13 August 2001 ~ Swimming with Mount Rainier and blackberries and friends...

Aug 12 2001 ~ 3ish PM, PST
Lake Taps, near Auburn, WA

D. ~

Everything's working out okay... Things are good... Mostly everything at this place and time is warm, smells sweet, and tastes like fresh wild blackberries in the sun...

Am convinced that glacier-water lakes must have curative powers. Not that I really needed curing or anything today, but if I HAD needed curing, I would be cured by now. My skin is sort of tingling, and I swear I have never felt this clean in my life, ever.

They say Mount Rainier is due for an eruption whenever it feels up for it. Jane says an eruption would immediately melt bunches and bunches of glaciers, and, at the moment of an eruption, huge lahars -- floods and mudslides -- would pretty much wipe out this part of the state, maybe this part of the country. But right now -- RIGHT NOW -- I'm sitting here, chewing a blackberry [FYI, everything Tom Robbins has ever written about Washington blackberries is true...], my skin tanned and soft from sun and whitish-blue opaque water, and Brian and Jane and I posed for a picture in front of Mount Rainier. Right now, it is gentle and graceful and poised. Right now, Brian and Jane and I sit smiling three-wayed smiles at each other. RIGHT NOW, we won't worry about volcanoes and lahars. Or anything else.

No, not everything is perfect. There are tensions, little bits of chaos, words gone unspoken, dramatics, but there are no indications of eruption, of anything being wiped out by emotional floods and screaming, blazing ash... I don't think I could be happier than I have been this week. Even if the slight imperfections were glossed over, I really couldn't be happier. It's the imperfections that remind me I'm really alive.

Have to go. More later, D.

~Me*