Thankful for my snuggle bug even if he does like to sleep on my neck/throat/face/shoulder and he lacks the opposable thumbs needed to fetch my medicine.

Dropped off a kitten and brought home a eunuch. Bless his heart, he has no idea that anything even happened to him.

(an ode to http://icanhascheezburger.com/ for the uninitiated.)

I just had Jack towed out of the parking deck at the office. Not sure what’s wrong with her, but she’s making a very ugly grindy-stop-it-right-now-or-I’ll-never-work-again noise when I try to start her, and there’s a lovely thick layer of corrosion on the top right side of her battery as if she’s rabid.

Baby’s first cold and my first tow experience. I’m not excited, nor am I amused by the irony of my batteries being recharged and hers shitting the bed.

We sat by the fire talking about nothing of consequence but something of relevance and wondered aloud why we were alone. We hadn’t been there long enough yet to funk ourselves up.

Others were either still loitering around the meal table, or had scattered back to their tree houses, or were on an adventure somewhere in the other 140 acres.

Thirty minutes passed before he sat down and injected himself into our rambling which then turned to Jekyll Island and Isle of Palms (where I’d just been with The Mc) and erosion and aerial shots that show how the “hammocks” doctors build on the intercoastals impact the water flow and and the environment in blatant, painful, indisputable imagery.

Conversation eventually turned to turtles and our planned visit to the Georgia Sea Turtle Center the following day. “They’re my favorite!” he exclaimed and I left it at that. He rambled on a bit before we derailed him and for once, I didn’t counter “mine, too!” even though they are. Instead I smiled and we moved on to Golden Retrievers where he and Gwen compared notes and enjoyed memories of their blonde loved ones. Before long he wandered off into the night, and we turned fire watching duty over to The Cute German and her curly headed boy.

The next day we passed Turtle on the way to dinner with two lovely ladies in dresses the likes of which I wouldn’t have expected at the hostel. Cute young women with long legs and lots of skin in spaghetti straps and tight busted sun dresses. We giggled and “look at Turtle go!”-ed and carried on.

Later that night we sat by the fire with half a dozen or so other visitors, and Turtle was among them. Again we found ourselves in conversation and one of us let it slip by way of blunt and potentially alcohol induced explaination “you know we’ve been calling you Turtle, right?”

His eyes got big in the face of the fire, his mouth opened wide and his posture straightened. With a look that asked without words if we were psychic, he replied with great gusto: “They’re my favorite!”.

*sigh*

Bless his heart.

Another morning has arrived and my mind remains too exhausted and spiritually hung over to think/write except to offer this: there may be nothing in the world that cleanses my soul the way my bare feet on the earth, great deep gasps of fresh ocean air, and skinny dipping in a crystal clear lake do.

There may be nothing as rewarding as knowing the peace of sleeping under a sky that provides stars you can actually see, in air that caresses and heals your city lungs, or with an alarm clock of birds singing/clucking/crowing to the morning.

There may be nothing as liberating as a shower without walls and a spigot attached to a tree in the middle of the forest to help remind you that you are perfect in your imperfections, and that modesty and a war against age can easily become suffocating.

There may be nothing as rich and pure and beautiful as deep spontaneous belly laughter with friends that causes others to seek you and find the source of the ruckus…even if it was prompted by one of you falling and scraping a knee (only to be attacked by a tipsy friend with a first aid kit).

There may be no greater reminder of our habit to over-complicate things and the need to return to simplicity than drinking out of an old glass jar and watching a turtle as big as my reading chair eat a crab for lunch.

There may be nothing as comforting as finding “home” in friends, in laughter and stories and great adventures, or in s’mores by a campfire that result in your being donned “Minnesota Angels” by strangers (oh, yaaaa).

I’d never smelled the city in the way that I did when we hit her outskirts, she was dirty and thick and full of noise. I’d long since stopped being aware of soap, and it never smelled as perfumed as when I slathered myself with it in attempts to eliminate a funk I was almost unaware of (at least, until we got in the car and it swirled around us).

It’s hard not to want run screaming back into the embrace of that magical place in the forest, and to just fall off the grid for a while, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll let it live on as an escape from reality in bit by itsty bitsy bit over the days and weeks to come. Stories created and lessons learned over 3 short days with 3 wonderful women in the Golden Isles of Georgia nearing the end of the summer of 2007, that I only wish you all could have been there to share - because it was really, that delicious.

Pictures today, stories tomorrow.