Firsts

My amazing husband took my sweet soon Man Camping this weekend. There was fake-meat sandwiches, honeybuns, hikes to search for wild animals, swimming, wakeboarding, and no sunscreen or baths to be found. Meanwhile, Bella and I had fun the way we do. We shopped at the Farmers' Market for fresh strawberries, asparagus, and bread. Then we oohed and ahhed over pottery at the local pottery festival.

But there wasn't much time for blogging. So I'll have to share pictures of our day soon, but not tonight. Tonight, I'm accepting the torch from Jill and re-posting my very first blog post ever (July, 2001):

i've been awake for a total of seventeen hours today, but it feels like decades. javi has a cold, so every once in a while he punctuates the silence of small-town nighttime with a wheeze or sigh. i wonder if i'll ever get used to the quiet again.

i remember lying in bed one morning in boston with mike and trying to figure what the noise was. not cars, not glass shattering, not my roommate having sex in the other room, and definitely not a variety of languages and accents filtering in from the street. you know what it was? crickets. i had forgotten what it was to hear crickets when things are soft and quiet outside. that's what it is like here, now, just crickets and the occasional bullfrog (i live near water, so lots of that).

have you ever felt that no matter where you are, or who you're with, you just can't get comfortable? i am like that these days. if i'm not too open then i'm too reserved, if not too chatty then too quiet. i've only felt completely and utterly comfortable in my skin with one person and he'll never know what that meant to me. july 4th made a year since we first stumbled into a friendship and i've not yet met another person who instilled in me the kind of hope and faith in myself and my future that i gained from this friendship.

my wish for today is that i find a way to recapture that thing he made real for me. i'd love to find it within myself, but i'll take it any way it comes. when i do find it, i will hold on to it and recognize it for the sacred emotion that it is. i will store it in my heart, and by doing so, i will truly be free.

goodnight, moon.

Reading it made me slightly weepy and nostalgic. I was so alone back then, still six months from re-connecting with my Mountain Man. Javi and I on our own in our little trailer island where I'd sit at night and sob after hanging up from phone conversations with the wrong person. I remember one night saying out loud to no one but God, "why does it hurt like this?"

I need to go love on my husband now, the answer to my wish that night. He ushered in a new, profoundly different life for us. We are whole and happy and loved. Javi and I were an island and now we're a continent flanked by the most gorgeous scenery you can imagine. And there's a sprite named Bella living in our orbit now. She burns bright like a flame starting around 7 am each day.

I'm just so thankful for it all (and asking everyone to play along with the meme).