All there is today is to take a walk or fix dinner, to take my car and have it fixed. This is a Monday without attachment, a Monday that doesn’t stick to you. And for that it could be any day. A stream of days with no faces or names, a necklace or a noose.

Here at once I am back by the river, the way the morning light makes it look bejeweled. We are young in our days of family car-camping, the girls picking through stones by the shore. And I am thinking that this is the life I always wanted to live, and I never want to leave this moment.

And we try to go back every year but we miss a few, and the kids are harder to wrangle now with minds of their own, and that morning by the river gets sealed into a family album that’s safe from harm, safe from the sun. The sun that makes things grow but drains all the color from our faces until those pictures are just like us, bleached out and fading.

We went camping to a remote area outside of Portland and my friend’s car slipped off a forest road and got stuck in the mud. But before that, how we celebrated being out! He with his son and me with Lily, and thank heavens we had fire starter with all that rain. I got my car attached to a tree and separated part of the body from it backing up, but dealt with that today. The sun set past 9. Lily and I made plans to camp again and baked salmon. The frogs sang all night as our fire burned down and in the morning we had coffee and another fire and then packed up in the rain. How many more days did we have like that still? There are no days like any other days if you’re living them as you might.

Categories: microblogging, parenting, prose, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, pacific northwest, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer