I don't know how we spent the morning. The day before, we'd gone to the farmer's market, which is called the tailgate market, and bought chorizo breakfast tacos and lemon chess pies. We'd seen our new neighbors and new friends, walked around looking at the tomatoes and squash and corn, which we didn't need to purchase, because our neighbors had been leaving them on our doorstep regularly. It seems that everyone here grows gardens, and grows them with great success, western North Carolina being a rain forest, a fertile crescent, where I am told one can grown nearly anything. I want to grow coffee beans. I want to wear a panama hat and cradle green coffee beans for roasting in my soil-covered hands, but look, there goes my movie self again. Not me. Never me.

I probably cleaned the house, or laid listless in bed with a book. I am easily overwhelmed. The weight of the day's tasks often crush me and I curl up in bed, happy and hating myself by turns. I don't remember, but in the afternoon we got in the car and drove a direction that might have been north to Asheville, where Noah was flying in to see us for the first time since we'd moved, four weeks before. As we drove, the valley opened up and I could see the sky. Everywhere was green. We were bouncing with excitement. We were minutes from the airport when Noah texted to say his plane had been delayed in Charlotte and he didn't know when another flight would leave.

Since moving to Brevard four weeks ago, all the vestiges of my former life had vanished, washed away by the daily torrential rain. All the places I knew were fifteen-hundred miles away. The landscape had changed like an old-time theater prop and all my routines with it. All the people I knew. The places I used to drive to and past, the place we used to go for coffee, for beers, for a quick dinner. The faces I used to see around town, the parents at school drop off, the sounds of the neighborhood, the hue of the sky. My husband was gone and for four weeks I had lived as a single mother, making friends alone, going to parties alone, arriving at strangers' houses invited but alone. Everything was changed and it is no wonder, no wonder I lost my sense of self.

So you won't blame me for what I did next. I spoke to Siri, oracle to my slouching Odysseus, and she guided me to Starbucks. The girls asked for a "Frakking-cino" and I indulged them. I ordered a chai and we parked in the shade of a maple tree and pushed all the doors open. Just an hour later, my movie self would arrive to pick up Noah in white lace and aviators and Noah's movie self would tell me how proud he was of everything I'd done, alone in the forest. In reality the sight of him would bring tears to my eyes. Tears that were happy and releasing a bit of the strain that had been keeping me up at nights and waking me at dawn.

But first, while we were waiting, Ayla climbed into the front seat. Two days before, I had walked out my front door and smelled that gorgeous soft-apple scent of fall. Now the breeze that blew our hair to our faces was teasing and cool, and the light filtered rich and golden through the trees. Everything different than the day before. Do you feel that? I said to Ayla.

She closed her eyes and scented like a lioness. "Mmmm," she sighed, so deeply content. "It makes me feel like everything good is going to happen."

Wintering

I saw a book, resting on a nightstand in another blogger's photograph, and I bought it immediately, that day, on the spot. I knew I had to have it.

And on Sunday morning, lying in bed, I discovered that Sylvia Plath kept bees over the summer and winter before she died. She wrote five poems about them. I discovered this while my husband sat in the white light of the morning kitchen, drinking coffee and reading about the things he reads about. Sports I suspect, though I know he likes world news and movie blogs too. Please don't mistake them with celebrity blogs, which he cares nothing for and neither, much, do I.

Last week in bee class the instructor showed us picture after picture of the process of setting up her first hive, harvesting her first honey. Pictures of herself, her husband, her fellow beekeeper friend holding up comb frames and smokers and golden jars of honey, and in every frame every person had Elphaba-green skin. The bees were yellow and black, the hives were white, the honey was gold, and the people were green. The first shot was of the friend only, smiling her in her bee suit but afflicted by a terrible verdigris. I waited for the instructor to explain, but she did not, and I thought maybe her friend's skin really was quite kelly, and it was therefore impolite to talk about it. She clicked through then, the power point, photo after photo of Wicked Beekeepers of the West, green hands on hives and forest-smiling faces and nobody said a thing about it. But of course, neither did I.

I drive my husband crazy, I forget everything. He tolerates my forgetfulness teasingly, or bemusedly, or distractedly. I lose the keys, I lose the forms, I lose my cell phone, the remote, the scissors, the tape, the earrings, the shoes, I even lose the coffee pot. (We found it in the fridge. We found the milk in the pantry). It's like I'm a romantic comedy heroine, except forgetful rather than clumsy and I don't wear high heels. "You are out of control," he says teasingly. "You are stressing me out." And I tell him, imagine what it's like to BE me, rather than simply be fated to put up with me.

Here is what it's like to be me: I am not like this in real life. I am not shy, exactly, but I am reserved. I despise small talk and ask questions that are too personal, too soon. I forget everything, including the story you told me, unless I wrote it down, which I probably did. I am easily overwhelmed. I make social appointments and dread honoring them. I'm not funny until you've known me a really long time. I get exhausted and pass out after half a glass of wine, I am therefore a failure at parties. I dread loud environments, I can't raise my voice, unless at my children. I am distracted. When you pause and search for a word I provide it for you, which annoys you and I try to stop, but I can't. Often I know where the story is going after the first sentence, and by the time you've finished it I've lost my energy to give the proper reaction. I can't admit when I'm wrong.

I am sorry.

I want to live everywhere, all at once. Los Angeles, Taos, and Paris currently highest on my list. This sends my husband looking for jobs in each city, except Paris, to which he replies that I must be the one to get a job in Paris. He does not like the French (he does not know the French).But like Sylvia, I am wintering. Winter is for women, Sylvia writes. She is talking about the bees; in the winter they seal out the males, the drones, who don't make honey but consume great amounts of it, who would eat them out of house and home.

Winter is a thing to be survived, it demands female energy, quietude, patience, and peace. So says Sylvia, or so say I. Here I am, dear January, I am fallow. O'Keefe spent long periods fallow, so I read, long periods of gathering, of stillness, of waiting, and so do I. The muse, like spring, like honey and hurry and drone cells, drowsy cells, green grass, vital energies, always return.

What is it Oprah says? This I know for sure.

Wander Lust

In case you didn't know, the spring always wants to make me travel.

I typed it that way on purpose. It doesn't "make me want", it "wants to make" me, and I say that because the desire to pack up my bags and leave is palpable and unignorable in the spring. It's like April, the greening-up grass, the fragrant soil, is purposely releasing a chemical it knows works as a travel aphrodisiac to me. The month hooks its unfurling, viney claws--fertile tentacles, if you will--into my flesh and brains and bones, it pulls and aches and yearns; it's a terrible, terrible feeling and I don't wish it on anybody.

It makes me cranky and uneasy in my own skin. It's a hedged in, trapped feeling. It threatens to make the everyday routine feel less like a routine and more like a prison.

Then I think about my parents, who have never been to Europe, and how at least I've been twice--once in high school and once in college--and I think about people who can go whenever they want, who hop a jet to Paris like it's the A train to midtown, and sometimes that all just seems too painful, you know?

For a long time I was trying to figure out how to be grateful for what I had, and sometimes that felt like giving in. I felt like I had to be one or the other: grateful or yearning. But you know what? I'm both. I am grateful for what I have.

And I really, really want to go to Europe.

So there it is. It's a Thursday in April. Dewy and cool. The sky seems bluer than it did last month, doesn't it? The flowers coming up make my heart happy. This October I will plant bulbs, and next April I will watch my own flowers grow. And maybe I can plant the travel seeds now, too.

And maybe next spring, my travel-buds will blossom with the tulips.

You never know.

I am Vesuvius and will you forgive me for being sentimental in the spring?

Maybe I'll Go To Australia

(PICTURE OF ULURU THAT I DELETED OUT OF TERROR.)

The things I want are hard to keep up with. Which is what makes me think I don't know what I really want at all.

Yesterday a brewing job popped up in northern Montana. And Mr. V said, Do you want to move to Montana?

I've always wanted to move to Montana, I said. Except for when I always wanted to move to Paris. Or New Mexico. Or California.

Recently I've latched on to Arizona. Anything might be taken as a sign. An advanced readers copy of a book in which the heroine goes missing to Arizona, takes a lover, eats food made with chilies and cilantro, swims at night in a moonlit pool, begins to feel like a possible road map for my own life. (Hey, I've already got the lover). I dream of heat on my skin. All the time. Of large houses filled with that dusty red tile. Great open windows. The desert air and lots of light.

I even dream of finding scorpions in my cupboards and snakes on my patio, so you can't say I'm completely out of touch with reality.

Then Amanda Palmer comes on my ipod singing one of those songs that you're certain must have been written for you specifically. She has visited me in my sleep. I believe in wonder, these things do happen. You'd have to hear the song, it won't translate into print, but at the end, she sings--F it. I'm gonna go to Australia.

And I think: Yeah. Australia.

Then the Oprah show is in Australia for a week and do you see what I mean about the signs?

In Montana, I would ride horses and grow tomatoes and kale and rhubarb. In Arizona we would hike in the canyons and live at the pool and never feel cold. In New Mexico I'd buy Hopi pottery and Navajo rugs and not see my neighbors for days. In Paris we would spend rainy afternoons at the Louvre. We'd buy our dinner fresh every day. My children would say merci.

But what of Australia? Barcelona? Coastal Sweden, Southern France?

Don't mistake me. I'm not feeling depressed or morose. If I really, really wanted those things--I'd be doing them, wouldn't I? I cannot say that I've seriously researched moving to Paris, or even to Sedona or Bozeman. I'm just wondering at what point do we realize, at what point do we say: Yes, the weight of all those other lives might crush, if we let them. But maybe what I always wanted was to be right here. Right now.

Lucky--Amanda had a song for that, too.

How strange to see that I don't want to be the person that I want to be.

In this life, there is a good good husband and children whom I love. There is time to write, time to read, time to drink good wine. There are summers by the pool, drives in the mountains, afternoons by the river, evenings in the yard. There are the scents of grinding coffee, roasted chilies, and coconut oil on pale skin. Barbies in the bathtub, princess dresses worn with pink cowgirl boots and medieval armor. There are three warm bodies early mornings in the bed. There is someone to come home to. Hot dinner and cold beer waiting. Yes, there is the brutal cold of January, the early dark, the cluttered kitchen.

January passes. Everything does.

I am Vesuvius and I left my Soul with Amanda Palmer. She picked it up and wrote some songs.

Love / Money

May I be honest for a moment? I can't decide which is more important to me: Following your dreams, or making money.

Everyone out there is telling us to do what we love and the money will follow. But no one has instructions on how to carry on when 'what you love' turns out to be writing and brewing beer. If you want to make money, you know what you don't be? A writer or a brewer. It turns out that no money follows. At all. Unless you count free beer (I do, but only a little).These are probably two of the most unlucrative (nonlucrative?) careers out there. Because guess what? There is one J.K Rowling and one Adolph Coors and we are not them.

We made this move, this 'career-change' as I am fond of calling it because I imagine it makes me sound less insane, almost exactly a year ago. And while I wish I could sing to you ballads of our triumph and bravery now at the first annual, I knew all along that wouldn't be the case.

I'm not complaining. I went into this with both eyes open. We did this because we believe in dreams, we believe in risks, and we didn't want Mr.V to work for a few more years at a job he hated and then one day wake up and we own a house and two cars and are used to living in a level of comfort that we would have been much, much more hesitant to leave.

O magazine lands in my mailbox every month telling me to follow my north star, or my bliss, or my passions. And it's not just the big O telling me this--it's our entire culture. The Dream Machine. Heavy in the ether is the idea that if you are brave enough to do what you truly, truly love--happiness will follow.

I'm not saying that isn't true. It's still too soon to tell.

But there we were, my husband and I, walking to the car after our first 'date' in months. The date was going around to breweries where they feed us free beer because we bring it to them in return. And it hit me that I just don't know if it's worth it.

I really don't. I'm saying this to offer it up for your consideration. There is another side to all this. I believe you should follow your dreams but what if your dreams are careers that earn basically no money? Mr. V has traded in that awful soul-sucking job for one he enjoys. But it has been a huge, huge sacrifice and I'm not saying it isn't worth it. I'm just telling you, I don't know yet.

There are times I wonder if we should throw in the towel and go take the highest paying jobs we can find. Work up from there.

All of this may never, ever pay off.

But you see, it might. And so I just keep going.

I am Vesuvius, and I will trade you beer for sweaters.

Too Soon To Tell

"Wife," says Husband. "I find I must needs travel to Scotland for two weeks in order to better our lives together."

"Hmmm," says I. I am kneading my dough like a proper house woman. Next I shall be pounding dirt out of frocks with stones in a courtyard fountain. "I suppose this venture will be filled only with sweat and hard work, and surely not many visits to whisky distilleries and breweries that craft beer with a 41 percent alcohol content."

"Surely not," says he, as he dons his dapper cap and ties the laces on his newly shined boots. "No more than it shall include visits to peerside doxies on the shores of the Thames, nor gluttony and revelry among all the goodly pubfoods and football fans merry olde England has to offer."

"It shall be well, then," says I. "You shall travel to the labyrinthine streets of London and the bonnie olde highlands of Scotland, leaving me here with the babes and the laundry and me own bookshoppe work and this cursed dough that requires constant kneading."

And that is, more or less, how it happened.

I told Noah to apply for a job in India, and then the next day he tells me Brew Dog in Scotland has invited him out for two weeks.

And would I move to Scotland, if we had the chance?

Absolutely.

And do I think we will be moving to Scotland?

Probably not.

A week ago Mr. V got the offer, and I spun like a planet knocked out of a treacherous orbit. Revolving madly on hope and possibility.

I have long time dreamed of being an ex-pat.

And if I want to live off 'maybe' like a drug, well, who can prove it does me harm?

Mr. V hates the maybe.

Me, I grow expansive. I am a daydreamer with ambition. An idealist who believes my own fantasies can become real.

I researched the United Kingdom's immigration laws.

Pictured life in a small town on the Scottish coast.

Started figuring out how to get Mr. V a UK work visa.

Checked out books by Iain Banks and Diana Gabaldon.

Hope and action go hand-in-hand for me.

And that, more than anything, gives me--

well. You know.


Now I am thinking that we probably won't be moving to Scotland. But--they only get two hours of daylight in January, did you know?

Yeah. F you, Scotland. You and your lochs and your whiskies and your land of eternal night.

We might have found a reason to settle here for a bit. And then again, we might not have. (Poor Mr.V)

I'll be a little sad if we don't move to Scotland. For a few days I may even mope.

And then, this little daydream believer will just keep bouncing around in the roulette machine that her life seems to have become, and wonder:

What next?

(That is, right after she fetches her poor Mr. V, who thrives on routine and order and predictability, a very large brandy).