In our best days, the people around us are witnesses to our lives. Yesterday, I sat on the backyard swing with Eliana, while Asher ran in the neighbor’s yard, flush-cheeked and happy. Shaya was asleep in his crib.

My daughter walked barefoot in the wet grass. I found a dead bird buried amid the green. Shoveled it up to be taken out with the trash, wondering how it got there, what happened, how I had missed it.

The backyard is summer-height green. Come August, it will harden, grass like pinpricks in the incessant heat. But yesterday, with all this rain come and come again, I couldn’t let the kids run in the sprinkler. Too much water can kill a living thing, too.

The night before, Shaya awoke in the early hours and asked to be taken to my bed. Most parents try everything in their power to remove their children from their beds, but since he went into a crib Shaya has not been the kind of baby who would nestle in next to me and sleep with his little body arched into the curve of mine.

He did that Friday night. And though I was unconsciously pushed to the edge of the huge bed, I didn’t mind it, for the feel of his soft skin, his pudgy legs, his sweet breath against me. I awoke in smiles to see him there, holding his light-blue “blankie” in one hand, his other reaching out for me.

W.S. Merwin wrote:

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

(poem called “Witness,” from the book The Rain In The Trees)

These basic elemental items from the every day, those are the forgotten language. How many people live so close to the bone? How many of us can banish the voices of the to-do list to revel in the little things, like a baby’s even breathing in the brown-dark of night or a daughter’s tomboyish pull to wrestle through the grass in bare feet?

Friday night, Asher pulled on his Superman costume and ran around the house. Shaya called, “I want to be Super Baby!” And so his brother outfitted him in the first Superman costume, the little-boy one that fit Shaya perfectly, and the brothers paraded through the house and the yard in the gloaming, proudly outfitted as superheroes.

Yesterday, Asher told me, “All I need are parents. That’s all I need. And family. Parents and family, that’s all I need.”

I tried to explain to him about love and all its complexities. How people need various kinds of love from different people. He nodded, but I could see the vacancy in his eyes. Love is love, he was telling me. You either have it or you don’t.

The birds are awake now and so are my children. We are heading to the forest today, to walk among the trees and learn the language of their bark. Last time, we saw a snake near the swamp. Maybe today. Maybe I will carry the baby up the hill and maybe we will stop to notice the flowers.

In any case, it is the sweet breath of morning that I am in search of, and the innocence of love to blanket the forest floor, to be wrapped in the scent of pine.

Eight pinpoints of quiet light, flames aglow atop the candlesticks. The room is dark. Their flicker reflects off the red dining room wall, illuminates the swirling painting above.

On a brass tray carted in a tattered bag from coldest Russia to the new world of New York, two knobby brass candlesticks. My great-grandmother’s. Given to me by my mother when I became religious enough to want to light candles every Friday night, 12 years ago.

Tonight, I lit five - the traditional two, plus three for my children. My grandmother lit two. My daughter lit her single candle, a Chassidic custom I adopted for her at age three, to have her own tangible tradition in a way of living made expressly for men. This single silver candlestick and its accompanying ritual were her third birthday gift, mother to daughter, something only she has, different from the boys.

I’ve never embraced the sexism of religious life. I ignored it for a number of years, tucked it away like a forgotten memory in a back pocket, but never banished it completely. I couldn’t.

And now, as I emerge a butterfly from the longest cocoon, I face it full-on. I lived one way for a decade, trying to fit myself into someone else’s corset, never able to tie all the laces.

At this end, I am back to the pick-and-choose, whatever-makes-me-happy approach of my youth. Except now, I carry a woven basket of real knowledge so that each choice I make is a grounded one.

Candlelight bounces off the walls. The room is dark except for the metaphor of light to bring in a special day. Light for knowledge, light for inspiration, light to open our eyes. Dark when we are sad, when we don’t know, when we have forgotten how to question.

I look at my candles and think, I can choose to be rigid, I can choose to be free-flowing, I can choose when to light or not to light or how many to light.

And as I welcome the light into my home, my children are smiling. No one screams at them to straighten a tie, clip on a kippah, say a certain blessing before taking a bite.

My children run eagerly to the sink for the ritual hand-washing, two spills over each hand, the water a wake-up call, a refreshing noticing of this very moment, then the blessing in Hebrew in their tender little voices.

We each made loaves of sweet challah today. They run back to the table, unwrap their little loaves and I unfurl the large ones, my I-can-do-anything-if-I-can-make-bread. Together, all of our voices, the short prayer, then sweet bites.

This tradition was given to us by ancestors, by generations gone before us. We choose to accept it in a way that it is meaningful.

In my neighborhood, people follow a certain routine, respect the stricture of one way of living.

In my house, we follow the rhythms of the morning, of the mid-day, of the evening and twilight, and of the night when even breathing softens the rooms. Tonight the tooth fairy will visit Asher’s room. Tomorrow he will see the sunrise in ecstatic glee.

And I will sip my coffee slowly, listen to sweet music, maybe make pancakes, maybe waffles, and feel the senses through my fingertips in a way that is most religious.

Traditions are ours for the taking, or for the parsing, or for simply learning of the many options that exist. And then each of us makes it up as we go along. No one is different, though they may believe they are faithful to one right way. There is no absolute truth. It’s a convenient charade, a comforting blanket on a wintry afternoon.

I bless each of my children on Friday night, their little heads bent toward the floor, my hands on their silk-soft hair. That was not something done in my childhood, and though I am back to feeling free enough to make my life how I want to live it, I have adopted this one of many traditions as mine-exclusively.

A special little noticing of each individual child. We make memories if we try. And sometimes, quick rituals make the moments last a little longer. That’s all. The gift of the ancestors is the richness of being together, the connections of blood and passion, and the idea that this life means more than we know.

If a great day is defined as a series of moments worth noticing, then today has been exactly that.

I awoke with the dawn, stepped into the silent kitchen and put my hands into chopping, peeling, washing, cooking. Chicken soup bubbling on the stove. Yair’s chicken (finally) with turmeric, cumin, pepper and garlic, long-baked and finished off under the broiler flame until crisp.

In bare feet, flannel pajama pants and a tank top, I padded to the end of the driveway to retrieve the newspapers. The ground was wet from storms long since ended and the dew of the night, the air heavy with damp in the quiet morning.

Back inside, it was Shaya’s voice in my ears, calling out to be lifted from his crib and tenderly carried downstairs. Which I did, amid smiles and cuddles and incessant kisses along his soft skin.

Nestling into the living room couch, pillows flung on the floor to better gaze out at the trees, I heard Asher stir. He joined us on the couch, his curly hair tilting against my shoulder, Shaya’s head on my chest, and I held my boys in the quiet of the new day.

It was waffles for breakfast with maple syrup and melon - cantalope and santa claus. Coffee for me, then green tea. Eliana eventually joined us in that austere-sweet way of just-waking, her hair scattered in front of her face, her arms flung around my legs in that first hug of the new day.

And then the work began - slow and steady, successful, deliberate, while the children played at a park with the nanny, a park enveloped in a hug of tall trees, silent with only the voice of the slow wind.

We are still feeling our way into this new phase of life, which means the nanny leaves at noon on Thursdays and the children’s father arrives at 1. So in that open hour between self-imposed structure, we peeled back the screen door and stepped into the thick sunshine.

I tossed Asher a ball, and he hit it with a bat, running imaginary bases between grass, swingset, tricycle and hose, me trying to tag him out with a toss. Shaya sat on the green and red inch-worm, wanting to move, not quite figuring out how. Eliana let her just-painted nails dry; we’d stroked on the blue, purple, pink, and green polish in the bright sun, sitting on the warm patio, our shoes kicked off.

And then I noticed the garden box which, in the wake of the divorce, I have not had time to plant. Overgrown with weeds, some sharp and forbidding. I pulled out the garden gloves, tools, long heavy red shovel. Each of us climbed into the soil, each with gloves and tools, turning over the dirt, wresting free the weeds that clung to their hold as if they knew better than we how to remain planted.

The quiet of the sunshine, the steady hum of a mid-day in summer, the sweet breathing of my children and myself in a rhythmic flow. We pulled out every last weed, discovering, in the process, fat new carrots spun out of seeds left in the soil from last year’s garden.

When I tossed them on the pile of decimated weeds, Eliana called out. “But Mommy - let’s eat them! I’m sure they’ll be fresh and good.”

So we created a carrot pile and later, carted them with their long stems streaked in black dirt into the kitchen. The cold water cascaded over them; I pulled a knife through the stemmy stubs and handed the still-wet carrots to Eliana and Shaya, who stood on a shared kitchen chair.

“Hmmm, sweet,” Eliana said. Shaya palmed as many carrots as he could contain in his little hands, shoving bites into his mouth when there was room.

Yesterday, I spoke with a friend about how I could carry a little piece of my vacation last week into my everyday life. This is it. Moments in clear air, sun seeping into my bare skin, that inexplicable scent of carrots so ripe, so fresh, so real, that I cannot even find the words. And my children, taking bites, turning soil, offering to toss in with the work because it feels so damn good.

“Lynne, when am I seeing you this week?”

It was Yair, the handyman, on the phone. I smiled at the affectation, at the warmth from an inevitable stranger. Another person to come into my life in some small way and I into his, accompanied by little rays of happiness.

As he measured my kitchen backsplash, where he will later this summer put subway tile, he regaled me with tales of the dissolution of his first marriage, his subsequent disenchantment with the religious Jewish world, and his later discovery of real love and a second marriage. (Did you ever see that Family Feud episode where they asked who was the most common confidante and hairdresser was the top answer?)

It was with the assurance of an older brother that Yair nodded in my direction, a nod of camaraderie, of understanding. He’d been where I stood; he’d come through the tunnel to find sunshine on the other end.

Before he left, he dictated his no-fail chicken and potatoes recipe. When he called yesterday, about the particleboard doors to replace my warped ones, he asked if I’d made it yet.

“Uh, no,” I replied. “Maybe I will for Shabbat.”

“Good! Then I’ll come over Friday afternoon and show you how so you do it right. And do you have two sticks of margarine and some flour?”

“Two sticks of margarine? Yair, you’re trying to kill me,” I said.

“No - I’ll show you how to make Yemenite bread - one taste and you’ll fast the next day but it’s so good.”

Today, after I finished a work project with a colleague, he asked, “How are you doing? Really?”

He didn’t have to inquire. We’re just colleagues. But I smiled at the gesture and nodded. “I’m doing well,” I said, and meant it. I asked about his recent surgery, he told me he’d started running again, we laughed over our obsessive connections to our Blackberries.

At a friend’s house last night, I sipped wine on the patio and ate crusty bread with soft cheese and fig spread. She proudly walked me through her just-planted garden. When her children came home, her daughter brought out lotion and offered to give us massages. I scooped the little girl up in a hug.

One night not long ago, I dabbled in front of the computer, sleepy but not enough to go to bed, nothing on the television, no one I particularly wanted to telephone. I signed on to Facebook; ten of my “friends” were online, too, ten o’clock on a weeknight, most of them married, with children. My laugh echoed against the blue walls of my office. Night air seeped in through the open window.

Everywhere I turn, I see people yearning for connection. But all too often, the only connection many can muster is the distant kind, the kind at enough of a remove that it keeps them safe from getting hurt.

What is so scary about face-to-face, soul-to-soul connection? Sure, there’s always the possibility of being crushed under foot - but every one of us will inevitably scrape ourselves off the floorboards and begin to walk again. In most instances, it wouldn’t even take that long.

A workday ends, dinner is cleared away, the dishes cleaned, counter scrubbed, children tucked between sheet and blanket. And so many of us turn to the computer, to email, to Facebook and MySpace, to quick quips and fast hellos, even faster goodbyes. I’ve had furious text-message conversations where I can’t read tone or intent, but it’s the voice-to-voice I really want and even better, skin alongside skin.

In our evenings, is the dark that frightening? Like children imagining monsters in the closet and ghosts under the bed - do we envision the worst rejection, should we get too close?

When I was a child and afraid of thunderstorms, my father sat beside me, a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Lynnie, remember that Igor is protecting us.” That was all it took and I could sleep.

Igor, my father’s fictitious invisible security guard, stood watch over all my scary childhood nights. When my own children were old enough to run into my room in the middle of storms, I told them the story of Igor, said Papa had given him to us since all of the children were grown and no longer living in Papa’s house.

The fear is an illusion, you know. Those moments of supreme silence? That glass of wine sipped simply for flavor and subsequent warmth? That favorite dog-eared book picked up yet again just to journey down the path of adventure, crisis, and resolution?

That’s where our souls live, in the moments, in the being, in the daring to listen to the silence.

And that is where true love is found.

First, you have to love the silence and be brave enough to sit with it in the night. Then, and only then, can you love another. Look, I’m not talking from experience - I lived for years with a person I thought I loved, and still I heard the echoes of the night all too often.

But, in the aftermath, with my hundreds of Facebook “friends” zipping in and out of messages and wall posts, connection - soul-to-soul, face-to-face, the kind where you catch your breath because you know the other person likes the real you - is, I believe, possible.

Maybe I’m an idealist or maybe I’m just naive, but I believe with every beat of my heart that true connection exists. I’ve never had it with a lover, but I have it with friends. They are a lifeline.

When I decided to end my marriage, I did it with the firm belief that loving myself and living alone would be better than living with someone who did not truly love me and whom I did not truly love.

But I also believed that somewhere out there exists a man who will one day touch my soul as I will hold his in my soft grip, securely, firmly, with enough release not to cage each other but with just the right pull to know that a connection unlike any other has been planted.

In order to find him, I knew I had to eliminate the empty or flimsy or distant connections from my life and accept only veracity. Substance. Depth and heart.

From what I’ve seen with those few exceptional friends of mine, I can only imagine that real connection, the kind every person wants but too many hide behind excuses and distance and computer screens, that connection must be like the surge of energy I got climbing Dog Mountain.

The challenge lies in opening up enough to find it, looking eye to eye and not daring to look away.

It’s farmers market season again in these parts, one of my favorite details about summer. The kids are waiting for me to take them strawberry picking, then to the blueberry orchards, then apples, peaches, raspberries - whatever Michigan fruit is ripe enough to slide off the vines or bushes or low-growing trees and take a quick, juicy bite.

This morning sounds like I remember the orchards. My office window is open enough so that I can feel the cool sunrise air kiss my fingers. The white noise of nearby highways sounds almost like a river. I’ve seen the sky go from hazy-lavender to morning blue to streaks of pink to sunrise.

Last night, Eliana came scurrying into my room, afraid of the pop and crack of the fireworks. “I can’t SLEEP!” she wailed. Neither could I, but that’s nothing new. For when, at the end of a bustling, interesting day, I finally lay my head against the pillow, it’s time alone with myself and I suppose I don’t quite want to rush through that.

My tender little girl spent most of last night in my bed, despite several attempts to return her to her pink room. Her blond bob tilted in my direction, her round cheeks soft as I lightly graced her face with my fingers. So sweet.

Last weekend, I strolled along the Portland Saturday Market, eyeing mountains of purple-green artichokes like cool sunbursts, a stack of carrot points, pints of delicately sweet Mt. Hood strawberries whose flavor bursts on the tongue. I stood in a long line for perhaps the best tart I’ve ever eaten - a creamy-smooth mix of gorgonzola cheese, spinach, and mushrooms, whipped with eggs and just the right spices into a beautifully formed crust. It was art.

Many budding restaurateurs begin their careers at Portland’s Saturday Market, like Mark Doxtader, who for eight years trucked a wood-fire oven there every Saturday morning to bake pizza, bread and rustic desserts - and later, hugely-popular wood-fired baked bagels.

Just last week, Doxtader opened a restaurant called Tastebud (www.tastebudfarm.com), so boosted was he by his rousing market success.

That doesn’t quite happen here.

Still, this Sunday I anticipate strolling among tables of chard, tomato and just-picked strawberries at the Birmingham Farmers Market, sipping a steaming cup of coffee, and watching the little stream trickle along behind the inevitable musician.

The children will be with their father, but if they were with me, Asher would sink his teeth into a tomato and let the juices trickle down his chin. Shaya would taste just about everything I let him put into his mouth. And they’d all demand a cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice mixed with fresh-made lemonade, take three sips, and render it finished.

Asher, Eliana, and Shaya would also help pick just the right everything for the coming week. Maybe one night after, we’d make pizza like we haven’t done in months - the children rolling out their portions of dough, lathering on their favorite Don Pepino pizza sauce, and sprinkling atop the various fixings we’d chopped, sliced, and diced.

The best thing about summer is the freshness of flavors. Everything budding, working its way toward ripe, the promise of long days and peaceful nights on the kiss of the wind.

No hurry to get anywhere fast.

The perfect touch of warm air on skin. The tickle of grass under bare feet. And long afternoons on the backyard swing, children squealing in and out of a spinning sprinkler, happiness like a ray of unbreakable light streaking across my world.

Dragonflies winged their way inches above the water’s surface, as I stood on the dock with a fishing rod in my hand, threading a squirming worm onto a hook. Melissa stood beside me, cringing in her posture at the task at hand. We were 7.

The lake was not much more than a swamp-thick patch of water surrounded by woods at the edge of the camp. Just the two of us stood on the silent dock with a counselor watching over our attempts. I’m pretty sure in one of those moments I hooked my finger and felt that piercing sting of metal into skin. But in memory, all I can hear are the far-off swingset squeals and, where we stood, the clicking of insects and mirror-stillness of the water.

Many times, I have stood in a moment and not tried to escape with thought. That’s what my entire last week has been - a series of sensory moments, strung together into a necklace of being, gleaming so in the sunlight that it’s almost blinding.

And then I returned home. It’s foolish to think that a life can simply be a series of moments and nothing more. No one is like that. Ideas about what the future holds creep in like the spider crawling across the ceiling; he’s there one moment when he wasn’t before and I have a choice: to stand on the bed and extend my arm until I reach him, smash him, flush him down the toilet, or let him continue on his crawl to whatever end he has in sight.

More often, I smash him. I listen to the fear and give in - what if I let him live and, when I am sleeping, he crawls his way across my bare skin and bites me?  It’s happened before.

But then there are the times when spiders lurk away from the radar of my vision and I have no idea that they’re there and I don’t get bitten. Our paths don’t even cross.

Fear is arrogant. What if I get hurt? But what if I don’t? What if I am never touched, never? I kill him just in case? It sounds stupid from where I sit, instant hysteria, for what? I never quite consider the good his presence can bring, only the potential bad.

It’s 4:30 in the morning and I should be asleep. But I’m hungry and I’m thinking and, well, I’m awake. Not much food in the house, since I only returned twelve hours ago, but there was an apple so I ate it and now I’m not as hungry. Some moments are like that.

And then there are moments worth repeating, moments worth lingering in. Moments meant for the deepest of breaths, breaths that fill your entire body and then you are new.

I’m getting rather good at living in my moments. And so, back upon the homefront, camp and grocery-shopping and swimming lessons and dinner at my parents’ house all on the schedule ahead of me, and oh yes, work, I am going to try hard to not look at each day as a series of things to check off - but rather, a sequence of ever-important mundane moments in which I have the chance to become a little more alive.

At 2,800 feet elevation, I came upon a meadow of brilliant wildflowers. The path was just wide enough to sit and so I settled in the dry dirt and pulled a pint of just-picked Oregon strawberries from my backpack.

I could see for miles - straight ahead, over the Columbia River Gorge, the jutting tree-lined mountains of northern Oregon. Peeking out from behind that ridge, the snowy top of Mt. Hood. And to the south, a line of snowy crags so still and strong in the sunlight, that I couldn’t help a quick intake of breath.

I tried not to look down for it was a scary plunge. I quelled my innate fear of heights and turned my face to the sun. I’d climbed a mountain.

And along the way, I realized some essential lessons from Dog Mountain. On my steep ascents and gradual declines, this is what I took away.

* On the narrow, rocky trail, don’t look up or down. Keep your gaze straight ahead. It’s the only true perspective.

* Keep your mouth closed. Not only is there nothing you could possibility say at this moment of import, too many creatures are quick to fly in.

* There is no such thing as right of way on the trail. Hope for kindness. You will inevitably get it.

* Imprint the smell of fallen pine needles, golden from the sun, in your memory.

* For that matter, breathe so deeply that the scents of forest - pine, moss, chalky dirt and fragrant wildflowers - fully penetrate your soul.

* Try not to think, and turn your Blackberry off. Nothing manmade is better than a mountainside.

* Remember that you crossed a border to get here. Then remember that borders are a creation of the mind and concentrate on the view.

* Be happy that you can do this. Be supremely happy.

* Love the zone. Adopt the zone as your home page.

* Don’t forget a pen. But if you forget to bring a pen, don’t fret. Write your noticings in the dust with a stick or record them in your memory.

* When you get to the point on the trail where you say aloud, “I am fucking exhausted!”, keep going. Every opportunity is a gift, and this one is as if in a big box with gleaming red ribbon.

* Breathe deeply. Breathe like you never have before.

* Pay attention, but don’t obsess. It is never worth it. And remember that when you get back to your car.

* From this elevation, sweat trailing along your skin, stop by a tilting tree covered in a fur of moss and listen to the wind. Listen to the birds. Listen to the river coursing its way through the gorge.

* When, near the top, you hear the waterfall, don’t lament that you cannot see it. Let its voice soothe you along your way.

* When your parents take this trip, do not send them on this hike. For that matter, don’t take your kids here until they are husky teenagers stronger than you. There is no way you could carry the baby up this mountain. (And that is when you realize it is not a mother’s job to carry her baby up the mountain. It is her job to teach him to climb it himself.)

* When you start to think about your ex-husband frantic with the kids back home, or feel guilt for enjoying your week alone while the kids miss you, put the thought out of your mind. Your ex will finally reckon with his own path, and you will take your children on a trip like this in time - or they will take themselves on such a trip because you have set the bar yourself - and you will be happy then, too.

* Of course, if I had known how difficult this would be, I never would’ve done it. (”That’s what I thought,” said Brandon at the front desk of Hotel Lucia, who sent me to Dog Mountain. “But I’m so glad I did,” I said and he smiled.) One needs blind ambition to get ahead because if we ever really knew what lay in store, we’d never try.

* As the slope angles at a severe degree and the rocks beneath your feet stumble from under your grip, there is no point in being afraid. Fear is what we reserve for those moments when we have nothing else to do. Or when we want, desperately, to exert control. One thing you learn from climbing the 7-mile loop of Dog Mountain trail is that control is an illusion and fear a crutch. You have the ability to do just about anything.

It’s hard to see the sunrise in a city. A faint orange glow emanates from behind the buildings in Portland, which are thankfully low enough to allow serene views of the tree-lined hills that enwrap the city.

I am staying at the Hotel Lucia, a wonderfully European chic downtown hotel with an iPod dock alarm clock, a flat screen TV and a funky steel and glass sink. The bed is big and plush and heaped with pillows - though I was tickled to learn that guests can order the perfect pillow by pressing the Get It Now button on the room phone.

That’s what you press to order your spiritual book of choice, too, and the list is long. From the Bhagavad Gita to the Koran to the usual King James and Torah, no spiritual wanderer is left without words of rapture or just the right religious prose to guide their journey.

Somehow, the juxtaposition of Get It Now for a slow spiritual canon cracks me up.

Yesterday, I hiked through the Hoyt Arboretum down to the rose gardens, which were teeming with people and cameras. My favorite moment was a cool glimpse of a distant mountain; I couldn’t help but pull out my camera to try to capture its essence to take home with me but a wonder - the mountain did not even show up in the viewfinder. Not even an edge.

And so I have no choice but to keep it vivid and illustrated in my memory.

Earlier in the week, my sister asked me if I am lonely on this solo vacation. The answer is an emphatic no.

Admittedly, I, too, find comfort in the familiar. Just yesterday, I was a bit sad to leave Dundee and the sound of the fountain outside my inn window. What was I driving to in Portland, a city then unknown to me?

But this vacation represents exploration and a desire to keep my spirit not only alive, but thumping like my heart in my ears as I climbed the steep gravel drive at the Black Walnut Inn. The challenge to find myself amid the murk of everyday routines and tending to the needs of others. We all need that at times, and we need it more than we allow.

And so I drove along the quiet highway to my next destination, a city meant for exploring with its hills and gardens and shopping and tattoo-painted residents with so many hair colors, it puts Ferndale or Royal Oak to shame.

In minutes, Portland was no longer new to me. And I was a subtly more developed soul for having struck out on a path I didn’t know.

I’m not lonely this week. Not even for a minute.

After breakfast, I am driving to the Washington state line to climb Dog Mountain. I hear there are five waterfalls along the 6.8 mile trail. I can already hear the tumble of water over rock and feel the sun on my shoulders.

The sun rises over the hills early here, in streaks of pink and blue. Sometime before 5 a.m., though I awake only as the brush strokes are fattening. A rooster crows. Really. Birds are very chatty now. The fountain cycles through itself, but then it did all the night.

Yesterday was a day of wine. For a girl from the heartland, far from the slow growth of grapes on vines and more used to the buzz of traffic and grit, it was a pleasure to listen and sip.

“If you’re here, you must stop at these wineries,” a young passionate man told me at the Torii Mor tasting room. He pulled out a map and a pen, drew lines from here to there. “Tomorrow is my day off and I’m going there,” he said to endorse.

In the morning, I had been to three wineries before noon. A giggle escapes my lips. At the Dobbes Family Estate, the lovely young woman pouring my tastings told me about the glass topped bottles that will hold the next harvest and dispelled the myth that twist-off bottles don’t by definition contain swill.

Joe Dobbes, whose name is on the label, loves making wine. “He sees it as a perfect blend of science, passion and art,” she told me.

for your hands, smooth as grapes, writes Pablo Neruda in “So That You Will Hear Me”

from “The Blind Seer of Ambon,” W.S. Merwin:

I take a shell in my hand
new to itself and to me
I feel the thinness the warmth and the cold
I listen to the water
which is the story welling up
I remember the colors and their lives
everything takes me by surprise
it is all awake in the darkness

Last night, I blew out a tiny candle on the edge of my plate of chevre cheesecake with pistachio brittle. Every exquisite bite pitted savory against the sweet of fresh Oregon blueberries macerated into a purple syrup. I almost forgot to make a wish, and when I remembered, there was nothing I wanted to wish for other than the exact feeling I had at that very moment. I ate Halibut from the Pacific off the coast of Canada, crisp atop a bed of celery-root risotto and surrounded by a brilliant moat of tangy tomato cream. The amuse bouche popped in my mouth - halibut ceviche atop a cucumber disk, thick local mushrooms giving off heat against the salty crisp of fried onion slivers.

So many flavors. Each taste on the tongue a surprise of satisfaction.

Before dinner at The Painted Lady in Newberg, I walked through the bookstore on the corner. The proprietor was whipping milk into foam at the coffee bar. So many bookstores here sell new and used titles, new and used together. I trolled up and down the aisles - there weren’t many but they were packed with spines. But there was no section of poetry, not even a single shelf.

I couldn’t contemplate buying a thing there. For without the carefully crafted words like sculpture on the page, it could not be a complete offering of thought. The bell on the door rang as it swung shut behind me.

Today I will drive to Portland. No plans, just steering the car ahead. A new place to discover, a new me to become. The sun is still climbing over the hills as I write this. The pink has deepened and now counts a layer of lavender along its canvas. What of the colors of nature? Why imitate what is real? The grapevines look yellow beneath the pine trees and I know that at the bottom of the gravel drive here, my friend the hawk is soaring in circles, screaming his independent cry.

I could wake up to this view every day and never get tired of it. This morning, two hot air balloons hover over the valley. The morning air is cool but I love that. There’s nothing like a cold morning where the coffee steams in swirls and tastes good just because it’s warm.

But of course, on vacation, everything tastes good, right?

Yesterday I drove through forest to get to the sea. Tall pines taller than any I’d seen framed a winding two-lane road that swelled and dipped as the mountains rose along my path. Finally, I turned onto Highway 101, the Pacific Coast highway, which follows the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean all the way down this side of the country.

At first sight of surf, I was giddy. I could smell it through the car window and so I turned the music louder and kept on, looking, feeling, breathing in.

Finally, I stopped at the lighthouse in Newport and climbed to the highest point. A winding dirt path through thicket of wildflowers took me face to face with a low pine and just like that, I was home in a place I’d never been before.

How to imprint a beautiful memory? Words are not enough. I can only close my eyes in the moment and listen, to carry the surge of wind and crash of wave and whisper of grass and click of insect on my skin to take away with me.

Why take pictures on a trip? Will I ever look at them again? My camera becomes a barrier between me and this place, any place, obscuring the view, blocking taste and texture. And so I tucked it away and sat on the grass atop a cliff, laid my head against the rushes, to fully live the moment so it is forever a part of me.

When I climbed down a dune to the beach, I carried only my car key. Shoes off, I walked the sand to a mosaic of water-smoothed rocks, over which stream water threaded into the sea. I watched it and listened to its sweet sound, stepped a foot in its cold bath, as ocean waves rose and crashed on the sand.

Then I walked back along the beach almost to the cliff I had to climb back up, and sat on the sand to watch the water, to listen to its heartbeat, to breathe in its pristine salt kiss.

At the end of my day, as I was about to pull away from the Salishan Market outside Lincoln City, a tire on my rental car went flat. Dead flat. Had I been home or had this been a few years back, I would’ve been tied in knots nervous and angry. But I wasn’t.

I walked into a shop and sweetly asked an old man at the counter what to do. I know nothing about changing a tire, but it was 3 o’clock on a weekday and I was on vacation so somehow, I’d figure it out. He had no answer for me, and so I retreated to my car and started dialing.

Suddenly, a man called to me from his open car window. “Do you want me to help change your tire?”

I was relieved and suspicious, thinking of horrific stories and my mother’s inevitable reaction had she been standing beside me. But I relented and David Naidu got out of his car and walked over to mine. “I hope someone will do this for my wife one day,” he said.

I slung my purse over my shoulder and kept my bluetooth on my ear as we looked for the spare (full-size, yay!), the tools, the manual. He thumbed through the pages since the jack was nothing like anything he’d ever seen and it obviously wasn’t familiar to me either.

As I finally got an Alamo car rental person on the phone, David hoisted my VW Rabbit up on the jack. He unbolted the tire and pulled it off. And then, the car fell off the jack.

“That’s bad,” he said.

Alamo was just about to send a tow truck when David sweated his way through hoisting the car up one more time. It rested there long enough for him to fit the new tire in place. I ran to get him a large Pepsi. When I returned, he was walking away, having put away the tools. Sweat dotted his face.

I thanked him and thrust $50 into his hand. “Don’t say no,” I said. “Buy yourself a nice dinner tonight and thank you so much.” Then I asked for his card and home address, so I can send a proper thank you.

As I drove back through the forest to my wine-country stay, I felt like the stars were shining just for me. I always knew people could be this generous, this kind, but each time I see it, it is a revelation.

Today I am 37 years old and on top of the world. I had forgotten I was this person all the years of my marriage. I love this state of being, living steeped in the passions of the mundane - cool, crisp morning air, a symphony of birds, a hawk spanning sky and screaming, hills imprinting the view, being the view, loving the view and the air and the moments like the glass of wine I sipped years ago at my friend’s Virginia farm, living in the passionate pauses and loving the line.