From sometime in this past week:

Yesterday, I found a ceramic pitcher painted green in my local thrift store, it was three dollars and fifty cent and even though I didn't really need a new vase, I bought it anyway. Tonight, it is filled with the purple hues of Lilacs, the smell intoxicatingly beautiful, filling my small cabin with the divine scent of spring. That vase was just one of many wonderful everyday moments I've been having lately, the kind where it's nothing to write up in the paper about, but each moment is a thread in the fabric of my present life, and I am grateful for the colors and the warmth. 

Reflecting back across the day, I realize it was an odd day, I felt accosted by emotions that had no place dwelling in gray in my mind. But they dwelt anyways.

    I drove to work, the afternoon sun, glinting gently on the dark pavement of the road, the yellow line extra bright, as I ate my turkey and greens sandwich, feeling the seemingly weight of the world on my shoulders. But god is good, Grace is good and it shows through in the people in my life. In the most surprising of ways, actually.

 Like at work tonight, I danced. For the first time in weeks. I danced around a polished cement floor, music echoing tinnily from a small set of ipod speakers on a dusty shelf, the gentle sounds of my goat nursery around me, the smell of milk and baby goats and hay mingle in my nose, but I close my eyes and sway, letting the music pour through me, hold me and let me rise and catch me as I fall.

    In my arms I hold my little prince, he is a new born baby kid, a goat, born this morning, with less than twenty hours of singular life and he's already my dance partner. 

The farm is empty, the other workers either gone home or as the case of Sarah, gone to feed the other sixty or so babies down the road. 

It is peaceful on this farm. Tonight it feels balanced and calm. With all the babies fed, and all the does bedded down, with the stars winging high overhead and the great shadowy silhouette of the mountains standing guard as the moon rises and scorpio spins upwards. 

My little Prince, gently nibbles on the soft skin of my neck, searching hopefully for a teat, or a nipple to suckle his supper from. 

He leaves sticky baby goat spit trails on my skin, and I don't mind one little bit.

Driving home tonight, so many houses I pass on my way home from work, it now dark and close to midnight, lights on in upstairs windows and cars parked out front, nearly everyone home and settled, nestled in. It is a comforting feeling, this looking in from the outside, but it can also be one of isolation, of loneliness, if not looked at in the right direction from out here.

My headlights illuminate the road, rocky and narrow and steep, but it leads me to my own home, my own sweet cabin, where I have lilacs in a green jar, and clean sheets waiting just for me and a happy dog to sleep on the floor.