Reading Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I’m lost in a sea of seeing. It’s a pleasant sort of lost. A place to go when I’ve no interest in being found because I’ve already discovered everything I was looking for, and everything I didn’t realize I needed. Words uttered in soft twilight against my cheek sitting quietly on the bottom of a creek bed. Sentences shouted against the solid sides of mountains loyally limping alongside me, floating behind my eyes like tiny fireflies twinkling as we trek down switchbacks my legs have been memorizing when I was too busy breathing to notice, fire trickling eerily and insouciant down a nearby hillside.

It’s all here. It’s always been here.

In chapter two, appropriately titled “Seeing,” Dillard talks about a childhood proclivity for leaving gleaming pennies for strangers to find, often with chalk-drawn notes and arrows leading the way to said gifted treasure. She talks about the power of cultivating a “healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day” and how, once properly done, you’ll find gleaming pennies planted the world-over. Each day a gift. Each day rife with treasures ripe for the finding.

As she wrote, and as so many others before her have, too: “What you see is what you get.” It really is that simple. And that complex.

The trick is in the looking. In the being there, wherever “there” is for you. It is, Dillard maintains, our “original intent…to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

I delight in this sort of homeland detective work. It’s what being outside-and, especially-what trail running is to me. What it is to us. To know a place because our feet have merrily and determinedly trod upon it. To participate in the sacristy of miles of trials and trials of miles. To stumble upon an alpine meadow only seen by four sets of eyes all summer. To watch a sunrise soak the sky with light as our legs are climbing higher and higher still, our heads careening through clouds littered with soft pinks and oranges. To be overcome with a quiet awe as we fly underneath trees older than we’ll ever be. To know a trail, a forest, the contours of a valley because we’ve heaped our breath upon it, mixed our sweat with the scent of sagebrush, fir, and alpine tamarack, left our blood alongside coyote tracks and bear scat.

In the aforementioned passage Dillard is of course discussing the metaphorical “why” with regard to individual and universal existence. As to why I’m here, sitting next to the unequivocal love of my life in this perfect-for-us house in this dynamic valley flanked on all sides by gorgeous foothills, I know exactly.

I’m here because I said yes. First to a hike in unexplored backyard trails two Junes ago. Then, more than seven hours later, to sharing fish tacos and beers and more of our respective stories. I’m here because he said yes to one more day, and we both said yes to daily conversation and story-sharing, and to a combined road-trip back from beloved twin cities. I’m here because our lives began to weave themselves together from that first conversation, even as we initially weren’t really paying any attention, were only ever enjoying each other’s company, basking in the beauty that was easy conversation and easy laughter and time evaporation whenever we occupied the same physical space, and even when we didn’t.

I’m here because I kept saying yes, to invites to stay another day, a few more hours, to visit for Thanksgiving and, ultimately: to stay.

What I’ve found here has been staggering, overwhelming in the best of all ways. I’ve found joy, daily. The kind that sticks to your bones, makes you want to run home, to share your every moment with someone who makes you better, stronger, faster, wiser. Someone who makes you laugh down to your toes. I’ve found hope, both quiet and still and loud and brazen, rushing at me from all sides, seeking to seemingly drown me in happiness.

I’ve found peace and progress and forward-thinking and wisdom garnered from experience and from books and from deep thinking, writing, ever more reading. I’ve found chosen family, growing together like groves of wise and exuberant trees. I’ve found mountains. Every day I wake and see mountains looming stunningly in the distance, foothills rising on my immediate horizon, daily donning magnificent wintry shades. I wake and I ogle and I am overwhelmed with gratitude for all that my life is and all that it is yet to be.

I’ve this ring on my finger now. Simple and silver and featuring a tiny knot on the top in the shape of an infinity symbol. A placeholder of sorts for a ring being made, this one equally simple, hand-carved from a Koa tree.

Because, see, what I’m really trying to tell you is:
Over Curdsmas Break Matt asked me the best of all questions. And I, being madly and unendingly in love with him, of course said yes, am still saying yes, actually, as he’s resolved to perpetually ask me until our rings arrive. As he so perfectly put it: “Kerri Anne said she’d give me forever.” I did. And I will, oh so happily and without hesitation, without a semblance of doubt: give forever to a man who makes me feel like the luckiest person in this universe, in every and any universe.

I’m here because it’s where I belong: In a vat of gooey, gorgeous love with a brilliant, compassionate man with superhero legs. A man who makes my life, who makes every moment feel like a ridiculously fantastic gift I can’t believe I get to open daily for the rest of my life.

We electively rose before dawn, eighty fires worth of smoke still poaching our air, sleep still determinedly stuck to our faces. We sat with small waves of nausea as our stomachs realized the time (4am) and the place (no longer asleep). Eggs and tator tots and sausage we ate, merrily but quietly, the three of us thinking about moutains and miles and the day’s adventures quickly approaching.

Mountain seasons are short, harsh, blunt. They don’t do small talk. They won’t take you halfway. They’re big, impressive, grandiouse in scale and, often, especially if you let them, in body brutality. They don’t know how to be anything else.

Mountain miles, in somewhat amusingly stark contrast, are long, sometimes deceptively so. They like to play Coyote, to meander, to keep you guessing. Five miles can easily feel like eight, or ten. Four-and-a-quarter on swithbacks to finish the end of an intense twenty-two, headlamps on and flames eerily bright in a ridgeline above you, like fifteen.

On the reverse, nine can feel like nothing. Can feel like leaping and dancing and unadulterated joy. Can feel like a gift you didn’t know you were being given. That’s how the first nine felt last Saturday. Like I was flying, floating, couldn’t quite believe where I was allowed to be going. 3600 feet to 5400 feet and then up to 8,000* in a mile-and-a-half via a mountain pass meant for climbing with only my legs. No part of it had my feet yet seen, and no part of it wasn’t stunning, much of it breathtakingly so.

As it inevitably does, the landscape is changing.

Two Saturdays ago a much anticipated rainfall accompanied by a dazzling thunderstorm ignited over eighty fires in our area, most of them not measly in scope or size or damage still being done. We sat in a backyard belonging to dear friends as if around an unwelcome campfire, watching flames devour hillsides mere miles away. Neighborhoods continue to be evacuated and crews continue to work tirelessly to ensure homes are safe, but we hadn’t seen rain since mid-July and so now we’ve canyon after canyon after beloved canyon aflame, and countless acres of dry forest for constant kindling.

It’s hard not to feel frustrated, to feel helpless, not to take it all inherently personally: everything ablaze and nothing we can do to stop our sacred mountains from burning, to save our favorite trails from providing fuel to flames firefighters don’t have enough manpower or resources to fight. Nothing we can do to rescue our breathable air and our stars from the blanket of smoke suffocating them both.

This is where we live. Where we play. Where we regularly and happily challenge sinew and synapse to be better, stronger, faster. What we so routinely deem our backyard even while it feels brand new nearly every weekend. We could spend 365 consecutive days playing amidst the myriad mountains that surround our great valley and still not exhaust every trail there is to run, every combination of vista-laden fun.

It’s hard not to take it personally because it’s supposed to be. It’s home. This beautifully imperfect home we’ve found in this verdant valley laden with chosen family and surrounded by peaks we’d climb daily if afforded the ample time.

It’s ours, and now it’s also his**, and even as no transition is seamless and we’ll trip and stumble and conversationally climb our way from a dynamic duo to an even richer trio, even as we’ll wait (im)patiently for access to trails our feet have memorized-to survey the damage and discover what was left untouched-our home has grown, and our resilient trails will endure, and all of it feels full, feels happy, feels overgrown with laughter, with hope, with forward momentum and myriad adventures into the great unknown.

*[Notes for posterity's sake, trivia] The second highest my legs have ever carried me. (The first was Brokeoff Mountain, at 9,235, in June of this year.)

**Which is to say: Welcome, Josh!*** I’m so glad you’re here.

***Matt’s brother, who is super fantastic (it runs in the family; weird, right?) and moved from Minneapolis/Wisconsin to live and run trails and adeptly listen for cell phones falling off the roofs of cars with us for the year upcoming.

Tuesday night the moon donned a waxing gibbous, blasting its nearly full body through blinds I can never seem to shut tightly, so much do I want the sun’s company during the day, and then the moon’s when the sun’s seen fit to sink below this prized, peak-studded horizon.

I have moons on my mind lately. Maybe because the moon’s been especially bright as of late. Maybe because the moon’s always especially bright here with so few clouds to cloak the sky from necks accustomed to craning upward, eyes eagerly seeking seas of stars.

Maybe because lately I find myself awake during the darkest hours of the much too early morning, my body not rife with the sort of fatigue it’s grown accustomed to needing, my recently acknowledged broken big toe deciding it doesn’t much care for sleeping, and my mind full of light, bathed in happy anticipation.

I lie awake and watch upcoming plans clad in soft orange hues ambling quietly over the horizon. I smile like Carroll’s Cheshire cat as I try to count the myriad more yet to come, dipped in brilliant yellow and gently tickling the nape of my neck. I sit still and listen to steady breathing and memorize beloved silhouettes and think about all the books I’d read if the day would only sprout a few more hours of unscheduled time.

Still, with all the bustling that is forever rustling the golden-tipped leaves of all my favorite trees, my bones are endlessly thankful ones, my skin full to the brim with grateful words and tingly feelings, my feet sure of brutally beautiful trail miles patiently awaiting them just around the riverbend.

—————–

A moon battered into being by another moon was the topic of a cozy coffee-shop conversation with dear friends this past springtime. One I still remember thanks in large part to a charming and incredibly alight nine-year-old who himself possesses an impressive memory and a fondness for storytelling and the Science Channel.

There are similar theories as to how our own moon found itself orbiting earth in a delicate give-and-take I most days forget to stop to appreciate.

I find it comforting, perhaps strangely so, to think something so beautiful and bright and lasting–something so innately essential–can come from something so initially jarring, so unexpected.

—————–

A dear friend with an age chasing mine texted to tell me she’ll be gifted a blue full moon tomorrow for her thirtieth day of cake. I’d no idea of the celestial significance, only the phrase I’ve employed along with countless others to signify a special and presumably rare occasion, a once in a great while sort of story. And indeed it is that.

More specifically, it’s a bonus moon: An additional lunar cycle that will light the sky alongside our typical twelve. It happens every few years, and is the result of accumulated solar calendar days.

There’s something profound and profoundly simple about the sun and the moon making the best team this planet has ever seen.

But lest I metaphor you to death, what I’m mostly trying to say is: What a great while this has been, this is, this continues to be.

a) This week donned its best Hammer-inspired crazy pants and thus
b) my words have been spent elsewhere, writing instructions for grant-torch-passing, helping students attack comma splices and encouraging them to write conclusion paragraphs.
c) This being very-new-to-me territory, I honestly have no idea what to expect (beyond miles of trails and trials of miles, of course).
d) All of the above.

Matt’s written a far more eloquent version of the past week’s events and our impending trail-laden trek. The truncated version of the story goes a little something like this:

Tomorrow I’m running 31 miles. That’s (by far) as far as my legs will have carried me up to this point. I’m a bundled mix of nerves and excitement and fear and trust and doubt and without a doubt I’m finishing once I start. My legs feel ready. The rest of me isn’t so rock steady. But I said I’d run, and as crazy as it feels to admit, hydration unfinished and unfriendly pathogens making their presence known, right now thirty-one still sounds like quite a bit of fun.

And not just because at some point I’ll be running here:

But also because of that.

See you on the other side, kids. (I’ll be the one crying and looking like I just went swimming and probably not being able to walk, but also beaming and asking with a mouthful of pizza when we get to do that again.)

It was here, while waiting for my brother, that I started this story, although, of course, at the time I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books. But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water. And I sensed that ahead I would meet something that would never erode so there would be a sharp turn, deep circles, a deposit, and quietness.

-from A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean

There are so many stories to tell she isn’t quite sure where to begin. Lately she’s been waffling about where and how and when to best tell her stories, and which stories need to be told at all.

Sometimes she feels as if she’s hoarding her happiness, keeping so much sacred and soft and to herself, but then that isn’t entirely true, isn’t probably true at all, because she’s been told she radiates joy even when she isn’t climbing mountains to sing at the top of her lungs. She’s been told she has light behind her eyes even when she isn’t dancing from moment to moment, skipping merrily from mile to mile, each step revealing words and plans and looks and trips and bellies full of laughter.

She wants to tell you about epic road trips, whaleslap weekends, saturated spring breaks. About ground nut stew and soft green trails, accidental sunburns and mothers who bake blueberry muffins and talk with happy tears in their eyes. She could cheerfully regale you with stories about her preferred ring-toss stance (unconventional and yet effective!), how poorly she plays bean bag toss (and how she refuses to call it “corn-hole”), high-fives and bike rides. She wants to tell you about brewery tours (she could this minute write a compelling ode to Scotch Ale), meeting new friends who instantly felt like old ones, easy conversation with nary a trace of small talk, how much she’s missed artichokes.

She wants to tell you about twenty miles run and years of loss undone by legs turning over even when they wanted to scream, wanted to cling to doubts about their ability to careen along trails unexpectedly unfriendly. She wants to tell you about cramping calves and a high-ten she almost collapsed in, about how just the sight of him made her want to run farther, run faster, master her mutinying limbs just a little bit longer.

———

Once in the recently passed past someone well-meaning attempted to unearth historic heartache to make a point. He loves her and she knows it, but not being an authority on her heart, he was out of bounds and she told him so, without hesitation. She wasn’t able to say much else for the duration of the conversation, so overcome was she with a range of emotions and all of them giant-sized, all of them wiggling in their seats while eagerly raising their hands, vying for front-running attention. So she sat still and thankful someone who knows her heart could and would and did speak, not for her but for himself, boldly, but with heartfelt sincerity and patience.

Not wanting to be too hasty in her storytelling, too harried with her heartfelt responses, daily she’s been collecting her words, fishing them from streams, plucking them from early morning sunbeams, finding them tucked behind her ears amidst strands of hair longer than she’s grown in years.

She could tell you she has a past, yes, and it’s both black and bright, as all pasts are. As everything is. But what she really wants to tell you about is her present. Her now full to the brim with smiles and inside jokes, with once-buried speed and dirt under her feet. Her now littered with light and vertical promise, with tie-dye and big sky and endless ridgelines. Her now rushing steadily with memories worth cherishing and keeping, joy seeping in from all sides, threatening often to make her cry. She wants to tell you about a present routinely making her grin, causing her to swim headfirst into currents at once both new and thrilling and yet somehow easy to navigate, perpetually gentle. She knows she hasn’t seen this watercourse before, and yet it feels homegrown, feels winsome, feels perfect amounts of unknown.

———

Daily she finds herself pausing to revel in the frenetic beauty of her life. She would say she feels lucky, but that word never quite fit in her mouth just right. She would say she feels doors and walls and tangles of vines thrown asunder. She would say she feels as if she’s standing atop a high peak with pine boughs for arms and buttercups for eyes, a cool ocean breeze wafting through all of her favorite trees, a litany of trails unraveling their routes below and behind and beside her and all of them calling out to her in welcome and challenging tones, perpetually urging her to brighter and bigger and bolder movements, conversations, transformations.

She would say all of that and think it sounded as much like truth as oversimplification.

Mostly she wants you to know she’s really very happy.

(She really hopes you are, too.)

I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.

I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity of a story. As it turns out, I’m protective of my phrases, perhaps too much so, and so I’m learning when to stand my ground and when to let the ground go tumbling out from underneath me and I’m wondering if catapulting my words into the eyes of impartial third-parties will ever feel even slightly comfortable. Right now it mostly feels like every inch of me splayed open in front of scrutinizing strangers, my voice quiet while my words chatter nervously, naked and vulnerable and waiting to be torn asunder should they ramble or run-on or pause for too long.

————-

Twice a week we saunter to sleep before 9pm, invite our dreams to come early so we can rise and add the sound of our feet flying over ice and snow to dark moonlit hours otherwise devoid of all sound, save for the quiet and yet unmistakable hopeful humming of a day just breaking, all consciousness and worry still soundly sleeping, nothing more alive than the blank slate creeping across butterscotch hills laden with promise as long as the trails we traipse, eyes blown open by exhilarating cold, wind dancing across our eyelids. In these pre-dawn hours there is not light enough for worry; to-do lists aren’t welcome here, can’t compete with the peace of legs turning over and over and over still, arms pumping, hot breath steaming in front of faces softly waking, happily star-gazing. I love these mornings best because at 4am there is only the present tense and it’s stunning and I like to think about him climbing and careening down silhouetted ridge-lines above me, his legs warm and loose now and miles ahead of mine, his momentum pulling me ever forward like a conveyer belt of dirt and rock and sagebrush, like the magnetic mountains pull him to them, up and up and higher still.

————-

Yesterday morning I met a hawk on my way into my favorite coffee shop and he let me stand next to him for multiple minutes and I smiled as I admired his stately stance and his dappled rust-red breast and he looked at me with clear eyes (full hearts, can’t lose) and reminded me I’d dreamed of an eagle the night prior and since then I haven’t stopped thinking about flying.

————-

I’ve been spending the bulk of my days reading and writing and working and running and laughing and being happily highly caffeinated. I collect slivers of sunlight for less bright days, but in this valley of apples I’ve found I never have to wait too long for the light to come rushing back if ever it’s gone. The sun comes to dance here almost daily, giddily cascading, cannonballing, catapulting itself into windows and foothills and upturned faces. Soon enough with prolonged light warmth too will come skipping, clipping winter’s frosty heels, and already I can feel the gentle touch of spring soft and sure and green against my skin. Already I can hear fingers reaching for the edge of a page where another chapter’s ended, and another’s about to begin.

It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed oh so easily, and hours bled across hours. (Evaporating time would become a recurring phenomenon for us.) Leaves boughed low with the brilliant yellow-green of growth, the trail we were traipsing just muddy enough that we each brought a bit of it with us into the evening. An afternoon turned into three days. And then you left.

You came, and then you left. Physically, anyway. You left a piece of yourself here, perhaps wholly unintentionally at first, but daily tethered were we by texts, emails, phone calls when you weren’t sure you could or wanted to keep going, when you wanted to hear my voice, when you wanted to pretend to be upset I was standing with my feet in the Pacific and you weren’t.

But ride off, you did – as you had to, and as I was excited for you to, even as I realized missing you had already most likely become inevitable. Pushed and pulled pedals through the miles of fatigue you insisted on spending yourself on, losing yourself in – and that was your summer. My summer was likewise a blur – of legs treading trails, ogling waterfalls, embracing a new level of busy, but also laden with anticipation, this adorable pterodactyl niece on the way, training for races I wasn’t sure I could really run, a friendship steadily deepening with daily exchanges, so many changes on the horizon.

Some things impending don’t need a name, but we tried anyway: a white whale, an albatross, separate souls adrift in the same sea. Writers both, we’d each our own heads to lose ourselves in with little effort. I tried to think it was nothing, knew it was something; you said you weren’t sure it could be anything, even as you routinely acted as if it were everything.

We staged a great road trip adventure (complete with exclaiming acronym!) and snagged weekends thereafter, kidnapped them from our respective schedules. I fell in love with a small town nestled beneath some of the most stunning mountains I’ve ever seen, and you kept finding ways to keep me there. Thanksgiving became a three-week festivity, lingering nearly to Christmas. Your landlord joked I’d moved in; my friends wondered if I was ever coming back to Portland. What had been a someday, maybe fell instead toward when?

I came home – or to what has these past four years been home – and you followed only a few days later. Co-workers were met, and then a few weeks later, family introduced. Packing became my daily evening ritual; each box sealed was another step from before to after, the unsteady in-between-times past to this happily unwritten present: exciting new terrain to navigate and explore. There are plenty of questions, yes, but it seems like maybe there are just as many answers, even if we haven’t yet unearthed all the right words for them.

The change of address forms are through; this week is my last here, though I’ll surely be back to visit my beloved and eccentric Portlandia, to hug the bodies belonging to the faces of those I can count on missing terribly, to frequent favorite haunts and all the best coffee shops.

In a week, I’ll again be a Washingtonian, nearer those snowy peaks and cold mountain lakes. In a week, I’ll have traded the bustling city streets of Portland for the hard-packed and secluded trails of Wenatchee foothills. In a week, I’ll have traded this stretch of Columbia for that. In a week, I’ll be with you – and for the first time, I won’t just be visiting.

Happy! Monday, friends.

(Oh, and I’m “kerri_anne” on Instagram if we’re not already photo buddies there.)

Friends. Bloggers. Countrymen. I have a confession to make.

I really like Pinterest.

It’s quite unexpected (to me, anyway) I’m enjoying it as much as I am, being that before joining I was staring at the site blankly, confused and overwhelmed and for the love of HTML, why, what is the point?

But here’s the thing. I think I’m sort of a story-boarder by nature. I love grouping interesting and like (and pretty) things together, sometimes just for the sake of grouping (see also: my Etsy favorites or my Flickr favorites). And that’s sort of what this is: Collecting and cataloging inspiring and/or lovely and/or helpful and/or amusing items together on a board to share and enjoy.

I also realized I have at least three versions of personal story-boards in my apartment. Like this one, which reminds me daily to eat breakfast and move until I’m sore.

As a bonus, you can add friends and family to your Pinteresting circle, and thus be newly inspired and helpful together. Just this morning I snagged an awesome(ly simple) chocolate mousse recipe Torrie originally found and posted, that I’m verily going to make for upcoming sisterly baby showers.

More perks to the Pinterest:

a) It doubles as a sweet bookmarking tool you can take with you anywhere without being tied to a specific computer or browser.

b) It makes me think of both golf (Pinnacle) and climbing a mountain (Everest). I don’t know how that’s a “perk” exactly. But I find it amusing.

c) I can also see how it could be pretty awesome and efficient for work-related projects, especially in the creative circuit, as there’s a setting which allows multiple users to add pins to the same board(s).

d) All of the above.

Anyway!

I’m sure a lot of you are already using Pinterest (If you are, what’s your username? Let’s be story-board buddies!), and if you’re not, maybe I just convinced you to try it. (Do it, do it!)

I may have also just convinced you to head for the hills, running as if being chased by a rabid story-board.

In any event, thanks for still liking me even though so often I’m a Super Nerd, built in a laboratory out of parts from lesser nerds.

(Oh, and for the record, this is Pinteresting me.)

(Updated to add: Let me know if you aren’t using Pinterest and would like to be. I have invites!)

Ian recently made one of the best homemade videos I’ve ever seen (below), and I’m not just saying that because I’m wholly biased about their family being one of the coolest on the planet. I’m saying it because Ian is an artistic ninja.

The best part? You can totally hire him to hit your life in the face with his insanely creative nunchucks.

Snow, A Tale of a Toddler. from theBolyards on Vimeo