Can-Be...Can't BE, or...My Summer on the River

It doesn't seem possible that I haven't had a thought to post in ten months... and yet... maybe it CAN be.  I don't remember a thought I meant to write that I just forgot to...'course, that's the nature of forgetting, isn't it?

I've wandered through a summer unlike any I have ever had in my life...nothing close...and yet what do I say about it?  What is unique about this summer?  It's the summer nothing happened.  No one died, no one was born, no one was married, so one suffered terribly... Nothing happened.

"Nothing", I say?  "Wait...lots of deaths, lots of births and marriages and the like...".  Ok TO ME.  I mean that I was numb to all these externalities. I didn't entirely miss them, you understand; I think I've just been in a fog.

This is, you see, my 'summer on the river'.  Never before have I spent two full months almost entirely uninterrupted on the Metolius.  It's something I've always WANTED to do, but how could I?  Ailing family, new businesses (my own or my childrens') various responsibilities real and imagined kept me occupied.  But not this summer of 2010.

I think I've been numb to the surprise of it...that I/we actually could be...no, we ARE, actually parked here in the pines and the dust, reveling by the river.  It's felt different...odd...less familiar and at the same time entirely TOO familiar.  Perhaps this is a physical manifestation of the way we come to know our closest companion; not with contempt, but maybe with a dollop of complacency.  I NEVER imagined that would happen.  Not to me.  Not here. Not with my River.


So this post is about change.  What CAN BE, rather than what is.  Stopping.  Looking again, for the first time.  Remembering what it is I love and who it is I love.  Just writing about it makes me smile and breaks the spell a bit.  I can see it ahead of me...the change...the return to NORMAL, where normal is excited about the morning, the air, the sun, the sound of the river and waking to the sound of a coffee grinder and the amblings of the one whom I love so, making my and her life better; doing the things she does without thought that at the same time are so completely thoughtful.  Me.  Excited about....EVERYTHING.

Ok, so I'm ALMOST awake, after my two month slumber and I'm finding that like Scrooge I didn't miss it after all.  It's all still happening all around me.  I didn't MISS it!  Oh thank god.