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Wild deer do not fear death or worry about their next

move as we do. They simply know survival and flight.

[day by day the farm girl way]

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Today I am completely happy. I pound up the stairs of the community center and hear the notes of a local bluegrass band, I smell hemp soap and see the crowd at the Amnesty International booth, and I am flooded with delight at being here, at having a role in this town. 

I am ninety and already looking back on my life and loving this moment, bright in my memory, brushing against the nubby scarves and weathered skin of the women selling pottery, fingering necklaces with slivers of moon and shards of tile, seeing my sister tall against her surroundings laughing and slipping salt taffy in her mouth. 

I am loving the crunch of glittery snow outside, the single pure note of a Christmas carol starting up, finding friend and family gifts, seeing people I know laced in the crowd of familiar-anyway faces. I see thirty-year-old mountain men in snow boots and Carharts, with scruffy cheeks and lopsided smiles, lugging children in hand-knitted hats with names like Rowan and River. I see women, brown-skinned, white smiles, their skin soft and worn and folded against their bodies like an extra layer, beautiful and long-fingered. 

It might have been a survival and flight month, or maybe two months, or three. I can't remember today, because I smell cinnamon and a small boy just tried to hug me and I found a necklace that's perfect, just perfect, and has morphed from a present for someone else to being clasped around my neck. It's hard to remember today about loneliness or anger or fear, or why I ever spent much time with things like that anyway. I can feel in my bones the fleeting nature of flight, of survival, and know deep down that this is a month of thriving, of diving in. 

I can smell it in the lavender pillows, hear it in the tinkle of old women's laughter, feel it in the ridge of the ceramic mug under my fingers.