The Spin Cycle this week is LOVE.

Living with people you love isn’t always easy. But just when you wonder if it’s all worth it and maybe your life would be simpler and more peaceful if you did a nonalcoholic version of Kerouac and took off with that backpack and headed, say, to a train (and no, Captain, we do not have trains over here I’d have to take a plane first, which does change the whole running away mysticism). What was I saying? Oh yeah. Just when you wonder if all the anxiety and stress is something you can live with FOREVER, it stops. And you feel the love come pouring in, like a calm blanket, and it wraps you up and you know you would lie down in front of that train instead of getting on it if you needed to in order to make your loved ones life better somehow. And I guess that’s what we do metaphorically every time we stick around when it’s not pretty.

I woke up from a dream this morning. My dreams can get fairly bizarre, but this one was so simple, it was like dream interpretation for intuitive idiots. In my dream I was at the movies with my daughter. I was watching the movie, but I was holding a white teddy bear with a red ribbon tied around its neck. We were sitting in the side aisle. Along through the middle aisle, I feel before I see someone approaching. It’s my husband, and he’s making his way over to us. And guess what is in his arms? A bigger-than-mine, white teddy bear and a big cello wrapped bunch of long stemmed red roses. My daughter elbows me and we move down a seat and make room for the hubs. Without saying a word, we both acknowledge we are not angry any more, and shake our heads at the matching make up gifts.

I know it sounds as corny as a carnival dog, but that’s the dream. Very clichéd, yes. But in reality, we have NEVER given each other stuffed animals, so I guess my psyche was telling me we are both a couple of toddlers when it comes to holding a grudge and staying pissy.

So I wake up from this dream and it’s, of course, 3:30 AM (because that is the usual insomniac moment of waking and not being able to go back to sleep for me) and I look over at my sleeping husband and it is like watching a terrible two year old. Remember those days? The wild child by day looks like an angel when sleeping? I see the peacefulness of his sleep rimmed with the worry of work being slow and bills not paid. Instead of wanting to hit him over the head with a blue pillar, I want to lay my hand over his forehead and somehow absorb the anxiety that haunts him.

I go into my son’s room and there is my 6’1” gangly sixteen year old sprawled as only a teenager can when knocked out for the night. He looks totally konked, but as I brush the hair off of his forehead, he smiles in his sleep, opens one eye, and mutters as he falls back to sleep, “love you mom.”

My heart melts and is refueled at the same time.

Punahou Carnival 1994. How's this for a Valentine's photo? The boy is a sweet 19 month old in the arms of his father. Grandma was still with us. She raised my husband and we made a home for her after we bought our house. Daughter is a precious 4 and a half year old looking like a poster girl for cotten candy. The giant balloon baseball bat is a bit of a scary foreshadowing of the bam bam nature of my men, but we are letting that go...

I don't remember my husband having pink shorts...I don't think he'd be able to pull that off these days, not quite sure if he pulled it off then...just saying.

Happy Valentine's week. For more love spins, head on over to Sprite's Keeper.