Life has been unstoppable lately.  I flew home to stacks of boxes and totes and piles of pictures everywhere.  My sister and I are in a funny little upstairs apartment with a teal stove and huge windows.  It has been so long since I have lived with anyone and even longer since she and I have been under the same roof, inside the same walls and it is so much easier than I had hoped.

I had forgotten how very nice it is to come home to another body, to doors opening and disappearing clothes and extra hair products.  It smells like girl everywhere, it looks like girl everywhere and it only gets better when you get to the bathroom.  Perfume bottles and hair bows and flowers.  You can't help but to come out of that room beautiful.

Our kitchen is a Buddy Holly type of room.  It has old slanting floors and an even older stove top and oven.  It's an apron wearing, music blaring, barefoot experience and since it is a terribly old house with terribly old walls, it is a room full of surprises.

Our rooms have large windows and I have the greatest view of one of the most regal trees I've known.  They're windows that make you scheme about slipping through them, out onto the roof and into the limbs, just because you can. 

The whole thing is perfect.  From the floors to the glass knobs to the panes they stopped making years ago.  But the best part is in the late evenings, after we get home and kick the day into a pile at the bottom of the closet and head for the chairs or the couch or a bed, books in hand. 

This fall has moved me along.  I outgrew floor sitting and purchased a couch.  I'm enjoying my classes.  While I was hanging my closet, I noticed that I've moved from large patterns and unusual colors to solids.  Whites and blacks and light pinks.  I have a bed time routine.  An organized laundry system.  Wheaties.

I'm settling a little deeper into myself, anchoring into this place and I am not as caught up.  I miss it a little, on days when I leave the windows open later than I should and the sun smells warm on my skin, when I sneak sips of the kids' kool aid, when I wear a headband and really large ring.  And then I smile because it reminds me that I am not so far away from her.  And in those moments when she bursts wildly from me, when I can not help but to giggle and hold my middle, searching for air, in those moments I am the closest to woman and girl and I am so alive.