So I’m hanging out in the woods with my kids, my girlfriend Molly and her daughter Natalie.
The other day I’m chilling out on the porch while the kids play in the woods next to the house. Natalie comes up to me with a leaf stuck on the end of the stick.
“Can you light this on fire for me?”
“Sure,” I say cheerfully. I hold my hand out and pantomime striking a match, making whooshy flame sounds as I touch the end of the leaf.
Natalie looks crushed.
“No,” she says. “I meant for real. Light it on fire for real.”
“What do you think would happen if I did that?”
She looks thoughtful.
“It would be a candle?” she asks.
“I think it would burn up that leaf very fast, and then the stick would catch fire and it might burn you, and you would drop it and all these pine needles and dry leaves on the ground would catch fire and it would make a huge fire that would burn the whole house down.”
Natalie thinks about this for a moment, and then flashes her best puppy-dog eyes.
“Can I please have one chance?”
I haven’t updated this blog since BlogHer. That’s the longest hiatus I’ve taken from writing here since I started about 16 months ago.
It’s not that BlogHer put me off blogging; far from it. The conference was incredibly inspiring. I made great connections, had a lot of fun, and left feeling more inspired than ever as a writer and a blogger.
But after that intensity of four days in New York City, I stopped by my home in Boston long enough to swap out the contents of my suitcase and visit with a few friends, then took off again for Maine. I’ve been sitting by a lake outside Bangor for about 10 days now, soaking up the sunshine and silence.
There’s been so much moving and changing for me this summer: I closed my preschool, became a full-time freelance writer, traveled the world. I’ve been living out of a suitcase since the middle of June. My coven suspended it’s regular meetings after almost five years. My husband and I spent some intense weeks figuring out what our marriage means to us, and reshaping the container of our life together.
Taking a few weeks of silence up here in Maine feels like giving myself time to change and grow, to catch up with the new life I’ve made around myself.
So I’m hanging out in the woods with my kids, my girlfriend Molly and her daughter Natalie.
