oh sure, that is exactly what it is. Just like the note he wrote me over a year ago that said I smelled like poop. I want to frame it, but I am not sure where it got to.

Heh. I remember once tearing up a love note my mom had written to me in front of her (I had saved it because it always made me feel good) when I was somewhere between 12 and 14. I was SO MAD I couldn't even yell at her, so I destroyed something she'd given me out of love. So transparent, that.

Hours later she found me sobbing in my room, frantically trying to tape it back together again.

I wonder whatever happened to that. I probably still have it somewhere.

....I have no idea what I was SO MAD at her about. Those were really emotionally bad years. Even at my worst in the past decade or so, and there were some really really bad doldrums, I never want to repeat that age. Ever.

I'm trying to imagine my mother writing me a love note when I was young. She'll send me kinda schmoopy emails once in a blue moon these days (okay, once on my birthday, and migraine-related sympathy), but growing up? In my late teens I finally asked her if she'd ever been proud of me. She looked surprised at the question, and not in an "Of course so!" sort of a way.

I'm pretty sure all of the love notes I've gotten from relatives have been on bananas.

I just got someone else's work email. It's late for that! I'll write back tomorrow.

I'm pretty sure all of the love notes I've gotten from relatives have been on bananas.

what now?

Oh, and putting on an old Criminal Minds reminds me that my bartender tonight was the French Matthew Gray Gubler.

what now?

If you scratch something on a banana in the morning, it shows up brown by lunchtime. Cute!

I'm pretty sure all of the love notes I've gotten from relatives have been on bananas.

???

Affection is given and received more normally from non-immediate family members. Except for K. He's creepy with it.

My parents and their lack of demonstrativeness resulted in one kid being very stoic and one being very needy. I leave it to the audience to decide which is which. But mummy and daddy have gotten sappy as they grow old, and I'm willing to cuddle with just about anyone not in my immediate family. No schmoop talk, though. I may take a bullet for you, but I won't say the L-word.

It was a rough time for me. The note basically said she liked who I was becoming and referenced a specific situation and how I reminded her of her mom (still the best compliment ever.) And that she loved me and was proud of me.

I didn't know my maternal grandmother that well, she died when I was in my early teens. But she graduated in math from Grinnell in the 30s, was a farmwife during the Depression and teacher, loved to swim and sail (I only learned about the swimming recently. She drove through blizzards in a tractor against my Grandpa's strenuous objections to the nearest town with a pool. I can now sympathize.) She was interested in everything, loved to talk about world politics. Grandpa used to invite in door-to-door missionaries in because she'd sweetly debate them to tears over biblical stuff, she was a very liberal lutheran (she was always annoyed, but Grandpa liked to watch her shut them down.) She was really a renaissance woman, one who never left the country.

To be compared to her? WOW.

Is mine the only family that writes on bananas???