A certain glow lights the area under the willow tree behind my house.  From the writing loft, I watch the tree’s lush tendrils sway in the wind.  As the sun sets, a coolness settles over the park.  A chill will rise in the air of my house.  I don’t mind.

A little while ago, I sat on Pattie Whitaker’s porch talking about life in the Delta.  I have never lived anywhere quite like this.  Rivers wind themselves around the ground on which we stake our meager claim.  We have only to point our vehicles upward from the valley in which we sit to  find ourselves at the river’s edge.  We drive five miles on winding levee roads to get to town.  It reminds me of Martha’s Vinyard in some ways, with its dual-slotted post office:  “Island” and “Off-Island”.

When I drove to Lodi on Sunday, Amanda at Secondhand Rose left the front of her store to embrace me.  We spoke of my recent trip to Missouri.  Earlier I had met the folks in the neighboring vitamin shop.  They suggested that I try CBD for inflammation, but as an alternative, I bought Frankincense.  They cheerfully mentioned that if I am over 55, I qualify for a 10% discount.  I laughed and admitted that I am.  They put me in their computer.  “You’re a customer now!” they chortled.

I spend my days closing out cases, writing, and looking for work.  At the post office today, I realized that it has been four months since I abandoned the Midwest for Northern California.  My sense of place and time has nearly shifted.  Surrounded by my trinkets, my angels and my old books, I might have grown whole in this place, born of the river silt and the shifting sediment from which the island arose.  I feel at home.  This land has taken me into its heart.

It’s the thirtieth day of the fifty-second month of My Year Without Complaining.  Life continues