I remember playing hide-and-seek once as a child when I hid so well that I was never found!  The hiding place of choice was the spare bedroom.  But we never went there, it was just too scary.  It’s not that the room itself was scary, but we had to pass the wall furnace in the hall to get to the room.  And the wall furnace was surely a tool of the devil himself to instil fear in us and keep us in bed at night.  It was one of those old gas units that hung on the wall were you could see the pilot light inside, and the bar of flames running across the front.  At night, when all the lights were off, this metal contraption hanging on the wall was nothing more than a cage for the monster or even worse the *gasp* demon face of fire inside it.  We held a healthy respect for that furnace, and in turn for the whole hall and the bedrooms beyond it.  But, as it was the middle of the day in the middle of the summer somewhere in Oklahoma, I braved the hall of fear and as my sister counted to 50 I made my way under a pile of blankets in the corner of the spare room.  And I waited. I waited, and waited and waited… but no one came to find me.  I remember the suffocating heat under the blankets.  I remember the sweat starting to roll down my brow and how it stung as it spilled into my eyes.  But I still waited.  It was The Best hiding place I had ever had and I hid there fantasising about how everyone would congratulate me on such a wonderful hiding place I’d found… but they never came.  The blankets weighed soooo heavy on my little head and shoulders.  I was nearly bent in two with the load on top of me…

In searching for a description of how I have felt for the last few days weeks months, this was the closest I have come to it.  The childhood memory of being weighed down by heavy blankets.  Only now, I am not physically bowed, but in the same way the weight of my hiding place put pressure on me, I feel somehow my head and heart have been burdened. Emotionally I have had what seemed to be a weighty shroud resting on me.  I have had some valid, big (read huge, ginormous, whoppingly fantastic) stress, and I have had a few extremely petty things hanging on me.  The petty ones have become HUGE.  Things that would normally never even faze me have totally floored me!!

The good news though, I think I am finding the way out from under my metaphoric pile of blankets.  I will try tomorrow to tell you about one of the petty, parasitical things that has been threatin’ my mojo!!  It is (now) fun to tell, if I can do it justice in writing… but the full resolution won’t be in place until tomorrow morning!

PS.  They never did find me under all those blankets AND I was accused of cheating when I crawled out an eternity later, hair matted to my head with sweat!!  That still pisses me off 30 years later!!  (yes, I *am* that old… but chances are, you are too!)