"well, all i need is the air i breathe...

...and a place to rest my head"

there are a lot of things that i don't like about myself. and there are plenty of things i am bad at: like math and not laughing when its inappropriate. but there are some things i fare well with: i shake hands firmly and i can make a place feel like home even if it's far away. and, for better or for worse, i notice all kinds of unimportant things. i remember the way the furnace sounded in the house i grew up in. when i heard it i used to make my way to the nearest vent and stand on it to get all the hot air for my own two feet. i remember that my dad's fingernails had ridges on them (i looked out the window after i wrote that and a white corvette drove by). i remember that my nana's black station wagon had a disney bumper sticker on it and that my babysitter mary's station wagon had a hump in the roof. i used to think that came from a very tall person sitting in the car, or maybe harry from harry & the henderson's had sat in there once. i remember waiting for my flight to italy there was a woman across the room eating an orange. she was wearing all white and i thought that was a dangerous combination, she spread a napkin out on her lap.

and what do i gain from knowing these things? comfort, is the answer to that. maybe it's a respite for an overactive mind. but i really appreciate the way these very small and non-essential moments make me feel, they're like a framework for my mind. i was thinking about what home meant to me last night when jill, mom, and i were driving to dinner. i don't have a clear picture of what my someday-home will be. but i know how it will feel. like open windows when the evening air starts to cool the temperature. like the string on a fan swinging back and forth. and waking up from a nap in the late afternoon. it will feel like the moment after you've turned off all the appliances and realized that nothing before was ever really silent. like sleeping at the foot of the christmas tree with its light on the first night after you've decorated it. and cold stones on bare feet. the smell of green peppers while you're cutting them. like wet hair and those last beads of water from the shower on your shoulders. it will feel like grass does in the spring when you barely even remember that there was such a thing as "grass" beneath all that white.

i realize that these things get me nowhere and that they're probably just taking up space in my mind where knowledge of linguistics and shakespeare and british literature should be. and maybe it's corny. but these things are really very important to me. and i am grateful for the ability to see them.