I am content as I sit on my friend Ann’s flowered couch here in Victoria, her cat smelling my socks, having just consumed a chocolate chip cookie and sipping on hot water out of a yellow smiley face mug.

Ann is reading on the couch perpendicular to me in companionable silence.  I like nights like this where entertainment isn’t the goal, but quiet companionship and just being peaceful together is. I am so grateful I attract the right people into my life. I seldom find myself in uncomfortable situations with people anymore.

Today I am grateful for sun and warm clothes and the unsubtle, in-your-face beauty of this magnificent island I live on. I am now an island girl, something I have always wanted. Yesterday I was running around, buying diapers for Zoey-Lynn my new little friend who comes over when her parents are working on our backyard, buying food to feed the bounty of people coming and going from our house, visiting the Other World Nursery, which was the happiest place on earth to me, comparable in my new plant-loving life to Disneyland. My friend, Julie, and I were prepared to keep one another upright if either of us fainted from sheer delight and awe. I have become an avid fan of certain spruce and the sheer variety maple trees have catapulted me into a world of wonder (their syrup has always had my avid appreciation), not to mention some Dr. Seussian off-kilter trees that I am still trying to find the names of. I am attracted to the weirdness of nature and the oddness in people.

And nothing feels ordinary to me anymore. This whole life is new and full of wildness and ambition and a feeling of ‘what’s next’ every morning. I won’t feel guilty for this excitement with my new island girl status because Emily is the first one I greet each morning upon awakening, not with sorrow, but with knowing; when I am coming out of the torpor of sleep into the wholeness of my awakening, that is when I welcome my girl and ask for her care and serendipity and feel her the most. I lie and converse silently with her for a a few moments and then prepare the morning coffee, opting for the yellow mug most days because l like the cheeriness of it. The small details are important. I do my Duolingo Spanish and my Wordle; I’ve all but stopped scrolling the news; I putter; I pull weeds, often tugging up 100 and then, caught in the rumination, starting again and excising another few hundred, each pluck an “I love you Emily:” a rosary of weed picking.

I don’t know how the days pass in this reverie, this gratitude and grief, this busyness that gives me purpose and peace, that provides me with reasons to keep going. I don’t think too deeply these days, I just do. I do for the sake of doing: when I garden or wash the dishes or do any one of a million meaningless tasks, I imbue them with meaning by being present, methodical, in the moment. I am learning that I can make any moment a meditation. And when my moments are meditations, I am honouring my Emily.