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 posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I traded dreamscape for a bedroom ceiling speckled with hues of pre-dawn blue my left hand was curled as if his right were still clasped around it, once-distant memories made painfully present and quietly but persistently ensuring I wasn’t going back to sleep anytime soon.

River walking as I am today, it seemed appropriate to share words from water previously forded, images remembered and collected and poured into a submission-of-sorts this past November.

———–

Sometimes I swear I would have saved him.

Swear I could have rescued his breath from the icy depths into which he so foolishly and voluntarily dove, if only he had provided me the opportunity to play fearless, to play savior. I was twelve at the time, almost thirteen. I knew how to act older. I was a good swimmer.

Rationale tells me we both would have drowned that day.

Some days I can feel my blood crying out for his, and an overwhelming sense of loyalty, of family, succeeds in convincing me I wouldn’t have cared. That it would have somehow been right, noble even, for me to sink to the bottom of that river with him.

Sometimes when I’m sitting next to her on a particularly pleasant spring day, her voice loud, myself mere feet from where her shape-shifting body brazenly cuts itself over rock and bank–her rushing waters background music to those thoughts of mine strong enough to overcome such a deafening roar–I feel her icy pulse rushing through me, liquid electricity, and for a the briefest of moments my loss sits still, lapping lazily in sixteen years’ time.

The rest of the time I sit and stare.

I stare at the way she moves-unforgivingly fast, cruel and cool in her perpetual serenity-and I’m amazed at how after everything she’s taken from me I still find her absolutely breathtaking. Strong and stunning, proudly drenched in apathy toward everything but her own power, I could watch her lunging past me for hours.

I wonder and write stories in my head about the lives she still holds captive underneath her fluid visage. I battle quietly with the naïve, impulsive, wannabe hero in me: the hero who assures me I could jump headfirst into her ice-cold heart and live to the see the opposite bank.

The hero who lies.

Today, if not for icicles draped across branches of a small fir tree growing boldly between crevices of a rock cluster on which I sit, her waters look inviting, maybe even warm. But it’s still early April, and she doesn’t fool anyone easily this time of year. Proof of her malice manifests itself in a world frozen all around her, layers of splashing river water quickly becoming incriminating fingerprints of solid ice.

In my dreams I see a woman with brambles for hair and tendrils for fingers. Her voice spirals along the riverbank, years of practice yielding her song a pitch-perfect match to the foamy water churning feverishly below where she sits, pointedly perched on an uneven slab of granite, her skin sun-baked and clutching her bones hungrily. She whispers his name, four syllables splashing off her tongue onto nearby reeds. She waits for the current to give back what it took.

———–

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.

Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.

I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?

(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)

(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in which case he probably really IS going to tell you everything. And you’re probably going to want to break all of his fingers by the time you reach page 500.)

———-

Before Thanksgiving I drove from Portland to San Mateo and back in a single weekend* to give Iggy a better home. He traded a one-bedroom apartment he was forced to occupy mostly alone while I worked and worked and worked some more for a house near the beach with a sun-soaked yard and multiple laps to occupy at all hours of the day and night.

I know how many of you appreciated and loved him, and anyone that ever met Iggy can attest to how surely he loved you right back, so routinely did he nearly asphyxiate himself out of sheer excitement whenever anyone walked through the front door. Letting him go remains one of the most emotionally challenging decisions I’ve ever made, and yet one of the easiest, too.

I didn’t talk publicly about my decision or the trip until it had already begun, and while it certainly might have looked abrupt from the outset (most decisions do when you’re not privy to the emotional or physical backstory), it was a decision a long while in the making, and the best for all parties involved, but most especially for Iggy.

I held him close the entire trip, paid attention to how and why I would miss him, took an excessive amount of pictures. We ran in circles at rest stops and made new friends in San Francisco and fell asleep listening to Pacific waves cresting and crashing steps away from a tent I pitched at midnight in Half Moon Bay. Like so many mornings prior, I awoke with a snoring pug curled against the small of my back.

The day after I said goodbye I started sobbing mid-run, still in San Mateo, sun warm on my face, the San Francisco Bay in front of me so bright and beautifully blue. Two days later I found this picture in my inbox, taken after Iggy’s first walk in his new SoCal city, and I haven’t cried since.

*Not at all recommended. Unless of course you have an Erin to play co-pilot, and a Hans and a Jen and a Matt for triple-team text support, and another Jen to play gracious hostess/distractor/non-judger as you start crying while petting her boyfriend’s dog.

———-

If you’re good at inference reading, you’ve probably already surmised this isn’t the only story I’m going to tell you. But it’s the only story I’m going to tell you today.

Tune in tomorrow (or maybe the next day) for more radical life changes!

This week I’ve been finding pieces of writing long lost and forgotten. Unearthing words belonging to me, and words penned by some of my favorite of all literary voices, collected and saved and scrawled excitedly on pages littered with foggy memories of past lives, obscured now in light of all that was and is and is to come.

Of the words not belonging to me, Lucille Clifton’s were the ones I found most often, recounted in notebook after notebook, or inked on napkins from memory during a particularly quiet night behind the bar. It makes sense I would find her again now, as I always do when I’m feeling quiet with so much to say. Her poems never cease to pour themselves into me, make me want to tell taller, stronger, better stories.

And stories for you I certainly have. As soon as I can find them all.

In the meantime, I’ll let Clifton do the talking, especially because “further note to clark” is perhaps my favorite of all her poems. One of them, anyway.

———-

further note to clark

do you now how hard it is for me?
do you know what you’re asking?

what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?

I’m collecting stories about the apartment window filled with small elephant figurines along one of my favorite walking routes. So many trunks standing side-by-side and none of them alive.

I’m collecting the surprisingly sweet scent of roses that shouldn’t still be blooming. Their light pink petals and aroma daily chilled but unmistakably fragrant.

I’m collecting hill-infested streets, cataloging them to keep them close always, to remember the way they push and pull at the breath in my chest, the way they make my legs shake in anticipation of reaching one of their playing-hard-to-get crests.

I’m collecting looks you give me when you think my attention is busy being corralled elsewhere. I pretend I can’t see, climb slowly, stay rock steady. (Don’t worry; your secret’s safe with me.)

I’m collecting trees, so many trees imbibed with intoxicating fall hues. Reds and yellows and oranges so vibrant they make rowdy noises when you catch them in the light just right. They cheer and scream and sing of renewal and growth and death-bringing-life.

I’m collecting hopelessness, so I can set it on fire. Doubt, so I can devour it.

I’m collecting quiet moments, to save for noisy laters. So much change on the horizon, and all of it welcome, sweetly peppered with seeds of mysterious possibility to be watered; I’m going to help it grow.

I’m collecting words, so many stories I want to tell you, when the time is right. When you’re ready. When I am. Soon.

A Marine Biologist and a Professor of English Literature. I tried to be both until a university system said it was too much work, what I wanted too different, made me choose. Beautiful decisions unfolding tenderly like fiddlehead ferns before me, showcasing a forest of promise. But the ferns don’t tell the whole story. That’s not their job. Their job is to mirror resilience. A verdant metaphor of life and longevity and YES.

The whole story is both simple and complicated, as most stories are. As choice is. Exalting one opportunity to a favorite mountaintop so often means another is relegated to the ice-cold trenches of a deep sea, destined to drift quietly in a current swirling with various nouns and half-hearted starts, ideas for zany inventions and thoughts too bold and brazen and untraditionally you to speak, sweet everythings whispered once, when you were sure he wasn’t listening, a promise you nearly shouted with your eyes when she wasn’t in the room.

Sitting in a room packed to the brim with awkwardly brilliant biologists, entomologists, analytical chemists, forestry and genetic specialists, I listen with wide eyes and a broad smile. I hear passion wafting fragrantly underneath every sentence uttered. I watch collaboration and critical thinking and problem solving with endlessly broad applications for a brighter world, and for a brief moment I find myself wondering if I made the wrong decision. I wanted to study whales and ocean currents and the mating habits of starfish as much as I wanted Yeats, Keats, Heaney, and O’Connor. And now anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows why I adore it so. Melville’s seafaring heart is something I inherently understand. He was fascinated by the sea and everything living within it we can’t and won’t ever really see. He wanted to paint the mysterious leviathan, tell its story by simply describing it. A scientist lived in his heart, but the writer was always bigger, bolder, more verbose.

I traded labs and microscopes for books splashed with the souls of kindred spirits, true. I’ve always been drawn to those who can’t be quieted, whose words have to find blank pages daily, even if said pages are never to be read, never to be heralded while they’re still breathing. The heralding matters least, I think. The truth has always been in the trying.

Words are sticky like velcro, will always find their place eventually.

“My son forwarded to me the nice things you wrote about him…Your thoughts made a dad very proud of his son” is maybe the best compliment I’ve ever received as a direct result of my writing.

All of that to say: If you’ve written something for someone, about someone, in memory of someone, share it!

With them if you can, or with those who love them. I can guarantee you’re going to make their day when you do. Unless maybe what you wrote about them is a biting diatribe. Maybe keep that to yourself.

——————-

He was the first adult male friend of mine who didn’t talk in circles and called me beautiful and worthy on a regular basis. He was also the first mental health professional who had ever befriended me. He was hilarious and outgoing. Friends with everyone and yet he always seemed to walk alone. I would have spent all day with him, every day. I wasn’t the only one.

He was also the first relationship I ever had with a male friend that would never turn even slightly sexually tense. He was attracted to men, and had been all his life. The son of an evangelical minister, his sexual and personal freedom had been hard-wrought, and hard-won. He still maintained a working familial relationship with most of his family members, though sometimes he spoke of them the way you might speak of a pebble you’ve been forced to carry around in your pocket, something familiar and light enough, but slightly annoying, inescapable.

He was bright, intellectually razor-sharp, and deep-feeling, perpetually and intentionally burdened by the weight of his own decisions, and the weight of those he listened to for a living. I never paid him to sit in front of me, although I could have for the invaluable advice he bestowed upon me almost accidentally whenever we spoke.

To this day he remains the most honest person I have ever met. The type of honest that routinely knocks you into your own subconscious when you’re not paying attention, while you’re sitting there laughing with him, amused and engaged and merely attempting to keep up with his wit and verbal banter.

When I miscarried and was subsequently dumped by a man who the week prior had proposed marriage, he didn’t hesitate to warmly embrace me, and then moments later offered to drive to Montana to vandalize his house. I laughed through hot tears, my face buried in his shoulder, my mascara splashing quietly from my eyelashes to his dress shirt. I knew he meant it. I knew he would have driven the three-and-a-half hours across two mountain passes just to spray paint profane and holy things on the weathered sides of walls that weren’t his. Because within those walls something that belonged to him–something he understood and appreciated and loved–had been soiled. A friendship, and a woman who was once strong and self-assured, now lying in shattered pieces on an embarrassingly dirty floor.

He saw a portrait of who he wanted me to be, and saw the mess of paint I had allowed myself to be reduced to, and he never for a moment judged me on either canvas. I don’t know how he did that, how he managed to be so completely and consistently unbiased. I just know I am forever grateful for his color blindness, for his inability to see me for the wreck I was. He saw me shattered, yes, but he always believed I would rise.

I believed because he did. And for awhile that was enough.

——————-

*Post title from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and “Little Gidding” specifically.

[Updated to add, as of 3:45pm on June 12th: Theresa is officially sans water and in the hospital for the duration of her delivery. Which means: Sometime tonight, or maybe tomorrow (but hopefully tonight!), Baby Barkley will officially be here. You have no idea how much self-discipline it's taking to refrain from using excessive ALL CAPS and endless exclamation points right now.]

I was sitting in a grassy courtyard earlier tonight chatting with Cayly (you’ll probably call her Hans, just like I do) about everything and nothing, about how amusing life is, and how tired our respective feet are after hiking thirteen miles yesterday, and how amazing it was to see a doe with her two fawns standing a mere ten feet away from us on the trail, looking at us curiously before taking yet another step closer, when your dad called to tell me your mom was experiencing contractions four minutes apart, and even now I don’t really know what that means, except that she’d been having contractions long and strong enough to know you weren’t joking this time. You were ready. You are coming tonight. Right now.

Right now I’m sitting at my desk writing you this note after having readied everything for tomorrow like it’s an ordinary day. Iggy is fed and walked. My lunch is made. The weather’s been checked and suitable work attire has been somewhat haphazardly set aside on a hanger on the inside of my closet door. My workout gear is eagerly anticipating me wearing it.

A 5:30am run has been cemented in my early morning plans because (the sun is set to rise right about then, yes, and) it’s 12:00am now and I can barely sit still, and if I thought I could run in the pitch dark and not break one of my ankles I would be outside right now, imagining I could send my sister bursts of my own strength with each stride so she’ll be sure to have plenty extra for the long night ahead, even though she probably won’t need it because your mom is one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.

But a 5:30am run it is, because I know after a night of waiting to see your face for the first time I won’t be able to keep my legs from sprinting as fast as they can, as if I’m running toward you, but that’s too far to run in one day and so I’ll just run as far as I can and pray your mom is still feeling strong, resting when she needs to rest, and pushing when she needs to push, and that you’re feeling strong too, healthy and not too scared about entering this world, because while you’ll soon enough learn this place isn’t always as beautiful as we’d all like it to be, for you, and for everyone, there is so much adventure to be had, so much to touch and taste and see and do, and there are so many people so excited to meet you. So many people who have loved you from the moment you existed. (Did you even know that was possible? I didn’t, until Theresa told me you did.)

You’re entering a big family, Baby. Maybe bigger than you’ll initially appreciate (big families have a way of suffocating you with sentiment sometimes), but our family is filled with people who’ll know exactly how to hold you, and how to make the best tea and the best pancakes (they’re huckleberry, by the way), and how to run a ridiculously fast mile and swim a perfect side-stroke, and how to steer a canoe and make the best stew and how to read to you so you love reading, too, and how to tickle you so you’re laughing so hard you won’t be able to breathe for a second, and oh how quickly you’ll come to see what a glorious gift laughter is, and how you’ll be doing copious amounts of it as part of our family. Someday I’ll tell you all my favorite jokes, including the joke that makes me laugh harder than any other, and I can’t wait to see the look on your face when you hear it for the first time, and you love it as much as I do, and we’ll both laugh at how I never learned to master a passable Irish accent even though the joke clearly requires it.

You see, what I’m really trying to say is: Today is anything but ordinary.

You’re a game-changer, little one, and even as at this very moment you’re forever changing Theresa and Will’s lives, you’re also forever changing mine.

Love and huckleberry pancakes,
Your aunt Kerri, who is looking ever so forward to meeting you soon and very soon.