start as you intend to go on

I recently ran across this advice while doing hundreds of hours of research before adopting a cat: start as you intend to go on. And by recently, I mean over a year ago, around the time I decided to start this blog. The purveyor of said advice, whose identity I have unfortunately forgotten, stumbled upon it herself in a parenting book, but felt it had a broader relevance, and I quite agree. Because while I don’t remember where exactly I heard it, here I sit, one year later thinking yeah! That is how I should start this blog!

Exactly as I . . . intend to go on.

Kind of awkward though, just wandering in and getting down to it like I’ve been here all along. Awkwarder still, my rustiness with language. Put any skill on a shelf for long enough and it’s bound to atrophy. I keep using the word “really” like it’s the only word I know. I also seem to be really fixated on the phrase “as a matter of fact.” I really do.

I suspect that the fix for it is to embarrass myself until I get my sea legs back, so we’re just going to have to suffer through my early posts together. Or I’ll suffer through them, you absolutely may leave if you wish to. But I hope you’ll stay because otherwise I’m just talking to myself, and while I’ve tried that, dear reader, I am an unsatisfactory substitute for you.

By the way, while I didn’t start the blog so much as pay for it and then agonize about it for a year, I did adopt the cat, and she is as perfect a creature as I have ever known. Her interests include riding around on top of a cat backpack but refusing to go inside it, slapping voles in the garden, hissing at rain, and sticking her whiskers up my nose.

She walks on a leash and meows like “hoo hoooo!” and hates riding in the basket on my bicycle. I love her.

The cat and I live in a great music city of the northern plains, in a sweet little bungalow, white with white trim. “It’s like the White House,” one of the painters said, as we stood back to take it in. “Like, for the president.”

He glanced at me sidelong. I grinned. “Yeah.”

My inspiration was Newport mansion meets Life After People and I think I’ve achieved that. The front yard is a riotous native prairie that I always say will look good next year and the back yard is feral. Once, one of my neighbors gestured at my extensive gardens and said, “I mean . . . don’t rodents live in there?”

Again: Yeah.

Some fifty potted plants share the house with the cat and I in winter, and in the summer we all go out to the garden. No matter how much time we spend out there, it’s never enough. The feeling intensifies this time of year. Now the leaves are in peak color, the tropicals back inside, clustered at the brightest windows, the cat strutting around all fancy in her little red sweater.

I was happy to have a break from gardening for about three weeks and now I’m in mourning. I forget all the misery once the mosquitos are tucked in their evil little beds.

Tis the season for trying to dress in such a way that I am both a.) warm and b.) not constantly being told that I “look so cozy!” which I’m pretty sure is not a compliment. Results are, so far, mixed. But today, at the workbench in the furnace room (or “Engineering” as I call it, live long and prosper) in grey sweats, and a brown knit blazer over a My Favorite Murder Live tee, I feel like I nailed it.

I painted my toenails black, Happy Halloween. Then I pulled out my watercolors, wasted a bunch of time on pinterest, and got down to work.

Which brings us to how I intend to go on.

Look, the truth is, I don’t really know what this is yet. (As a matter of fact, I really really don’t.) That’s what I’ve learned in this year of pointlessly sitting on my hands.

I do know I’d like to share a little of how I see the world, share my life and my travels, some photos, some art. I’d like to see if there’s anything left of the internet as I remember it. Meet some people, tell some stories. I used to love this place.

Does the world need another quirky little lifestyle blog? Does anyone want to read about an elder Millennial and her wanderlust and her weird cat? Well, who cares. Maybe I’ll skip the angst and overthinking for once and just do the important thing, just start.

I’ll figure the rest out as I go along.