189.366 - 2016 project and muddle

every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates

muddle

the English language has stolen words from countless languages, but one of the best thefts is muddle.  we weren't satisfied to steal it, we stole it and twisted its meaning and added meanings of our own, twisted those and wound up with the muddle it means today!  when I first ran into it, I was a child trying to understand this mysterious place grownups called "home".  the grownups were mostly UnitedStatesian Baptist missionaries in northeastern Brasil, where I lived, who made it very clear that where they lived and worked was definitely not home.  the other two accesses I had to "home" were Time magazine and the Reader's Digest.  so I may have had a distorted idea of "home".  but in one of them I ran into the word muddle, and looked it up in the dictionary.  I should probably call it the Dictionary.  it was an Unabridged Dictionary with its own wooden stand.  whenever I ran into a word I didn't know, I looked the word up in that Dictionary.  often that helped, but sometimes I would look up some word like hempsquatch, for instance, and be told that it meant a sampbiddle of froombisqutable vornadoes or a hoople of polisidereal formpfnagels. these are not helpful to a foreign child, who can only imagine the beings to whom those mean something.  but muddle wan't like that.  it had half a dozen or so meanings, and I understood each!  better than that, it was like a secret word!  it fit so many things I ran into.  the time after a school assembly was announced but before it started.  what grownups sounded like talking before an event.  my room before my mother lost her temper.  (I never found it.  prob'ly just as well.)  my family when I tried to figure out how anyone ever put us together.  the books in my "library".  what a map of all the ways I had walked home would look like.  what life felt like.  the bicycle I'd seen after a truck ran over it.  I treasured that word!  I'm not sure I ever used it out loud until long after the grownups yanked me out of northeastern Brasil and dumped me into this place called "home".  which was indeed just like Time or the Reader's Digest had described it.