There is change in the air.  A melancholy feeling of nostalgia has hit me like a stone in my stomach.  This place here, this one that is full of sand gnats and mosquitoes all year round, this one that has isolated me purely on the basis of location, this one… I will miss it dearly.   For underneath the initial veil of flesh-eating bugs and stifling heat is true beauty.

I heard on a recent ted talk that beauty isn’t something seen with your eyes, or heard with your ears, or even felt with your fingertips, but a feeling you get.  This couldn’t possibly be more true when it comes to the earthy scented south land.  She is draped in Spanish moss and coated in a candy blue sky.  Live oaks tower.  The world is blindingly green most of the year.  But its when you sit back and let it all hit you at once that you can truly know its beauty.  It fills my cup.

And all in all I have found lots of beauty around here.  I have found the intense beauty in mother nature and I have found the soft graceful beauty of friends.  And the thing is they are not just friends I will have once known, despite what our distance will soon be, but friends who changed it all for me.  Some ladies who I miss so much already and I haven’t even left.  And I have been around enough to know it won’t be the same.  No matter what, these friendships will change along with my new location.  It may seem like a hopeful thought, or a little lie, but they will actually grow stronger.  I have seen three different states in the last few years, and three separate times I have left a piece of my heart with a sweet girl friend.  And its true, we still declare admiration and love for each other on a regular basis.  A sworn sisterhood.

It is hard for me to see things in any different way. I believe in the powers of fate or the universe or the gods because I don’t know how else I could have found more perfectly matched girls to spend my days with.  For that I am so glad.

In less than two weeks we take one final trip up interstate 95 in hopes to find our forever home.  This is so hard to write.  There is so much involved.  So many reasons to rejoice, but so many to mourn all at once.  I suppose I can only take it slow, embrace them while I can, and know that finally the universe cooperated and I am going home.  Or as close as a forester will allow.  Holidays will be filled with familiar voice, familiar sights, familiar tastes.  My boys will get to know the places I romped as a girl.  They will get to grow up with a cousin or two.  They will live in four seasons.  

But I do hope a bit of this fern green wetland stays in them.  

I know it will be in me.