The next morning I went for my walk, almost four miles this time, and then went back to bed again. I was definitely feeling that trail ride in my sit bones!
Later the relatives found it hilarious that I'd slept all morning. I found it vaguely insulting that they found it hilarious. It was my vacation, and I'm pretty sure I did more physical activity the previous day than any of them. Cousin P- was there but she wasn't one of the folks who found it funny (probably because she'd be along for most of Friday's wild ride.)
Everybody showed up around 3 ish, although a few more trickled in later.
Cousin G- and A-'s son, daughter-in-law, and family live in the farm across the street. They weren't coming to the reunion, but the son was cultivating the pumpkin field directly opposite the open garage we were in. He finished up right as people started arriving, but then he left the cultivator running. Right at the garage door with only the width of the double-wide driveway between it. Very loud and incredibly hard to hear people talking over it.
Most of the older relatives either farmed or (they all) grew up on a farm, and I guess the noise didn't bother them, but I thought that it was extremely thoughtless to have left it on, and left it right there (it's a big field--he could have driven to the other end. It's not like the cultivator belonged in the garage; its home was across the street in the farm buildings).
In addition, I was tired, and in pain, and I'd had a lot of social activity already this trip. I complained about the noise to one of my relatives, thinking surely somebody else was bothered by the fact that we couldn't hear ourselves speak much less understand what each other was saying. She duly went and told either Cousin A- or Cousin G-, but someone went and told son that he needed to move the cultivator "because it was bothering <my name>".
So before he moved it, he decided to come over and tell me that I was too sensitive and just needed to spend some time on a farm. He was very derisive about it. (Apparently my negative reaction to the intense smell of the mulch when we first arrived at their place two days before had also been conveyed to him. I thought that had been between Cousin A- and me. And I'd only wanted to know what that smell was, not demanded it be eliminated or anything.)
I managed to assess my feelings, ascertain that they were unlikely to lead to anything good happening if I stayed, and leave without saying the nasty things I wanted to say in return. I went in the house (which luckily reduced the sound of the cultivator considerably) and went to my room (I thought "there's a distinct benefit to the reunion being held at the same place I'm staying at that I hadn't thought of till now--I have a place to retreat to") and stayed there.
For a while. The sensory overload produced the meltdown I'd felt coming, and while my meltdowns are unpleasant to watch (and be inside of), they aren't noisy. I just sat in the corner by the half-sized sofa and rocked while I cried quietly. I heard the cultivator moving off, and fade into the distance. I was just as glad this meant the departure of the son as I was glad about the cessation of the noise.
I scraped myself together, washed my face in the bathroom sink that was on my end of the house and wasn't the bathroom everyone else had been invited to use, so no fear anyone would come in and ask what's wrong, and then went back out among the people.
Luckily, the first people I started talking to were a married cousin pair who do contract manufacturing of supplements. I mean, they're the contract end, not the manufacturing end. So they're the people who would pay us to make their product for them. And this was cool because rarely do they get to talk to the analytical chemist testing their product and producing the CoAs for them (that's Certificate of Analysis) so not only did we get to have a back-and-forth conversation about it (and that type of conversation is difficult for me if it's something I'm passionately interested in--I dominate the conversation--or not interested in at all--I don't say much) it was about something I know back to front but that I'm not passionately interested in.
I guess what I'm trying to say was, it was about the easiest way to ease back into social behavior after a meltdown that I could have come up with if I'd thought about it!
And the rest of the night I quite enjoyed myself. I love reunions, and there are so very few "bad" incidents like the two I've described here that I often forget that they can happen, and they take me by surprise when they do.
I got to talk to my Uncles H-, and S-, and my Aunts F- and M- during the eating part of the reunion; I talked to other aunts and uncles during the rest of it, and the few cousins who showed up.
And then, when the sun was setting, Cousin M-, wandering around the front yard, found a kitten, about 8 months old. A very friendly kitten. Knowing I like cats, this kitten was deposited into my hands.
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| Crouching on the ground, my knees up under my dress, cuddling the kitten and talking to her. |
She was a gray calico, with kitten fuzz all over that made the calico part hard to see. She was purring and liked to be petted but then was very squirmy and wanted down. Her sharp little kitten claws got me a good one on my arm before I could safely put her on the ground (didn't want to drop her upside down or anything, and squirmy doesn't begin to discover the contortions a kitten can put herself in). Made me think, "hm, I need to clip my boys' claws when I get home; believe that's this weekend." (They get clipped every other week now.)
She bounced around from person to person. We'd moved the chairs out in a big circle in the back yard's grass, and some people liked her and accepted her, but Uncle C- didn't notice her climbing up his leg until she got over the knee bend, and reacted very startled and "hey, get away" and shaking his leg to get her off. (She left him, her attention to the humans unfazed.)
I felt critical of this behavior till I thought that I would have done the exact same thing to a dog, so it's not like I have room to talk.
Since we (my parents and I) were traveling back the very next day, I couldn't stay up as long as I wanted to. Going to bed at midnight was not an option tonight. So I said my goodnights and went inside to get ready to go to bed. As if my departure was a signal, though, everybody else slowly broke up and went to their cars and drove home, too. So I didn't miss much of the reunion at the tail end.
Updated later: after I posted this, and my mom read it, she told me something that made me stop and think for a while. Sometime between the reunion and when we left, she was in a conversation with Cousin A- (the one we were staying with) and mom mentioned, referring to me, "you do know she's autistic, right?" And Cousin A- says, "no, I didn't know. So that's why J-'s tractor bothered her."
Okay, think about it for a second. They didn't know. They only knew that I was upset by the tractor noise--that I didn't like it. In fact, I doubt any of them realized just how bad it was for me, since I wasn't complaining in a very constructive or informative fashion about it. But they had J- move the tractor anyway.
Because one person didn't like it. (My dad explained that for all the "old folks" there, the sound was simply background noise that reminded them pleasantly of farm life, which is how they all grew up.)
This is why I love my relatives so much. They didn't know I had a neurological reason for having such a dislike of the noise. But they accommodated me anyway. Is that not simply awesome?
My mom says this part of the blog was depressing, and I guess I did go into more detail about the "tractor incident" than everything else, but trust me--I love my relatives, I love spending time with them, and this is one of the main reasons why.
It's just not very interesting to write about the good stuff, which is repetitive (conversations with different relatives) and stays the same (conversations I liked having) ...
Continued in Part V
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