This feels like a dream.  Last night I packed long johns, wool socks, whiskey, snowshoes, and too many books into suitcases, held back tears, and tried to still my guts that vibrated with an emotion I couldn’t exactly locate.   Everyone asks, “Are you excited yet?”  I don’t think it was excitement I felt last night, all month.  A mix of fear, disbelief, and utter gratitude gets a little closer to a definition.  Fear that I won’t be able to focus on my writing the way I see it in my minds eye; disbelief that I am deserving of this gift; utterly grateful that it is all actually happening. 

Emotional.  This is me.  Always.  Probably forever.  I wear my emotions on my sleeve, I am obvious, my raw nerves sense every brush of feeling well before I am able to articulate the why and how.  I yell, scream, curse, cry, sometimes in the same breath, because I am overjoyed, because I am mad as hell, and everything in between.  No matter what the occasion, a well placed “fuck” gives me great satisfaction and over the years I’ve come to accept, even treasure my emotional outbursts.  I can’t be so certain for those who share my company.

Still, deep down, I know writing is a way for me to channel all this and it is no surprise that I’ll first feel this Vermont experience in my body before being able to put it into words.

I spent the day with my English bulldog, Girly.  We took a walk around the Lafayette Reservoir with a good friend of ours, who inevitably asked, “Are you excited?”  Yes, of course…and scared.  "Scared of what", she asked.  Once more, a rumbling in my gut and tears.  I don’t know. 

The truth: scared that I will, that I am, actually accomplishing a dream.  I think of actors and musicians, the rare artist, who work their asses off for years and finally, totally, arrive and it is beyond anything they ever imagined and they spend the rest of their days living the cliché…doing what they love.  To have even found what I love, my passion, the thing that makes me spill over, is a gift.  I know this.  I know that people walk this earth for a lifetime and don’t find their gift or at least don’t have the courage or the support to go after it.  

For me, it is all happening.  Right now.  Yes, because of my hard work, but also something else, no?  Magic.  Timing.  Luck.  Others.

I have not arrived, but I am on my way.  Of course, I am crying as I write this so I know I am right where I need to be.