I bought an easel today. Found it on Craigslist. It was $35, metal, old, but I talked him down to $30 because two of the 'stability pins' are missing. I'm working now (I work full-time-plus, dammit! WTF! I was in school 10 months ago!) but in my head I'm already biking to the hardware store to buy replacements. I can see what I want. Either a sliding pin with a pull-loop to the end.. attached to the easel with braided yarn so I don't lose them. Or, if it would work out/is threaded, maybe even a kind of screw to be extra secure.

I'm here in the mountains. I have no graduation in front of me, no relationship that will lead to babies, no plans, ergo no frame of reference in which to site the future. On the one hand - nothing standing between me and a future of.. exactly the same: undetermined possibilities, nebulous, overwhelming. On the other hand... I have an easel. I have a hardware store. I have a bike. I work, I drink whiskey, I settle deeper into new friendships like a silent plant whose real life lies below the soil (roots, you know). Perhaps it's true that my life is better, richer, truer for that it is determined by my choices and actions in the NOW than by the structural but artificial certainty of school, of actual choices lying far in the future.

I can't promise I will paint on said easel. But I will clean it. I will repair it. It will be mine, and I will love it, and slowly slowly slowly I begin to engage in joy.