Our sweet borough decorations, strung along Lincoln Avenue, our main street. I love their charm and earnestness, their infectious cheer. Cheer that I, at various moments, need desperately. Moving is difficult, dear reader, more than I recalled. Not just the labor of it, the unpacking and sorting and organizing, the literal learning of territory, but the fiddly feeling of discombobulation, of being at a crossroads. I remain untethered, yet duty bound. This house is mine, ours, Milo’s, yet it is so much someone else’s. Whose, I do not know. It’s own, perhaps, biding it’s time, waiting patiently for our stamp, for pictures on the wall, a washer, a dryer, herbs in the garden. Singing. A clothesline strung in summer sun.

Then there is the greater, more complicated question of self. Me. Colleen Sohn. I do not wish to be the person I was in Portland, not wholly anyway. I am eager to shed the skin that held me back, that made friends with malcontents, drama queens, mile takers. And do what, you ask? Write more. Submit stories, poems, drawings, paintings. Be myself. Make friends and lose them when necessary. Rise to meet the sun, the clouds, the stars. Recognize my own value. Make money. Read more. Cook more. Exercise more. Love more. Stare fear in the eye and not blink.

Be the merry mighty light…