This eccentric old soul

All it takes, some days, is sitting with a group of women talking about their careers or their adventures in parenting, pregnancy or nursery decor themes, the ins and outs of real estate or where they shop for clothes, to realize I'm a bit of an oddball. An "old soul," I've been called.

Because I am. Just a bit.

Me, with my downward mobility 'career' in a coffee shop. With kids not in the plans or dreams for the future, at least not in this moment. While they're talking about baby clothes, I'm thinking about how we'll build a cool habitat for our tortoise and where I'll continue to find her steady supplies of dandelions through the colder months. Instead of dreaming of how we'll find a house in our price range in this neighborhood we currently rent in, I'm quietly longing to leave it all behind and move to Mexico. To live in a simple, brightly painted adobe house with a garden and goats up in the moody, mountainous city of Guanajuato, living close to my husband's family, closer to the earth, immersed in creating art through my words. 

From our engagement photos - on a goat farm.

Me, who considers "wearing makeup" to mean the rare occasion I put on mascara and tinted lip gloss. Who shops at thrift stores and wears running shoes with skirts and loves hand-embroidered peasant blouses from Mexico. Who still believes I'm not too old for splashing in puddles with rain boots, playing in fountains, collecting children's books, believing in magical things.

I seem to forget, in my everyday face-to-face relationships, away from this place where writers find kindred spirits among quirky others, that most people don't talk to trees - or at least don't admit it. That they don't, every now and then, stop and place their hands on the rough trunk of a towering old tree and feel something deeper than words pass between them. Some unutterably holy spark of the eternal. 

When I'm talking with other people of faith and throw out words like "mystery" and "wonder" and "doubt" in the same sentence, of "reading the Word in the world," holding back those words describing moments when I experienced Jesus in a goose by the lake or a walk down a street, I feel it in their blank stares. 

And that's okay, because we're all a little odd and different in our own ways, right? Even as we are all a little like each other, maybe more than we care to admit.  These revelations of my particular oddities resound each time a little clearer tune.

Because I'm perfectly okay, at the age of thirty-three, being just a little bit eccentric.

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Linking with Kate and the Five-minute Friday community, to the prompt of "Because."