(above: detail, cobblestone, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA.)

They, the ubiquitous they who appear to know everything, say that it’s impossible to move forward until you look back.  See who you were to see who you are.  Observe what it is that led you to the place you stand, so that you can avoid the same mistakes, find out what works, determine the next step.

This morning, while the world outside my door is covered in sparkling frost, windows fogging up with no more than a breath, I stood and watched a crow circling over the yard.  I could hear her calling to something I couldn’t see, scolding and dropping into the grass.  Everything else was silent.

*  *  *

Just over a decade ago, I stood at a similar window.  I’d just painted our living room, and the smell of fresh and drying paint made leaving the window open a necessity, despite the fact that it was freezing outside in Portland, Oregon.  A crow sat in the Rhododendron bush outside, and the frost had made the cat-spider’s web in the windowsill look like glass.

Life was about to change for me then.  I didn’t know it at the time.  I don’t know what I’d have done differently if I had known, but I was so wrapped up in my own head that I couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing.  My father had just died a few months ago, and I felt cut adrift — a girl playing at a grown-up life with no real connection to who she was or where she was going.  The world seemed very big all of a sudden, and I seemed very, very small, and it was terrifying.

The crow took to flight in the morning sun.  The frost melting off the web was returning the world to a normal that I couldn’t quite reach.

And I went back to bed.

* * *

It’s so cold here this morning that I’m wondering if I didn’t accidentally bring the Iowa weather with us by accident, packing it up in the back of the truck like another set of silverware, wrapped in a blanket that smells like iron and dirt and cornfields.  I’m wearing one of the new sweaters — one of the ones I made with my own hands — and I’m kind of amazed that it’s done.

I have trouble finishing things.  We’ve talked about this before.  Endings.  I’m not good with endings.  Long and lingering death by neglect, I’m good at.  Definitive stops, periods at the end of sentences, not so much.

Squawking crow outside hops over toward something almost imperceptible in the grass, picks it up, and is done.  She flies up onto the overhead wires with it in her beak, unaware that I’m watching her.

*  *  *

Six years past.

I’ve only been in Seattle for just over a year, but it’s home.  It’s more home than anywhere I’ve ever been — and I’ve been to a lot of places.  I love waking up.  I love walking outside to watch the seaplanes take off — they take off at the same time every day, and I mark my hours sometimes by the sound of the engines.  Even though I don’t go outside to smoke anymore (I quit, while I was there.  It seemed wrong to take that air and make it dirty and black instead of fresh and green.),  I still go outside with my sketchbooks and pencils, just about every morning.  Watch the planes fly off over the Queen Anne bridge, Olympic Mountain ranges framed by it’s man-made boundary.

I’m leaving it, though.  I’m leaving this little bit of home in a few days.  I’m packing what I own, which, decidedly, isn’t much (by my own choosing), and putting it in panniers, strapping it to a bicycle, and lugging it all from the top of Washington state to the middle of Baja, CA, Mexico.  The way it’s planned, it’ll take me three months.

I figured, at the time, that it would give me time to think and time to heal.  That while my thighs were being brutally tortured, I wouldn’t have time to think about the brutal pain in my heart.  Healing in motion.

And in the interim, I’d have a story.  I’d have an experience that was greater than myself, greater than any stupid boy that didn’t realize how awesome he had it.

Sitting on the walkway, listening to the Eastlake traffic, a murder of crows talked and gossipped on the roof of the daycare next door.  I knew them, a little.  I could tell which one was which, from months of observation and drawing, and the oldest of them (I’d assumed, from his authority), was telling the others what to do.  They had a bag of fries.  How they got a McDonald’s bag to the roof of the school, I have no idea — it had to be heavier than they were used to.

For the next six days, before I set off on the trip, I found crow feathers everywhere.  Literally, everywhere I went.  I have some of them taped and pasted into my journals of the time — found in Ballard on the cobblestones while I biked for practice.  In Redmond, after a long trek down the Burke-Gilman to its terminus.  Once, I even found one on the passenger seat of the car, which boggled me, since the car had been locked with the windows rolled up.

I took them as a sign to take flight.

Which I did.

*  *  *

My crow outside seems cold.  She’s puffed up her feathers on the wire, making her look twice as big, and she’s moved herself into the rising sun.

I’ve got a list here.  2009.  What I did, what I wanted to do, what I had no intention of doing but did anyway.  Stuff I dealt with that I never wanted to deal with again, stuff that I didn’t know was even an issue, stuff that makes no sense, even now, in retrospect.

Part of me still doesn’t believe that it’s the end of the year already.  That December’s rolled around again, and so many things have happened.  Part of me knows that 2009 is closing down, and I’m not all that sad to see it go.

I’m puffing up my own feathers in the cold, trying to find a sunbeam.

*  *  *

December, 2008.

I’m here.

I can’t believe I’m here.  Can’t believe the way God’s machinery turned to land me right here, in this hotel room in North Carolina.  A thousand, million, gazillion tiny actions, seemingly unrelated, culminating in my standing at a window looking out on a green, rainy parking lot rimmed with trees.

I’m content.  Completely at peace, even though I’ve had to walk through fire to get to this point, and I know that not all that further along, I’m going to have to walk back through it again to the place this long hallway ends.

But for now, listening to the rain and my breath and the hum of the laptops in the background, I’m okay with that.  I’m where I’m supposed to be, and I know I’m going to be here for as long as I’m supposed to be, too.

Later, I’ll put on pants (because you know I work better without them), make my way to an unfamiliar Starbucks, and feel the machinery of the world moving around me in silence.

On the way to the rented car, I’ll stop just long enough to pick up a black crow’s feather, and paste it to a page in the Moleskine.  I make no commentary on the page.

I don’t think I need to.

*  *  *

A truck’s just gone by, scaring my crow off her perch.  She flies, and I watch her go, until I can’t see her anymore.

It’s cold this morning.  I’m warm, confused.  I had a flight path, and now I’m where I’m supposed to be, gearing up to do what I believe I’m supposed to do.  My life’s changing again, flight path veering off to the right in a sharp L.

Maybe all you can do, in this life, is look back.  Evaluate.  Watch your path change with all the myriad decisions you make without even thinking.

And then…fly on.