I write because there is no other choice. Because it sorts things out. Makes sense of the chaos.

I write because it helps me find the answer. Because it helps me rest in no-answer.

I write because it continually keeps me alive. Because, at one time, it saved my life.

I write because I have time and I like words.

I write because I want someone to read it. I write because my mom reads it.

I write because I have something to say and I don’t yet know how to use my voice.

I write because it feels like flow and then I can carry on with my day.

I write because I like to explore my mind and your mind and how we’re all just alike.

I write because sometimes I’m not sure what else there is to do.

I write because I’m bored…but not really. That’s just something I say.
I write because inside of me feels like chaos, always.

I write because I like words. I write because I like worlds. Because I like telling stories. Because I like describing the birds as if they were human and myself as if I were a bird.

I write to not forget my dreams and visions and trips.

I write in the hopes that in the future, it will all make sense. I fear it will never make sense.

I write because it’s how I remember.

Can you let me lay here in
the utter unknowing?
In the space with no words?

No questions to ask.
No desire to explain.

Fragments of every facet of life.
What does whole mean?

Let me be all of it. Please
do not try to make sense.
Do not try to apply your logic.
Your own experience.

I do not know what this is either.

Let us rest here,
reflecting the sun.

The shape of me is long and winding.
Stalling out in eddies.
Rushing over cliffs.

The shape of me is a perfect blue water droplet.
Round, un-punctured.

Still. Suspended.

A stew of all things.
Every item in the universe.
In all the universes.
In all existence.

Everything that came,
and everything to come.
It’s all in one body.
Multitudes.

The enormity of seeing,
of knowing,
of a baby’s gaze,
of a still, all-knowing child.

A soupy mix of every feeling that ever existed.
Feelings that have lost their use now,
new feelings waiting for a circumstance that warrants their utility.

Every planet’s evolution,
every species that ever lived,
that ever procreated,
that was aware of its planet’s cycles.

Every energy ever felt.
Every color ever seen, touched, painted, captured.

Every word of every language,
every experience of both man and woman, and no gender.
Every experience of the void.
Every experience of everything, all at once.

Every meaning ever made by anyone about anything at anytime.

Every death.
Every birth.
Every single new beginning.

Every data point measured, or not.

Every day, every second since the beginning, of-which-of-course, there was none, so an infinite amount of moments simmering in one small black iron cauldron.

Three drops and the enormity presses into the epidermis, seeps into the capillaries, sweeps into the veins.
Off to the heart, up to the mind.

In one moment,
awareness of every single thing ever known to anything.

In an instant,
the knowledge of everything ever created and destroyed.

Eyes roll back, head goes limp on neck, knees hit ground, palms grip wooden floor.

How does one accept it all?

How does this feeble, little mind make sense of what I could not begin to comprehend?

Red Fox is not exactly red, but more of a reddish, orangish, tannish brown, which is how I feel most of the time. An earth tone of majesty and passion.

Red is for those who like intensity.

Foxes are intense in their gaze. In their spray of tail. In their general I-give-no-fucks attitude.

I am intense in that I wake at 1am ready to prowl our moon-soaked forest trails. Nothing in me wanting to go back to sleep.

Fox is fluff and fur. She is never cold. Fox knows the best places, out of the wind, to bed down with her babies. Places you could never know about.

I am red because some mornings I wake up with a hot lava mixture of rage and longing and heartbreak flowing through my veins with such intensity I wonder how it is I could relate to anything other than fox, or wolf, or mountain lion.

Some nights I go to bed so wholly confused how a woman can sleep with an entire world of nature happening outside the window.

Hugs. Hands on knees. Hands wiping tears. Head in hands. Phone calls.

I know, sweet love, I know. Sister, I know.

What’s up?

What are you doing?

Can I come over?

I made soup for dinner, come over and have some?

Wanna sit on my couch and watch a movie with me?

Will you lay with me while I cry?

What’re you up to?

How’s your week?

How’s your day?

What’s new?

What should I make for dinner?

I’m losing it. Can you talk?

How’s your trip?

How’d that thing go?

How is it going at home?

I’ve been thinking about you.

I love you. Gosh, I love you.

I love you so much.

This is hard. How did you get through this?

I’m so glad we’re friends.

You’re doing that thing again.

It’s okay, I still love you.

I won’t stop loving you.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

I wonder about the cotton clouds,
their snail pace almost imperceptible.
Always, carrying on.

I wonder about 160,000 years of homo sapien.
How close are we to the first human?

How gradual is the shift?

How protracted my own evolution?

*

*

*

I hear only,

Can you slow down, child?

*

*

*

And then,

Now.

Can you slow down even more?

What she loves about butterflies is how they tell her she’s perfect. How they tell her that nothing is wrong. That all is okay.

What she loves about butterflies is how they metamorphize. How they once were a caterpillar, a creature she likes a lot less, and then that caterpillar turns to goo in a chrysalis and somehow things rearrange into brightly colored tissue paper wings and long antennae. How does the gooey green body of caterpillar turn into an azure blue, the color of the Nicaraguan sea? How does a worm spread wings with false eyes?

Down by the creek she watches the little white cabbage moths tumble over each other in the air. Just above the tamarisk, they somersault. It seems she need only raise her eyes and they always are, telling her all is well.

In fact, they are always visiting her. She doesn’t have to look far and she’ll spot one. They say, there are no problems. Not even death.

They do not visit her directly. One has not landed on her shirt, pumping its wings. She’s never examined one perched on pointer finger.

But they surround her while she sits on a rock overlooking the pond. If she looks closely, she sees them everywhere.

I wonder about the butterflies
that I mistook for detritus,
floating on the surface of the lake.

Sitting next to my love
in a blue paddle boat.

We watched them take flight,
wings soggy with water.
Bright yellow and orange and big.

If this week had a theme to it, it would be something like this:

Girl (woman?) starts going to bootcamp classes and is now dreaming up a new activewear wardrobe.

In between power jacks and burpees, I lay out the details in my head. I think, I’ll use that blue spandex I thrifted a while back. I’ll make a set of leggings (looser, going forward in life) and a little tank top. I want to look cute; a vain (is it?) desire that has accompanied me most of my life.

If this week had a theme to it, it would be moody, misty days in the Rocky Mountain West in early June. We’d mention how the wild flowers just keep going.

It would be muddy mountain roads and soggy dogs and a very dirty house. It would be a brand new couch draped in grimy sheets with no throw pillows. It would be dog pee on my vintage Turkish rug that has now been urinated on so many times that I need to pull it up and hose it down or get it professionally cleaned or just throw it away.

If this week had a theme to it, it would be abundant creativity. Compulsive sewing and a show-and-tell dinner time. It would be a mind obsessed with finishing those flowy pants.

If this week had a theme to it, it would be casually observing this energy to create, how it waxes and wanes; a roller coaster always.

If this week had a theme to it, it would feel brand new and yet the same as always. A girl (woman?) expecting all to be changed and reckoning with her ingrained habits and thoughts. She’s starting to accept that too.

The other night I awoke from a dream and could not remember a single detail of it. The only lingering remnant was the most certain feeling I had worked through something in dreamland. A part of my psyche knew peace it had never felt before. I still don’t know what happened or what was solved in those hours of unconscious amnesia.

And then, for the following four nights, I woke up with my cheek clenched tightly between my teeth.

Somehow I knew Jen’s dad had just been to Disney Land. Maybe, in the cavernous cafeteria in the days prior, over pb & j, Jen had told me her dad was on a business trip there. Maybe she, and I, and the other girls had all fantasized how he was spending his time: wandering around the park alone, riding Space Mountain, drinking chocolate milkshakes, and amassing souvenirs to bring back to the family. More likely, he was holed up in a conference center in Los Angeles and picked up the pencil at a gas station before rushing to make his flight home.

In the classroom that morning our desks were situated into pods, four to a group. Jen’s and mine directly faced each other. The morning bell had just rung and little bodies were struggling to settle. Mrs. Johnson licked her fingers, counting sheets of the floppy beige paper with blue and red lines. Small hands reached into rectangular voids to pull out pencils. A boy lumbered over to the sharpener at the corner of the room by the sink. His arm turned the crank, slow and jerkily, as wood and lead ground into the metal canister. He pulled the pencil out, admired the impossibly sharp point, blew off the sawdust, and shuffled back to his desk.

With my own (already sharpened) pencil in hand, I was primed to get to work, just waiting now for the instructions. Let’s goooo, I thought, as my legs bounced impatiently under my desk. My eyes scanned the room, willing my peers to hurry up, and as they landed squarely on Jen, I felt something was notably different about her: she was giddy. With a coy smile, her bright eyes looked up at me and instantly I knew she had something good to show me.

No doubt, she had been fantasizing about this moment since last night. Since her father pulled the gift out of his own bag and placed it in her hand. I wonder if she slept, knowing how different handwriting practice would be with this new treasure. I wonder if while eating breakfast this morning, she practiced using it, feeling how the weight felt different in her hand, entirely novel.

Slowly, out of the cavity of her desk, she unveiled it.

It was long and fluorescent orange. A pencil. But different. What was that unusual shape?

As she held it upright in front of me, her body started to wiggle. As I focused on the thin piece of orange wood held in front of me, the shape slowly came into focus.

I saw that at the top, the wood deviated from its straight line and gracefully swooped around, up and down and over, to form the outline of a Mickey Mouse head. Through the negative space inside the Mickey Mouse outline, I could see Jen’s face painted with exhilaration.

There was even an eraser on the end of pencil, at the place where Mickey’s neck met itself. Of course, it was an eraser one could never actually use. But its placement was brilliant, nonetheless.

The entire creation was utterly magnificent, like nothing I had ever seen.

I don’t remember asking her if I could hold it. I don’t remember compulsively reaching my arm out and wrapping my chubby fingers around Micky’s ears. I have no memory of pulling the pencil quickly toward me in one motion.

*

But, I do remember feeling the snap.

*

Pause. Silence.

My mouth fell open in disbelief.

I looked down. Mickey Mouse was in my hand

I looked up. The rest of the pencil was still in hers.

Immediately, I shrunk into my tiny plastic chair.

With eyes shut tight, I imagined Jen’s eyes welling up as her soft whimpers became barely audible. In a moment, it was obvious, she was gently weeping.

I opened my eyes, but stayed looking down, shocked and mortified.

And then, out of nowhere, Mrs. Johnson stood over me, hands on her hips, looking wholly disappointed.

A few years ago, I asked Jen about this day. I told her how I’ve carried the guilt and shame of what I did to her pencil over thirty years ago at our miniature desks. I wanted to say, Look at how I was a bull in a china shop, even as a kiddo? Look at how I needed to slow down, even at six years old?

I ask her if she remembers her devastation, how her sweet, shy soul publicly grieved the loss of her father’s gift.

Remember how crushed you were? How your silent tears made the entire class go hushed?

“Really?” she says with a chuckle, “I don’t remember that at all.”

What if each rise and fall of breath didn’t remind us that we are all born, simply to die? What would we discuss then?

If seconds didn’t turn to minutes, which failed to stretch into hours, that forgot to languish into days. If the earth didn’t spin while it circled the sun, if the seasons didn’t show us that we are almost another year older since that heartbreak, since the day where we almost didn’t make it through.

What if time ceased to exist? What would we talk about then?

What if we could not (were unable to) reference what came before or what’s to come? The eternal present and nothing more. No expectation, no staggering pain of the past. Would conversation exist?

What if wrinkles didn’t cross our face, more grooved with each passing year? What if age spots didn’t tell the story of our summers? What if our bodies never broke down, backs never got stiff?

What if our hearts beat with vigor - forever?

If there wasn’t time here, would there be anything to talk about? Maybe we’d linger on a drop of dew on the honeysuckle in the field where our dogs play keep away in the morning.

But, maybe that requires time too.

If there wasn’t a past here, a little girl in Montana who once rode piggyback through a freshly cut wheat field, with a farmer whose boot nearly made contact with a tightly coiled rattlesnake.

If there wasn’t a future here, an old woman, spine bent from years of hand work. Eyes cloudy, a left ear gone muffled long ago, what would there be to talk about?

Legs aching, body writhing.
She floats in: silent, knowing.
Rests beside my curled body,
her hand light on my too-hot back.

You must be growing.
This pain is normal.

Now, sometimes.
That familiar gnaw.
But, this time, my heart.

She is not near.

Afterwards -
Days, months, maybe years:
Length,
Different posture.

Form made new.

There is a small piece of art that hangs on my bathroom wall. Attached to a piece of painted cardboard is a tiny cream colored weaving set atop a bed of copper mesh. Small beads, secured by careful knots, hang from the fringe. Stapled above the weaving is a long piece of metal with a turquoise patina. In the middle of the weaving, a rusty washer is affixed.

The back of the cardboard reads:

Allie, Just messing around! love you - Mom
(5-2020)

Every time I look at this small wonder I am struck by the beauty we create when we let ourselves play, and when we left our craft be compulsive and compulsory. Closely examining every detail of this small wonder, I am filled with an indescribable love for my mother, her hands, and what it means to make.

Because of (and thanks to) my mom, I’ve been making my entire life. Not always consistently and often with lots of angst. Much of my sewing, weaving, and entrepreneurial endeavors has been centered around my ego. I created in a rushed frenzy to see if others’ perception of my finished product would finally ensure that I was a human worthy of love and belonging.

I have created businesses, courses, and countless garments. I have drawn, and dyed, and knitted. Probably like you, I have cooked a thousand meals, arranged hundreds of bouquets. I’ve curated a home, a body, and a life.

So often I hoped that the thing I sewed or weaved or whittled might actually, finally, deliver me to the land of eternal happiness.

We all know how this ends.

For every human, we are creating in nonstop, perpetual motion. Through every small step, every thought, every movement of hand, we create our realities. When we channel this human experience through form and vibration, we have the profound opportunity to transmute pain into staggering beauty.

Through several (temporary, albeit profound) ego-deaths and the weathering of age, I am starting to understand the purpose of creating: not as a destination and not at all about the finished item I create. Everything dies, after all.

Instead, what has slowly unfolded for me is the understanding of how making (with my hands, my voice, my thoughts), has kept me alive for 39 years. The process of the creation is my lifeline. And I am creating my life.

If you are a creator of any modality (and spoiler alert: you are) and crave a deep community-driven introspective practice around your craft, I am calling you in. Bring your paintings, your collage, your exquisite meals, your on-point curriculum. Bring your songs, your woodworking, your poems, your profound (or not) thoughts.

Once a week, in an intimate group on zoom, we will be sharing what we make and how it keeps us alive. This is a devotional practice to yourself and your craft where, over time, you’ll witness how your craft is actually crafting you.

Sign Up Here

Yesterday morning as he walked out the basement door to go to work, the dogs got into an all-out brawl. Or, to me, that’s what it sounded like.

I wheeled around from my spot at the table where I sit every morning sipping my coffee (this week, especially testy and hormonal), to see his thick pit bull, Cleo, snarling over my tender chihuahua/shepherd mix, Luna, who was making awful, dying noises.

“Get off her!” I roared. As my knees hit the ground, I tried to pry them apart. Panicky sounds flew out of my mouth. I screamed his name, over and over. I think I may have screamed the word help, repeatedly. My fingernails gouged at Cleo’s meaty neck as she lunged and Luna screamed.

It was only a second before I realized that Luna had Cleo’s thin blue collar wrapped around her lower jaw, twice. She couldn’t get free and was being drug around the hardwood floor by Cleo, who was suffocating, terrified, and therefore, in kill mode. It was chaos; play gone terribly wrong.

A few seconds later, he came running in the front door. A low, authoritative “Hey!” came out of his mouth. Time whirred. The room became a blur. I’m not sure if it was him or me, but someone unclasped the collar. Luna ran to the corner of the room with her tail tucked and I stood and paced in front of the sink, starting to hyperventilate. Big heaves of tears mixed with rapid breath.

Panicky, I rushed to the bathroom and shut the door as quickly as I could. I closed the toilet lid and sat down with my head in my hands. Sobbing, wishing simply to disappear. I heard the kennel door clang shut, and then the bathroom door open. He squatted down and put his hands on my knees. “Breathe,” he said searching for my eyes.

I couldn’t make eye contact. Couldn’t bear to see him see me lose my shit.

“It’s fine,” I croaked, my throat hoarse. I didn’t realize how much, how forcefully, I had screamed earlier. “I’m fine.”

That night he said, “I’ll call Meg tomorrow.”

“Why?”, I asked, knowing exactly why he was referencing Cleo’s foster mom.

“I’m going to give her back.”

“To put it bluntly, I think she’s too much dog for you.”

This morning I have very minor scrapes on my right wrist and a tiny, little puncture on my palm which I tenderly dressed with a bandaid and much internal fanfare. We discovered Luna took a canine tooth deep to the forehead (of which she is oblivious) and the dogs are friends again.

This morning we anxiously monitor their morning play. As she tenderly mouths Luna’s scruff, Cleo glances at me with expectant eyes, only wanting my love and affirmation, just as she has every day since she came to us five months ago. I stand with my arms stiff; unable, unwilling to soften. Luna shows no signs that anything at all is out of the ordinary. In fact, she’s sort of egging Cleo on.

Yesterday, after the play-gone-terribly-wrong, I went to breathwork; a private session with my favorite teacher.

Before we began, noticing I was clearly shook, she asked me to close my eyes and call in my spirit guides - any helping presence that I could lean on. I started to anxiously name people in my mind: papa, great grandma, maybe? But today, it felt forced.

And then the session started.

For an hour she led me through three rounds of rapid breathing. As my breathing grew faster, my body became electric, earthy and cosmic. I inhaled and exhaled on a swift two-count, tears slowly sliding down my temples. As I lay on the yoga mat, hyperventilating on purpose, the scent of palo santo hung in the air and a heavenly woman’s voice crooned from the speaker in the corner of the room. With every sharp inhale I went deep within my mind; every exhale feeling more expectant, more searching.

At the end of the last round, I took a giant breath and held it inside while squeezing my root chakra. The almost orgasmic spiral of kundalini energy shot up from my tailbone, through my spine, and into my brain, and I lay there, waiting for the weightless, peaceful feeling I had felt before. I waited to be held by god, for my entire body to start floating. But as the music slowly wound down so did the sensations. I released the air from my lungs like a balloon set free.

Okay, I thought, today I don’t get to commune with the divine.

As she slowly brought me out of the session and into a sitting position, my teacher explained what she saw as she sat with me for that hour, guiding me through the inhales and exhales, with her own eyes closed, channeling god.

“There was this beautiful goddess…with wings…almost like Pegasus.”

I smiled, and nodded. “That sounds nice,” I said weakly. A beautiful vision - for her.

I rubbed my eyes and put my hair back into a ponytail. I reached for my water bottle, and glanced around for a clock, wondering if I would make it to the yoga class I signed up for. Wondering if after that I would be able to go home and soften, after so many days of being hard. I started to fold up the blankets I had been laying on.

“Don’t worry about cleaning up, I got it,” she said.

“Oh, and one more thing,” she tossed out.

“There were so many animals with you.”

What have I been up to?

Pause.

Silence.

Honestly, I cannot remember.

Probably a lot. I’m not sure. Let me think.

Okay, how about this. I could tell you that I made sourdough bagels last week. Sure, they were good. Or I could describe how I’m planning to put wallpaper in the bathroom closet.

We could talk about how I feel like I’ve been driving a lot lately. To where? I have no idea.

I most likely made dinner several times. Yes, that’s right, the beef stew was particularly good. Sure, I can send you the recipe.

Oh yeah, my house sold, finally. What a relief.

If we’re going a bit deeper, I could tell you that he told me, “you’re a lot” one evening while holding me and wearing a smile. I could tell you in the moments that followed, I burrowed deep into a hole of shame and confusion and stayed there for three days. I could tell you that we (I) eventually moved through it, like we always do.

I could tell you that I’m thinking a lot about being a floating ball of energy lately. That I read a book that changed my life.

I could also tell you that the purple Pasqueflowers on our sloping lot are a potent soul salve. I could tell you that this land continues to hold me in a way that I didn’t know I needed.

Want to come create with me on our land? I am hosting pine needle basket workshops every month this summer. The next one is June 1!

Learn More

I suppose I want to inform you that there’s a mama red fox tending to her grey babies down the road. Yes, she’s living under that shed, the tan one right by the road. Her babies tumble over each other in her watch.

Oh and I forgot! A few weeks ago, I witnessed a baby be pushed out of a vagina. Yes, yes, of course it is amazing. Profound, sure. And also? The most ordinary thing in the world.

I could tell you that I had one full morning of existential dread last week, though I cannot recall why, and then he and I watched live bluegrass that evening while eating pizza and I felt happy again.

Mostly though?

I don’t want to recount my days to you.

I do not want to list the ways I have moved through the space and time.

In fact, let’s not talk about days and hours and minutes.

Did you know, the soul is eternal?

How do I put into words the psychedelic experience of living in this human body?

How do I articulate this unfolding mystery? How all of life, every moment, feels like a continual act of letting go?

How do I tell you the ways in which I was held by god last week?

How do I express to you that my dreams feel like utter magic?

We are souls floating in the ether.
Many balls of light.

Each floats upward, expands, aware of each other.

As we float, we realize that we are free: unencumbered and held.
Weightless. Pure energy.

As this realization dawns, each being reacts.

Some do somersaults. Flipping over and over again with jubilance.
Utter joy and celebration.

Some move slowly in motions of awe and wonder.

Some weep tears of many millennia, releasing the struggle of form.

I look around, witness, and think, “This. This is what we needed.”

Last week the cactus started to bloom. Soft, fuschia petals exploded from the spiky centers of two barrel cacti I pass by every day. On one of our evening walks together, we looked closer. Latent buds are forming on nearly all of them. There’s about to be a real bloom event here on the land.

(The truth is, I don’t know if they’re called barrel cactus. They look like miniature versions of the big boys in Saguaro National Park that go by that name. So that’s what I call them and he trusts that I’m right. Sometimes I wonder if names are really that important.)

I walk the cathedral loop most days now with the dogs. Sometimes I run it, doing the loop twice in alternating directions. Big rock walls rise up out of the pine needles on either side of the trail. In between the loops, the dogs and I go sit by the swimming hole and look at the fish darting around: rainbow trout and another kind I don’t know.

One day last week, Luna sailed down the trail with an antler shed in her mouth. I rewarded her pocket treats and told her what a good girl she was and now it sits on our dinner table. We wonder what we’ll do with it.

I’m letting go of keeping score around the house, slowly realizing the pain I was causing myself by always feeling put out by the things I do, that he does not. I deeply enjoy doing most of it, so it’s a mystery to me why I create a problem. Something about feeling righteous, I suppose, when really it just kills the love.

I’ve been going to the yoga studio down the hill. The 60-something yoga teacher recently spent some time in India. We do kriyas before we start, breathing and twisting rapidly to let go of tension. There are big mirrors in the studio where I am want to watch my body through each pose. I close my eyes, let it go.

There are still dark days; many lately, where I cry for the people I love the most. For the pain of being human, in bodies. Sometimes it feels like too much.

But I’m also working on gratitude. Working on the habit of being thankful. Writing through it all. The dream of a bigger project, a published novel, always in the background.

Today I’ll go down the hill, finish a sewing project at my old house before it gets packed up and moved on Thursday. Before I say my final goodbye to the place that held me tight, contained me for seven years. A space that let me fully unravel, and then introduced me to god and myself.

A dear friend and her husband are buying it. She’s got plans for a desert chic aesthetic and he loves the natural light. It’s a delight I never imagined, to pass on the house to them.

Endings and beginnings constantly overlapping; life spiraling ever onward. Thank you, spirit, for the chance to witness it all.

Last night, I told him that the land is healing me. I didn’t think this would happen. I thought I’d be the same person when I moved here, with the same problems, just with a better view. And I am. But also, I’m not.

What I notice is, that I’m letting myself do what I want to do here. I’m not waking up in the morning making lists to try to prove myself. Getting things “done” because that’s the energy that surrounds me. The sound of traffic incessantly reminding me that I am not moving fast enough.

Here, I let myself ponder. Linger on thoughts and activities. Hike multiple times per day. Simmer the juniper I gather from the tree right outside the back door. I’ll start whittling the cedar branch he cut for me into a spoon soon.

Here I am changing. Set and setting. It really does matter.

It’s quite possible, likely even, that I am just having a really good week, a post ovulation high. And we have just returned back from a trip to Michigan and I missed my dogs and I am glad to be home. Here where it is nearly silent, save for the cackling of the ravens, having a comedy show in the trees across the valley.

This week, the creek started running and we can now hear a trickle of water when we’re outside. We both remarked how pleasantly surprising that was. We knew it would happen, we didn’t know how good it would feel.

In the mornings, he spoons me and tells me he loves me. It’s my favorite part of the day and I spend time listing all the things I am grateful for in my head. This house, this land, this body. The struggle of health, an ongoing three year journey, that I know is healing something, teaching me something, even though I don’t know what it is yet.

He and I don’t yet agree on what to watch on TV, but I’m starting to realize that I can just make him dinner and he happily eats it, grateful to be fed. I’m realizing that it feels good to feed him and it has nothing to do with the patriarchy or feminism, instead just a gift I like to give.

He listens to things I say and brings them up later in conversation, which means more to me than he will ever know. We both drag our feet getting stuff done around this house. He does it, because he works all day as a carpenter on rich people’s vacation homes and his body is tired. I do it, because I just don’t feel like sanding the bathroom walls.

We wait for my old house to sell so that we can spend money here at the cabin on things like a garage and a new roof and a new deck. We’re waiting on getting chicks and that Dremel tool and doing that Costco run because money is very, very tight.

Every day gets better and better and I say this knowing I am in the most optimistic days of the month. Next week all may be doomed. But it feels important to say, I am happy and life is good.