Ella had been surrounded by mental illness all her life it seemed. First her parents with their obsessions and alcoholism and then her first husband with is Jekell and Hyde personality. There was her aunt who committed suicide, then one of her daughters began seeing a psychiatrist for anxiety. But the straw that broke the camels back was her new husband. She guessed on some unconscious level she had always known it. But she was so happy to have someone want her and to have a husband again, she pushed any thought of his quirky personality out of her mind. Until one day it was just to much to keep the illusion going. She just had to come to terms with it and be honest with herself. She had married another kook. No wonder, she thought I am attracted to such people. It is all I have ever known my entire life. I either cannot recognize what normal is, or I have become so use to people with mental issues that it is my normal. Or maybe I just have very poor judgement, she thought. Ella stared out at the lake that stretched before her as she crossed her arms over ther stomach and walked on. She ambled along the shore, stepping over clumps of yellow grasses and mounds of red clay. Fall had given way to winter just a few days earlier and the bleak sky cast a gray pallor over eveerything, as far as she could see, fron one end of the lake to the other. A crow cawed and the sound of a distant moking bird drifted over the glassy water. She had another thought as she pondered the morning of acromony that had ended in her drive up to the lake. Maybe it is just men in general who are crazy. Maybe it is all that testosterone coursing through them that makes them so single minded, so determined, so oblivious.