You Keep Spinning on Your Compass Spoke
For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television. My mom would spend evenings reading poems and stories to my sister and I, as we sat, picking at the splintering wood, on our old front porch. She encouraged summer reading programs and the money she splurged on us was usually spent at Scholastic Book fairs. Later, when I hit my unfortunate rebellious phase and began skipping school, I would go to the library. I don’t think my mom even knows that. She undoubtedly thought I was hanging out with a Bad Crowd, smoking in alleyways, sketching my first tattoo. Nope. Library. Thanks to an early exposure to the beauty of poetry and…
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It Makes No Difference If the Sky Is Blue
I started this post yesterday, the one year anniversary of the evening we drove away from our home in Connecticut, but then life got in the way, as it sometimes does. Anyway, here we go. I was the one to suggest going homeless, “We have enough money to buy a cap for the truck. We could put everything in storage and just go.” I’ve always been one to “buck the tide,” as they say, but it was a wild idea, even for me. Brian didn’t hesitate before agreeing, but I don’t think he took the suggestion as entirely serious. However, over the next few days, as we started talking about our options more and…
And I’ll Never Get Too Old to Get Around
Today we made the last payment on our truck, McGillicutty. Now we’ll have some extra money each month to spend on really important things like toilet paper and deodorant. I can’t even express in a sane way how much having deodorant and toilet paper makes me happy because it’s probably not very sane to get as excited as I do. McGillicutty has been through a lot over the past five years. He’s driven us over 127,000 miles, travelling all over the country. He’s plowed through some roads that probably shouldn’t have been roads (and possibly weren’t roads), up the mountains of Montana, through the forests of Vermont, to the end…
Oh the Desert Dreams of a River
Our camping trip ended early last Thursday. We had rain every day we were there but the last night was storm after storm after storm, which turned the soft dirt roads back to our campsite into deceptive mud pits. Luckily we had been monitoring the weather and had packed up and headed to gravel just before the sky broke. I don’t have any great pictures to share because I was trying some new settings on my camera that didn’t work out. This picture was taken on the way back to camp the evening we called it quits. It was taken from inside the truck because I’m terrified of lightning. I’m…
And Driving Down the Road I Get a Feeling
On Friday we leave to go camping! The plan is to take a week of vacation every year around this time and camp somewhere. This year we’re going to Wyoming. Next year? Probably the same place. I love Wyoming. I love that at times the air itself smells like sage and I especially love the red dirt. In fact, there is a half-gallon mason jar full of red Wyoming dirt sitting on our bedside table as a bookend. The other bookend is an old pickle jar full of beach rocks from Rhode Island. We planned for this particular week because historical averages showed minimal rainfall and where we like to…
