It’s one of those days that you’re not sure will come again once you’ve hit September. The kind of day when summer dances with fall- the air remaining crisp, but warming ever so slightly- the seasons colliding in a way that commands you to go play outside and feel what might be the last of the summer sun against your cheeks. I know now, sitting in that sun, why my cheeks are so speckled with sunspots that I’ve tried to laser, microneedle and vitamin c to death, to no avail. I don’t think I’ve ever said no to an invitation to a day like this in my life, and my face has kept the score.

Shaun and I rush to finish the work we have to get done so we can beat the outgoing tide. My parents' boat sits on their dock in Shoestring Bay, and she’s ours for the day, if we want her. And we do.

​It has been one of those mornings where a simple school drop off turns into picking up a few groceries, which turns into a whole host of other errands that I wasn’t expecting to have to run. I’ve tried to be very purposeful in making this time in my new/old hometown meaningful and important, whether it’s another six months, another six years, another six decades. Not in the way that things have been meaningful and important in the past...In fact, probably in the opposite ways. I want this time- the time that I’m spending in a place that knows me and that I know back, in a place that moves slower, with people who know one another- to go deeper than I’ve allowed myself to go for the last several years of living in a place where none of those things are true. While I, like everyone else, hope to be financially successful, of course, mostly, I wonder if this isn’t my time to work on my legacy. Whatever that means. Whatever that will be. I wonder if this isn’t my time to make the art I've perpetually put on the back burner. If it isn’t my time to look in the mirror, and better recognize the woman looking back at me. I wonder if it isn’t my time to be the thing that I want to BE rather than the thing  I end up being because of the things I do.