I’ve been feeling a little blue. Not TRULY sad, just a kind of elusive azure. You know, JUST opaque enough to be sky colored around the edges, but mostly just an opalescent wash for the rest? Then today, I got a present. In the mail. And it’s so beautiful, I’ve been crying all morning.

I know that those last three sentences should technically be one, and, at that, it is barely a sentence, but if you know me at all, you know that these are miracles. I am notoriously difficult to buy for. Really. Excruciating. I’m quirky to the point of downright weird and every thing that I own is a brick in the mortar of my eccentric cottage of a life. From my favorite wooden spoon (Amish, from an unexpected road trip I took with my mother in law) to the antique silk slips I have collected and worn as nightgowns since I was a teenager, it’s impossible to look at something that I own and gift me something like it. There’s just something too personal about everything in my closet of kook and to find that magic just existing in an object and expect it to get along with the witchcraft already woven into my life is, I’ve been told, a Herculean task. There’s no obsession to which my oddity doesn’t extend– I love Spider-Man and Bat Man, hate Superman and any super hero whose name ends in “girl.” I love Star Wars and James Bond and I hate Luke Skywalker and Roger Moore. With organic, local flour and butter, I bake my own bread, make my own protein bars and would never eat a store bought cookie, but I can’t pass a hot pretzel stand without buying a cheap, doughy salted mess and eating it while it burns my mouth. I can’t live in a room where the furniture matches, but I can’t leave the house in lingerie that doesn’t. I hate chocolate, unless I don’t on that particular day, and I am pretty sure that the world, in its wild unadulterated wonder is a personal gift to me each day, so I’m always surprised when someone gives me something that takes my breath away. Today it happened.

I’ve never mastered the grace of receiving a gift. I’m terrible at it. I hate to GIVE gifts, because I am so terrible at getting them, except that I love to wrap. Honestly, more than I love almost anything, I love to wrap a gift. Sometimes, when I’m wrapping holiday gifts, I have to physically resist the urge to wrap the sofa……and the dogs….and the ironing board…..But I digress…….

The point is, today I received a present and it washed away the blue I was wearing with a rainbowy wash so excruciatingly lovely with warm reds and yellows and oranges with purple sparkles! And I’m HAPPY. Just incandescent. That’s all.