The last post I wrote was probably before I went to the doctor; she told me to lie down on the table, and then when I was pretty naked she started giving me chores to live better.

The stress starts to accumulate throughout the weekend, and then on Sunday morning I'm crying into my salad and so homesick for the farm that I fall asleep after work thinking I've suddenly gotten in the car and driven there while I'm asleep. Let go of my jobs and let the 100-year-old farm house wash my sins away on creaky bunk-beds, and the steadfast and hearty-spiritual feeling of drinking my grandfather's coffee that has grounds in the bottom of the pot. He is blind, he doesn't know about the sediment.

"No, sorry ma'am, that patient hasn't been here since 2011, their prescription is expired," a heavy Louisiana accent comes back to me, and I realize I've been breathing heavily on hold for two minutes, and that the call is recorded. I know it will later be audited (probably by Matt) and the auditor won't know the heavier sighs are coming from the homesickness, and he won't care.

But then comes a  new  prescription, and in small, happy letters, the words Scranton, PA flash across my monitor and I have to smile. God gives you happy little things to keep going. God is the auditor hearing my sighs and knowing how many days that I'm not going to get hit by a truck that is going through a red light on my way home.

And that's enough.

don't tell anyone I'm here, I've got Tylenol and beer.

Life is sweet, and pretty restful right now. 

I'm a force to be easily reckoned with. I sit around eating oranges in the extra hours that I get to myself. I am doing laps on easy street. I even do yoga sometimes before I stretch myself out under a new, bright yellow duvet in the afternoons after company subsidized steak-lunches. I know the next part could be fierce, and I will be strong when it comes, but it's really nice right now to drink coffee and listen to a book on tape and take the day off on my days off.

I'm living out my college dream of sitting in my room drinking tea and being an editor at 2:45pm on a Monday afternoon, and now my grown-up dream is to go back in time and become an accountant or an analyst or something where I'd have pants on at 2:45pm on a Monday afternoon.

hemingway and me

You promised I'd get to be a sailor, after I did all of the hard things we've all gotta do. You said we'd get away and eat fish raw from the ocean, and lay out on the deck under the big huge moon and drink wine til 3 in the morning. You said you'd cook me eggs for breakfast and we'd read in our bunk and every day would be Saturday in the same way that every day'd be Monday in all the good ways and all the bad ways that come of working hard and working with your hands and taking leisure very seriously and being in love and making someone else belong to you.

When you wake up, there are pieces missing from the story, and you're so thirsty for water and you have to pee and find yourself crying in the bathroom and you want the dreams to go away and everything smells like Lysol and there are pillow lines on your face.

In the real life we went in different directions for good reasons. You--too much a liberal and smirking, thinking me naive. Me, trusting in God supremely because I see the world dirtier than you do. The questions would have come up later, but I made them come up right away so we could save time getting back and used to being by ourselves for breakfast and lunch  and under trees and in hallways and having the whole bed to ourselves.

We won't get to go fishing, I think. We won't get out, even in a small boat so that we don't sink a ship.

so I could be happy

I feel pretty lighthearted today.
The weekend was good, the time change was hard.

I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep quickly on Sunday night, and that's always the time that you think of everything, right? I miss the farm so bad. I miss it, and I look forward to it, and I get up and make toast and coffee and go to work for it. The love of being home in the green hills and with my grandpa, and the smell of hay and grass, the way the sun sets in bursting stars through holes in the walls of the barns. Slipping away to eat an ice cream sandwich in the cellar. Finding a frog got into the bathroom from an open window. The thunder and lightning keeping you up at night and sharing a room with five people you love so much. The love of the sadness, the history, and how it keeps moving on as we lose people who go to our real home to be with Jesus. Patsy Cline at dinner time and drinking wine til 1 in the morning with a soldier and his Iraq baggage and his hopes and his fears. Running down gravel roads with cousins.

Those are the only dreams that I want to dream at night.

But God has given me gifts here too. Movies til 2 in the morning. Strong coffee. Surprise morning snow when I walk from building to building. A 3 hour conversation with an old buddy who makes me laugh. Rewatching The Office from the beginning. Freedom. Mid-day hangouts with my dad. Sunlight. Running outside again. Fancy dinners with Celisse. How fun my siblings actually are. My job.
The grass is so green, when it comes down to it.
Thank you God for your plan for it, even when it happens one day at a time.