I probably have every piece of cheap jewelry I’ve ever bought, every objet de junk I’ve dragged into my house over the years (that plastic Buddha, the Day of the Dead skeletons, the squeaky tin bird), every impulse buy I quickly hated–but the things I treasure I always lose. The silver ring that matched the gold one above that I bought from a jeweler off Portobello Road in London, the expensive bracelet made of porcelain beads painted with Chinese characters that I wore for luck, the leather envelope purse from Il Bisonte that no other bag can replace and that I didn’t appreciate until it was gone. I have searched frantically through my house for the missing items and  through the universe for people I’ve lost.  I can’t wear the gold ring without its mate, and I can’t replace the man I loved with another one, but losing things and people is a lesson in letting go, one I need to learn before I leave this Sweet Old World. Why? Because some day I will have to let go of life, let go of sunsets, Champagne, foot massages, Chopin, Bach and Lucinda Williams, bookclub dinners, skinny dipping, dolphins feeding at dusk,  Fedoras, ballet slippers, salt, twinkle lights, cruise control, dishwashers, sand in my shoes, 411, down jackets, lucky charms, the color red, my friends, my family, my  biker jacket, pears and cheese, clean sheets, hot showers, gardenias, glue sticks, homemade pasta sauce, pomegranate seeds, morning glories and so much more. But facing that encourages to me to open myself to color and sensation and compassion and sadness and embraces before it’s too late. It makes me want to be honest with the people I love. It makes me feel urgent about having conversations that are real and revealing.  It makes me realize, when I’m able, of  the beauty that the world offers, like a woman opening herself to a lover with nothing withheld, nothing calculated, everything free and priceless.

At dusk, the setting sun bathed us in an opalescent light, like the lining of an abalone shell. For a breath-holding moment, the sky and wavelets along the beach turned pink, and the ocean-bound container ship took on the glamour of a tramp steamer in the mist. Maybe headed to China or Fiji or Easter Island or back in time. I wanted to be on it, going anywhere but here, being anyone but me, feeling anything but sad. I wanted to lean on the railing and watch the land disappear and not know my destination but be deep-down sure it was going to be life-changing. For just a minute. Then the light changed, and night began to move in on our picnic and Prosecco and my soul fell back into my body. But for a beautiful brief moment I was between Here and There, just dreaming.

What is it about red lipstick? I never wear it. I always thought it was for women with more self-confidence or bigger lips than I have, but today I bought a tube on a whim. And I love it. With this stuff on, I think I could run a company (oops I’ve already done that), get the best table in a restaurant, wear a nipped-in-the-waist suit, write a country western song, not fall down in high heels, be seductive instead of stupidly shy, have a secret and dangerous lust affair, drink port and smoke cigarillos after dinner, lead a revolution, write a erotica or a bodice ripper, not give a fuck, host  a sunday salon of intellectuals, move to Paris, understand Foucault, fall in love with a bullfighter, write a poem like “Howl,”  stride down a street like I own it, live by myself on a houseboat or in the desert, learn to fly a plane (wearing a shearling/leather aviator jacket of course), talk back, be a hermit, be a rock star, be the me that lives under my skin.

I’ve been thinking really hard lately about greening, about trying to resensitize myself to the world around me, to somehow get back to a five-year-old’s matter-of-fact oneness with it. Of course, I can’t ignore the layers of experience that have built up around my soul since I was five, that have muffled the message of the beautiful old world, but there are certain objects, colors, sounds, words that call them up still. The green leaves of the basil plant on my porch remind me of the big, velvety green leaves of the tobacco plants that hung from the rafters of my grandfather’s barn. A poem like The Healing Time by Pesha Gertler that breaks through the carapace formed by being one of the living wounded (aren’t we all?!) to make me cry. Coming across a paper garland on Etsy made out of pages of a book I first read in front of the fireplace in my grandmother’s bedroom, which also functioned as living/sitting/center of the world room in her house. Remembering that aside from stabbing my playmate in the scalp with a No. 2 pencil I was a dreamy, quiet kid who had a rockin’ interior life and vivid imagination. That I loved cutting and pasting more than anything, and whenever I can do it now, I regain fragments of that state of mind. Scissors, please.

This morning I was rushing around the house because I was late as usual, trying to make a sandwich, take my blood pressure for a chart I’m keeping for my doctor and apply self-tanner, all more or less simultaneously. Then I exploded from the house like someone shot from a cannon. Later, I came across old photos from Italy and found this one of the cat that belonged to the villa where I stayed. So peaceful that just looking at it made me exhale all the worry and tension that keeps my shoulders standing at attention in anticipation of the next brouhaha. I remembered watching how slowly the night came down and how it smelled and the long vistas across the hills at blue dusk. The silence was bone-deep — no TV, radio, music. How many times does that actually happen in our daily lives?  We’ve managed to distract the whole planet with our Stuff. At night, our stars are put in the shade by the ambient glow of electric lights, and even if  the TV is off, chances are the dishwasher is running or the dryer is whirring or cars are passing the house. And, of course, the usual chorus of sirens, garbage trucks, leaf blowers and chain saws. I’m so unused to silence that I don’t even miss it until I’m reminded of how it didn’t sound.