Tonight I tempted fate and went for a frosty sunset run. A couple of laps around the marina, a little over three and a half miles, after almost everyone else had gone home. It was 30 degrees when I started, 28 when I finished, cold enough to be breathing fog, and by then the stars had started to come out. It was beautiful. And it felt so damn good after spending the last week going stir crazy, laid up with a head cold. I didn’t rush it (not that I ever rush it); I was paranoid about the cough that’s only been gone a day or two. But there was no sign of it. It was perfect.

I think some friends think I’ve lost my mind, gone off the deep end with this stuff. Especially people who’ve known me a long time, who have always known me to be a hundred different things, know me best through those hundred different things. And then to watch over the last two years as I’m inexplicably reduced to just these two sharply-focused things. Even I never really saw it coming. I don’t know. It’s a good change for me. It feels like it feels when you hear a new song on the radio, someone you’ve never heard before but like right away, and you spend weeks or months or years just enjoying a little bit of it at a time when it happens to come on, amidst all the other noise and music and talk and commercials. And that’s exciting and fun because you never know when you’re going to roll across a station on the dial and it’s going to surprise you. But then someone gifts you a CD, and you play it and play it and only it until you understand fully every nuance of the language, every subtle shift in the tone, every intended or unintended moment of it, and you think, “Jesus.” And you put it in your headphones when you’re going to bed, because you know there’s even more to get about it. Down in there. It’s like that.

Our first snow of the winter arrived, today. We keep the bedroom window open all year, I love to sleep with the cold air drifting around, like camping, and last night in the middle of the night I woke up just long enough to feel like something was there. “It smells like snow,” I mumbled to my husband, and we both rolled over in the assumption we were dreaming. The sky has been unnervingly warm and blue since October. But when we woke up this morning, there it was.

* not to be confused with night sailing, or, equally as enchanting, nightswimming