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

Go to the movies where it’s dark and soothing, alone in your seat amidst a fleeting community. And then, take yourself out dancing to a club where no one knows you. Stand on the outside of the floor till the lights convince you more and more and the music shows you. Dance like no one’s watching, because, they’re probably not. And, if they are, assume it is with best of human intentions. The way bodies move genuinely to beats is, after all, gorgeous and affecting. Dance until you’re sweating, and beads of perspiration remind you of life’s best things, down your back like a brook of blessings.

Society is afraid of alone, though. Like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements. Like people must have problems if after a while no one is dating them. But lonely is a freedom that breathes easy and weightless, and lonely is healing if you make it.

Good Thing Two: Dynamite A Cappella Cover by Mike Tompkins

While it’s undeniable that Mr. Tompkins definitely knows he’s ridiculously charming, he’s also insanely talented, and this video just makes me ridiculously happy.

Good Thing Three: Literature, Speaking To Me

My sister is currently reading Anna Karenina and sent this to me when she read it two weeks ago. I haven’t read Tolstoy in years (and haven’t ever read this particular book), and have thus decided to read both Lolita (Nabokov) and Anna Karenina before the end of the year.

———–

I’d honestly love to hear what’s currently on repeat in your head. Share the wisdom! Share the nonsense! I’m a big fan of both.

• Friends who call me for no reason, or for very specific reasons, and who ask me every question, or no questions, while I ramble and spill my words clumsily and excitedly all over them.
• Butterflies in places where I didn’t realize I could feel them again.
• Emotional transparency.
• Accountability.
• Redeeming love.
• Grace. The amazing kind.
• Sisterhood.
• Greek festivals with tasty gyros.
• Impromptu mid-week dinners with dear friends who make me laugh, and make me feel like family.
• Nine out of ten consecutive days running in the woods, where I feel free to sprint and jog and sweat and stumble, and cry and laugh as my body remembers where it’s going and where it’s been.
• Hot apple cider.
• Crisp fall days that mean I get to wear scarves and hoodies and maybe even socks.
• New Chucks.
• Mustaches, both real and imagined.
• Meatloaf. (The musician, not the 1950′s dinner staple.)
• Walking toward difficult conversations intentionally.
• A job filled with people who believe in the work we’re doing daily, and who believe in me.
• Kind words spoken honestly and thoughtfully.
• Mid-day walks with coworkers who inspire me and make me laugh.
• Evening walks with a best friend who lives eight blocks away from me, and loves me even when I’m ridiculous.
• Bright October sunshine.
• New Twitter. You guys, I just can’t hate it. I cannot. I think it’s rad, and super functional, and I could just kiss it.
• Time to write, to read, to daydream.
• Texts about sailing, about support, about random hip hop lyrics.
• Possibility. Hope. A promise of something amazing on the horizon.
• Upcoming quality time with friends both old and new. (To clarify, Torrie and I have been Twitter buds forever, but I have yet to see her lovely face in person. EXCITED.)

—————–

What about you? What are you thankful for today, this week, always?

—————

This post inspired by a dear friend of mine for whom I am quite thankful.

Writing, editing, and organizing grant proposals, and preparing gargantuan-sized grant budgets feverishly, to meet deadlines both old and new.

Snuggling with my pug and enjoying any downtime I have been able to muster.

Writing! I’m so excited about three different stories I have in the works, and thanks to a recent prompt by Danny, I’ve been sitting down daily to translate my excitement into actual words on a page. (Not unlike snakes on a plane. Only better. And with less Samuel L. Jackson.)

Ruminating on some writing feedback I received from a poetry competition (Spoiler alert: I didn’t win), and from friends regarding the first chapter of one of the three aforementioned stories.

Sucking at email. I’m sorry! I promise next week will be better. (I think!)

Editing photos from last weekend’s sisterly homecoming in Spokane. These are a few of my favorites:

Cleaning my apartment to an anal-retentive degree in preparation for Kristin! staying with me this weekend.

Absolutely riveted by the first installment of The Hunger Games. After a gentle prompt from Kali (It went something like, “Have you read these?”), I skipped over to Powell’s and bought the first book, not thinking I was going to be into the story, having read the back cover before and convinced myself I wasn’t interested. By page five Collins had completely hooked me, and I gave the Jiffy Lube attendant the stink eye when he interrupted my reading to ask me to pay him for my oil change. (And yes, I verily realize I’m late to the proverbial party, being that the first book was originally published in 2008, but I like to pretend I fall in love with series when they are basically over so I don’t have to wait years/months/days in between installments. See also: Patience is for suckers!)

Using the note I found on my car after leaving an apologetic note for the person I parked way-too-close-to (There is construction in our parking garage! It is a nightmare!) earlier this week as a bookmark.

Not getting much sleep.

This weekend I am going to:

Have way too much fun with Kristin.

Eat at Andina for the first time.

Introduce Kristin to Hans, and watch hilarity ensue.

No doubt cry as I watch Rhi walk down the aisle toward Bill, and then back again holding his hand, happily married.

Dance my face (or maybe just my feet) off with Kali, and Amanda, and Kristin, and a slew of other people who are in town to watch Rhi and Bill begin their happily ever after.

Take Way Too Many pictures, especially more ridiculous hand-held group shots.

——————-

What are YOU going to do this weekend?

(Whatever it is, I hope you enjoy it.)

*Title is a literary hat tip to Joyce Carol Oates’ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?