Comfort

One afternoon last week, I found myself with my laptop set up on the prep table in the kitchen. By the miracle of the wi-fi connection I had installed at the café (it has finally decided to work!) I was scoping out election results on the internet. And suddenly, I was immersed in crafting a politically slanted journal entry, right there between the toaster and the meat slicer, about the rapture attributable to the demise of Donald Rumsfeld. It felt like the two distinct parts of my life—B.C. (Before Café) and A.D. (After life-altering Decision) had finally begun to fuse into something recognizable—an existence I could countenance, without feeling that I had given up something I loved to get…something I loved.

I knew the time would come when I would be at ease in my own skin again. When "Entrepreneur Lisa" would begin to bear a comfortable resemblance to my past personae: Writer, Wife, Animal Mom, Birder, Traveler, Gardener, Home Decorator par excellence. Because in actual fact, these are not "past personae" at all, but part of the ever-more-complicated puzzle that is me.

This, at last, is the reward for growing older...for attaining this "mid-life" with which, sometimes, I have such difficulty "coming to terms": That a life which starts out as a stick-figure pencil drawing eventually takes on the beauty and intricacy of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

I’m not there yet…but I’m getting there.