My friend Steph once told me she thought I was "well grounded." I thought she was crazy for saying that since I was the most ungrounded person I knew. But I never argued with her about it. I liked that she saw something else in me and I let her.

It rained nearly non-stop this past weekend. And C and I woke up early each morning to a fog that enveloped our house and the rest of our little mountain. When we looked out our back window, you could barely make out the trees in the yard, and our neighbors' houses were entirely lost in the gray. On these mornings, it's nice to wake up and listen to the rain trickling softly through the gutters, and to imagine that we are the only house for miles, and to go back to sleep.

Last Friday, Honey went to doggy day camp so I could meet a deadline, and for the first hour she was gone I was more distracted than I would have been with her there and I paced and made too many cups of coffee and listened to music and tried to remember what I did before she was around to help keep my mind off itself.

Can you see me from where you are Steph? Do you see how well-grounded I am?

There are 2,421 songs on my iPod. I don't say this to impress you with my large music collection because I'm certain that this is pocket change compared to many of you. Still, a couple thousand songs and several dozen podcasts—that's a lot of media to have latched to your waist. And yet some days I go to the gym and can't find anything to listen to. Because each song is a ghost, reminding me of where I've been. Ready to take me back minutes or hours or weeks or months or years to some point in my personal history. And sometimes I don't want to be reminded. Sometimes I don't want to go back. So I click forward through song after song in the shuffle and I stop on every tenth one or so. And when I have the right song and the right endorphins from my stair climb washing over my brain, then sometimes the words come, and I scribble them down on whatever scrap of paper I can find.

My body produces a really good drug. But I usually have to beat him up to get him to give it to me.

Honey and I were outside at 3 am the other morning. Rain pouring down. She needed to go. We walked out into the backyard through puddles of water a couple inches deep. And as I stood in the grass, the water creeping through the holes in my crocs and making my socks wet, it made me feel alive to be outside at 3 am in the dark and the cool and the wet, listening to the steady beat of rain and feeling it begin to soak my clothes.

Honey is always surprised by the rain, and her first instinct is to run back inside. But after she's been out in it a while, she'll bury her nose in the soaked ground and begin to slap her paws on the large puddle of water that settles near the patio. And I would swear, it almost seems like she's laughing.

And I wanted to do that the other morning—get on my knees and slap my hands in the water and stick my fingers in the wet earth. But I didn't. I let Honey do her thing and then we went back inside and when I put my head back on my pillow I realized my hair was wet and I fell back to sleep.

link to this | File:  TheLine  Chewing 

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