"I'm Falling in Love With Someone"

Victor Herbert is still not doing it for me. And although I find the repeated leap of a ninth fascinating in this song, the text is never helpful in getting up there. An 'ah' vowel of some sort, please? Or once? I'm being lazy, I know. I didn't say that I didn't make the leap, I just didn't enjoy it as much as I could have.

It's snowing here, which is always magical. Something about snow just takes me, and a lot of other folks, back to childhood. Days off of school, snowball fights, amazing snow forts. I think of a few things in particular: Building a snow house in floor plan, marking out all the rooms, walking through them, laying down in the 'bedrooom'. The super long sled runs my brothers created, starting way up the hill, in the woods, a vertical drop of about six feet behind the garage, and then down the driveway to a final jump (the inner tube worked better on this than the sled, admittedly). And snowmobile rides with my grandfather up the mountains.

We don't talk to my grandfather anymore. He's still alive, but a bit insane. He's accused my father of having an FBI file three inches thick, and of running drugs with his cousin in California, who he hasn't seen or talked to in a decade or so. He wasn't always insane, but he's always been a bit of an asshole. He had a rough life himself, with an alcoholic father, and never quite figured out the love thing. My father once admitted to me that he married my mother for her loving family, as much as for herself. But I still remember how charming my grandfather could be when he chose, his stories, his bad jokes, and the fact that I look like my father, and him. As far as I know, I'm the only female in our family who carries this face, though there have been lots of males, including a couple of my brothers, who have it.

Of my siblings, I'm the one with the most, or possibly only, good memories of my grandparents on that side. I still remember Christmases there, and my grandmother's cooking, and her smile. She's seen my daughter twice, though not recently. She's still alive too, but we stopped having as much contact with her when she first chose not to see my father, one Christmas. My mom lost sympathy for her at that point. She thought that there should be nothing that would make a mother choose to not see her children.

On the whole, my family is very close. We all get along really well, there's a lot of love and laughter. I feel very lucky, knowing that lots of folks don't have this. But I remember at one point my father stopped saying, 'Your family will always be there for you.' Thankfully, this is still true for us, his children. He chose well.