Paradise

3 meters behind me

I am writing from paradise.  We arrived yesterday afternoon.

Last night I dreamed the perfect next tattoo for myself.  Which wasn't actually a new tattoo, but was also probably the most expensive, time consuming, and painful thing I could possibly invent to have scratched into my skin and still have absolutely nobody notice that it was there.  It was to be done essentially on top of my old tattoo.

Waking up here, 14 months ago

Then I dreamed that I was meandering through a bookstore set in an ancient castle tower.  It was room after round room, stacked on to of each other, filled to the brim with old books.  I was wandering lazily through this store in the company of half a dozen authors, living and dead, talking about what made books so wonderful.  What made reading so important.  Which authors they loved.  And then I noticed that F. Scott Fitzgerald had grabbed a civil war novel off a shelf and was carrying it around, and it was written by my husband's cousin.  Who doesn't write, to my knowledge, but seems pretty full of a secret life.

And then I realized that I wanted to wake up, and I stretched gloriously and opened my eyes.  And I was at Guppy lake, with the early morning sun coming through the blinds in the corner bedroom.  And as I stretched, the covers fell away, and my gigantic, snoring, bear of a husband rolled over and hugged me, and just continued snoring.

And there was silence from the room next door, where I used to sleep as a small child but my own children were still sleeping now.

And I kissed my husband, and I grabbed his laptop, and got onto my father's wireless network in the middle of nowhere in paradise.

And now I'm writing, laying on a hammock under a crystal clear morning sky.  My view of the lake is blocked by the world's best climbing tree, but I can see glints of the sun bouncing off, and the occasional patchy view of the softly drifting greenness of it.  The birds are singing, and there's a lazy hum from the amazing machine that keeps the mosquitoes away, and every few minutes a dragonfly swoops past overhead of a turtle dives with a tiny "sploosh."

DD here last summer

Lots of things have changed in the last year, since our last visit.  The girls are children who run and play (with the same toys I loved my whole childhood), the main cabin is filled with the furniture from my parents' old house instead of my mother's grandfather's house.  There's a working shower that I just can't WAIT to try out, and during my almost-a-week here, I have a few items on my agenda.  All of which are pleasant and will result in the taking of many pictures.

But in the meantime, I'm just going to go inside, have a cup of tea, and get ready to help my children start the day in my absolute favorite place on earth.