one door away from heaven

Plenty of hubub in the house this year and yet I still can't seem to drown out the worries of Austin, which have followed me to east coast. I love my family, but yet I'm seriously irritated half the time. Grouchy in my old age or some such.

It's bitter cold here. Last night I donned a coat and sat basking in the moonlight and the sound of the waves crashing on the rocks, looking for a moment of internal peace long after the house had gone quiet. It's all energy somehow, light, motion, sound, five year old boy... The two year old carries around his blanket like Linus, occasionally moving too quickly and tripping over it. There is love here, in this house that is finally feeling broken in after fifteen years, that's starting to smell the way I remember the cottage smelling, of old wood and dust and salt air settled into the cracks. There are answers somewhere in this, just at the edge of my peripheral vision, just beyond graspable.

deep breaths

Wake up, wake up this ain’t just a thing that you
Give up give up don’t you say that I’d be
Better off better off, sleepin’ by myself and wonderin’
If I’m better off better off, without you boy
-Colbie Caillat

Does it get easier? More than a month now and I still on occasion have to concentrate on remembering how to breathe.

Hoping Thanksgiving weekend at the cove will help. Salt water cures all and I need my family.

Rhode Island Dreaming

Thanksgiving made for an absolutely amazing weekend. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to have family around. Family one gets along with, that is. I have a plethora of photos from my trip, all of which are currently languishing in my computer because I left my USB cord in Rhode Island. My aunt is mailing it to me, so hopefully I'll have it back and photos posted soon.

My cousins, Cameron and Devon, are the cutest kids ever. Two and four may be the perfect age, at least when you get to give them back. From intense and sarcastically competitive Scrabble games to walks on the beach to pumpkin cheesecake, all in a place I love, I cannot imagine having a more perfect Thanksgiving weekend. Not to mention the fact that I finally figured out where my sense of humor and some other major parts of my personality come from. And I was genuinely happy. More so than I have been in a long time.

All of this is enough to make me seriously consider moving to New England. Finding a job wouldn't be difficult, one of my mom's brothers works as a consultant in the biomedical field and offered to use his connections, I'd be close to family, my allergies are negligible compared to Austin, the ocean is right there, and the northeast actually has seasons. However, I don't know how much of that reasoning is my deep dissatisfaction with graduate school speaking and how much of it is really what I want. Nor do I think I'm ready to pick up and leave all of my Austin friends. It took a long time to find my support network and I seriously doubt I'll ever find a group quite like them ever again. Then there's my rugby team and the fact that Austin is finally starting to feel familiar. Really, though, all of this is pointless conjecture because unless I'm prepared to walk away from my degree none of this is feasible for at least another six months. But it is a relief to know there is somewhere I could escape to that I am happy.

thanksgiving

Less than an hour before I head to catch the shuttle to the airport. While I'm not feeling particularly enthusiastic about spending the next twelve hours or so dealing with air travel I am extremely excited about this holiday. I fly into BWI via Denver (wha?) midnight-ish and from there am heading north to Jamestown, RI with my mom and youngest brother. It's about an eight hour drive and there was no option for changing my flights, even with a hefty fine; it seems holiday travel really doesn't lend itself to changing plans.

There is absolutely nowhere in the world I would rather be this weekend than with this particular group of family in Hull Cove, Jamestown, RI. I'm probably going to have an interesting time explaining just why I'm mastering out my graduate program, but otherwise these are people whom, given the opportunity, I would choose for family and I haven't seen most of them since the summer of 2004. The cove has been a refuge for me all of my life; some of my earliest memories involve family vacations there surrounded by my cousins and my mother's siblings. I still hear the waves in my dreams to this day.

In four days I'll be back in the reality of life, hopefully with plenty of family anecdotes that don't involve being offered cheap whiskey by my grandfather (That was the other side of the family, last Christmas. This upcoming Christmas I'll probably need it.) Until then, though, it's comfort food, and time with a book next to the fireplace and waking up with the waves outside my window.