grand lake, co

I’ve sat down in this creased leather chair with a pile of books as tall as my chest. I can’t decide which one to open first, but I plan on reading every single one. The chair “huffs” as I fall in, and I already feel my body melt a little. The light is golden yellow and the sunbeams seem made up of floating dust on their way to settle somewhere. When I was really little I used to think it was glitter in the air. This is the only place where I get left alone: This house perched up on a granite rock speckled with lichen, lapping water reflecting up at us and making sunshine shimmers on the ceiling. We are all still. Erin has her fat tome of Tolkien pinning her to her chair across from me, my mom is highlighting a book about native bird species, and my Dad is out on the dock fiddling with something I can’t see. It’s probably a boat. (It’s always a boat). Here everybody goes into their place of stillness and peace without too much fuss. This house has a hold on us that feels more like a rhythm we all know the moves to. We don’t trip over each other here. We float. I open the first page of “Our Eyes Were Watching God” but the letters haven't congealed into words yet in my brain. I spend a little more time watching the glitter/dust and just breathing. It’s a gift I didn’t know I needed.