one/one/twenty-one

Failed starts and doing it anyways- day one of the new year.

I could not remember the url for this website earlier today and when I did finally track it down, I found myself a stranger in what once was built to be a home for my writing and our business. Did I really write that? And with so much exclamation? It's hard to imagine. But- I decided to do what I hoped to do anyway, to write. I did find the website after all.

Elsewhere-

the camera was dead, the charger was long gone, and a replacement was ordered- but it won't arrive for another two weeks, didn't of course arrive before we left for our New Year's Day hike. So, it is here that our heroine retrieved the phone previously hidden away in pursuit of nobler devices, it is here that the contemptible little gizmo was returned to the palm of its captive-

but simply for the camera, simply In The Meantime, simply just that because there's little good to be found in it otherwise.

Perhaps that's a wild generalization.

But also- perhaps daily life gets caught in a current of outside forces with the access a tiny little handheld, pocket-friendly computer provides. I want to be both my current and my paddle, rather than swept away down the path of an unchosen life, only at-the-mercy and never steering. It was with that in mind that I tucked my phone away in the first place. Read a heap of poetry, drank water and coffee and more water, ate eggs and sweet potatoes, did the dishes and hiked until I could see the ocean- the kids and their tenderness, their piercing intensity, woven through all of it. And then- I sat by the fire and tried to remember what it was like to have something to say and write it out coherently. I wrote and I wrote- til the sun went down and the computer burned my eyes and Gus came in with wet Christmas mittens telling his father, I forgot how fun not watching TV can be.