How is the weather in PaulaB-land you may ask…and the answer this morning would be…delightful & snowy. Yes, we have crossed the threshold into winter, and the land is covered in a blanket of white. Cars slip and slide around the parking lots, and everywhere you can hear the ‘squeeeeesssshhh’ of tires on slick & slushy roads.

My happiness felt so spontaneous and pure. I kept thinking back to April of this year, as I had been at my sisters but a month, and I was directionless, worried and grateful:

I am trying to find my way out of these rolling hills. I’m getting seasick, I guess you could say. I want to take this beauty I find inside me and live within it. Make my living from it and become something that moves my soul, rather than shuffling it away again. I don’t need much to live. I am simple. I have collected what I require and now I just merely need a place for it and myself and Irish.

Have I done that? Not yet, but I am working still with that premise, of doing things that move my soul.

Last night after work, as I was walking from the bus stop, the cold chill night was bedazzled. A snowy world had descended upon us, and hanging up in the sky, above the turret of the old Normal School, hung the half-moon. I felt like Mary, throwing her hat up in the hair, in the opening scene of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”.

I felt that same liberated, giddy sort of joy this morning when I poked my nose out the door. YIPPPEEEE!!!! something inside of me said.

The crisp blue sky, the chilly air, all of it, and for the first time in a long while, I am happy. Why? I don’t know, just am. It is like this snowfall set off a trigger inside me, which is a long way off from where I was back on April 4th, 2013 when I wrote;

My goal is to find my way forward with a re-packaged set of truths; so as to reference them as a positive, and not merely as a negative aspect of my past. To take what was and go forward with it, but not dragging behind me like a satchel of shit. I can’t just walk away like I have in the past, emotionally. I can’t. That four years with Tim CHANGED me…and there is no going back. I have been stripped of all that gave me independence. I have NEVER been one to depend on others, yet the last 5 years has been completely about dependence, to one degree or another. I was tired of always being the captain of the ship, making all the decisions – I was emotionally drained when I met Tim. So once we found each other we went off and for a while he did ALL the steering. Until 2010 and then I once again took up my co-pilots chair. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer soon after.

I realized last night that my sister is holding my winter boots hostage, together with this big bag of my warm sweaters and hoodies, and various other odds & sods. It all wouldn’t fit in the move, and so this small pile of my stuff still sits in the Homestead garage…awaiting someone to have the time to bring it over.

UGH…which is going to mean I have to wear my dress boots, and walk along like a mannequin, with stiff legs, on the slippy, sliding sidewalks. Ah, but that tis a small thing, so insignificant right now. The beauty outside is refreshing and clear. My spirit has lifted, and I now have my independence back, and life is good.