I spill over

Where I live, in the Columbia River Gorge between Oregon and Washington, the very rocks run with water. For a short season in the late summer and early fall, most of the smaller streams and drips dry up, but for most of the year, the edges of the Gorge and the edges of the highway, and the edges of everything form little waterfalls and huge crashing, falling courses, and streams and falling water are everywhere.

Every once in awhile, I match my topography.

This is one of those days.

This week, my ground has been watered with such generous understanding and sparkling gifts of "atta girl" and "good for you" that I have become saturated. I spill over. I splash and play in the sun.

I have returned to "school" - even if "school" is a rather anticipatory word for what I'm doing right now. The very first edge of inquiry in a proposed and possible course of study - a class that only asks and answers the question, "Is doing it this way feasible for me?" - it's not really proper school. Not yet. It's challenging, of course. There are assignments, and things due, and a schedule to follow. But it's just a brief taste. Ha! I just got a little flashback! This part? Where I am right now in school? It's like a future bride and groom tasting various minuscule squares of wedding cake so that they'll know which whole cake to order for the Big Day. This class is just a nibble. (Like these tastes from &Eat It Too) But this is probably a good thing in my case. This tiny nibble is sending me into ecstasies of happy rapture. The real thing would probably cause me to lose consciousness!

Then, in addition to the loving support and enough applause to make me blush coming to me from other people, and the fact of my tiny sample taste of school, there is the impending Anniversary. We're doing things like buying rings and a few pieces of new clothing and some lovely spa stuff for our vacation. We're talking about it all the time. "We need a vacation." "Yeah. Let's go." It's a growing tune in the background, more and more audible. A melody and a harmony and a rhythm we already know - we're the composers of this particular little symphony, after all - and we can hear it swelling again, ready to fill the whole of the universe with its glory once again.

The end of June and beginning of July is always a time of anticipation for me. My birthday is in the first part of July, and since it's only a few days after the Fourth of July, it's seemed to me my whole life that my birthday starts with fireworks. Twenty-five years ago, I got married nine days after my birthday - so now the whole first half of the month is Celebration Season. We've never done anything flamboyant. We're more about the quiet dinners and homemade cakes and personal, private gifts. We vacation for a little while if we can. But still. Even for all the quietude of it, it's ours. And the anticipation I feel shimmering in the air, the knowledge that there will be something sweet and just for me around the next corner ... it's in my bones.

Today, my thanks for my friends, and my re-entry into academia, and my growing eagerness for our Season just around the corner -- they spill out of me and splash and play and run into the eddies at the sides of my river. I am so well watered I'm making a fine mist rise up, and everything around me seems to shimmer.