They're married! In less than 10 minutes. The bride looked beautiful, my mom looked great (I'll be lucky to look that good at 64, let alone at 31...), Ryan looked great and actually let people take pictures of him, and the Justice of the Peace wants to take violin lessons. The tiny church meant that I had to play for, oh, about 2 minutes total, which seemed ironic considering that I'd just driven three and a half hours back from Plymouth, MA to be at the ceremony. It was worth it, though.

After a brief stop at the reception, I headed home to say hi to Bonita and to pick up a few things (more socks, a blanket for M., salt water to gargle for my oncoming sore throat), and then got in the car to drive back to Plymouth to continue teaching tango at Pinewoods. Whew.

What I liked about my long weekend teaching tango with M. at Pinewoods, in no particular order:

• teaching with M. Many people asked whether we'd been teaching together for a long time, and told me they loved how we finished each other's sentences.
• teaching tango to folk dancers, who are just so happy and excited to be dancing.
• watching people start to look like tango dancers! So exciting!
• lying in my bed in the cabin late at night, listening to contradance music in the big pavilion.
• hearing amazing live music played [oddly enough] by amazing live musicians.
• skinny-dipping in Round Pond in the mornings.
• skinny-dipping in Long Pond late at night after dancing.
• meeting tons of fun and happy people.
• playing with the handmade marble machines in the camp toilets (must be seen to be believed).
• seeing tons of dances I didn't even know existed! (rapper dancing??)
• being in the woods.

I am not allowed to talk to D. anymore. Yesterday's marathon of gut-wrenching sobbing and a good dose of self-directed anger/guilt left me weary and sad.

As I later told M., luckily for him, he's in Montana and thus somewhat protected from my bleak mood. Today we discussed the difference between love and dependency, of loving someone but not feeling "in love", of loving someone but not feeling like you're really yourself when you're with that person. I expect I'll be thinking about this a lot.

I resolve to keep my messy feelings on the outside and not squirrel them away.

Something happens when Lori and Al and Austen come to visit. One moment I'm a relatively sane, competent adult, and the next minute I'm in the Whole Grocer with Austen on my hip, pointing to boxes of spaghetti/linguini/elbows and saying: "pasta!" over and over, until all of the store employees duct-tape my mouth shut.

Something happens when Austen sits in my lap to eat his dinner and I have to eat around him. It's very relaxing and satisfying, kind of like when Bonita sits in my lap, but with no cat hair in my food.

Something happens when I get to go on morning walks with Lori--I wish she lived here! :-)

I've been counteracting my glum mood by playing tunes from the Portland Collection, which I bought when I was at Pinewoods. I wasn't sure how to go about learning the hundreds of tunes in the book, so I decided to start with the ones that had the funniest or most descriptive names, or the ones that had completely undecipherable names full of apostrophes. There's something so lighthearted about contradance music that I can't help but be cheered by it.

On Friday I cut a restful visit to the camp short so I could have my doctor check out my ear/throat pain when swallowing. At that point, the pain was mostly in my ear and, after flushing my "excessive earwax", (I believe I snorted on the examination table due to "excessive imagery"), he sent me on my way. A day and many salt-water gargles later, the throat pain is now much worse, prompting me to cancel both my Music Together teacher training class next week, (involving lots of singing), and my trip to NYC to visit E. Double bummer.

As I wait it out until Monday to see whether the throat gets better or worse, I find myself in my usual "I'm sick" mode, which is to say: trying not to overexert myself, yet not bore myself to death. After transplanting the 4 eggplants that S. gave me yesterday when I went to her house to collect a carful of 30-pound rocks (thus flunking on the overexertion front), I pruned some water sprouts off the plum tree and spent some time sitting around the yard in various places, trying to figure out where I will plant blueberry bushes and wondering whether American persimmon trees will be taller than my two maple trees at maturity. And is that OK, or will I be tortured in 15 or 20 years because the trees aren't following the lines of the house? Perhaps pear trees instead? Ooohhhh, but I really want to try the persimmons.

Anyway, just about the time I had decided where the blueberry bushes should go, Bonita decided to accidentally fall off the deck, (her third time but the only time I've actually witnessed it), landing with an impressive plop upright on the driveway. I hastened inside with the slightly freaked-out (and thus ultra-fluffy) furball, who proceeded to go right back out on the deck and stick her head through the railing. Duh.

Then inside, I got on the computer to see if the mycorrhizal fungi associated with cranberries will live in coconut fiber instead of peat, and then proceeded to look up blueberry habitat. Thanks to "Brad S.", I now know that "The Native Americans eat them and use them for craziness." Hmmm...to promote it or to hinder it? Inquiring minds want to know--especially the inquiring minds of those who spend most of the year dreaming of mountain blueberry (and soon, yard blueberry) season. Mmmmmmmmm.