I’m not settled. I could maybe relax if I knew I didn’t have to go somewhere and do what people would do when here – hike, explore, be active in nature.  But I just sit.

This porch is nice but I’m finding it difficult to not think about what it would take to own a place like this, or when we leave finding the next B&B to go to and avoid going home. This constant and mostly unconscious need to mentally leave the present for more of what was abandoned in the now is too familiar – like pressing my tongue again and again against the rough edges of a tooth.  I can’t seem to stop the circular thinking long enough to lay down pencil and paper for the view, or ignore the droning noise of cars and trucks racing along the nearby blacktop road.  I’m flabbergasted at how these sounds echo through the hills and mimic the toll way volumes of Houston.

I’m not only frustrated, I’m negative and jaded.  How many times have I asked, “Just exactly how far do I have to go; how much money do I need to spend to escape to a vista of nature’s sight and man’s silence?”  It may be as simple as we are on the wrong side of the hill as my husband suggests, but isn’t that always my first answer?  That it would all be better had we decided on the “other side” of the hill – that place over there – just beyond reach.

But, when choosing my escape, how do I politely ask a potential B&B host, “Yes, your cabin looks lovely but how quiet is it?”  And to ask, I’ve discovered, does not exactly guarantee an answer in terms of what I consider to be accurate; they can not imagine the finely tuned, noise-intolerant-meter I have become.  Like a bat in the dark, my sonar can seek and report back the slightest man-made noise or child disturbance within hundreds of miles where with one outburst of the cutest goo-goo, one A/C condenser kicking in, or one car racing along the smoothest of asphalt sends an all out alert that threatens my idea of peace.

What chances do I really ever have then with this finely tuned radar and magic, magnifying mind that zeros in on every real and potential intrusion?  I’m too sensitive to be sandwiched in humanity, and too much of an isolator to do well alone.

So I draw. It’s not very good, but it’s better than the noise in my head.