A hat full of hope

We had a bit of a hoedown at the Ponderosa last night. It was, and I'll put this delicately, gruesome and pretty overpowering. I think that this time of year has essential characteristics of madness and chaos. It's no accident that the most holy of days for some, and the darkest shortest lousiest day come all at the same time.
It got so bad, and to know Echo, is to get a glimmer of the level of tension that we had to machete our way through, she was so scared of Eamon that she snapped at him and peed in our bed as he was trying to pick her up to be taken outside.
Today with the rising of the sun, came a brightness that had been missing for the last week. I'm going to say that it was a step towards normalization. The old man went to work, and we started to pick up the pieces of our shattered lives and, I returned to the land of the Internet hostesses, replete with snapping fingers and "hey, Miss!"