On being an aunt.

Six years in the making, and I finally understand what an aunt can be in a child’s life.  Or, at least, in the lives of the children who call me auntie or some such garbled variation.  And there are many such children.

I have two nephews, one niece, and three dear friends’ babies who I claim a little bit as my own flesh and blood, too, because each of those friends are like sisters to me anyway, and I am quite certain I will watch their little boys and girls get bigger, get baptized, blow out candles, run across the beach, and then graduate, and then grow up altogether.  Just as we once did.

As each of these sweet souls came into my life, so did these odd feelings of excitement, worry, fear, hope, sadness, and supreme happiness.  The combination of these emotions was, I assure you, confusing enough.  Factor in trying to interact with new mothers and fathers who are suffering sleep deprivation, hormonal upheaval, roller coaster highs and rock-bottom lows and, well.  It’s no wonder it took me six years to adjust and to appreciate, finally, the incredible role I have to play in these young lives.

This past weekend, my eldest sister came all the way from Pennsylvania to visit, carrying in tow her husband and her two sons, ages six and almost-four.  These boys—they were my introduction to children; I was just 25 when the first arrived.  I got the call when I was at happy hour in Washington, DC, and I’ll never forget running outside, onto K Street, into a warm, humid May evening so I could hear my father yell the news of Jack’s birth from the hospital waiting room, and then heading back inside to order another round. I drove home two days later to hold Jack for the first time.  Less than three years passed before I made the same drive north to hold his brother, Sam, just three days old.  They have grown into sweet, tender children: sensitive, warm, curious, brave, funny, blond-haired, blue-eyed, and achingly sincere.

Grace, newly obsessed with her cousins, spent the Memorial Day weekend tottering after them, calling their names in an ecstatic squeal.

I spent the weekend observing them all.  And thinking about this special place I inhabit in their lives.

I thought about how I want my nephews to remember the days when they asked me to draw “tracks” in the sand, when they shrieked in delight at six-inch high waves and begged me to hold their hands as they braved them, when they knew only snack time and bed time and everything in between was play time, when they lived like kings of the long, late, sun-dappled afternoons, wooden swords safely in hand.  I want them to remember how they tucked tight in my lap, how they sat with their legs splayed, how badly they wanted to be big and how badly we wanted them to stay small.  I want them to remember rolling in the backyard grass, climbing the sea-sprayed rocks of Prescott Beach, throwing pebbles across the low, shallow tide alongside Fort Sewall, and asking all the while if I was watching, listening, did I want to come play, too?

I want them to remember; but I know it is I who will keep this chronicle for them, as a dutiful aunt will do.

I want my niece to remember when she called me “da da” and pinched the back of my arm and clung to the drape of my shirt as I carried her home.  I want her to remember when we chased the sun across the sand in the mid-morning hours of high tide.  I want her to remember making coffee, dancing in the car, pointing out cars and trees and boats and signs.  I want her to remember me and her this young, living together, awaking to and parting with each day under the same roof.

I want us all to remember the sounds of the full, busy house: endless showers, slamming doors, laundry ever-churning, scuffed carpets, a scared cat scrambling around underfoot, sprinklers spraying on, the clap of the grill lid closing, the slap against a mosquito, the clank of ice collapsing in yet another half-drunk wine spritzer, children netting fireflies and the last light of day, while we sisters sit and marvel and love and wonder: did we live like this once, too?

I think I remember us then, in our Stoneyway childhood.

On weekends such as this, my sisters lives, full of children and households and husbands, flutter up and around me, like a swarm of graying dandelion ends:  hopeful and old and afloat on the breeze, uncertain of exact direction but buoyed by the promise of arrival, somewhere, sometime, in some other day’s twilight.

It has always been this way: me chasing them, fascinated by their dance across the days, oh so curious to see where we’re headed.  I want so desperately to know my place—and our conclusion.  Maybe that is the struggle I will wrestle all my life.

Maybe that is the role of the aunt, too.  Playing along but not necessarily leading the way.

I recognize the wonder and beauty and amazement of a weekend such as this: sisters, children, fathers, beach mornings, napped afternoons, slow walks to town, sun-reddened skin, strawberry-stained mouths, and a thirst for summer, now, bright, blazing, bring it on with the surf and sand and ocean spray.

I see the fragile innocence of family.

These are precious, young years.  This is time to savor.

As an aunt, I understand this.  Because I am witnessing these children in ways even their parents can’t:  I see their perfection (and their flaws) through a loving and devoted but distanced lens.  I can nurture and scold and teach and play—but the time is finite.  Every last minute counts, because at day’s end, that child isn’t mine.  I give him or her over.  But, I do so knowing I have loved every last inch of that little boy or girl, eyebrows to toes.  What else, as an auntie, am I to do?

In some quiet moments, though, when the children need tended and I, the childless one, am left to enjoy my drink or my book alone, I catch myself wondering when, or if, I will be the mother someday, instead of the aunt.  Sometimes, pangs of sadness push me nearly to the brink of tears, because I fear that “when” won’t come.  Other times, I almost laugh at the absurdity of such a fear.  If I am meant to do anything in this life of mine, it is to love and raise a child.  Of that, I am sure.

And, until then, being the auntie who can buy frivolously expensive clothing and sticker books and bags of Starbursts, who can show a little more leniency than the disciplinarian parents, who is silly and child-like, too, who can’t seem to tire of knock-knock jokes, or stories about school, or playing Legos, or making the grass and sky and trees any color I please across dozens of coloring book pages, who loves earnestly, who is so proud, who will remember all the early years—yes, being that auntie is just fine with me.

Someday, I will tell them all about who they were then.  I will tell them their stories.

I will say to Grace how, one Saturday evening, as her mother and I carried her off the beach and began heading home, the sun warming our shoulders and the boys calling our names as they ran to catch up to us, as she whimpered, sad to see the day’s end, her mother whispered, into the pink ear of her daughter, “It’s alright, sweetheart.  We get to do this all over again tomorrow.”

They were precious, young years indeed.

Keep me in mind. When you’re ready, I am here to take you every time.

I can’t remember which came first—the e.e. cummings poem or the yoga class lesson: “Let go.  Let it all go.”

Regardless of when the words came to me, I pulled them in close and clung on.  I understand the irony in this: squeezing tight to the mantra of release.

Still, despite my clenched fingers through the years, I have successfully let many things go.  Negative emotions, grudges, bitterness, sadness, unfulfilled expectations, unmet demands, empty promises, physical injuries.  Not to mention, the overstuffed bags of clothes, boxes of college novels and texts, pages upon pages of old writing, a ziplock baggie full of tarnished and too small jewelry, a dented cooking pot or two, a broken bookshelf, a crooked lamp, our letters, envelopes full of pictures, shards of my grandmother’s glasses, an apartment, and a torn coat, and a quarter of my heart.  I left these by the curb or in the dumpster or wedged onto the stoop of a Salvation Army loading dock.

Have at the wreckage, world; it is yours for the taking.

In yoga, I’m told that we are to let things go so that we may make room for that which serves us:  positivity, optimism, health, balance, peace of mind, energy, enthusiasm, breath, love.  The strong, centered, confident yogi in me understands this philosophy.  The exhausted, overwhelmed, and disappointed 31-year-old single woman in me thinks this theory is total bull shit.

Let me get this straight:  Life is a constant conveyor belt carrying off the burdens we’re unloading and bringing in the new baggage we’ll pick up?

Awesome.  Do we get martinis while we wait for the delivery?

Only, of course, if we promise to go to yoga to sweat and detox afterward.

Here’s the thing:  as hard as I’ve worked to “let go,” to embrace that simplest and most powerful of yoga (and life) philosophies, it dawned on me recently what I have, somehow, failed to understand these many years.

I used to think letting go was finite.  I used to think that by inhaling those words, sucking them up through the straw of my yoga practice or my runs or my long talks with my girlfriends or my drives home to Pennsylvania, and swallowing them whole, taking the two words down like vitamins or energy boosters (or pain killers), that I was accomplishing the act.  I was succeeding.  Because I was consciously telling myself, “Let go.”  I was consciously thinking, “Let go.”  I was wiping the chalkboard of my mind with an eraser of “Let go.”

One clean sweep is all I needed, right?  One big gulp?  One precise and purposeful and conscious decision?

That’s what I thought “let go” meant.

No irony is lost on me that my recent epiphany that this is, actually, not at all what “let go” means came by way of—you guessed it—a miserably hot, miserably humid, miserably difficult yoga class.

It was Sunday afternoon, and the morning’s lingering rain and fog followed me into the crowded studio, promising of a humid class.  Even the walls beaded moisture.  A man next to me settled onto his mat, smiling my way, smelling like the rich, black soil of spring.  From the record player came the rhythms of an old Krishna Das album, and as we began rising and sweating, his voice hung low, draping across our backs, like vines, wrapping around my legs and up my arms and rooting in my ear.  I felt as though I could have been practicing on a carpet of moss deep within a thick, hooded jungle.  Everything—my breath, the air, our collective movements, the swells of the music and our bodies—seemed of another time and place: earthen, primal, ancient.

I wanted so badly to enjoy the eerie sensation of it all.  Instead, my thoughts hitched on all the “unproductive” things: worry, frustration at my stiff joints, irritation at the teacher, a lingering sting of disappointment.  At one point, as we held ourselves in a long downward dog, I watched a trickle of sweat run down the ridge of my tricep and over my elbow joint and across the slope of my forearm before reaching that curved web of skin between thumb and forefinger.

I was marred in minutia.  And I was holding it all in, entangled, thorned.

Class worked its way through, and when I rose to leave, my legs swished and buckled like an overturned bucket of water.  It took me 15 minutes just to get out to my car.  I sat in the driver’s seat for another 10 minutes more, waiting for the waves of nausea to pass.

As I drove home, I got to thinking about how, even though I’d told myself repeatedly throughout that class to “let go,” I clearly hadn’t.  My finite, once-and-done command hadn’t worked.  Then, I thought about the days when I practiced my yoga six times a week and felt incredible—and then remembered that’s not my reality anymore, and that’s okay.  I thought about the moments I’d enjoyed him best—and then remembered those moments are nostalgic wanderings into the past and are not reality, and that’s okay.  I thought about this here blog and how I never write the way I used to—and then remembered this is my space, and if I chose not to come to it, that’s okay.  I thought about my old apartment—and quickly remembered I will never live there again, so get back to reality, it is okay.  I listened to the song blasting on the radio—”Love Lost,” Temper Trap, in anticipation of their live concert in a few weeks—and heard my favorite line, “Keep me in mind.  When you’re ready, I am here to take you every time,” and felt a sudden, sharp jolt of sadness for that sweet line, that sweet sentiment, and then remembered the very best poetry and love and sweetness of my life is still to come, and that is, absolutely, unequivocally, okay.

I noted and processed each passing thought.  I processed.

And it hit me:  that is letting go.

It is not finite.  It is certainly not once-and-done.  It is not, I guarantee, a one-time swipe across the chalkboard of your heart or your mind.  It is not leaping from the present moment of pain into the beautiful, pain-free promise of the future.

Letting go is, just like my yoga, a daily practice.  Methodical, medicinal, momentously difficult but also magnificently easy, because all you really have to do is show up, and try, and breathe through whatever comes.  It will never be perfect or clean or even pretty.

Because letting go is not snipping the ties neatly—rather, it is unbraiding, piece by piece, with your fingernails, the knots that have held you asunder.  That could take days.  It could take years.  I’m certain, for some, it could take a whole lifetime.

And, perhaps most of all, as I sped home, sweat still drying on my skin, the fog still rolling in off the ocean, the sweet, muddy smell of turned earth wafting across the lawns, I understood, fully, that “letting go” doesn’t have to mean giving away for good.  There is great fear in releasing something, because we perceive that release as loss.  But, look at us—we are all undone anyway.

Besides, no matter how much I let go, no matter how many bags I fill and throw in the trash, no matter if I never see you again, no matter the course life takes, that which is, truly, most important cannot be lost.  That which matters, those who do good, who love, who fill my life, and all the poetry, and all the poignancy of our past—

It will stay with me, always, ribboned tightly ’round my heart.

We are just stories.

Walking the streets of the old, marbled city, and feeling the humidity settle on my cheeks like a blush, and pausing by the thick clumps of lilac bushes long enough to leave perfumed and violet, and then remembering the taste of the summers back then, and the bars back then, and the men back then, and thinking about the rushed excitement and anticipation of tipsy happy hour conversations, and the blistering rub of those tired days when I took the bus to work, when I chose to trudge the three miles home, because maybe then I could outpace the horrible truth that I loved him with an urgency and a consumption that, cities and years later, still astounds me—

I think:  We are just stories.

Because the constants remain:  the lights on the corner of 21st and P St., and the first sharp curve of Connecticut Avenue hitting Dupont Circle, and the wide, busy stretch of K Street, and the soft, gentle, perfect arch that carries you across Memorial Bridge to meet her golden stallions, always poised in a silent, grand finale on the Washington, DC side.

The constants remain:  The Potomac still churns with an unfortunate brown tint.

A one-block walk, and you still catch the tourist, the lobbyist, the intern, the homeless, the privileged Georgetown-ian, the radical, the Republican, the high sheriff, the harried staffer, each charging (or settling) into the day with a purpose.  Because this is Washington, DC, damn it.  We’ve got an agenda!

My yoga studio has not changed its sign, its front windows, the bulk of its teaching staff, even its annual membership pricing.  (I hope, for the students’ sake, they’ve at least changed the carpets and perhaps the rental mats.)

Happy hour runs rampant still.  Even at Starbucks.  You know you’re in our nation’s capitol when you can even enjoy your coffee for half off during the hours of 3 to 5 p.m.

On NBC, that same wrinkled, rumpled, greying man drabbles on about the weather forecast, which, still, includes a regular dose of thunderstorm warnings.

On every street corner, I still search for her face among the passer-bys.

I remember it so then.  I remember it so clearly.  I see it so plainly now.

The change is that many of the characters from my stories then—I have written them out of my stories now.  I realize I have, in large part, even written Washington out, too.

But, when I go back, each time, the constants remain, and it is as though I am visiting you all over again.  It is as though I revert to the woman I was then, when we were young and new, our pockets full of stories, cheeks flushed with warmth, my hand drifting toward yours, letting time disappear.

And there, on the bedside table stands a bouquet of your lilacs, violet and vased, wading in shallow, green water.

On going gray.

I always wondered what my reaction would be when I found my first gray.

Some friends told me they cried.  Others ran for the tweezers or immediately picked up the phone and booked an appointment with their hairdresser.  A guy friend of mine actually shaved his head.  And some didn’t do anything but shrug.

What, after all, is the big deal?

Throughout my childhood, my parents constantly reinforced the principle that I should “act my age.”  Sure, as a tortured teen-ager, it’s expected that you pine for the days of “When I grow up…”, and I was no different.  But, my parents were so insistent that I not try to act or live a life older than where I currently was.  Instead, they so encouraged the moment, the exact phase of childhood or adolecense or adulthood, I was currently in.

The dutiful daughter, I listened.  I complied.  And as I got older, I started taking their advice to mean “embrace your age.”

Be 13—obsessed with horses and friends and school and sports!  Be 18—on the cusp of college, scared and nervous and hopeful and courageous!  Be 22—biting the lip of the real world for the first time, boldly, bravely, hungrily!

Be 25—establishing a career, gaining professional confidence, building a network, breaking hearts and licking your own wounds, exploring cities, understanding the world.  Be a late 20-something—more grounded, more centered, more focused, more inclined to stay in and cook a nice dinner with friends than go out and further build the credit card debt.

Be a 30-something—to be honest, I am still figuring out what exactly this phase of life entails.

It is as though my parents really wanted to say to me: “Embrace your age, embrace wherever your life has led you up to this point. Because, eventually, you will understand the rush of time.”

Time has, of course, always rushed.  It’s just a matter of when you pick your head up and realize its frenzied passing and decide, right then and there, you don’t want to miss a single moment.  Suddenly, you wouldn’t dream of wishing you were any other age or in any other place, because you know, fully, how quickly it all changes anyway.  If anything, you start wishing you could hold time still.  Or, better yet, hold it back.

I had this realization in my late twenties, I think.  Around when I left Washington, DC for Boston, when I was 27.  When I decided I wanted to make great and exciting changes, and I was possibly losing the time and chance to do so.

And each year since then, time seems to have gained momentum on me.  It has become better conditioned.  The harder I try to stand in one place, the harder time pushes more efficiently and effectively to move me forward.

And now, at 31, leaning against the bathroom sink at 7:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, brushing my teeth and pulling my bed-tangled hair back into a ponytail and staring into the fogged mirror, I find one shockingly bright, shockingly white, shockingly wiry gray hair.

And I laughed.

I stood there, and I laughed.

And then I grabbed the Listerine, and then the face wash.  Downstairs, a pot of strong coffee brewed.  My stomach growled for breakfast.  I could hear my sister banging cupboards closed and my niece chattering and toddling from living room to kitchen to hallway to living room again, sometimes calling a hopeful, “Da da?!” up the stairs at me.  I began to hurry, anxious to go down and swoop her up and begin our Tuesday morning routine together.

A whole day awaited.  It didn’t even occur to me to stand there and commemorate and care about my discovery.

When your life starts to feel like it has a history—when you can sit back and know your stories fill chapters—perhaps it is natural to feel less inclined to pause and place meaning on everything.  Because you are older and wiser and better able to identify that some milestones (by societal standards) are merely passing moments in your own life.  What do they matter? Because, with time, you become better equipped at identifying the true moments to remember and record: the warm, wonderful smell of a child’s neck right before bedtime; the shiver of delight and the wave of comfort that never goes away when kissing the one you love; the length and strength of limbs freshly rinsed cleaned by yoga or running or swimming; the first taste of summer corn; a father’s hug; a mother bathing her 31-year-old daughter the day after she’s given birth to her first child; the smell of the ocean on your fingertips.

The nostalgic romantic in me constantly wants to place MEANING on EVERYTHING. But, that isn’t realistic.  That isn’t practical.  That kind of behavior isn’t, well, embracing my age.

I’m old enough, at 31, to know a gray hair isn’t a sign of anything other than biology and genetics playing its natural role.

Of course, I’m still young enough to want to document it.

Something tells me, though, that particular penchant of mine, that need to write it all down for memory’s safe-keeping, won’t fade with the onslaught of time or the phase of life through which I’m moving, no matter how old or how gray I get.

What does time mean?

My mother once wrote that time meant nothing to her in the days she was happiest: young, in love, raising her babies, making crafts and painting pictures with us girls, keeping her hands always busy, busy, busy to keep her mind quiet.  ”Time meant nothing,” I marvel, and I envy that freedom.

Lately, time seems to mean, to me, everything.

The timing of meeting a man who’s emotionally available, stable, mature, ready to commit, ready to leap and try and hope for the best and stay open to exploring the joys and hardships of a relationship together.

The timing of leaving my current job in search of a new one, a better one.

The timing of when I will move out of my sister’s house and into my own home again and unpack the boxes gathering dust in storage.

The timing of when I will finally sit myself down to write as I know I can and should write.

The timing of letting go; the timing of holding on.

The timing of changing my life.

Time.  I see its meaning, its place, everywhere, in all things.

When I was home in Pennsylvania over Easter, I felt time ticking all around me.  Probably because nothing shows the steady progression of days as clearly as family and children do.

My oldest nephew is now too big for me to pick up—he wants to play catch and soccer and run races and talk about Mario and Luigi.  I remember when he wanted to join the adults for dinner so he could cheers glasses and listen to my sister recite grace and was content to sit and go through sticker books with me for hours.  My younger nephew, the one who I rocked to sleep in my arms just a summer ago, is now pushing through the surly three-year-old phase and marching toward being a “big boy”: talking in full sentences, working on potty-training, readying for pre-school, and approaching that short spell of timid shyness a child feels because they realize they are actually a person in this massive, overwhelming blur of a world.  All you want to do is soothe that child, tell him that he will be good and wonderful amid the madness, but you can’t.  Because he won’t understand.  Because it isn’t the right time for that talk yet.

Don’t get me started on my niece.  She chases after her cousins with a new sturdiness, a mounting resolve to be a part of the rough and tumble rather than sit safely on the sidelines.  Although she still lets me scoop her up and hold her tightly, although she still sits snugly within my arms and clings to the front of my shirt, although she still looks to me for reassurance and comfort, I can already see her fledgling wings growing, strengthening, and I know it will not be long before I let her go.  Before she runs off with time, too.

And seeing my best friend 8 months pregnant, rubbing the hard, sweet swell of her belly, laughing and tearing with her sisters and her mother as we watched the present opening and the game playing and the cake-eating at her baby shower.  At one point, I stood back, briefly, because I wanted to freeze the moment.  Because she is about to embark on an entirely new and fantastic life as a mother, and I know it is only a matter of time before all this—our late-night phone calls, the spontaneous visits, the ridiculously long e-mails written mid-day, the drunken silliness, the visits where it’s just the two of us, the days of having her all to myself—is gone.  Time giveth, and time taketh away.

The evening of Easter, my father and I sat outside on the back patio, drinking cold Chardonnay, skimming the Sunday New York Times, before settling back in our chairs and staring at the sky, puffy and bruised with clouds.  We began to talk about me—where I’m “at,” how I’m doing, what’s going on.  I held it together for awhile, until my voice snagged on the words, “I just…don’t know which way I should be headed.”  My father laughed gently and told me that most people don’t know—most people just decide to go for it, choose to take some risks, and hope for the best.

“But, there’s no ‘right’ way,” he said.  ”There’s no ‘right’ time.  There’s just right now.”

How can time mean nothing when you see its effects rippling through everything?

How can time mean everything when all we truly have is the right now, the present, this very second and none other?

Yesterday, I received an e-mail I had not expected from someone I had largely given up on.  This e-mail arrived on the heels of me folding the last of our tattered past into a drawer and wedging it almost closed.  The “almost” is because, despite the hurt, of course my hopeful heart couldn’t give up.  Because “there must be in the heart a faith so faithful that it returns even after it has been slain.” (Agnes Smedley said that in Daughter of Earth.)

But, time.

Time has passed in weeks, months even, since I last heard from this person.  A lot, somehow, has already happened and changed during that passage.  I am not the person I was then; my heart is not the heart it was then.  I appreciated the words in the e-mail.  But, the timing of them felt off.  Was it too late?  Too soon?

Give me time.  I’ll sort it out.

I have spent the last several days, ever since I read that line of my mother’s when I first arrived home to Stoneyway, thinking obsessively about which side of the coin I believe:  Time means everything.  Or, time means nothing.  Or, perhaps, it just doesn’t matter?

Today, after returning from a whirlwind work trip to New York City, after throwing my bags on the floor, kicking off my heels, and grabbing my sneakers, I headed back out of the house for a run.  Everything hurt: my head from last night’s wine, my body from all the travel I’ve undertaken in the last week, my legs from sitting cramped in cars, planes, and conference rooms, and even my heart, all because of that “almost.”  I wanted to escape it all; I wanted to elude time for awhile.  I ran until I reached the ocean.

And then I forced myself to slow to a walk.  A very slow walk.  And then, finally, no walk at all.  I stood perfectly still, staring at the sea.

You look out at the ocean, and it’s hard to think of time in such black and white terms.  The ocean is time.  It is older than the land, and yet, there it still churns, hour after hour, bearing the tides anew.

I listened to the small waves roll into shore, again and again, no two the same, yet so wonderfully consistent and measured in their arrival.  Despite the breeze, the sharp smell of seaweed and salt water hung heavy in the air.  A group of children laughed and played on the sand down near the Lime Rickey’s stand and the swingsets.  I let the minutes pass, watching the day wane across the water.  I thought of how Grace and her father would be home by now, and I should go, and hurry, so that I could hug and kiss her goodnight.

I thought, suddenly, that time can’t mean everything.  No one thing—even time—is every thing.  But, time also can’t mean nothing.  Not to me.

Perhaps, like the rest of life, time simply carries the weight we give it.  Time just is—until we, individually, strap symbolism and purpose and blame and responsibility to its chest, until we beat time or praise time for what it brings us.

I took the jog back to the house leisurely.  I wanted to savor the last of the day’s sunlight and the peaceful, wonderful calm of the early evening hour, when the shadows lean long and thin across the sidewalk and the lawns, when most cars are already in the driveway, and lights sparkle in the windows, and family dinner is underway, and mothers are upstairs putting their babies to bed.  It is the hour I like best.  Time in the suburbs has taught me this.

Time, they say, teaches us many things.

I, for one, am beginning to think that time, if we pay it heed, allows us a chance to learn the lessons we’re gathering along the way, through this life.

And that—that means something.  Not everything.  Not nothing.  Something.

And that is enough for me.

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p.s.  I just discovered that this entry marks 600 posts on Hannah, Just Breathe!  Talk about timing…

You came, and you did well to come: I needed you.

Change is in the air.  Buds line the limbs of each tree I walk beneath.  Freshly mulched flower beds dote on the young sprouts of daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips.  My morning alarm is now the birds outside my window. Yesterday, I saw two, beautiful red-breasted robins, sitting, resting, in the branches of a backyard dogwood.

Spring is here.  Finally.

And I can’t help but keep thinking to myself, “You came, and you did well to come: I needed you.”  A favorite Sappho quote, perfectly fitting.

Because I did need this shift of season—I needed it badly.  I needed the sunlight, the bright green grass, the lightness of dresses and flip flops and long, breeze-tangled hair.  I needed warm afternoon runs.  I needed to know the dark stretch of this past winter was fully behind me.

I needed to see the kind of change that is exciting and yet predictable, annual, and, thus, comforting in its arrival.

I needed the other changes I feel lately, too: the small, hopeful bloom in my heart, the shedding of all those heavy winter layers, the lessening weight of words once said and words never said at all.  A wonderful sense of acceptance has overthrown the bitterness, hurt, and anxiety of these last few months.  It has settled quietly within me, and I am glad for its stillness, its soft shine.  It has pushed open my door, finally, in greeting, in welcome.

I look around and see so many other changes, too.  Friends moving, baby bellies swelling, fingers sparkling with engagement promise, colleagues packing up their desks and moving on to the next great opportunity.  Even my niece—she is trying so very hard to say full sentences now.  She’s nearly two.  My oldest nephew Jack turns six in roughly six weeks.  I go home to Pennsylvania in a few days, and I am certain Stoneyway will even smell and feel and look different than it did just four months ago at Christmastime.

But, this is okay.  Change came, and it did well to come.

I needed you.

In a yoga class last week, the teacher reminded us that what we do on our mats is change out of the day and the world around us and change into who we truly are.  We unpeel ourselves, layer by layer, like the seasons stripping away the months before, until we are our naked selves.  We stand nude to everything but our strength.

Our strength, I thought, and suddenly realized I am feeling much stronger these days—stronger in my conviction, my decisions, my heart, my yoga, my present life and the future life I am just now laying the path toward.

And I keep thinking—on my drives around Marblehead with the windows down, in my sweet morning conversations with Grace, in my sweaty hours atop my yoga mat, during my walks along the sun-filled stretches of sand at Devereux Beach, with nothing but a stone’s throw between me and the great, cold Atlantic ocean—that all this change must be, will be, for the good.

Because it is stripping me bare.  It has forced me to unpeel the past.

I stand in my naked self.

And I am ready.

“In the rubble are all the things you’ve been dreaming of.”

Lately, I have been craving new music.  This always happens to me: right as the seasons change, I want my music to change, too.  It’s as though turning over my wardrobe and cleaning out the clutter from the season just passed inspires me to clean out whole other corners of my life and make way for the new.

Also?  I bought myself a shiny MacBook Pro for my birthday, and I can’t get over how much free memory space I now have to fill up!

And, of course, thanks to my commute into Boston and to my burgeoning triathlon training, I have whole chunks of time in which I can’t really do much other than listen to music while I drive, run, bike, walk, get from A to B to C and back to A again.

And?  Yesterday, when I was looking through the list of upcoming shows in the area, I realized I didn’t recognize 95 percent of the bands out on the circuit right now.  And that is just wholly unacceptable to me.

So, I have found myself scouring the depths of iTunes, independent music blogs, and the daily 88.9 WERS playlist for my next, great, yet-undiscovered handful of new (and by “new,” I mean new-to-me) artists whose music I can explore, put on repeat, and fall madly, deeply in love with.

The other—and ultimate—joy of uncovering new music is pasting it into various mixes for myself and for friends and dears.  Remember, if you like someone well enough, you give them music.  You share the genius with those you like best.

Yesterday, I finally finished a mix I’ve tinkered with for the past several weeks.  I kept struggling with it because usually my mixes have themes.  A collection of slow, folksy songs, or a mish-mash of strange, new bands, or a tried-and-true assortment of established, favorite artists.  Or, I arrange by tempo: fast mixes, slow mixes, medium-paced mixes.  Or by mood: happy songs, sad songs, love songs, break-up songs, running songs, sitting on the beach songs.

You get it.

This mix?  Runs the gamut.

Some of these bands have been around for years but I only just stumbled upon them.  Others just released their first album in the last 12 months.  One or two of these songs are radio hits—and, as a rule, I try to avoid radio hit songs.  (I hate my sister a teeny, tiny bit for playing Gotye’s “Somebody that I Used to Know” so many times that it finally got under my skin.)  A few of the tunes are “fast”; several are achingly relaxed.  Two tracks even have the exact same title!  Although, interestingly, they’re two totally different songs.

I cannot find one, unifying thing in the rhythms, the artists, the genres.  I even broke my most cardinal mix-making rule of never repeating the same artist within one mix.  (Massive no-no in my book.)

So, with all rules out the window and no clear sense of theme, the only thread I can find woven throughout these songs is that this collection, as a whole—lyrics, artists, tempo, tenor—represents how I’ve felt dragging myself out of this odd, unsettled winter and bounding, joyously, into the warm, wonderful arms of spring.

I hear my own heavy footsteps on some tracks and the happy, rowdy high heels of me and my girlfriends out dancing on others.  Some of the lyrics, with their sharp thorns of truth, catch in my throat and cut and bleed—I feel I could have written them about my self, of my heart.  Other songs I’ve listened to at least a dozen times and yet haven’t retained a single word; I’m too busy clapping my hands and tapping the steering wheel and staring out into the blue Boston sky and bopping my head with the beat.

But, each track…well, means something to me, trite as it may sound.  I could cite the time and place I discovered each.  I can immediately map the emotions I first felt upon that first listen.  If I run my finger down the list, I know exactly why every song is there.

I won’t include that “why” for you.  I’ll let you arrive upon your own “why”‘s when you give the mix a listen.

The one rule, however, that I am following is the real cardinal law of mix-making:  Spread the music love.

So, here you go.  Enjoy.  I sincerely hope you do.

Some Nights — Fun.
In Your Light — Gotye
Where You Go — The Young Romans
Love Lost — The Temper Trap
Rock & Roll — Eric Hutchinson
Love Love Love — Avalanche City
Over and Over — Good Old War
That Moon Song — Gregory Alan Isakov
Natalie — BellX1
Somebody that I Used to Know — Gotye
Love, Love, Love — Of Monsters and Men
Death of a Decade — Ha Ha Tonka
Call Your Girlfriend — Erato
Banjo — Leonard Cohen
New Beginning – The Young Romans

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If you have any musicians/songs to suggest, leave it in the comments or e-mail me at hannahjustbreathe at gmail dot com!  I’m always eager to learn about new artist and good music.