Plans

I need to go home before I can come back; I just realized this: I need to go home before I can see the details of what I want to create next winter. Maybe cold and ice and salty slush staining suede boots is what I will find I need . And then again, maybe it's not. Maybe when Thanksgiving snow flurries shiver down inside the collar of my jacket, slice down the back of my neck, I will fly like clever robins to the sun, to the Monarch Butterfly wintering grounds, back to mysterious, warm Mexico. Maybe I will become fluent in Spanish. Maybe I will make trinkets to sell for rice and beans, do massage to pay rent on my tiny, perfect casita. I could become extremely homesick. But one thing I know is that before I can come back, I need to go home and complete what I've already planned of this oddysey I have begun: summer at the cottage with the lake and the loons, with Mum and Dad, with monsters in the woods at night, barely-there voices singing somewhere in the distance by the midnight outhouse, rocks painted white like ghosts marking the path to the cabin and a long, fat milk snake slowly sliding into the dry, rustling brush. When the nights get too cold, and the lake starts to show slivers of ice at the muddy shore, then I will probably know. Then I will be well on my way. But first, next, what I know now is, that I am heading for home.