la valise turns one

this time last year i was living with 6 other females (if you think that sounds crazy, you're smarter than i was) in a non-insulated back room across the street from chico state university.

i was drawing naked people in a figure drawing class

and watching the chico trees themselves undress

reading les miserables and the chronicles of narnia

running everyday to keep my sanity

day dreaming about slo

ripping pages from a cheap bible to paste on the wall

trying to keep cool, then warm

trying to believe that life would not always be so gnarly.

and now, 13 months later,

i have an address in the town i love

only prayers to pay my bills

(i complain not, i assure you)

half the roomates

twice the recipes

the grapes of wrath

a summer spent with my jesus beneath a fig tree in my friend's backyard

a red hair boy who sat under that fig tree and wept

and the tree outside that was blighted by the heat, but decided not to give up and grew new leaves in october anyway.

an excerpt from my first post:

"i shall embrace my fate as a pilgrim, tethering myself loosely to this one stationary website...like a kite, i guess. tethers are great because they help you remember where you're from, and that the wind will not always carry on so forcefully...they are a hope that someday you will be reeled back in."

and in the meantime, i bake. today is irish soda bread made with white whole wheat flour, bob's 10-grain cereal and flaxseed...

you gotta love the irish for the crosses in their bread