May 16, 2026
It’s hot today. Hotter than I would have expected. I worked last night and didn’t get any sleep, so honestly I was really hoping for a rainy afternoon where I could sit and watch movies guilt-free. But the rain dried up early, so here we are.
We’re not going very far today. The dogs are already panting, and I don’t want to take them too far from the car because I don’t want them to have a long walk back.
Apparently we’re coming into a dry season because the wetland is no longer especially wet. Today we walked right through the place where the dogs usually swim and out into the middle of it. But even with the water disappearing, there is so much life here. Birds everywhere. So many different songs overlapping that the whole place sounds alive. I tried taking a video just to capture the sound, but I don’t think a phone can really hold something like that.
I saw a goose family today, and I realized they were doing something clever that I hadn’t fully understood before. One of the parents flattened itself low against the water with its head stretched down so it looked more like a rock than a goose. All the babies lined up silently behind it where you could barely see them. Meanwhile the other parent stayed visible, just sitting there looking like an ordinary goose.
If you weren’t paying attention, you’d think there was only one goose and a random lump along the shoreline.
Now I’m wondering how many times I’ve seen that trick before without realizing it. I remember seeing what I thought was a lone goose swimming near what looked like another dead goose stuck against the shore, and now I’m pretty sure it was another parent hiding goslings behind its body.
It’s hard to resist exploring some of the denser wooded areas even though I know there are probably a ton of ticks back there. But honestly there are ticks out on the sunny trail too, so I don’t know how much difference it really makes. The dogs are due for flea meds anyway.
Something has dug these huge burrow holes back there, about a foot wide. The dogs absolutely love sticking their faces down inside them trying to see what lives there. I keep telling them someday a beaver or something is going to come flying out of one of those holes and bite their faces off, but nobody listens to me.
Besides the goose family, today’s wildlife sightings included a huge blue dragonfly, a cabbage white butterfly that was actually yellow, and a turtle that launched itself off a rock the second we got close. I can hear big frogs somewhere deeper in the marsh — the kind that sound almost like somebody thumping on a drum. And of course the swallows are everywhere doing what swallows do best.
When we first started coming here years ago, we entered the trail from a different parking area. I actually like where we enter now better, but for years we always came to the same little hidden lot because almost nobody knew about it. There used to be a bridge connecting the parking area to the trail, but years ago they took it down.
For the longest time after that, every time we walked past that spot the dogs would still try to go to the bridge. They would stop where it used to be and just stare at the empty space like something was wrong.
I have a funny memory about that bridge too.
Max has always been my outdoors boy. He loves mud, water, swimming, all of it. Scout… not so much. It took several visits before Max finally convinced Scout to even go into the water at all. And when Scout finally decided to try it, he picked a spot right next to that bridge where the water turned out to be way deeper than he expected. He scared the absolute hell out of himself. After that he refused to go back in the water for the longest time.
He still doesn’t love it the way Max does, but at least now he’s willing to get in.
Parts of this area smell like catalpa trees, and every time the wind shifts it reminds me of the farmhouse. I miss that farmhouse so much.
One of my long-term financial goals is honestly to someday buy that house back, or at least buy something like it. Somewhere with enough room for the kind of life I actually want.
I want space. Foster kids. Chickens. Maybe goats. Maybe one of those tiny cows everybody is obsessed with now.
One thing I’ve noticed lately is that now that I’ve finally stepped off the constant stress merry-go-round I’ve been trapped on for years, I’m starting to remember things I wanted before survival mode swallowed everything. Things I imagined for my life before paramedic school, before exhaustion became my default setting.
One of those things was always adoption. Especially teenagers.
And after I learned how many kids get thrown away by their own families because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, that feeling got even stronger. I genuinely cannot imagine a deeper betrayal than a parent deciding their vision of who their child should be matters more than the child themselves.
I can at least follow the internal logic of parents who convince themselves they are “helping” a child by trying to change them, however harmful or horrifying I think that is. But abandoning them? Turning your back completely? Deciding your love has conditions attached to it? That is something darker.
Ever since I realized that happens, I’ve had this persistent feeling that I want to be part of the opposite of that. I want to be one of the places people land instead of one more door closing in their face.
Of course all of that requires space, and space requires money.
I used to imagine Riley growing up, getting married, having kids, and bringing them to visit Grandma at her little farm someday. We’d bake together like my grandma did with me. We’d gather eggs and feed goats and let the kids play with chickens and maybe even a horse.
My neighbors at the farmhouse, Margaret and Guy, lived something close to that life.
Guy was Margaret’s third husband, and he absolutely adored her. Together they mostly just collected animals and loved them. Pigs, dogs, goats, miniature horses, maybe even donkeys. Margaret took in every unloved or inconvenient creature that crossed her path.
At one point one of the kids she babysat had a guinea pig his father didn’t want in the house anymore. The kid was devastated, so Margaret just told him to bring the guinea pig over to her place. She became the custodian of somebody else’s unwanted guinea pig simply because she was kind enough to do it.
That was who she was.
Honestly, if I could trade lives with anybody, theirs would be one of the lives I’d consider trading for.
But all of those dreams cost money because they require land and stability and enough breathing room to build a life instead of constantly patching holes in one.
Sometimes I think I should make a vision board or something because there are so many things I still want. So many versions of life I still want to touch if I can.
When I was little I used to read Dear Abby and Ann Landers constantly. I loved advice columns for some reason. And every so often some woman would write in saying she wanted to make some huge life change — go back to school, leave her husband, move somewhere new, start over somehow — but she was worried because by the time she finished she’d be forty or fifty or sixty.
And the answer was always the same:
How old will you be in that amount of time if you don’t do it?
Time passes either way.
Doing the thing doesn’t make you older. Refusing to do it doesn’t stop the clock.
There are so many things I still want to do that sometimes I feel like my life is that old Bonnie Raitt song. I’m scared to run out of time.