Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 60

Welcome to 2017

I had the loveliest/weirdest New Year’s Eve. It was R’s 21st birthday and I was prepared to be sad about not getting to spend time with him on his birthday. Obviously, now that he is an adult, that’s going to happen less and less often anyway. It is certainly within the realm of possibility that I will never spend his birthday with him again. Although having written that out, it seems very unlikely. I didn’t often spend my birthday with my parents between the ages of 20-30, but after that, I sometimes did, especially the major birthdays. I definitely saw them on my 30th and 40th.

Anyway, it’s a nostalgic day, of course. As always, I remembered details of the day 21 years ago, mostly how madly, head-over-heels, totally joyfully in love I was. I know some moms don’t get that. My midwife told me it was the endorphins from a very long labor. It might also have been some exhaustion delirium—my water broke on Thursday and R was finally born on Sunday morning and there was not a lot of sleep during those three intervening nights—but whatever, I was dazzled and awed and infatuated beyond anything I have ever experienced before or since.

But I was also trying to remember details of the year before that — 22 years ago, the New Year’s Eve when I had no idea, none, of how dramatically and permanently my life would change in the next 12 months. I couldn’t remember a thing. I assume I spent it with the boyfriend that I was coming to realize I ought to be breaking up with and probably that we both drank too much, but no specifics beyond that.

And then my thoughts turned to last New Year’s Eve. It was just a year ago. I had no idea it would be my last new year in my house. If you’d asked me then, I would have predicted this new year’s to be just as the previous seven or so had been: quiet, at home, probably including a nice meal with R…

Instead, he was in Paris. And I was sitting in a friend’s driveway watching the best fireworks display ever. Best, not because the fireworks were out of reason spectacular — Disney has some great fireworks shows with music and fireworks that create designs in the sky, ie Mickey Mouse ears, so I’ve seen some impressive fireworks — but because it went on and on and on, and I could watch it from the cozy comfort of my own bed with the dogs on top of me.

I would love to know what Zelda thought about the whole thing. She’s always hated fireworks, but she’s never figured out that they’re the flashing lights in the sky. She started to get agitated, barking and pacing, when she first smelled the smoke and heard the banging, but then she came and sat on me and watched them with me. Ears up, eyes alert, I really think she paid attention to the whole thing. And they were beautiful, big fireworks, some simple explosions of blue and red and green, others those swishing things like one little explosion after another in white sparkles.

It was a lovely night. Not what I meant to write about this morning, but I’m glad to save the memory.

The other lovely thing that happened was that Andrea Host released a new book in her Touchstone series. I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned the series here before — I know I have elsewhere on social media. But those books somehow became comfort reads for me, such that a few months after reading them for the first time, I got sick and the only thing I wanted to do was reread the series. They’re fantasy/science fiction, but the new book, In Arcadia, is very much a romance: it’s a calm, quiet, slice-of-life story that tells the tale of the main character’s mom from the previous books falling in love. I read it between fireworks and thoroughly enjoyed it. If you haven’t tried her books and you like fantasy/sci-fi/romance, I really do recommend them—she creates worlds that I love escaping into. I’ve reread almost all of them, I think.

In fact, my one regret about In Arcadia is that it makes me want to reread all Andrea’s books, one right after another, and I really shouldn’t. I should be writing my own books!

Resolution for 2017: write lots of words.

My bed of roses

I have no data — I’m even out of data on my phone! — so I can’t look up the origin of that phrase I’m using as a title. But I’m coming back to it in a minute.

Night before last, my fan went crazy. I bet that’s the kind of description that drives mechanics crazy, too, but believe me, it is an apt description. When the craziness settled out, it was beeping. Beep. Five second pause. Beep. Five second pause. Beep.

The five seconds is a weird number. It is just long enough that there was no way to turn the beep into background noise. No possible way to ignore the noise, convince myself that it was cicadas or a crazy bird, no way to fall asleep between beeps and not wake up for the next one. Five seconds is maddening.

By 6AM, I was at my RV dealers (getting sent away by the security guard) and by 7:45AM, I was back at my RV dealers, plaintively begging for help. I didn’t have an appointment, of course, and they don’t generally take walk-ins, but they said they’d try to take a look and at least figure out how to cut power to the fan and shut it up.

While I sat on a couch in their show floor, dogs beside me, desperately wishing for sleep, I catalogued Serenity’s problems. There was the leaky air-conditioner that let so much water in the first night that the beds got soaked. The window that once opened wouldn’t close. The screens that weren’t properly placed in their tracks. The propane tank that wouldn’t fill. The thermostat that didn’t measure the temperature correctly. The sticky drawer latch that led to the facing of the drawer pulling off, exposing bare nails. The sink latch that jammed, had to be replaced, promptly broke again, and while I waited for my service appointment to get it fixed a second time, let the sink bounce around enough that the hinges broke, leaving the sink dangling half off the wall. The dead awning which fortunately died while closed. And then, of course, the fan going crazy.

All that in the first six months of ownership.

I was filled with gloom and doom. After the air-conditioning and until the fan, none of the problems had been major livability issues, but what next?

And then I took a deep breath and began re-cataloging. The air-conditioner was fixed. I don’t open the window that’s hard to close. I got the screens into their tracks and yes, it was a pain, but they work fine now. The propane tank’s sensor reset once the tank was empty and now I know to tell the guy filling it to go very slowly. The thermostat was user error, albeit based on unclear instructions, but still, no longer a problem. The drawer had been repaired. The sink was scheduled for repair. The awning was scheduled for repair. The only real problem was the fan.

And I went to Vermont. I watched the sunrise over farm fields and mountains, and waded in a mountain stream with the dogs. I sat next to the ocean and wrote. I wandered around the cutest little Massachusetts town at dawn. I’ve seen owls and coyotes and manatees. I’ve visited relatives and friends, gotten to have real time with people that I hadn’t seen in years. Sat around the table with my dad and stepmom on Christmas Eve eating chocolate cake.

The service guy came back. He told me they’d pulled the fan out and ordered a new part for it, but wouldn’t be able to get it fixed until the part came in, some time in the next couple of weeks, but that they’d stopped the noise. Oh, and that they’d fixed the sink and the awning. I hugged him.

Beds of roses do have thorns. I’m not excited about how many things have gone wrong with Serenity and I’m definitely not looking forward to whatever goes wrong next. But the last thing I have to do in Florida now (depending on when the part for the fan comes in) is a vet appointment on the 10th of January, which means that in less than two weeks, I can be heading west. And just thinking about that makes me want to bounce with excitement. Or you know, roll around on my bed of roses, hoping none of the thorns draw blood.

Streaks

I’m starting to feel terribly stressed by the approaching end of the year and all the things I both want to do and need to do in the very near future. I’m trying to remind myself to breathe.

Breathe, breathe, breathe, and all else will fall into place.

But it feels like I have lots of things that I’ve been putting on my list to take care of soon that have all stacked up now, not taken care of, and needing to be done.

Get my websites back up as independent domains. Format the translations for print editions. Organize my financial info for taxes and FAFSA purposes. Create a new budget for next year, based on the data from my first five months of traveling (with realistic numbers for how much my darling dogs actually cost me.) Get Serenity in for service, help my sister move, visit my brother in Fort Lauderdale, get birthday presents for Rory, do my laundry, respond to emails… you get the idea.

I’m letting the things in my to-do list start to intimidate me, even though a) most of the things have been waiting for me to do them for a while and the fact that it is the end of the year does not make them more  imperative, just makes it more obvious that I really should take care of them and stop dwelling on needing to take care of them and b) some of them are just life. Normal life that requires that we do stuff.

But I’m using an app that I found recently called Streaks, and it’s making me so much more aware of getting things done, if that makes any sense. Streaks describes itself as “a to-do list that helps you form good habits.” It’s really simple — you set 6 tasks and when they need to happen and when you want reminders and then let it go.

It can link to Apple Health, which is really nice for some types of tasks. So, for example, my first task is to walk 4000 steps and my goal is to do that every day. Apple Health tracks how many steps I’m walking and in Streaks, a circle gradually gets filled until I reach my goal. If I haven’t reached the goal by 3:30 in the afternoon, it sends me a reminder that I still want to walk. Right now, I have successfully reached the goal 21 days in a row, so yay me.

Another one of my goals is to meditate for 15 minutes every day. I use a meditation app as a timer, set the timer for 15 minutes, do my best to stay still, breathe, and listen to the universe, and when the timer goes off, the app sends my meditation info to Apple Health and Apple Health sends it to Streaks and Streaks marks my goal as successful for the day.

I also have a goal of writing Morning Words, which is basically stream-of-consciousness journaling every day; writing 2 blog posts a week; and writing 1000 words of fiction 6x/week. I gave myself one day off for fiction because sometimes it’s just not going to happen.

Since I started using Streaks, I’ve hit all those goals. The app counts the number of days in a row you succeed (that’s why I know how many days I’ve walked) and it really does work to motivate me. There was one day last week where my morning walk got cut short and my afternoon walk wasn’t enough, and I did actually take a longer-than-usual evening walk just because I didn’t want to break my streak. (I should note that 4000 steps is really not a huge amount to walk, less than 2 miles, and I should probably set it higher if I really want it to count as pushing myself. Maybe in the new year!)

But checking items off my checklist every day is making me more aware of all the things in my life that are not on my checklist and that are not getting checked off. I guess that’s a good thing? Honestly, I’m not sure it is. Today I have started laundry and exercised–a class, thirty minutes on the cross-trainer, and a mile walk with the dog!–and cleaned up Serenity and written morning words and now I’m writing a blog post and I ought to feel accomplished and like I’ve gotten a lot done. And instead I think wow, it’s noon already, and I have so much to DO.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

I hope all your Christmases were merry! I’m hanging out at my dad’s house, parked here for one more night, and moving on tomorrow to a friend’s house. My big plan for the next few days–and maybe part of why I feel like I have so much to DO–is driveway surfing and visiting lots of local friends. But I am really hoping to get my website stuff taken care of while I’m able to use internet that doesn’t measure cost by megabytes, so that’s the plan for the afternoon. That and writing my 1000 words of fiction because right now, while I’m sorry those are not happening to be words on Grace, I am really enjoying the story I am writing and those 1000 words are turning into the best part of my day.

And that is the best result of all of my Streaks results.

 

One step away from the wild…

Yesterday I was walking Z in the very early morning. Pre-dawn, but not so pre-dawn that it was still dark. I’d taken her up a white sandy road that led past the dumpsters out of the campground. The road had a “No Vehicles” sign posted but no other signs, so I wasn’t sure where it led, but since we were just walking for the sake of walking, it didn’t matter to me.

It felt incredibly lovely. The still of the early morning, nothing manmade in sight except for the road itself, just me and Z, alone in the world. And then I saw a flash of dog, tall dog, just a glimpse of leg and tail, crossing the path a long way in front of us.

Dang it.

You never know with off-leash dogs—are they off-leash because their owners have trained them well or are they off-leash because their owners are terrible owners? Zelda is a Jack Russell terrier, which means she is genetically incapable of backing down from a fight. If she decides a dog is a threat, she’ll get aggressive and size won’t deter her. Although she’s never gotten into a fight with a dog smaller than her, only dogs bigger than her, so I guess size does deter her, just not in a fearful way. But I’m wary about bringing her near strange off-leash dogs that she might decide need to be taught a lesson.

I paused and the dog disappeared. It looked like it disappeared into the brush, but that seemed unlikely, so I decided the road must have a path I couldn’t see leading off it. And since the dog and its owner were moving on, they were not a problem.

I kept walking. It was grey and chilly, at least by Florida standards, but I was enjoying the cool air and the brush of moisture in the fog… and then I saw dogs again.

Three of them. Tall, skinny, and a matched set, all a sort of grey brown with flags of white on their tails. Someone had a pack of dogs.

A pack of dogs that they were letting run off leash.

In a state park.

In fact, in a wilderness area.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

I stopped walking.

Two of the dogs disappeared into the brush, but the third stood where it was and stared at me. I stared back.

It wasn’t really close, not so close that I felt immediately threatened. And I did, in fact, have a little mental debate of whether I wanted to keep going on the path that I had been so enjoying and trust that I would scare it/them off. Coyotes are not known for attacking people.

But — my mental thought process went — coyotes are known for taking small animals and I am walking with a small animal that I love very much and that would never back down from a fight, even if it was with a pack of coyotes. And I am not the biggest of human beings myself. I’m not short, but I don’t think anyone would ever suggest that I could be threatening. Even to dogs. And these weren’t small dogs, they were definitely long-legged and tall. And like I said, skinny, so maybe they were hungry. Also out in daylight, even if maybe they were headed home after a night of hunting, but still… daylight plus night-time predators has at least the potential of meaning hungry predators.

So I took some careful steps backwards, not letting my eyes off the watchful coyote and then turned around and walked back to the campground. Zelda and I took the rest of our walk around the paved loop of the campground, admiring our neighbor’s various vehicles and tents and appreciating the day from a carefully sanitized distance.

The pros of the apocalypse

I’m camping in Blue Springs State Park this week, famed as a home to manatees in winter time. I’ve visited this park before as a day visitor, more than once, so it’s not new to me. But this morning while I was walking Zelda, I was imagining myself in a post-apocalyptic world. The kind where plague has taken all the people, not zombies. I wasn’t scared, it just felt incredibly empty. Every other time I’ve been here, there have been lots of people, but of course, that was never before dawn. Then I spotted some manatees in the water and got much more cheerful, because probably if the human beings all died out, the manatees would have a much better chance of surviving. The pros of the apocalypse.

Last night, it rained. My weather app — which honestly, seems fairly useless, except for the immediate weather — had been claiming rain for days, including an entire afternoon of lightning and thunder yesterday, but it didn’t happen until 4:43 AM this morning. I can be so precise about the time because I woke up and it had barely started, a little tap-tap-tap on the roof of Serenity, but as I lay there wondering what that noise was, it really started. It went very quickly from tapping to torrential, which sounds a lot like being inside a drum. Or maybe a heart beat. I haven’t had nearly enough rain in Serenity, because I do enjoy it so much. Last night, I could hear the difference in the sounds of the rain hitting the roof and the rain hitting the plastic vents over the fans. It was music, definitely. Albeit slightly boring music after ten minutes or so. Plenty of rhythm, but a lack of harmony.

Despite the rain and the bleak apocalyptic thoughts, I’m really happy to be here. Right now, I can see a cardinal sitting on a branch outside my open door. There have been squirrels darting through the trees—or maybe one very busy squirrel. I’m surrounded by trees and greenery. It’s definitely not the most peaceful park I’ve spent time in—the train tracks must be incredibly close because wow, the trains are loud when they rumble through—and there must be some kind of construction going on nearby because there was a lot of heavy equipment moving around, including those annoying backup beeps, earlier this morning. But it’s not a parking lot, it’s a park.

I spent the last two weeks sitting in a campground that was a parking lot: trailers on either side of me, nothing separating me from my neighbors, and my view consisting entirely of people stuff. My goal was to finish Grace or give up. I did neither. I didn’t get very far, but I did come up with a new ending and a new plan, so I’ll be persisting. But I did learn that I should really, really not sit still for so long in a place that doesn’t inspire me.

While I don’t seem to get a lot of writing done on the days that I’m moving from place to place and planning moves takes energy that I could be putting into writing, my level of depression rose steadily over the past couple weeks. Or my mood sank steadily? And the trap that is depression was sucking me in: I knew I was starting to feel bleak but I lacked the energy and motivation to make a change. It’s really only today — gloomy apocalyptic thoughts and all — that I’ve been able to wake up and realize how much I had lost my joy. That’s because having a cardinal sitting on a branch avoiding the rain brings it back. I don’t want to live in places where I have to search to find the beauty, even if they are cheap.

Of course, that does mean that I should earn some money and that means that I should be writing Grace right now. So off to do it! It’d be nice if I could get out of the scene I’m in and back to a scene with Grace and Noah together. Not that I know what happens in that next scene, but I’m a lot more likely to find out if I keep writing than if I wait for inspiration to hit.

 

Owls are cool

I saw an owl this morning. Two of them, really, although the second one was a black blur on the wind. I wouldn’t have recognized it as an owl if it were not flying in collusion with the first one. And the first one… well.

It flew across the sky in the pre-dawn light, clearly a bird. Clearly a big bird. My brain had to process. What is that bird? In Florida, the default on a big bird is vulture. That’s what we’ve got the most of. But this bird didn’t say vulture to me. The wings were wrong. The flight was so smooth, such a glide, so quiet. Eagle? No. Hawk? No. Falcon?

The bird settled on a tree branch and finally my brain — in my defense, it was early, before coffee — put together the flight, the time of day, the size of the bird, its silhouette on the tree branch, and the calls of Whoa-whoa-whoa-whooooo that I was hearing and said, “Owl.”

Actually, it was more like my brain said, “Owl. Owl, owl, owl, owl, OWL!” I’ve seen them in captivity and I’ve seen them in photographs and once or twice, I’ve seen one in the wild from a far distance when someone else has pointed it out to me, but this was my first real close-up of a wild owl. And then another one flew by, and the first one joined it and they tried a different tree. I tried to follow them, but they moved again, out of the campground and deeper into the fenced-off forest that surrounds the campground, and I resumed walking my dog. But my morning no longer felt prosaic and dusty, but a little bit magical.

Owls are cool.

In other news, I’ve been having the most amazing time writing. Not, alas, writing Grace. But approximately 16 days ago, I got impatient and frustrated with myself and I decided that every day — every single, solitary day — I would write 1000 words of fiction. Not careful polished words, not words where plot and characterization mattered, not words that built to something, that were part of some larger whole, just… words. Quick sketches. Snippets of scenes. Bits and pieces of story. But a thousand of them every day.

I missed one day, because it was a moving day. That was the day I left Trimble Park and spent the night in my dad’s driveway, so it included cleaning and organizing, drying and stowing the kayak, loading up the camper, and then much sociability. Apparently I just didn’t even think about writing that day. But every other day for the past two weeks, I have written 1000 words and wow, I have been having so much fun with them! There is something about the freedom to write terrible words, the joy of pointless words, that has let me get madly creative. Most of the words have been starts to stories, world-building that goes nowhere, but I’ve had magic and vampires and dramatic confrontations, children of the gods and immortal courts and SO. MUCH. FUN.

I’m trying not to stress about the future. A writer who only starts things and never finishes them is really never going to earn a living, even if she’s trying to subsist on ramen noodles and other people’s driveways. And I’m still working on Grace every day, even though what mostly seems to happen is that I have a great time writing for a few hours and then grimly open the Grace file about mid-afternoon and stare at it until I can escape into feeding and walking the dogs. But yesterday I actually had some Grace insight and my 1000 words of fiction included several hundred on Grace, so maybe today…

The shape of a day

Yesterday, a dog threw up on the bed and I didn’t notice until after I sat in the vomit. (I say “a dog” because I have no idea which dog, but I suspect Zelda, because Bartleby tends to try again when he throws up. He doesn’t care if it’s partially digested and didn’t agree with him the first time around, food is food to B.)

Anyway, as I wrote to a friend, sat-upon dog vomit is the kind of event that is capable of shaping a day if I let it. As is happens, I had recently spilled coffee all over my other sheets, so that was the end of my usable sheets. It meant that I had to do laundry, on a Sunday, at a campground laundry, with coin-operated machines, all of which adds up to another event that can shape a day.

It made me think about the shapes of days. Some are flat, of course. That’s a definite day shape, for the ones where you reach the end of the day and wonder why you even bother to get out of bed. Of course, the days where you don’t bother to get out of bed can be pretty flat, too.

There are also curvy days. I think those happen when something unexpected but not bad unexpected takes place. Truly bad unexpected days are pointy, that’s their shape — like stakes through the heart. Maybe curvy days are also the days with lots of ups and downs? When the day starts out bad but recovers nicely? Those could be curvy days.

I don’t know what a triangle day would look like. Or a square day. But angular days definitely exist. Those are the ones that include trips to the DMV or the dentist’s office, without compensating chocolate or flowers to make them curvy. I like the thought of fractal days, but I have no idea what they’d actually contain. Maybe hallucinogens or high fevers?

And when it comes right down to it, I’m not sure what shape yesterday wound up being. The laundry was exactly as crowded as I expected it to be, but people were friendly and sociable. I felt productive when I had clean sheets on the bed, satisfied with my efforts. I’m using this software called Streaks, to track my efforts in exercise, meditation, and writing, and managed not to break any of my streaks yesterday, and that was satisfying, too. If it was a shape… well, I think it would be a complicated shape. Maybe a spiral?

I’m not sure what shape today’s going to be: I’m packing up Serenity so that I can take Zelda to the vet for her re-check of her ear infection. I’m at about 75% certainty that she still has an ear infection, which is not going to be fun, of course. And the vet is an hour away, via major highways, so I’m not charmed by the thought of driving and dealing with traffic. I’m also a little worried about this vet’s parking lot. I was there once before, in a regular car, and I was grateful that I didn’t have to try to park the van in the close quarters of the crowded lot, so today’s parking might not be much fun. On the other hand, on the road always has potential for adventure. And an hour or two with nothing to do but drive safely and think about Max’s motivation might actually result in some forward movement in Grace. 

What shape is your day going to be?

The loneliness of joy

I know solitary confinement is torture, but part of me thinks I’d do just fine with it. Obviously, I’d prefer it if it included my dogs and a fully-loaded ebook reader and something to write with and on, preferably keyboard-oriented, but even without all that, I think I’d be okay, at least for a longer while than most people. I’ve never been one of those people who can’t stand their own company and after almost twenty years of primarily working from home, I’m really pretty good at solitude.

Obviously, that doesn’t stop me from getting lonely–everyone is lonely sometimes–but I didn’t worry about loneliness being a problem in my traveling life. I considered it, but I thought I’d be fine. And I am. Mostly.

The interesting discovery I’ve made/am making is that loneliness is deeper, at least for me, when it comes with joy. When I’m having a bad day or something’s gone wrong, I might want someone to vent to or share with or even get help from — I spilled coffee everywhere this morning and it would be really nice if someone could have grabbed the computer while I was getting the dogs out of the way — but generally speaking, the thought doesn’t even occur to me. I grumble to myself or to the dogs and I try to take my time with problems and if I really need help, well, that’s what the phone is for. I don’t usually feel lonely because something’s gone wrong.

But when something’s gone right…when I see an incredible sunrise or a mysterious animal or have a funny story I want to share (like the text I got from my son the other day, where he said, “It is a mark of how Floridian I am that when I first started seeing icicles I thought they were decorations,” which just makes me smile every time I think of it)… that’s when I notice how alone I am. I’m still okay with it — it’s not like I’m in solitary confinement, my solitude is not breaking my spirit or driving me insane — but those are the moments when I feel lonely.

I suspect I will also notice how alone I am the first time Serenity has a major breakdown. Life happens. If I spend all my life on the road, then at some point, I will be stranded or I will have a flat tire and I’m definitely going to be wishing for company at that moment.

Anyway, I feel like I should be going somewhere profound with this thought but I’m not. It’s just an insight. I truly love my life right now. I feel incredibly lucky to be living the way I’m living, even when what I’m basically doing is sitting in a parking lot (as I am right now). My mobile tiny house life is far from perfect — I’ve got a pile of coffee-stained stuff in the middle of my floor waiting for me to solve the laundry problem and something that I haven’t been able to track down yet has made the van smell musty for a couple of days — but it is really damn good. So good, in fact, that I am lonelier than I imagined being. I’d call that ironic, but really maybe it’s just incongruous?

I’m currently in Wildwood, Florida, in a Thousand Trails campground. Yesterday, I was trying to pull a burr off Zelda and it just would not come — I finally realized it was a tick, incredibly bloated. I suspect half of it is still in her, but the internet assures me that it’ll probably come out on its own. So gross. The campground… well, I’m here because it’s a cheap place to stay while I work on Grace. I’m making a conscious effort, a quest, to find something beautiful every day. It’s harder than it should be. Fortunately, looking up almost always works.

 

 

Five-year plans

Almost five years ago, I was trying to decide if I should post A Gift of Ghosts to Amazon. I never really considered doing anything else with it: it was post to Amazon or let go, not start hunting for agents or rewriting or anything like that. I was well aware of the many things wrong with it, from an opening where she looks in a mirror to its lack of a real plot. But I liked it. I thought of it as not so much a novel as a puzzle box, something you keep opening (reading) to find out what’s farther in. My dad called it an “entertaining onion,” which I love as a description. And I’d let a few other people read it and they’d mostly liked it, too.

When I finally did decide to post it, I’d come up with a five-year plan: I’d write a million words, aiming for ten novels, and if I was earning $1000 per month at the end of the five years, I’d consider whether I wanted to take writing seriously. I also planned to finish graduate school, get my master’s degree in counseling, and find a job for my internship hours. Right about now, I ought to be about ready to open up my private practice, being duly licensed and all that.

Ha.

Life is weird.

That five-year plan was my very first five-year plan. I’m not someone who started college with an idea of what I wanted to be doing and my career–which worked out really well for me, actually–never came with associated goals. I didn’t flounder, but I always knew what I was doing made sense for the day I was in. Even when I hated my job, and there were times when I did, I was very clear with myself about why I was doing it. But it was never with an idea of where I wanted to be in five years or what my goals were. My goals were to do good work, be a good mom, and end the month within budget so I could take my kid out for Chinese food or maybe sushi now and then.

So here I am, having completely failed to accomplish my five-year plan. No million words, nowhere close. No ten novels. No degree. No license.

On the other hand, wow. The past five years have brought me so much. Some amazing friends — it’s hard to believe I hadn’t even met some of the people who make my life so much richer now. Some intensive self-discovery and growth. Some radical changes in diet and health — I couldn’t have imagined, ever, how much better I would be feeling physically. That it was even possible to feel so much better physically! If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t tell myself to write more and faster, but to get rid of gluten sooner. And, of course, adventures and travel and a stray dog and… joy. Lots of joy.

I sort of want to create a new five-year plan, not so much because I think I’ll accomplish it, but because this moment of looking back, of reflecting on what I aspired to and what I accomplished, is maybe what five-year plans should really be all about. I didn’t achieve what I hoped to achieve. In that sense, my five-year plan is obviously a big fail. But I am so filled with gratitude for what I found instead. My past five years were hard and painful and frustrating and challenging and so, so, so rewarding. For my next five… well, I’d really like to skip some of the pain. Maybe a lot of the pain, in fact. But for the rest… I guess I’ll be thinking about that.

But first, it’s back to Grace!

Reptile Heaven

I built a campfire the other night, right before sunset. While the sun slid down into the water, which rippled with pink and purple and rose and gold reflected light, and the sky gradually grew dark, I watched the flames flicker and leap. Doesn’t that sound lovely?

It would have been if I hadn’t spent so much energy worrying about alligators. My campsite is right next to the water and the fire pit is about eight feet away from the edge of the shore.

I don’t know what my thing is about the alligators. I mean, yes, the dogs are the perfect size to be alligator meals, and yes, alligators are actually much faster than they look when they’re resting, and yes, they’ve got the whole dinosaur, primeval, lumpy reptile thing going on…

But still, people don’t often lose their pets to wandering ‘gators.

And while this park definitely has alligators in it — I’m fairly sure I saw an eye peering out of the water at me the other day and my neighbors claimed they’ve seen one clearly — the alligators are just as likely — more likely, actually! —  to be small. Two foot long alligators, not ten foot long. Rodent-eaters, not dog-eaters.

In the darkness, though, the water felt much too close.

At one point — and this was rather cool — I thought I saw a shadow by the edge of the water. Not an alligator shadow, an animal shadow. Like a cat. I told myself I was imagining things, and then the shadow started moving. It was on the other side of the fire and it wandered by the edge of the water, a dark motion against darkness. For a couple minutes, when I wasn’t sure whether it was really there or not, I thought of fae and fantasy, creatures out of Patricia Brigg’s novels or JK Rowling. Then it moved enough into the light that I was sure it was real and I decided it was probably a raccoon.

Yesterday my neighbors found a snake in their campsite. I am 90% sure that it was a garter snake, but the dad told the kids it was venomous, maybe just to make sure they stayed away from it. Why take chances, after all?

And when I was walking Zelda, we came upon a turtle in the road. It immediately stopped being a turtle and started being a dark green and yellow rock, head and feet drawn inside. Zelda was more curious about why I was stopping our walk to take a picture then she was about the turtle. I guess turtles don’t smell as interesting to dogs as Spanish moss does.

I also had to chase a little lizard out of the kayak. It wasn’t an anole, which I’m used to seeing everywhere. Instead it was brown and patterned. If I had more data, I’d try to find out what it was, but as it is, I think of it as mystery lizard. I considered taking it kayaking with me, but decided that it probably wouldn’t be very happy and if it fell in the water, I’d feel guilty.

This morning, while walking Z, I saw another critter in the woods. No idea what it was, except maybe a very big armadillo? It was far enough away that I didn’t get a good look at it, and moving quickly, but the silhouette looked wrong for every animal in my mental repository of Florida appropriate animals. Including armadillo. Anteater and tapir were the shapes that came to mind.

So yes, animals. Reptiles. Great campground. I love all the little moments of excitement that random strange animals bring into my life.

Today’s plan — some writing, hopefully lots of it, some kayaking, probably not enough of it, and then a relative visit in the evening to see the Christmas lights go on and listen to Christmas music. Tomorrow I’m on the road again, although headed nowhere in particular.  I can’t believe it’s December already. I am as frustrated as can be that I’m still making no progress on Grace, back to wondering whether someday I just need to give up. But today won’t be the day.