From the neck down
I spent most of my life in my head and sometimes it gets so confusing up there, that it’s best to get out and take a walk. Yesterday, after preparing the house for rental guests to arrive, I decided to take a shower, put on a bindi and head out. I stopped first to see my friend at Swirl and she treated me to a fine cabernet. We caught up – me sipping my cab, her stocking her shelves – in the fashion that most friends these days do – on the fly.
Then I left and went to Canal Street Bistro where I was seated at the front table, overlooking their patio where three tables were full of lunchers engaged and hungry and the back drop was Canal Street and the trolley going up and down. It made for a fine vista, and then my food arrived. A big thumbs up. I got the Vegan Salad which had the most divine crisped herb tofu with chunks of grilled portobello mushrooms and black beans over a bed of spinach. I came home and wrote a review on Yelp.
Then I picked up cookies at Brocato’s and went to get Tin from school and the dogs from the vet. One came home with diarrhea all over the nicely groomed yard. How lovely. I then went to a playdate for me and for Tin and learned that new friends are leaving to move up North in January – reminiscent of when Steve and I moved here in 1995 – we stayed eleven months before California beckoned Steve home, and left me with some serious unfinished business – a home, a child, loved ones.
But move Americans must – they just can’t seem to put down roots. New Orleans folks have boomerang roots – they fling off but always crawl home. And here I am now, back at terra prima. But in the watershed of my life’s footprint, I am lately finding it hard to pinpoint me. It’s like I’m an organism that shifts and morphs as it moves through landscapes, relationships, work, but all this shape shifting leaves me weary of all the thoughts that float and don’t anchor into a form.
We raised our glasses of wine last night to toast to pregnancy, new job, moving, a pay raise, job recognition, a surprise check – it did not seem like 2012 for those moments – everything was about gain, not loss.
Tin and I drove home and made our way to the back of the house, where we sunk deep into the bed to read Bringing The Rain to Kapiti Plain. I can’t read it like James Earl Jones, but I must admit the rhythm of the words are mesmerizing no matter who is reading them.
When I climbed the stairs to bed, weary from my pre-dawn rising, I decided sometimes life is better enjoyed through the senses and not the mind – the streetcar click clacking down Canal Street, eating nourishing and tasty food, celebrating the bounty of/with friends, and a good read in a comfortable bed with a curious child tucked under your wing.