Clearing out

 The night before, I kept saying "I'm on vacation!" and Tom and I stayed up later than we should have, and I lingered in bed longer than I meant to and then there was coffee for me, made by Tom, and the walk around the property, and new blossoms on the apple tree and more weeding to be done in the circle of the middle of the driveway, and it was hard to leave. I wanted to stay and eat the good salad from dinner, with leaves from the garden and I wanted to open the watermelon I had brought home from the co-op, and suddenly it seemed like clearing out the spare room upstairs would be possible if I actually had a work day off, and I would have been happy to just move gravel around, for that matter, any of the things that would mean the mini-farm could be a still better version of itself.

But I got in the car anyway, headed off to a five day writing retreat near Leavenworth, with a box of books and a bag of knitting and two camera bags and enough clothes for three times as many days as I'll actually have away. It started before I even got out of Skagit county - little fragments of writing, nothing special, just throat-clearing sorts of things, a few words strung together to articulate the most obvious things. But a certain kind of writing, my mind starting to write itself, is how I tend to think of it.