the authoress at 19

i decided to merge at old blog into this one just so i could keep a handle on everything. here’s how i described myself, my life and my future when i was 19 turning 20. i thought it was somewhat charming, despite myself.

authoress

i want to own a bookstore when i grow up.  i love trees.  i write.  i love rain.  and lightning.  yes, i do know how to correctly use uppercase letters.  but i am small, and the world is small.  God is big.  therefore, i am in lowercase.  if i could, i would live in a thatched-roof cottage by the north sea.  or in england somewhere.  i like mushrooms, but not to eat.  i write poetry.  i sometimes sing in the shower.  my eyes aren’t brown.  i am still learning.

one version of my (imagined) future has me puttering around a lovely old bookstore in birkenstock clogs. in between customers i would chain myself to my pigeonhole desk and scribble furiously away at my novel. i would keep a maine coon cat and i wouldn’t color my hair when it started going gray. i would always lose my glasses because they would be on top of my head, and i would say sarcastic things while calling my customers “dear” and actually meaning it.
behind my shop i would keep a garden full of gnomes and moss and mushrooms, and maybe some flowers, too, providing i had grown out of my brown thumb.
i would drink suspicious amounts of coffee and green tea and look furtively over the tops of my glasses whenever someone entered the store.
i would play vivaldi and rachmaninoff and the other russians, and jazz and aaron copeland and george gershwin, and i would let my favorite customers smoke pipes in the store.
and maybe, just maybe, if i were lucky, i would find a dusty old man puttering around in my dusty old books.  and maybe, just maybe, if i were luckier still, he’d be the type of dusty old man who would love a dusty old woman who owned a dusty old bookstore.