i’ve never really been an outdoorsy sort.

my childhood memories of the delights of nature mostly involve being cold, or damp, or slightly unsure of what to do with myself.  i had an aversion to bugs, and other than my grandmother’s ancient raspberry bushes - which yielded more bugs than berries in any case - little connection to the concept of the fruits of the soil.

but this spring, i want to go outside like never before.  most of this is sheer and simple contrariness: the weather is terrible and i’m confined to my postage stamp of a backyard at best, therefore i wish to conquer the wilds.  or at least the local park.  i want to walk.  i want to plant things.  i want to just…go.  somewhere.  anywhere.  we ended up at the ER yesterday with Oscar for the second time in two weeks - oh yes, we make fine use of our universal health care here at chez crib - and it was…exciting.  which is pitiful.   i just want to touch something other than a computer keyboard, see sights that aren’t yet another doctor’s office.  i am beginning to dream, in my fitful sleep, about those rare occasions in my past where i’ve hiked mountains and rambled in meadows and camped in sand dunes…i considered most of those experiences vaguely unpleasant at the time (ask me about trailing the short-eared f&*#$ing owl all over a frozen wasteland of dykes on the last day of the old millenium and how i thereafter resolved, over a good stiff hot drink, to never go outside during this century) but suddenly, uninvited, the pastoral forays replay in my dreams like siren songs, all tarted up and sexy.

i know i’m being petulant.  i knew what i was getting into.  i would have given my teeth to be in this position, safely this far along, a few months back.  i still would, would be thoroughly jealous of myself, if i believed it at all, if etched on my brain in my own handwriting were not that journal entry from early April 2005 that reads, “we are having a daughter, a daughter! and Dr. X says everything is fine and we are so close now to all that i can remember wanting.”  all of it smoke within weeks, ruins, the cruellest of jokes.  so i roll through this endless cycle of days feeling confined and detached and overwhelmed by all the minutiae slipping by me, waiting for the axe to fall on this foolish dream and wondering if i shouldn’t just pack it in now and start running already, running far far away from the reckoning that must have my name on it, running to meadows or mountains or whatever in nature has the capacity to contain me and all this wild, terrible fear, this unshakable sense of being sacrifice for the impending slaughter.