Gunboats & Gratitude

It is, in fact. 

Today is my birthday and I am infinitely wiser at 32 than 31. I’m almost sure of it. 

I am grateful for the magic of the internet that keeps this blog afloat when I do not, for the family that keeps me afloat when I do not. For the new additions to my life, the new people who keep it interesting, who make me feel loved and challenged. Grateful to have known the people I lost, those who filled up my life, my thoughts, my heart and whose absence will always hurt a tiny bit. Trying to let you go without letting you go. 

Grateful for this house, the literal and the familial, that keeps me sheltered and warm. Grateful for Paris, quite grateful for Angelina’s hot chocolate, the book Game Change, which is like crack, grateful to learn that To Kill a Mockingbird (the book) and The Godfather (a little known indie) stand up after all these years.

Grateful for the slow shifting landscape under my feet as I think about where I’m going the next year, the next five, the next ten. 

I enjoy getting older. I feel better at 32 than I did at 22, which feels like the right direction. Trying to keep it going that way. 

Cheers. 

They used to say we’re living on borrowed
time but even when young I wondered
who loaned it to us? In 1948 one grandpa
died stretched tight in a misty oxygen tent,
his four sons gathered, his papery hand
grasping mine. Only a week before, we were fishing.
Now the four sons have all run out of borrowed time
while I’m alive wondering whom I owe
for this indisputable gift of existence.
Of course time is running out. It always
has been a creek heading east, the freight
of water with its surprising heaviness
following the slant of the land, its destiny.
What is lovelier than a creek or riverine thicket?
Say it is an unknown benefactor who gave us
birds and Mozart, the mystery of trees and water
and all living things borrowing time.
Would I still love the creek if I lasted forever?

“Debtors” by Jim Harrison, from Songs of Unreason

This has been the focus of the last… nine months? That feels long. 

The process of finding a home in the Bay Area is especially challenging, I’ve found. Nine months of open houses every Sunday. Nine months of debating, driving back to homes at all hours of the day to see how the sunlight is, how the neighborhood is, what’s the school situation, is there public transit, what is that crack in the foundation, the neighbor is staring at us and, oh yeah, he’s a registered sex offender. Nine months of offers that were too low, of being outbid by 50K (really), of getting counteroffers where they want us to go up 20K, of losing the house, losing another house and then another. 

Nine months of craving a space of our own. Of wanting a washing machine more than world peace. 

I am afraid to write this down, to commit it to paper(ish), but we may have found our home. 

So please cross your fingers hard, knock on something wooden and wish us well as we hurtle (or hurdle, if we’re in a Olympic frame of mind) off this cliff. In 30 days, if all goes well, I’ll post a picture. I promise you now that even a picture of this home will look broke, exhausted, terrified and happy.

That title refers to nothing except that I’m looking at vitamins and “once a day” is certainly not the frequency with which I post here. 

Ironic titles may be a strange way to step back in. 

I’ll consider it again before I publish. 

So hi. 

I took a many month break from this, didn’t I? I’m not promising, internet (mom), that the break is done but I’m wading back in. 

I wasn’t kidding about what I wrote in that last post: this forum has a lot of baggage for me. Aunt passing, personal crisis stuff, job craziness. But I’ve been thinking about writing the past couple days, thinking about starting up again, because I actually do like it quite a bit.

I’ve been writing other things. Rambling paragraphs of prose, for instance. I use that word with the clear understanding that it makes you think Shakespeare but you should be thinking Clifford the Big Red Dog.

I’ve been writing outlines of stories that change with alarming frequency. The character is a mercenary! The character is now a one armed girl! The mercenary IS a one armed girl! I dunno! Actually, in truth, the character is usually me, barely disguised by age or gender or hairstyle. 

Anyway, all this other writing makes me miss this. Because I get this. I just write what I think. What could be easier? Now writing what other people think? That is freaking hard. 

So I shall try to come back a bit. Slowly, timidly, probably infrequently. I am reminded, by doing this, to take pictures and remember stories and see the good when it’s hard to see. 

I’ll aim for that. Probably just not every day.