Starting when you're an infant

It is spring out.   It smells like spring, like May in Maryland on Washington College's campus, like warm soil and thick juicy blades of grass and trees indulgently fat with cherry blossoms on their ends.  Like those big pink fluff balls that make the air in May look full of pink snow.  It smells like potential, all the time, buoyant and life-giving, and also like salt.  Like flowers dripped with dew of the sea.  Palm trees prattle, destiny leaves full of future's sound.  Whiny dogs fight it out every morning in a funny barking match, I live in the suburbs again but maybe they dont call it that when your downtown is a beach?  Out my window I awake to Laura's mourning doves.  One of them laughs, I swear to God I didn't know they did that, but look it up.  It does.

I sent Erika edits today after staying up til 11:30 with her latest book in hand, wrote about 600 words today on mine.  It's shy of my 2000 a day goal, but for easing in to what will become my routine...I'll take it.   Last evening it was Huntington's street festival, live music and vendors and veggies and stands, and when the night came on with that big ol moon I drove to explore a new section of my town in the direction of the library.

And then, for the first time since 2005, I got totally giddy and spinny over books.  So much so--and I am thinking of my 33rd birthday here when Katie had to lead me out of Laila Rowe by the elbow because of all the sparkly pretties--that I actually got breathless in the basement poetry section when I put the seventh book on the top of my stack.  And I had to gently, gigglingly, lead myself out.  It feels so good to be so nerdy.  I haven't lusted over library or books like that since Oregon in 2005.

It takes one full year to get settled in to a place, I've learned that as the years have gone.  In a year you can tell the seasons, the in-breaths and outs of the land, the tilt of the sky and what it means by certain winds.  I did yoga in the park today, made my first just-by-happening friend.  I am counting days already, eager to soak to soak it all in.  On the beach Sunday I introduced myself to the sand, to the ocean I said a little prayer.  I was always scared of the Pacific, it's crazy I get it, and I've begun to let that go.  I know the Atlantic so well I can tell her tides with my eyes shut, tell the weather just by feeling her swell.  That's what 34 years starting when you're an infant will do ya.  

But now, as I round out the last days of year 35, I'm hitting re-set.  Getting myself settled, letting life lead me much as I am slowly allowing myself to start to lead it.  Ready, but like a baby now.  And okay with it. Just setting myself down to breathe, to learn a while.  Willing to crawl way before I run, willing to learn really, long as it takes me, how it is that you walk this land.  Giddy and spinny, all the things I love close as my own hands.