Life is Strange, Beautiful and Heartbreaking
Water drips from the snowy roofline as the sun slowly warms the air to above freezing. Never did I ever think I’d look at a high temperature of 34 degrees Fahrenheit and think “not bad!”
There are a lot of things I never thought would happen that did happen in the last couple years. I’ll refrain from stating the most obvious. Moving from one corner of the country to the opposite corner was something else I couldn’t have predicted. It’s turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
It feels strange to feel happy in a world being ravaged by climate change and Covid. My dogs and I spent an hour wandering through our woods, following the tracks of a fox left in the snow the night before. When we paused, the quiet among the trees rolled in like a soft blanket, wrapping us in peace. As we continued, our steps crunched as if breaking into a perfectly caramelized crème brulée. Here, there was no omicron or racism or political manipulation. The fox whose tracks we followed didn’t care about economic crises or the spread of misinformation on social media. Here, we could take a break from mass shootings and efforts to strip away human rights. I stopped often to allow the quiet peace to roll back over us.
Moving across the country in the middle of the pandemic was an exercise in self-trust. I had to trust my…
