Life Soup

Today has been an internal, mostly indoor, solitary day. Not bad, but strange. Take the weather for example: Snow for most of the day, flakes sometimes big as silver dollars, gently falling, and then soon after, whipping horizontally in 40 mile-per-hour wind, with — I thought I imagined it, but I didn't — thunder and lightening.

A~ has been on the road for work since early this morning. Even now, late tonight, he is making his way home, many miles to go. We spoke on the phone a few minutes ago and realized we won't see each other for another ten days. I'll be asleep when he arrives tonight, and he'll be asleep when I leave for work in the morning. By the time I return, he'll be long gone to the airport and back-to-back assignments until the day before we take off to visit family for the holidays. We might not be together before I ovulate again, so I likely won't be peeing on any pregnancy tests any time soon.

Stir-crazy by mid-afternoon, I walked to the Salvation Army store and bought a gift for my brother. (Can't tell you what, he may read this.)

I met my across-the-street neighbor, whom I've been watching from my office window for years, taking comfort in the sight of her coming and going with her unapologetically gray hair and growing pregnant belly, and then later, with a baby, and more recently, chasing a toddler in a pink snowsuit up and down the block. She told me she was 35 when her daughter was born, which surprised me. I thought she was older.

Okay, I admit it, I was disappointed to learn she wasn't older. She had made me feel young. She had seemed like such a good omen. But now it strikes me like horizontal snow: I'll only be 35 for three more months.

I made pumpkin soup today.

I bled.

Life goes on.