Today was day one of working. Up at the ass crack of dawn, jerky zombie-like movements for the first few hours with an IV full of coffee hooked up.

I spent the morning filing, photocopying, and cutting and pasting. It's rather mindless shut-your-brain-off work, but for $12 an hour I can handle it. It's kind of odd being privvy to people's medical records, knowing such intimate details even for people I don't know. Anal fissures, psychosis, pap smears oh my!

~*~

I don't know if it's because I'm exceptionally tired tonight or if it's because I'm currently bleeding like a stuck pig, but I feel extra melancholy. Bellan's stepmother was sending me pictures of their trip to Green Gables, and all I could think about was my grandmother. She passed away when I was 7, and I have vague memories of random events. I remember my third birthday, when both my grandmother and grandfather were alive and they gave me my first tricycle. I remember her in the kitchen, and I remember watching her give herself insulin injections.

She loved Anne of Green Gables. This I don't remember, but my dad told me the first time I read the books at 17. She was born in 1917, and grew up on a farm with cows and crops and an apple orchard. They were isolated, practically pioneers in the 20th century. She identified with Anne, and read the book every year of her life. I have an image of her in my head, reading by the gas lamp or by candlelight, devouring the book the same way I did some 65/70 years later.

While I don't exactly believe in angels or spirits, I've always felt her around me, watching over me and encircling me with her love and being. It was hard growing up without proper grandparents, but part of me has always been relieved that she died when I was so young, too young to understand. I don't think I could have handled the loss of someone like her, handled the loss of what our relationship could have been.

I wonder if she reads Anne's adventures over my shoulder, smiling when Anne breaks the slate over Gilbert's head, crying when Matthew dies. I wonder what she would have thought of the movies.

But most of all I wonder what she would have thought of me.