Now

Time is a sloshing, sticky thing. I first started this blog as a way to document my travels when I lived out of my car. That was nearly two years ago, and here we still are. I’ve kept writing because I’ve always written and I don’t know another way to live. But I also write because it connects me with other people and with myself. I have most of my writing from fifth grade until the present and about once a year I’ll do a deep dive and sink myself in memory, to a time when I was that girl, that woman, with those thoughts, those feelings.

So here’s what I am up to now. For you. For me.

Where I am:

The Adirondacks are thick with pollen this time of year. A swell of wind blows through camp, and plumes of pollen emerge from the trees like fog, like smoke, like every wish you ever dreamed when you blew on a wispy dandelion.

I like to think I know the Adirondacks, but I really don’t. Teaching here for the past two seasons has taught me that much. I’ve visited it as a tourist does–dropping in for a weekend in the High Peaks, walking around Lake Placid–but never knowing its bones. I’m trying to know it better. I root around in the woods and sleep on its ledges and talk to the frogs that hop away from me in the wetlands, and I hope that someday I have a place I know like a lover, a place that feels like mine. Because right now everything is all rain and movement and mudslides. And it’s good. It’s fine. But I want that stability. I want a forest I can watch change throughout the seasons, a woodland I can grow with.

What I’m doing:

This is my first season here not teaching outdoor ed. I still haven’t adjusted to the change. The new coworkers, the new responsibilities, the new shared spaces. Camps blossom in the summer season, and it is harder to find spaces to be alone.

It’s been exactly one week since I’ve started my summer adventure job, and already I’ve been on two backpacking trips. My legs ache with mosquito bites and my gear is drenched, but two nights ago I stood on a ridge with a group of high school boys, and we talked about traveling and climate change and how short life sometimes feels, and the sun set behind us, and it was a little bit magical, a little bit splendid.

What I’m reading:

I was upset when I finished watching Call Me By Your Name last spring in Ohio. It made me ache in that beautiful way art does when you see your own heartache mirrored back at you. Sometimes people stop loving you and there is no answer why. Why are you so upset, one of my coworkers asked me, and I realized that answering her question required more honesty than I possessed.

The book burns. I listen to Sufjan on repeat. Elio Elio Elio.

What I’m feeling:

It poured all day yesterday. There was a strange deja vu as I arrived back at our campsite, eager to check for flooding in my tent. Because there was a different tent once. A different place. Different people. A different year. I remember muttering excuses and racing from the dining hall to my tent on the hill, piling my possessions on the air mattress in the middle, pulling the rainfly taut, and readjusting the ground cloth underneath. It is hard not to think of Cape Cod this time of year. It is hard not to miss people and places that don’t belong to me.

What I’m thinking:

Everything and everyone has their time and place. And I am here. I am here. And it is now. It is now.