The last couple nights have dipped down below freezing, riming the fields beyond our house with frost. This morning a heavy skim of frozen fog at the foot of the distant mountains contrasted with the bold grapefruit of the pre-dawn clouds, like a painting of frost and fire. It feels like a fitting entree to November (though perhaps I should have fudged by a few shades and called that sky “pumpkin”).

The colder it gets here, the more starry-eyed grows my countdown to our vacation in just… twenty-seven days!

“Please don’t do that,” my husband pleaded with me yesterday, when I chirped that it was just 28 days till we go to Hawai’i. “It will get here when it gets here.“

You never stop learning a person. Ten years in, and this is the first I’ve realized that my husband actively dislikes a countdown.

I’ve always enjoyed the anticipation inherent in counting down to something, looking forward to a thing that I’m, well, looking forward to. It never occurred to me that it could come across as complaining about our current (i.e. NOT-in-Hawai’i) circumstances. Counting down to something in the future feels, to Jon, like being ungrateful for one’s present.

So I’ll say it straight out: I am happy to be here today, with the cold nights flash-freezing the oak leaves to scarlet… and my hot cup of coffee in hand when I look out across those frosted fields… and my toes at night wriggling into the silky-furry polar-fleece sheets as the temperature outside plummets… and the pumpkins harvested from our garden, baked into my all-time-favorite cookies (with cream cheese frosting!)

My gratitudes at this time of year are unforced by any calendared holiday.

AND! I am joyfully anticipating a return to my old “stomping grounds” on the Big Island. When Jon and I went, a couple years back (the first time I’d returned since my grown son was an infant), we found that I had not forgotten the secrets of some beautiful dive spots that tourists don’t find.

It was knowledge gifted to me by the “local boys” (words used to mean “from Hawai’i,” even when spoken in a location elsewhere) with whom I hung out, in university days.

We used to drive around to the sunny side of the island on Fridays, dive all weekend and eat what we speared and sleep on beaches, and head back to Hilo for class on Monday mornings. I was at UHH to study Marine Biology, and oh boy did I study it! That is, if you count “studying” those critters in real time instead of just in textbooks… (Not to mention “dissecting” them on my plate!) If so? I was never so studious in all my life!

So… I am counting down to some more avid “studying” of that sort, to renewing my bond with the saltwater, to floating in the warm ocean’s arms. AND I am being grateful for all the gifts of a colding November here on the Oregon Trail.

(AND I am keeping my countdown quietly to myself. Twenty-seven days!)

As a post-script… However much fun I’ve been having with AI-generated images, I’m still even happier when I have my own actual photos for illustration… Photos are evidence of experience rather than imagining, if that makes sense. And however pleased I am to be able to imagine things (writing a novel would be impossible without it!), it’s experience for which a person travels…