It’s a picturesque fall day – though around me people are complaining that fall was skipped entirely and we’re in the throes of winter.

Me? I’m okay with it. Sitting outside at a coffee shop – one I used to frequent far more than I do now – with a sweater under fleece, a hot cocoa and my trusty yellow tablet (oh, how I’ve missed you). On the sheet prior to the one I’m writing on now, I’m making a list of goals for myself in 2010.

The wind is gusty, sporadic. It holds a definite nip but it’s just teasing the leaves of my tablet. Flipping up the corners of the pages I have yet to fill with scrawl and navel gazing, I’m smiling back like the village idiot at the invisible when it greets me and flushes my cheeks.

The jolts bring me into the present: to feel my skin and pay attention to the nourishment filling my lungs. To revel in the silence broken by passing cars and footsteps of people hustling in and out of the shop as if they’re outrunning a blizzard. It reminds me at 9 knots that too much time has been spent worrying about where I should be and with who and doing what, and that it leaves me empty, even when I fulfill my obligations. Even when I have fun. Noodle that, Freud.

There’s an itch on the back of my brain, it has a face and a name and a little gray body with Gumby arms and it’s clearing its throat repeatedly to get my attention and pointing at a picture of The Mc and I not spending enough time together. Correction: enough quality time. In the picture, we’ve hit our routine stride as we encroach on the 4 year mark (my God! Has it been so long already?). We come home – exhausted – share a meal and collapse. Or, many evenings, I’m out and come home to him already in his second round of dreams. Thank you, Little Mr. Itch. I needed help seeing what was right in front of me.

I imagine that most of the coupled-up, once giddy and swooning population reaches the same space, but I don’t imagine they move through it. I imagine they stay there, forever. I see it in the way their bodies don’t touch in restaurants and in the sparkle missing from their eyes in the grocery store aisle when they hand off the box of pasta to be dropped in the cart beside the Rogaine and tampons.

I don’t want that. Never have. I want romance and love and I want it to ooze out of us like an abscess partnered with a fever you’re not sure if you should be scared of or not.

Luckily, I found a man who doesn’t want it either. Of course we’re moving forward and building our future (honoring our inner adults), but we’re also recommitting ourselves to dating and affection and affirmation and being silly and playful and not taking one another for granted and embracing the good and the bad we both carry with us. There will be tudes copped and eyes rolled and groans at bad jokes but in the end there will be this: mutual respect and adoration.

Contrasting history with reality, contrasting the days I spent at that coffee shop 5 years ago, the nights and weekend afternoons of writing my way through my own rebirth after thinking I’d failed at life against the balance (but with an acknowledgment if a permanently restless soul) I’ve been given today…well, it’s really something to behold.

You actually can start over. If you want it, if you try, if you fight for it and if you stop long enough – once in a while – to visit the old coffee shop, get slapped around by a premature winter wind and listen to Little Mr. Itch.

Pen to paper, carving a depression trail filled with ink.

I ran out of time to transpose/energy it, but it’s a step in the right direction. Right?

I’m starting to get greedy in my old age.

Maybe greedy isn’t the right word – maybe hoarding. Fiscally conservative. Bitter.

I was thinking this morning about how I shouldn’t have to pay taxes that go to schools. I don’t have kids, I’m not going to have kids, so why am I paying for schools?

The argument that pedestrians shouldn’t have to pay for interstate maintenance is equally valid, though far more silly and not a true apples to apples comparison/argument.

That said, I can see the value in schools and their educating the little people already in surplus. More educated children with bright futures = less aholes breaking into my car or my friends houses. Right?

So okay. If you won’t vote for a tax break for me based on non-consumption, then how about this: how about a yearly dividend rewarding me for not having children?

I’m a contributing tax paying citizen, not using the playgrounds, schools or government subsidized after school programs. No children = no little people bringing home germs = me not calling in sick nearly as much as colleagues with children. I’m also not putting an additional strain on the food chain, producing an extra large carbon footprint hauling LP’s to and from soccer/gymnastics/therapy. I’m not disposing of thousands of diapers, I’m not sitting next to you in a restaurant ruining a meal, and I’m certainly not going to be falling back on any government funded health care or food stamps for my 1:many children.

So…how about a little somethin’ somethin’, you know, for the effort?

Saw someone do this on Flickr recently and thought I’d give it a go. It’s harder than it looks – both to not feel like a complete tool when you’re snapping shots of everything you do, and to remember to do it. I petered out right before our 7:00p movie.

Click here to see individual images and notes, if you’re so inclined.

I’ve made a number of bad decisions in my life, some attributable to youth and ignorance, but more are attributable to a simple sense of mortality.

As a child, an adolescent and later a teen, my father would jest “I’ll be surprised if you live to see 30.” As children we’re apt to do with adults, I believed him. He was wise and knowing with the touches of grey at his temples and his big, round, smiling, baby blue eyes.

I have a picture of me in a box somewhere I’ve lost track of, I’m curled up and passed out on his chest in my wee footy pajamas. We were on one of the overstuffed brown leather chairs in our living room, and around us you can make out the red shag carpet, the wood (not wood panel) walls and a few artifacts only family members would recognize. In the picture my father is also K.O.ed – with a book in his hand, and me draped across his shoulder and side like a well worn blanket.

I was a clumsy child (still am. Both clumsy and a child.), which to an outsider may have been what sparked the comment, but it wasn’t. I ran through life with wild abandon and reckless enthusiasm. Through my 20’s – after he left me – I did more of the same. I was at life’s Suck Buffet, trying a little of everything: dating/marrying men who didn’t respect me, spending too much money on things that didn’t matter, jogging/walking solo at night on dark city streets in questionable neighborhoods. Mostly though, I ran from ghosts.

I finally turned 30 and held my breath. With eyes clamped shut so hard my nose wrinkled, I peeked with one eye, hoping I’d see it coming. I didn’t, and next came 31, and 32 and 33. I was still waiting for it. When I found my first lump/got the flu/had a toothache I though it was his prophecy. It wasn’t, and I came to understand this: I’m wrong a lot.

What the lump was, what his joke turned scar was, is this: a point of clarification. Live with intent. Choose carefully. Be kind – to yourself and to others.

I listened, though the truth is I’m still waiting for “it”, 6 years after 30. It’s lingering around like that final utility bill from years ago that hasn’t caught up to you yet but remains in limbo, angry and unpaid.

Until it tracks me down, I’ll be out here somewhere. Chasing dreams, smiling so big you can probably count my nose hairs and going on measured but daring adventures. I frequently imagine my father peeking out from around corners at the most perfect times and winking.

I get it.

I didn’t warm up to Anne Lamott immediately when a friend loaned me a copy of her book Bird by Bird, but when I picked up Traveling Mercies last year all that changed. The way she spoke with raw honesty – the kind that you can feel on your skin – oh it grabbed me and shook me around like an abused Raggedy Ann.

Plan B had more in common with the former than the latter for me, but now there was a different context: a relationship. She was someone who knew my secrets and I knew hers. We didn’t judge each other as my eyes danced over her words . She continues to go along before me, stumbling so I don’t have to and reminding me to embrace it all.

There were a few especially beautiful and a few especially witty things that forced me to dog ear pages as I blazed through. I meant to write them down for myself, knowing I’d never look back at them…and since changed my mind. I’m going to share them with you.

“I have grown old enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how I look, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people on the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be eighty, I’m going to wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I’m going to wish I had sum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert,. So this informs how I live now.”

Did I mention I’m going back to The Hostel in the Forest this weekend with my girls to skinny dip in the moonlight and make s’mores and drink from mason jars by the fire? It’s about more than a simple weekend away. When you’re isolated from rush-rush and surrounded by green and friends and love and fresh air, it’s easy to be kind to yourself, but it’s a step.

“I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone was glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season – too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they are cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky, and there are fresh winds, and misty salmon sunrises and then cool blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled and makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much works at all.”

I believe I’ve hit my fall. I believe I dreaded it for some time, that I’d feel somehow used up. Dry. Weathered. I believe I’m less worried about that lately, and that she made it poetry.

“She had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but when she finally followed Barb’s advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy – she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition.”

Alright this one killed me, because it’s true. She has a similar line earlier in the book where she’s listening to a sermon.

“She said that Christians have a very bad reputation in the world, and that we have earned it, with our hate and self-righteousness. We speak in reverent terms of grace, justic, equality, mercy and then we despise people also created in God’s image, who are Her children, too. ”

and a bit later

“This drives me crazy, that god seems to have no taste, and no standards. Yet on most days, this is what gives some of us hope.”

She’s right. My seester recently had a runin with a Crazy Christian, an old friend who had even stayed in her home recently. It made me embarassed, it made me want to hide my faith. I’ve wanted to hide my faith a lot since I found it a few years ago all dusty and pale from living in a closet and/or the shadows of justification. *shrug* I guess all I can do is be me and let you be you and hope that’s enough to show you we’re not all bat shit bonkers.

Related: I’m going to work on reintroducing the word “mallarky” into my vocabulary in place of “bullshit” as phase 1 of a many part plan to stop embarrassing myself in front of little people and their parents.

Practice, practice, practice.

Channeling The Smiths this morning and every morning of late – trying to squeeze time out of this dried up fruit I call a life. I want it to flow – or at least dribble – but instead it’s been cut up and dehydrated and locked up in a plastic bag for consumption somewhere down the road. Presumably when I’m on the top of a mountain after a long hike, which may seem convenient and perfect but when we’re talking about needing/wanting/clawing for time to write, the top of a mountain is less than ideal. Where’s the wifi and the power outlet?

I want to dump out everything that happened this weekend onto the page before the details slip away, but the forecast is calling for piles of shit to do and little time for that one thing I need to do.

The summary is that the show went well and I was humbled and Godsmacked by the amount of support and love shown by friends.

Before I start whining and blithering about what’s coming up, I need your help. The Mc and I are leaving on (an internetless) vacation on May 9, and I need book recommendations again!

On the list: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (thanks to SI and CM). What else? Preferably nothing too terribly meaty (though I imagine I’ll get something else by Anne Lamott, LOVED Traveling Mercies).

I could use more reccos along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love or even The Sweet Potato Queens Book of Love. I need happy (not morbid ala laughter Augusten Burroughs) with a twinge of deep.

Whatcha got?