“To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.”
I was a quiet child. I was an observer. While not conspicuously strange or isolated, I rarely sought the attention that everyone around me seemed to crave. I loved the idea of horses and the reality of books. Most comfortable tucked between my bed and bookshelf or sitting cross-legged on the floor of the school library, I devoured books about horses and people and places near and far, and daydreamed about who else I might be – Steve Cauthen, the Kentucky farrier's son who became the youngest-ever jockey to win the Triple Crown on Affirmed; a marine biologist with a private gift for speaking with dolphins; the eldest daughter of a poor, coal-mining family in West Virginia who gracefully endures getting herself and her siblings sent home from school with lice. I wanted to be ordinary yet quietly not-ordinary, someone who looks like everyone else but is a secret superhero. I wrote and wrote and wrote, poems and stories and visions of my personal future, on a portable blue-and-white Smith Corona electric that journeyed with me from early adolescence to college and the era of ubiquitous personal computers.
I just had my 50th birthday. I've learned a lot. I have learned that I love life and am a cheerful optimist at my core, in an every-problem-has-a-solution-so-let's-wrestle-this-cheetah-to-the-ground sort of way. I love serendipity, people who are larger than life, live fire and cast iron cookware, good horses, dogs, and trucks, my love-of-a-lifetime husband, and an extended family chosen more for mutual affection and spiritual kinship than shared DNA.
This blog is for musing about what I've learned and continue to learn. I'm talking to myself here, but you're welcome to pour yourself a cup of coffee and set a spell.
