lucky documents...

i've been taking a little time out here and there to cruise through my old notebooks. there's only so much i can take at a time with those things but there is a definite benefit in returning to them, seeing who you were on a particular day a year ago, 2 years ago, longer, and what your dreams were...


this is an excerpt from a journal of mine that i wrote about 2 years ago-



sometimes
i dream about living far out in the countryside in an old, white, wooden house with a porch and a porch swing and old creaking wooden doors and an old creaking wooden floor.

the house would be at the very end of a long dirt road. the road would go through oak trees and blue belles and daffodils. the house would have an old staircase to swing from and slide down if i wanted. it would have an attic. the attic would have a window. and from way up there i would look down the long dirt road and know that i could see everything but nothing could see me.

in that old house i'd make white dresses for myself. i'd wear them every day. i'd wake up in a big white bed under a big white quilt every big white morning and i'd sip coffee off and on all day.

i'd make paintings and strange sculptures, some little, some big, to put up all around the old house and out in the yard too. i'd make myself a red quilt and lay in the yard. i'd go walking through the oaks and out in to golden wheat fields and i'd collect little scraps i'd find on the ground and pine cones and stones and flowers to press between book pages just like mama would. i'd bring an old crazy camera and i'd take pictures of irrelevant things. i'd paint in the yellow afternoon and write little poems in the evening. i'd hang them all up together in the drawing room on the old, creaking wooden walls.
i'd read and i'd draw in the drawing room and i'd crochet myself little flowers and big sweaters and i'd sew myself a basket of apples and a basket of birds to match. i'd make a book for my irrelevant photographs. i'd sing in the bright morning and hum in the yellow afternoon. i'd be happy and i'd be beautiful too.



this passage made me smile and want to cry and slap myself in the face. my life today is very close to what is written there. very close. i don't have an attic and so no attic window. i live in a cottage not a house but the size of my dwelling has not stopped me from carrying out the lifestyle expressed in that passage. i do wake up in a big white bed under a big white quilt. i do sip coffee off and on all day. i jog through the most gorgeous vineyard there is every morning and i find things on the ground sometimes that i feel certain i should give a home to. i don't take many pictures but i buy the discarded, forgotten, lost ones. i have crocheted myself flowers. an entire wall of them, actually. i haven't made myself a white dress yet but i made myself a plum colored one and i plan to make a white dress in spring.

maybe this is the winter where i'll make the big red quilt?

all this to say is i wanted to slap myself in the face because i'd forgotten all about this particular dream and then found myself living it and being completely oblivious to it... even unappreciative of it at times... and that made me feel hugely ridiculous. enormously so.

and right now, right outside my big window, the light on the necks of the trees is bright yellow. they glow.

they are glowing.


good morning. :)