Leaving Life in the NEQ

As of this morning we're leaving the Northeast Kingdom. It almost seems completely random even though we've had this discussion about one million times since moving out here from Burlington five years ago. Do we stay or go? Have we put in all this time and effort and planted our seeds just to find out they were annuals? Or has this just been an incredibly important leg of a much longer journey towards a place we've yet to discover? Isn't staying always the easy thing to do? Once life isn't so difficult is it just tedious?

If after years of saying this isn't where I imagined living out the rest of my life why was the wind knocked out of me when Jason first told a co-worker essentially sealing the deal? Why am I so anxious and shaky? We've made list after list of the pros and cons of staying vs. leaving and they seemed to balance out almost entirely. Except for one biggie. Our security here. Asking "what if" didn't leave us feeling ok about being left up in the air out here. So how to place roots when the ground is too loose to stand on your own? Would we ever feel confident enough to build or buy a house of our own again up here? We just don't see that happening anytime soon and so...

We move on. We start all over again; strangers in a strange land. A larger family than we were five years ago, carrying a bit heavier load but with stronger arms. Here we go!

My Funny Valentine

I just thought I'd mention that my most wonderful valentine in the world said a new word today. POLKADOT. It was fabulous. Absolutely ridiculously perfectly sweet. It sounded more like "pokedot" but I'm giving it to her anyway. My heart is full.

And that's my story.

Raining Introspection

It appears there's little room left in one's brain for introspection of any sort when one has an eighteen month old puppeteer stringing one along day to day as one might a marionette. The closest to feeling any sort of deepness of thought is to fit in some interesting article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic while I nurse her down for a nap or to bed. The problem there is that (A) I'm too tired to register the words that my eyes are struggling to decipher (B) I have no one to talk to about such provoking ideas for at least a few hours and so they die a slow, anonymous death and slip away into the black and red oblivion that is my useless brain or (C) I say "hmm, how interesting", ramble off the entire contents of the ten pages I've tried desperately to memorize to Jason and then drink a glass of wine and retire to Top Chef, The Office or inane American awfulness like American Idol.

Tonight though there is rain. That ever beautiful tap tap tapping of condensation falling miles to your roof reminding you that yes, you can take this moment to be present. There is nothing more forcefully introspective, besides perhaps the rolling of the ocean against the shore, than rain. I realize it's February and so I'm maybe a little just sick of the damn cold and snow and I wouldn't mind a little washing away of the three feet in the back yard. It also means that yes! finally it's above freezing which is always an incredible moment, especially here in Vermont. People were jacket less today, their mittens nowhere to be seen, I saw a woman's legs! We go a bit berserk when it hits 40 but we're forgiven I believe. It won't last and we'll be frozen hermits before we know it but we'll have a spark of hope revived. Spring is somewhere in the distance our slightly thawed souls scream.

For now, I'll just sit in this pleasant almost-silence, listening to a toddler breathe, the rain remind me of now and the buzz of a computer connect me to somebody somewhere.

A Belated Merry Holidays

Happy New Year and all that. Tessa certainly enjoyed herself with our four days of Christmas. There are still gifts for her sitting right now wrapped nicely upon the buffet, I am saving them for another day. Perhaps this will be our tradition, since I'm somewhat dying to create one of our own. A wait it out approach, a new idea of no you can't get everything at once in some crazy wrapping paper orgy on some predetermined day.

Not to say I don't get in the spirit of it all. I am very happy, thrilled, giddy even to be given an excuse to shop for the people I love. It fills me with a sense of day to day purpose in an otherwise entirely manic time of year. So I won't be preaching the same "the meaning of Christmas is lost in the consumerism of the buy everything culture that's shoved down our throats by the blahdeeblahdeeblah...." even though I totally buy it (hahaha). I love the holidays all the same. I love the lights and the simple act of wrapping up a gift and handing it over to a cousin you see once a year. The absolutely pointless fun of cutting down a tree to watch it die slowly inside your house covered in tacky decorations. I love hearing the same crappy music on the radio every year and meandering through all the wonderful and hideous crafts at the local markets. I love watching the frantic faces on the small towners rummage through our small selection of shops and knowing they're thinking "yeah, buy locally my ass, who needs another blown glass candle holder?" And I love feeling totally self righteous because I did do all my shopping locally.

I do kind of wish that this extravagence was scheduled perhaps once every two years, maybe even five. Then the thousands of people who lost their jobs right before they finished racking up another couple of 00's on their credit cards might not have considered how much they're life insurance policies are worth.

So, yeah, maybe I love shopping and wrapping and being a part of some crazy cultural insanity rooted in excess but whatever. It's fun, I got to put a blinking reindeer nose on my nephew. What's better than that?