windinthemaples

Thank you, everyone, for your kind birthday wishes. Yesterday we managed to both celebrate my birthday and fly home from Florida. Perhaps the best gift I received was a night sleeping in my own bed while dreaming that I had been given $15,000 to spend on gifts for people at an antiques/thrift store. Pure wish fulfillment. Gifts for everyone! :D You have no idea how long it takes to spend $15,000 when the items you're buying are all one-of-a-kind and only $1-$3 each. For-ever. Like, eight hours of sleep hardly got me anywhere. :D

We caravanned down to Panama City Beach's shoreline with my Mom and her boyfriend to say our goodbyes late morning before driving the seventy-some-odd miles west to the airport at Fort Walton Beach. Along the way, Graeme napped until a very fortuitous awakening as we were passing the picturesquely unreal town of Seaside, Florida. It looked like something out of The Truman Show with its perfect white sand beaches, ultra-green town square, and everyone looking well-dressed and riding on colorful beach cruiser bikes.

We parked our car and walked across the street to a colorful taco bar. It was the best veggie taco of my entire life. It was cold and sunny, we were wearing every layer of warm clothes we had, but well worth the sensation of sitting outside with the rustle of sea oats and the subtle sounds of the sea just over the dunes. After lunch, we walked down there and marveled at the beach. Daniel says Seaside has been named, time and time again, as the best beach in the world. I don't know how true that is, but I believe it. I've never seen such soft, fine-grained sand. It was all uniform, too, sparkles of white quartz pouring through my hands like sugar. Unbelievable. The water there was still and shallow as a bathtub. (Though cold and windy--it was no day to be swimming unless you were a polar bear or a particularly enthusiastic 8 year-old boy on vacation.) I've never been on another beach like that...I wanted to roll around in the sand, take bucketfuls of it home, roll around some more. It had an addictive, sensual, cleansing energy to it.

We lost track of time, to be honest, and had to scramble and pray the rest of the way to the airport. We did get checked in with a few minutes to spare and had an uneventful two flights and short layover in Memphis on our way home.

We got in around 10pm and Graeme went right to bed. I heard an outrageous amount of paper rustling downstairs and thought Daniel was reading the newspaper with quite a lot of emotion. I came down to find him huddled in his office over some gifts and big sheets of pink wrapping paper. A few minutes later, he arrived with great pride and a couple wrapped gifts and sang a very quiet rendition of Happy Birthday to me. :D

(He'd snuck into a Life is Good store at an airport somewhere and got me a pair of their cute girl boxers, a little hoodie, and a girly pink hat. :D)

Very happy. :D I'm drinking a mug of the Jasmine Dragon/Rooibos Tropical blended loose tea that Sarah and Jenn got me for my birthday, watching the sun stream through the stained glass heart I bought *myself* for my birthday, and am just feeling centered and cleansed and thoroughly blessed by life. :)