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.

The Little Mermaid is the first movie I ever remember seeing in a theater. My dad took us when it was first released and we undoubtedly ate popcorn and Ursula made my sister cry and Sebastian made my dad laugh and Ariel made me angry. (I mean, really; who trades the entire ocean for forks and dresses and a pair of knobby-kneed legs?)

I used to spend entire summers poolside, my chestnut-colored hair streaked bright blonde and infused with strands of auburn, perpetual sun and perpetual chlorine my only salon. I practiced diving for hours. I learned to hold my breath as I swam four entire pool-lengths. I fearlessly honed all of my strokes, kicking my legs faster and harder and more comfortably, propelling myself from one end of the pool to the other with speed and a grace reserved for water and water alone. My mother called me her fish. I willed her words to magically gift me gills. I only left the water when she or my grandmother insisted I eat, or when the last tendrils of sunlight wrapped themselves around the moon. Years later I’d be allowed the privilege of swimming even then.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

When I wasn’t pretending to be a mermaid who would never consider trading her superior fins for uncoordinated legs, I was probably lakeside, biking to and from trails to explore, paddling my sister and myself to islands surrounded by sunbathing turtles in my grandpa’s ancient but formidable aluminum canoe, the Selkirks shaded and stunning in the distance. Excursions to the lake were always magic, sacred, slow to be shared with anyone because they’d first been shared with him.

Priest Lake was my dad’s favorite place on this earth. My grandfather’s too. It was where I learned to swim in water without a bottom I would ever see and to lose a trail and find it again. It was where my sister and I first learned what thighs riddled with exhaustion from a full day biking paved and dirt roads as fast as we could felt like. (And where we fell into giggling heaps on top of our bikes as soon as we’d made it back to my grandparents’ cabin.) It was where we caught our first fish and promptly decided we’d do well without ever having to remove a hook from a mouth while said mouth was attached to a slimy body wriggling and squirming in our hands.

It was where we learned to play outside. Whenever we were with my dad, and after he died, whenever we were with my grandfather, we were always outside, where life was abundant and fresh and would forever tell you stories if you could just walk long and quietly enough.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

Priest Lake was where my father and grandfather discovered beloved common ground to repair the rift caused between them when my dad decided he could no longer feign to believe what my grandfather so devotedly did. They found peace amidst water so deep it always looks black, and the still-deeper forests rife with deer ferns and huckleberries and granite-encased waterfalls.

Pristine wilderness was their church, the only real place that made sense to them. Years later I’d discover it was the only real place that made sense to me, too. Born from distance running stock but recruited into sprinting, I’d unlock a sacristry with my legs I’d never known I could find outside of water.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

Now: mountain trails run alongside superhero legs are home, alpine lakes my swimming holes of choice, even as so many of them prefer to stay inhospitable for consistent submerging for most of the year.

I smile thinking about how my dad and my grandfather would understand. How they understood long before I did.

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

What else is there to find at the bottom of any body of water but him?

He who voluntarily dove into the river that day in April. He who should have thought twice, three times, five-hundred times before removing his wallet from his back pocket and leaving it on the shore. Before leaving both of us there.

She hardly remembers and I can’t decide if that stings more than the salt of you seventeen years gone, seventeen years drowned.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

I am the girl who lost her father, yes. The girl who lost her father when she was still learning how to live, how to love, how to use her words and what she yearned for, what she hoped to find waiting for her at the bottom of a beautifully shapeshifting sea.

I will always be her: the mermaid with the dark hair circling silently above the wreck, the woman with sun-streaked hair and a face like his older sister’s waiting quietly on the riverbank for some trace of him rushing back to me. If only for a moment, so I could show him, so he could know: How well it is with my soul.

But I am more than that, more than both of them, and will always be. I am more because I lost him. Because I know what it means to lose, what there is to lose. Because I know what it’s all worth, how much there is to love.

*Poem pieces from Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.”

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.)

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!

Visual learning is fun. (Speaking of, there are a great deal more pictures here, from my outbound trek and my Mer-cuddling time in Minneapolis.)

Still to come: The epic return and oh, the endless stories I have, about the endless gorgeous I saw, and the endless mosquitos that oh so enthusiastically and perpetually bit me, and my car that in a moment of swoony weakness for the Grand Tetons momentarily bit the dust.

Milestone, The First: A 5k without thinking. I just ran it. After weeks and weeks of no running. I just started running and didn’t stop until I hit 3.1, which turned into 3.5, and my legs felt amazing, and my chest didn’t feel like it was burning itself in effigy and all of that was quite unexpected, a bigger-than-baby step for this always-only-a-sprinter, and then I turned around and did it all again the next day.

Milestone, The Second: A 13-mile hike. A Saturday morning hike was my idea, but I didn’t anticipate a thirteen-miler straight out the gate. I’ve long loved hiking, have spent countless summers exploring various destinations only reachable by foot, but it’s admittedly been awhile since my weekends were consistently characterized by endless green, my feet tackling delightfully muddy trails, my eyes taking perpetual snapshots of waterfalls. I grew up playing in the woods, traipsing trails new and old from as early as I can remember, trying to get lost for hours at a time in the dense woods surrounding Priest Lake and never quite succeeding. My dad had done too good a job teaching me how to navigate the trees. I always seemed to know where I was even when I was sure I didn’t.

Among a list of eight hikes suggested by Cayly, Eagle Creek was sitting there, batting its alluring mileage at me, wooing me with promises of challenging terrain, multiple scenic pay-offs, pools I could swim. I couldn’t remember what a thirteen-mile hike looked like, but I stopped being able to sit still when I realized that was what I wanted: I wanted to tackle the longest hike on the list, and her favorite. The one requiring a 4:00am wake-up.

I nearly bounded out of bed at 4am, so excited was I to see this trail, so eagerly anticipating perpetually sweating and laughing with Cayly as we climbed and climbed and climbed. I knew before stepping foot on the trailhead I would love this hike as much as she did. Knew following a gorgeous creek for half a day was going to be a perfect way to start a Saturday. Knew I would be taking countless pictures even while realizing none of them would be able to capture the deafening beauty of standing next to a roaring waterfall while it pours itself over a 130-foot wall of rock. I knew all of that.

What surprised me was never once did I want to stop. Never once did my body feel like it couldn’t handle the mileage. If anything, my legs were telling me they wanted to go farther, wanted to keep pushing, wanted to create a new trail from the end of the old one. The waterfall-littered hike itself was breathtaking, and Cayly and I didn’t see another soul for the first two hours, unless you count the doe and her two fawns who bounded in front of us along the trail, and who we met on our way back, standing mere feet away from us this time.

It was (and no doubt will continue to be) one of my favorite days of this entire year.

Milestone, The Third: Running without music. This happened accidentally this past weekend as I visited Tryon Creek for the first time (after yet another stellar recommendation from Cayly), and again found myself instantly captivated by the sheer beauty of the place, the unexpected quietness of the space. We already have Washington Park, Forest Park, countless coastal spots just a short distance away, and then there’s Tryon: A veritable bonanza of green resting comfortably in the middle of our otherwise bustling city. It’s almost unfair how beautiful Portland is.

It was pouring when I parked at the nature center, just as it’d been pouring most of the night and all morning, and as these trails were new to me, and because I was so smitten with the sound of the rain hitting the canopy overhead, I decided I wasn’t going to start with headphones in my ears. A mile in and I had already forgotten they existed, and there I was, thoughtlessly and merrily running the way so many do, the way my sister always has, listening to nothing but the woods telling me stories amidst my own breathing and the rhythmic turnover of my feet on the forest floor.

There’s something about rainy woods that will always be so comforting to me, as if the raindrops themselves are keeping me company, spurring me forward with their steady rhythmic drip drip dripping, my pace quick quick quickening as the trail bends and I stretch my legs as long as I can, eagerly anticipating what I can’t yet see as much as I what I still can: Lush green tumbling in, surrounding me on all sides, ferns reaching out to brush my legs with their waterlogged tendrils, branches falling over themselves to touch my head, my shoulders, narrowly missing my face as I dodge in and around and through them.

I ran four miles of rolling trails with a giddy grin on my face and by the end of it my legs were tired and all of me was soaking wet, and that giddy grin? Well it really hasn’t left my face.

(For the visual learners (myself included; holler), I’ve created a Flickr set to house all of my woods-traipsing photos, doing business as Hike The Planet! More coming soon and very soon.)

I want overflowing summer, refreshing water, to dive deeper and deeper into nouns not me. I want pine trees, fir trees, big bright green leaves covering us with a canopy of neon possibility and late afternoon cool. I want more ferns, never enough ferns. I want to be able to articulate how much the forest reminds me of you, and will always, while simultaneously reminding me of nothing but peace, stunning design, a promise of a time when I’m not back-diving, not looking to find you coming around some bend in a long-forgotten trail, looking for me all these years, greeting me with a hug that would last a lifetime.

I want to be able to access my darkness, to float alongside the loss I was given–to write in and around and underneath and through it–and not live there.

I want to live near the ocean, on a lake, in a tree house with a mossy staircase.

I want activity, my body always reminding me how much harder I can push it, how much more it can take, promising me steadfast feet, strong limbs, graceful poise on the muddiest roads. I want sheer exertion, my arms and legs pumping pumping, pushing myself up the tallest hill I’ve ever run, again and again and one more time, just to see if I can do it without losing my grin. I want to keep falling deeper in love with the feeling of my feet flying faster, pulsing and praising their God-given ability to traipse over wild and unruly rock, singing hymns to poetry in motion, to devotedly circling a soft track hardened with determination, with fierce competition, with memories of baton passes and 300-meter leads and the dumbest bet I ever took. I want to jump into a pool ten months after the last time I swam (last August, next to my parent’s pontoon boat for hours while they cruised Deer Lake lazily, my mom feeding me carrots and pretzels over the side of the bow) and do a flawless freestyle kick-turn, the way I did Friday without even thinking about it, blushing and diving underwater again after surfacing to unexpected, roaring applause. I want to swim for months without stopping. “My little fish” my mom will always call me, and I’ll always smile before diving in again, deeper this time.

I want music. New music, old music, live music, improvised music, melancholy music, music that side-steps me back to hours of your face close to mine, to one perfect night in a periwinkle dress I borrowed from one of my best friends, to two years of walking away from you. Music that giggles me back to ’90′s movies with ’90′s soundtracks and now-vintage dreams. I want to dance. I want to dance by myself and I want to dance with you, both of us laughing hysterically at how neither of us knows what we’re doing, but it doesn’t matter because I can play the tambourine and you can play something equally silly, maybe the kazoo, and we’ll both lose ourselves in drum beats and sax solos and make myriad references to dabbling in Jazz flute while everything else fades to back-up singers.

I want adventure, barefoot banter, aimlessly purposed wandering, lake discovering, trail blazing with Chacos and sheer optimism, laughing as I walk through another spider web because I excel at always finding them first. I want bluntness and camaraderie, unexpected hours of non-stop conversation peppered with sore calves and sweaty foreheads and copious amounts of jokes and stopping to look each other in the face when conversations get a little treacherous because what we’re saying is hard to say but we’re saying it anyway, for no reason and every reason, because we’re happy and comfortable and quite surprisingly so, but happy and comfortable nonetheless. I want to be touched gently, and spoken to sweetly, and made to laugh raucously until my spleen hurts. I want to be urged on ruthlessly, to never leave your side even when I’m hundreds of miles away. I want my own space. A lot of space. To run and roam and grow independent of you and everything I thought I once knew.

I want to take blurry self-portraits in sunglasses with a pro-hipster premise and send them to people I care about so they can laugh, yes always, but mostly so they can see how happy this girl is. How happy she will always be. Flying solo or equally matched I want you to know she’ll soar, higher than she’s ever climbed on her own before, no more stopping on any dimes, incapable of losing her forward momentum this time. This girl, this Kerri Anne who was once so lost and is now so found, about to be run underground by a freight train of joyful premise, propositioning purpose, unplanned terrain beckoning, guaranteeing her a life-changing reckoning, and she: running out of her woods to meet it.

I want all of this, and more. I want hope I’ve never smelled before.

Some of this I surely already have, already own, already heartily condone and carry with me, a fleece blanket of green sentiment, sediments stitched together from collected ferns and words I might have whispered, once, if you were listening closely.

The rest of it? Careening, screaming, rocket ship beaming toward me. Or maybe lapping sleepily in a sparkling stream, avoiding the meaning, floating soundlessly on a billowy breeze. Some of it surely lost in translation, waiting patiently for further concentration. But on its way, regardless.