Joyful Scribblings of a Bookish Wanderer

      You may not have been following along on previous posts of this journey, so I will summarize here. My husband and I took a cross country flight from North Carolina to San Francisco, CA.  I chronicled the journey, because it was my first flight, and our first week long vacation together in 10 years!  So, in my previous post, we touched down in San Francisco, and then came the wait to get off the plane.  Finally we were out, and we made our way to the car rental station. Ok, I followed along behind my husband obliviously while he guided us there.      We rented a nice little hybrid SUV that ended up having a mind of its own, and fussing at my husband every time he happened to do something it didn't like.  But it was a nice little car.  Before we left the city, we drove to the closest beach and took a few minutes to walk out on the brown sand.  The wind. The pounding waves. The rocks. It was so different from any of the east...

     Being in the air was less scary than I imagined. Before we had taken flight, I dealt with my claustrophobia and anxiety, and thankfully I didn't have another battle with either when we were in the air.  (Partially due to my hefty supply of gummy bear candy). I loved watching the clouds. I had only ever been able to imagine what it was like to look down on the tops of the clouds, with only one little pane of glass between me and them.  It was better than the movies show.      There was a little map on the back of the seat in front of me, that had our plane location.  I loved looking down on the earth, my imagination taking flight as I tried to imagine what the people in each state were up to.  We flew across so many states, I'm not even sure which ones they were. But the variety was amazing! It seemed like there was always something different to see.  When we flew over deserts, the landscape was either brown with crop circles o...

       I don't know where I got the idea that my silence was a good thing. But somehow over the formative young teen years, I developed the conviction that I had nothing to say that anyone would want to hear. Then I started a blog, and that blog led to writing articles for a Christian magazine.  My uncle once pulled my cousin and me aside and told us, "Don't ever stop writing. You have a gift, and you need to use it. We need to hear what you both have to say."      This lit the fire under me, and I wrote with a vengeance. Someone wanted to hear what I had to say.      Years passed, I got married, started a family, started a new blog.  I posted in that blog fairly often, as we hit change after change, and God kept placing things into my mind to get me thinking - and to process it, I would write another article. I was desperate for people in my life and church to understand where I was coming from. I was convinced that if they co...

      There are many times that I've felt that anticipation curl in my belly. The rush of adrenaline and the way my stoic Swiss heritage stamps down extra displays of excitement, my body letting go of the coursing excitement with taps of my finger or the inability to stand perfectly still.  I felt all of this when I stood with the other dozen or so people, everyone waiting in apparent boredom for the boarding call. I was anything but bored. I was terrified, because this 35 year old woman had never flown before.      I shifted closer to my husband, my nonchalance could have won me an acting award. Until we started down the long corridor, heading to the impossibly small plane door. Then I realized that I've watched too many cop shows, as my brain began spinning all the scary things that could happen in a narrow space like this. It only got worse when I actually started following my husband down the ridiculously narrow isle, my suitcase bumping along afte...