Today

Fall is my favorite for many reasons. Not least among them: I adore the feeling of crunching leaves beneath my feet. Adore. I don't know what it is, but it comforts my obsessive compulsive bits. Crunch one under my left, have to crunch one under my right. Only it's not a HAVE to, like counting syllables or having one bite of each food left on my plate at the end, it's more like a game. Can I make the crunching feel evenly distributed between my feet? Probably not, but at least I feel tall, and powerful, as if I'm a giant crunching building after building (with no people in them of course).

Another thing I love, not completely unrelated, is the sound I make when walking on a driveway of small gravel. Not the giant rocks of a new driveway, but the small worn down pebbles of an old country road. so worn down that some of them are almost as small as the grains of dirt. If there's no one around me but Lovely, and the only thing I can hear is perhaps a breeze and the crunch crunch of the gravel, then I am so comforted. It makes me feel small and cocooned. I am safe and surrounded by happy things.

So today, when I walked Lovely and walked up the gravel driveway covered in leaves, I was in heaven. Perfectly balanced between feeling big and powerful and feeling small and safe. Perfectly balanced between the feel of the leaves and the sound of the pebbles beneath my feet. Perfectly balanced in my steps and my breathing and my emotions. For maybe just two minutes, when I walk that path, I feel like I know what it feels like to be normal, and balanced.

I hope you don't think I'm too strange for this elaborate description of such a very small thing in my day. But have i told you about that fortune cookie I got that told me "You find beauty in ordinary things. Never lose this ability."? It keeps me sane. And happy.