Moving Along

It blows my mind how one minute you can feel so stuck, and the next, the stars are aligning and things just falling into place.

I guess Jeremy and I had begun to feel a little overwhelmed, perhaps, over the last few days regarding this whole Africa trip.  There is a lot to prepare, but more importantly at least for me, at lot being invested in this expedition.  Mostly our time, or to put it more personally, my time.  I have begun to feel very aware of the time I have spent, and the time I have left, and that there is no "time bank" for me to tap into when my age begins to impede my activities.  I need to get the most bang for the time I have left to spend. 

Tonight Jeremy made a phonecall to one of the people we hope to be working with throughout this whole madness.  I am so relieved that the call was, for lack of a better word, successful.  To summarize, we have connected, we believe, with like minds, of similar approach, someone we can relate well to and work well with.  Of course, this is still all over the phone, but you can sometimes tell a lot through a conversation.  I am so excited to meet these people, I feel like a lot of things are falling into place, and I don't want to jinx it, but I really have high, high hopes.

Today we had quite a bit of snowfall.  I walked to the library in the snow to return a book and borrow a new one, Investing for Dummies, to be precise.  I would be the dummy.  I love to walk in the snow when it has just fallen.  It amazes me how the entire landscape can change in just a few hours, suddenly everything is white, everywhere, it is so bright, the trees are dark against the white of the snow clouds behind them, you can't see the ground before you, just the layer of snow and you walk through it, not quite knowing where the road ends and the sidewalk begins.  Most of all I love to turn around and look at my footprints in the snow, the first footprints to spoil the smooth surface of white, and then I turn and look ahead where no-one has yet walked, but I am about to.  Usually the only others I see out in the snow are squirrels and birds, but rarely.  Usually it is just me, and an eternal white landscape.  I feel suddenly all alone though I know there are people surrounding me, hiding inside their houses.  And the silence, all sounds are duller and the missing sound of traffic puzzles me in the back of mind, trying to remember what is missing.

Of course, in a few days we will be complaining about the dirty slush all over the roads and sidewalks which won't disappear, and then when we have a freeze the slush will turn to ice and try to trip me up every time I walk to work.  But for now, it is just painfully pretty.  And everytime I look at it I try to remember, unsuccessfully, what it was like when I could see the grass everywhere.  And then when the landscape changes again and I am surrounded by green, I will try, unsuccessfully, to remember what it was like when it was all white.