Nestled between these gifts was an eight inch high, fake Christmas tree, complete with mini ornaments. Pulling the tree out of the box and unwrapping it, my heart soared. When an American couple at the school gave us an Amy Grant Christmas tape for our boom box, we had all that we needed.

I don’t remember what, if anything, I gave Bob or he gave me. It was a time in our life when we needed few possessions. We had nothing, just one another and the new foundation of marriage we were building. Our first four months in this very foreign land had been difficult in so many ways and magical in others. We had come to rely on each other, respect and love one another without the usual newlywed distractions of the brand new house, sparkling engagement ring, wedding presents, circle of friends and family in which to confide or vent.

I can still picture the room that Christmas morning in 1988 when we awoke. The song “Tennessee Christmas” will always take me back to that holiday, where we lit a candle under that miniature tree and played the Christmas tape that has now become part of our annual family ritual.

The little tree is still in our ornament box. Battered from having moved so much, it’s branches have opened and shut like a parasol for the last two decades. For the past five years, I’m not sure it has even been unpacked, so voluminous are our decorations.

In reaction to this past holiday, I have decided to make that little tree the centerpiece of our holiday this year. I will tell the story of that first Christmas to my children, explain to them that although there were no presents to unwrap, the gift to each other was the beginning of our family, the understanding that the best was yet to come as our life together stretched before us. This year there will be fewer items under the tree and more of the gifts that really count; love, music, togetherness, home-baked cookies, less rushing and more cherishing.

Of course, real life being what it is, it may not happen exactly the way I envision now in the months leading up to the holidays. But just the thought of slowing us down, of focusing on the simplicity and meaning of that little tree, rather than what lies under it may bring back some of the magic that the holidays offer to the very young and the very in love. I want to teach my children that the best gifts are the things we say and do for one another, the moments we can remember and hold in our minds long after the present has passed. These are the greatest treasures of families throughout the world, the gifts that evoke the magic of that long ago, very first tree.

In our family, the game of dodgeball has become a kind of moral and ethical template by which we judge people’s character.

It all started with my nephew Collin at a family dinner. We were grilling him about a kid his age, someone we vaguely knew. “He’ s an OK guy,” answered my nephew, thoughtfully chewing his burger. “But he cheats at dodgeball.”

We got it. We all got it. Dodgeball, a game we all played in the summer, had become the arbiter of whether or not someone was a decent human being at their core, honest and ethical.

For those of you who don’t know, the game of dodgeball has made a comeback. There are even college teams. It’s kindler and gentler now and much more PC than when I was in middle school. You don’t try to nail the chubby girl in the back row who eats paste or the kid with duct tape on his glasses who picks his nose.

Dodgeball is a process of elimination; a survival of the fittest. It begins with organized chaos as two teams square off with dozens of balls being hurled in the air. Unlike baseball or basketball, where all eyes are on the person who has the ball, dodgeball has dozens of balls all flying around at the same time with the goal of nicking any body part below the neck. If you get hit, you are out. Pure and simple. In the craziness of the first few minutes, it is often one person’s word over another’s. This means it is largely up to the individuals to police themselves.

There are those that get hit and try to get away with it. There are some who fight the call when challenged. Others give in and slyly slink off when called on the carpet. And then there are those who immediately come clean when they’ve been hit. Even when no one is watching, they pull themselves out of the game and onto the sidelines.

As a parent, I aspire to raise one of those kids. Oh, I’m well aware that cheating at dodgeball doesn’t mean a kid is destined to a life of robbing banks, kiting checks or pulling the legs off flies. But I found it interesting that my own nephew had arrived at the dodgeball test on his own. I like the fact that one teen could identify a kind of touchstone to determine the stuff of which his peers were made.

I recently watched an R-rated movie with my daughter and two of her friends. It was mostly inappropriate humor but I made sure to ask both kids if this was OK with their parents. I was impressed when each girl wanted to call their mothers to double check.

When I commented to my daughter about how wonderful it was that her friends did this, she immediately jumped on me. “Mom, I have never seen an R rated movie ever. And I would always ask you first,” she huffed defensively. OK, she passed the dodgeball test on that one.

The dodgeball test may be one little marker, one silly way we can look at an element of a person’s character. But cheating at dodgeball is just one of many small but critical transgressions I see today that we need to remain vigilant about when it comes to our kids. So many of life’s little lessons are being lost in our haste to be “friends” with our kids, or unnaturally force our lives to be completely “kid-centric” (a term that makes the hairs on my forearm stand up).

By being afraid of drawing too many boundaries, we are letting slide a lot of opportunities to teach good old-fashioned citizenship and manners. Like the dodgeball test, we can all be judged by an aggregate of the little things; respect for the elderly, giving up your seat on the train, looking people in the eye, delivering a firm handshake. As parents, we get sick of nagging about these things, but in the end, their presence or absence tells us something about an individual. I have a warm spot in my heart for a young man who calls me Ma’am, even though it makes me sound like an ancient crone.

I want my children to understand that there are consequences for actions. That means we need to follow through with our threats, not make the hollow remarks I hear screamed at kids in the grocery store aisles.

There is a famous parenting story about a family traveling to Disney World. Maybe you know this one, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it is an urban myth. Exasperated by the dreaded “when will we be there” question, the parents told the kids if they asked one more time, they wouldn’t be able to go to Disney World. Legend has it when little Johnny broke the rule, they stuck to their guns. They had to. The miserable parents went to the park by themselves all day, hiring a sitter for the kids in the hotel room.

I know I sound just like the grandmas of a generation before, cluck-clucking at that hip-swivelin’ rock’n’roll music. Or, heaven forbid, I sound like Tipper Gore sounded to me in the 80s about record lyrics, until I had my own kids and listened to some of the misogynist bondage rap stuff on the radio one day. I began to channel Tipper Gore that day, taking back everything I had ever muttered about her and freedom of speech.

When we lived in Phoenix in 1995, in the span of two weeks I left my wallet on top of my station wagon twice and drove away. Those were really exhausting days with two kids under four and a full-time home business. The second time it happened, I set the wallet on top of the car as I wrestled both kids into their car seats and then drove away. When I got home, I realized immediately what I had done and burst into tears.

Lo and behold, the phone rang a few hours later. A man had found the wallet and he lived 20 minutes away in what I knew to be a somewhat shady neighborhood. I was making bets that the money was gone and I was furious with myself because I had just been to the cash machine and withdrawn my bi-weekly budget. Planning on giving him some of the money in my wallet as a reward, I also stopped and bought a 12-pack of beer. I figured in his hood they could all have a little party.

When I rang his bell, clutching my two kids to me in the dark, the man who answered the door was in flowing robes, with a top knot of hair. I quickly reached into my limited knowledge of Eastern religions and dimly recognized that he was a Sikh. As I thrust the beer at him in gratitude, he practically jumped back in disgust. “We don’t drink in our religion,” he said. And my humiliation at my sanctimonious neighborhood profiling was complete. The wallet was intact, with every dollar accounted for.

One thing I knew for sure. If that man, the one who found my wallet on the asphalt of the grocery store parking lot, had been tagged out in dodgeball and nobody saw him? He would have quietly taken himself out to the sidelines. Can you say the same?

Last Sunday I was reading the Woman’s Sports Pages in the New York Times. For the uninitiated, that’s the wedding section; the part where a happy duo smiles blithely and innocently from their cropped photo on the page.

Much had changed since my own face beamed out from my engagement photo, a rite of passage with the formal wedding announcement. For starters, in the olden days, proper etiquette dictated that the photo contain only the bride. Hence the pejorative term, in reference to the accomplishment of having “bagged” a husband. The sport was in catching a man.

Today, those same pages spill over with lesbian and gay couples, hetero duos with bright faces beaming, unaware that they are about to climb on the rollercoaster of life together, certain their love will bring them only good things and eternal happiness. There are older couples too—couples stunned with the brilliance of their good fortune at meeting so late in life or getting a second chance at marital bliss. These couples look less jaunty, perhaps more prepared. They understand that a percentage of this is simply up to the fates.

Perusing those pages I thought back to my own whirlwind wedding weekend, my open, apple-cheeked face as a new bride marrying “Robert Woodruff, of Birmingham, Michigan attorney at Sherman and Sterling” as if all of those NYT pedigreed descriptions could contain him.

Our wedding had been hasty. Although we’d dated for two years, Bob had the chance to go overseas and teach in China. He had asked me to go with him, to marry him first, a feat which we pulled off in three months, with not just a little angst on my mothers part and a lot of friction between us.

The morning after our wedding we woke up as husband and wife in a canopy bed in the Adirondacks and made our way down the Hudson River by train, holding hands as the light flashed through the window between the trees like an old newsreel. We were married. We were determined that our love was big enough and powerful enough and generous enough… was simply enough, to forge a wonderful life together. Tragedy and misfortune were for people who didn’t follow the rules, who were mean and colored outside of the lines, who disrespected others and harbored black places in their heart.

I thought about all of this last weekend as I let my eye trail down the page at the images of all those happy, expectant people. These were folks who had just gotten engaged or married, who wanted to announce it to the world with their photos, to gleefully make us a party to all that happiness and hopefulness.

Thank goodness that the world kept turning out couples like that. I reveled for a moment in the prospect of all that boundless optimism to believe that life would deal you a good hand, that love kept regenerating, even while others battled loss and depression, disappointment and sorrow.

A silly thought flashed through my mind. I pictured us now, today, on those pages, envisioning how we would appear; the set of a jaw, the look in our eyes. Our love was richer, deeper, it hid more in the folds inside of us. It was no longer moonfaced and expectant. We were long past the point where we couldn’t touch each other enough or held hands on every sidewalk. Our love had mellowed into something with real texture; the fibers of the tapestry tough and tenacious from a marriage woven of good and bad, joy and sorrow, loss and abundance.

Thinking about the miscarriages, the loss, the injury, the fear, the things we had endured together I could touch the parts in me where dreams had been compromised. I could articulate what a parallel life would look like, one in which my husband was not injured in Iraq, one in which life had kept moving forward as he flew to all the worlds breaking events, covered the 2008 election, interviewed world leaders.

How do you live in the shadow of what might have been after something big and bad happens? How do you grocery shop and car pool and cut up the salad and not let your mind wander to that parallel life, the one where only good things happen, where good people are rewarded?

And in any marriage you play the hand you are dealt. Wherever that may take you. And yet, as my friend Jim told me once, you never stop trying to get your hands on the deck.

That, I think, is the lesson we all learn, in one form or another as we struggle to make sense of what it means to choose a mate, to hitch a star to pull a collective wagon, to overcome or to simply endure.

And as we move, day in and day out into a familiar orbit, one with duller colors and smoother edges smoothed by the passage of time, we are no longer that expectant couple looking hopefully out of the engagement photo. But the rewards of the journey, are often full of unexpected goodness, beauty and moments of grace.

My two sisters and I were recently in Hawaii to celebrate my 50^th year. We shared the resort with conference attendees and honeymooners and we watched with amusement and nostalgia as they draped themselves around one another in the elevators or gazed dreamily at each other during breakfast.

“Enjoy it now!” we joked under our breath.

“This is the fantasy island part,” my sister Nan said in a feigned warning. “The rest is all downhill.” We cracked ourselves up.

But lurking under our pretend cynicism was a moment where each one of us took stock. The children, the years logged, the good health, the close family, the new families we had built. We’d all three weathered the good and the bad. We were here. We were celebrating, each raising a glass, ultimately eager to get home to our house, home to our kids, and home to our men.

It was time. Past time. I stood with one hand poised over the trash can holding my bra. The elastic on the straps was shot, the material puckered around the back where it meets the hooks and eyes. There is no longer any support offered, but yet the cups now seem woefully big for me - or is it that with the advancement of time, my boobs have shrunk yet again.

Standing over the trash with the bra, I hesitate. My conviction wavers. What if I just keep the bra as a back up, some emergency moment when all the other bras fail me or are in the wash? The truth is this — this bra has been good to me.

This bra has supported me through the last three years. It has taken me through parent teacher conferences, been there for medical pronouncements, supported me when the doctor called to tell me the lump was benign. It has exercised with me, walked and hiked. It had held me together while my husband recovered from injury and I tried to buck up my children’s fears. It has grocery shopped and gone on girls’ weekends. It’s been to concerts and gotten sweaty in raspberry fields and while doing yard work. This bra has seen me at my very best and most joyous and put up with me through the headaches, the petty and snippy moments, the nagging.

I’d bought the bra in a group of three—one black and two nude, skin color they called it, although I have yet to meet someone with that truly pinkish color of flesh. But one of the fleshy ones was defective, one strap kept coming unhooked, and so it found its way to the back of my drawer. This one, the one I held now, had become, by default, my go-to bra. How many hundred times had I washed it by hand with Woolite?

But the support was gone. And now, with the passage of time, there seemed to be a chasm between the lip of the bra cup and the flesh of my breast. Its like the space between two glaciers. There is no longer any contact. You could lay an entire banana between the gap between my breasts and my bra now. Sigh.

I hate bra shopping. Hate it. Perhaps if I had perfect, perky boobs or a boob job where they sat like mounds of dewy perfection I’d enjoy this exercise. But bra shopping to me is an exercise in facing my flaws in a fluorescent mirror. It’s a little bit like whipping a cat-o-nine-tails over your back.

So as I held the bra over the trash, a sort of simple bra-prayer played over my mind; the kind of thing one mentally mumbles when a hamster or gold fish dies. You have a flash of remorse for the thing that was, even though it didn’t live on the grand emotional scale afforded a cat, dog or human being.

Here was the thing. I had already replaced that bra. I’d gone to Victoria’s Secret with my teenaged daughter, determined to walk out of there with something appropriate and well fitting. We’d chosen three again, one black and two that pinkishy nude of a band-aid, nothing racy, lacey or with demi-cups. Once again I’d ended up with something sensibly supportive.

With one last look and a sigh, I dropped the bra unceremoniously into the garbage trash. Covered with coffee grounds and rotten broccoli and the leavings of the previous meal, it seemed an inglorious end to something that had been so intimate.

I imagine it now, in some kind of land-fill heaven. I envision sea gulls dive bombing the area for food scraps as the bra stands, cups outstretched to the sky, silently holding together its little patch of hill.

Did I really just see that on the news?  Really?  A clump of what they believe is Elvis’s hair went on the auction blocked and fetched something with multiple zeroes after it?

The picture on  the news made me reel back in horror.  It was a black, snarled tangle of hair, supposedly shaved off when Elvis famously joined the Army around the time of the Korean War .

Some poor  barber ran over to the clump, pocketed it and then sold it.  And someone had it… where exactly? In a safe?  Did they stuff it in their pocket as a good luck charm?  Did they braid some of it to make a locket?  Did they put it under their pillow to be just a little bit closer to the King?

Looking at the unruly image of the hair on TV made me feel a little bit woozy.  It wasn’t even combed or tamed.  The clump of hair reminded me of the Three Stooges– was it Moe with that unruly black thatch on his head?  It looked like a mouse’s nest, or the things bird’s assemble to build nests from trash piles.

It had been just that morning that  I’d bent down to the drain in my own shower and retrieved a giant octopus of my family’s hair which had stubbornly lodged itself in the holes of the drain and seemed to grow in size as I pulled.  Other people’s hair, anyone’s vomit and rodents with tiny feet and tails are three of my top “household items” that can make me throw up just a little bit in my mouth.

So that thought that someone kept, for 50 years, a clump of someone else’s hair? And then the thought that someone paid a year and a half of college tuition for it in real dollars today is a little beyond me.  What in the world is the world coming to?

But I will tell you what this has taught me.  Don’t throw a damned thing out!  My kids old sneakers, their fingernail cuttings, the old third grade artwork.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

On the slim chance that my kids grow up and become famous– which seems to be as easy as being on a reality show these days, all of these items might one day help support Mommy in her old age.  I’m beginning to rethnk the concept of spring cleaning for this year and I urge you to do it too.

Well, it happens to all of us.  I have writer’s block and its OK.  I simply don’t feel like writing and all of my fall/halloween/ work duties are overwhelming me.

In fact, I don’t feel so hot. Could it be swine flu?  Please Lord, no.  So I’m going to crawl under the covers right now and fend it off.  I have a son coming home form college today and I want to be happy and chipper and make his favorite meal. Right now?  I feel like the meal.  Leftovers.

I am working on a new blog about throwing out my bra.  the one that has supported me through good times and bad for the past 3 years.  Yes, I wear a good bra into the ground.

So when I get my mojo back…. ill have a new blog.  In the mean time- some more of my favorite words– they are just fun to say.  And Id like to hear yours too.

CRISP

STENCH

DECREPIT

REPULSIVE

It was a summer of interruption. “Summerus Interruptus,” I called it and I can’t remember another summer like it. Maybe its because there are four kids and two dogs and every time someone walks by our lawn the dogs bark, as if to defend their turf.

Maybe it’s because my Dad’s dementia has progressed and so the three of us daughters shuttle him back and forth between our summer cottages to give my Mom a break. We want to spend some quality time with him before we all fade in his mind, and because this is what family does.

Maybe it’s because even though I am supposed to be writing, and answering emails, I find myself drifting out to my beloved garden, the dahlias of all shapes, sizes and colors, the pesky crabgrass poking through the mulch. These are easy solutions to easy problems; pluck and they are gone. The chapter I’m writing? Not so easy. On day two of creation, I’ve already deleted most of it.

The problem of the dementia, the slow erasing of my Dad has no easy solution. We will watch, and help, repeat and explain and there is nothing at all to make it better. We are voyeurs to the demise of a man we love and the heartbreaking burden on my mother, who has raised the three of us and now, in her golden years, is caring for a toddler-like person again.

When the phone rang on my last full day of summer camp for the kids, I was deep in my emails, deep in crossing things off lists. I almost didn’t answer it.

“Lee,” my mother said, and I could hear the strain in her voice. “I’d like to ask you a favor.” My mother is a woman who doesn’t like to ask anyone for anything if she can help it. She is, by nature, a giver.

“Sure, Mom,” I kept my voice even but I rolled my eyes. Another interruption. All of these emails blinking at me, the people waiting for answers to questions, the fundraiser for the wounded soldiers, the plane reservations for vacation I had to untangle. “This is your mother,” I told myself. “Calm down, slow down, it will all get done.”

“Dad was going to trim my hair, like he always does. But he is feeling dizzy, he bent over in the yard and now he is lying down. I’ve got my scissors here and wet hair. Can I come over?”

“Of course,” I said. And it wasn’t until later that I realized the right thing to do would have been to go to her. I was too entangled in my own work and needs.

“Do you have some coffee for Dad?” she asked. And I realized that she would be bringing him, like a child, in tow.

“Come on over,” I said enthusiastically. “But I can’t guarantee I’m a great haircutter.”

In college I had a brisk business cutting men’s hair. I set up shop in the bathroom that connected the boy’s dorm to the girls, a feature that was a constant source of amusement for us young coeds.

Something about cutting my own mother’s hair, however, made me feel slightly nervous. I suppose that I wanted to do it perfectly.

A few moments later I heard her car on the gravel and her small, slight figure shuffled in. She had a makeshift cape of dry cleaning bag on her shoulders, an old comb, missing some teeth and a pair of hair cutting scissors.

I settled my Dad down, trying not to feel the pain in the look of defeat on his face. I gave him water and urged him to drink, fed him the leftover French toast, now cold, from my daughters’ pre-camp breakfast.

Then I went outside where my mother was patiently waiting for me to cut her hair.

‘I don’t know, Mom,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m going to be very good.

“Oh, its just a straight edge,” she waved my concerns away. The scissors were dull and I went upstairs to get my own haircutting scissors. She held a hand mirror out in front of her to watch.

There was something so heartbreakingly intimate about that act. I touched my mother’s hair, barely gray at 76. I was doing for her what she had done for me and my sisters for all those years when we were really young. I suppose she’d cut our hair at home as she is doing it now, out of frugality and ease.

“Its just a simple, straight across cut,” she said. My mother has never been one for vanity. I love her for that.

“I can take you to get it cut in town,” I said. “It was only $17.00 for me.

She smiled with her lips closed and shook her head. “Your father has been doing this for years,” she said. “It’s just fine.”

I thought about the act of my father cutting my mother’s hair. I wondered if, with his shaking hands, he would be able to do it going forward. I thought about my mother, who had once been told that the future was secure. Now I knew that she worried about the cost of this long, slow slide with dementia, the agonizing lingering of a partial person, the vast cost of health care and nursing homes.

I did a decent job. And then I looked her square in the face to make sure the sides were even and gently sloped the way she had requested. What had started as a dutiful task had become an act of love, a care giving of the ultimate caregiver.

No child is ever prepared when the roles reverse, sometimes, gently, like a beautiful slow dance, other times in an instant, the aftermath of an accident or illness. My sisters and I have learned to be the parents at times, to ease the fears the way my mother and father once snuck into our rooms to banish the monsters under the bed.

I am taking care now. I am noticing these small moments, trying to slow time down. I see these experiences as gifts of grace rather than inconveniences, interruptions in my busy day.

“It looks great,” she says enthusiastically, positioning the plastic hand mirror to see the back of her head. My Dad finishes the last of his coffee, rises from the stool steadily and beams at me. It seems the earlier events have been forgotten.

“You just come back if you see any strays,” I said. And they both bent to hug me.

I am not kidding.  I went to search for the bullet and it has disappeared. Truly.  I kid you not.

There it was. A bullet in my sink. That’s right, a bullet. We’d been gone all summer and we came home to find a bronze metal bullet standing straight up like a bra cup in my stainless steel sink.

I thought nothing of this. My husband had spent half of his reporting life covering wars and he’d been in and out of the house all summer. After his visits overseas, odd items showed up around our house as a result of covering stories in third world countries. We now had a collection of knives, spears, and weird guns that looked like blunderbusses or something from the colonial era.

He spent a great deal of time reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the wounded families left in their wake. He hung out with soldiers who had recently returned, had a cache of awards and honors and military coins of his own that had been given to him by various generals and commanders in all branches.

So when I walked in and saw the bullet, I shrugged. No big deal. It must have fallen out of his stuff while we’d been away, pulled out during his nightly emptying-the-pockets routine. Over the next few days, as we unpacked and settled back into the house, the subject of the bullet came up.

“Why is there a bullet in our kitchen?” my daughter asked, and I shrugged.

“It must be Dad’s,” I said. “He just got back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe he got it over there.”

“Mom, nice bullet!” my son Mack said to me the next morning, breezing into the kitchen after sleeping until noon.

“The better to keep you in line with,” I joked. He was leaving for college in five days and his absence and truculence was getting on my nerves. He was being mean to me, subconsciously on purpose, to help with the cutting of ties.

“Did you know there is a stray bullet in the kitchen? “ Bob asked me casually one day. And that was when I perked up. The use of the word stray implied that there were more, tamer ones, bullets that stayed in line.

“Yeah, isn’t it yours?”

“Mine? Nope. What would I be doing with a bullet?” he said as if I was accusing him of packing heat.

I then questioned the babysitter, who wasn’t a weapons kind of gal, but she had been keeping an eye on the house and cleaning during our absence.

“Diana,” I said casually. “Any chance you left a bullet lying around?

Her eyes widened in response. “It’s so strange,” she said. “One day that bullet was just here, in the kitchen,” she said solemnly. She couldn’t really pinpoint exactly when it had appeared.

Bob had suggested throwing it out. We probably did need to get rid of the bullet, but no one seemed to want to take responsibility.

Now I was nervous. Who, other than dictators and mobsters, finds bullets in their kitchen? Was this a symbol? A sign? A warning?

We lived in a fairly quiet, white and uptight neighborhood. It’s not exactly drive-by shooting territory, but who knows, maybe the bullet had been shot through a window. Maybe my husband had just ended an affair, my son had made an enemy on the soccer field or perhaps I had cut somebody off in the church parking lot. Goodness gracious there was a lot of talk about road rage these days. Anything was possible.

So here was the thing. There was a bullet….. standing up, in my kitchen.

We talked about the bullet on and off and back and forth, as if none of us wanted to be the one to dispose of it. Maybe, in essence, the bullet worked in reverse as a kind of protection, armor or amulet.

And so the days passed. And the bullet stayed. It moved from the counter up to the window sill. It stood, like some common household appliance, right next to the kitchen timer, as causally as people perch salt and pepper shakers next to each other.

“What if it falls into the garbage disposal and goes off with a bang?” my husband joked with me as he poured milk in his coffee one morning, But still, I felt unable to throw it out. And I didn’t want him to either.

Somehow that bullet was meant to be in our kitchen, I determined. It had become kind of comforting, protective.

“Why is a bullet in the kitchen?” asked my mother in law a week later as she visited from Detroit. She was doing the dishes after dinner and had glanced up at the window sill where it sat pointing skyward like a mini missile silo.

“It’s for good luck,” I answered simply. And she, who is hard of hearing and is becoming more garbled in thought and speech, nodded her head as she scrubbed the pots, as if this was the most normal thing in the world.