Songs in my head: “Nightswimming” by REM and “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star. The first because it’s used in an episode of Shrinking, which I recently watched, and it takes me back to sitting on balconies in Memphis, evenings heady with the scent of magnolias and jasmine, drinking wine, and listening to the cicadas (and this song). It’s one of my favorites, possibly one of the best REM songs. Kind of weirdly, I sang it to O and J when they were babies, except that musically it really does feel like a lullaby.

The latter, because — same. Memphis, cicadas and wine. I can’t believe that was over 20 years ago.

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Present Day: I spent all of Friday and most of Saturday up in Bangor at a foster care conference. It’s been at least 3 years since I traveled by myself, possibly 4, and it was weird. As a card-carrying independent introvert who did everything by herself for decades, it never occurred to me that I could get used to traveling in a pack. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoyed getting take-out from Chipotle and eating it in my pj’s all by myself, no child perched on my knee sticking his hands in my food, and I did not miss having to referee some kid conflict every sixty seconds. I slept in a giant bed by myself, though fitfully (despite running the fan all night). But I had to drag my own bags to and from the car, and I had to eat (a terrible) breakfast by myself, and I missed being woken up by the almost-3 year old crawling in next to me happily announcing “I wake up! I see Mama!”

(I swear, my kids calling me “Mama” is one of the best sounds ever. Well, really it’s more like “Mumma” but we’ll roll with the conventional spelling.)

Also? Bangor is not far from UMO, the university I thought I would transfer to so I could be with my high school boyfriend (who would, a decade later, become the Memphis boyfriend) — until I broke up with him mid-way through my freshman year of college and decided NOT to transfer after all. I was also worried that going to UMO would just be a repeat of high school, because so many kids from my high school wound up there. Last year I had lunch with Marci, someone I grew up with and went to UMO herself, and she said she rarely saw anyone from our hometown, so perhaps I was wrong. God knows how many years of therapy I’ve done and I still have people from back then who just have the ability to make me feel badly about myself. (And then I keep running into them anyway, because the universe is out to get me, I guess). Or maybe I’m the bad penny in this story – “in my defense, I have none for never leaving well enough alone”, to quote Taylor. More likely none of it matters one way or the other; contrary to the side of the internet who thinks the Hadron collider shifted timelines, I fear this timeline is set — like it or not.

And speaking of timelines: I’ve been thinking a lot about the book “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” by Madeline L’Engle, part of the “Wrinkle In Time” series (also known as the Time Quartet series). I’ve read it so many times I could probably recite whole passages from memory. Basically, Charles Wallace and his sister Meg wind up going back in time to fix some “might have beens” in order to prevent nuclear war. Why was I reading this at age 10 at the height of the cold war?! Ooof. But I keep feeling like someone from the future needs to figure out how to do this, fix the might-have-beens and right the wrongs…’cause we’re in deep, y’all.