Do you know the word “ecotone,” Gentle Reader? It’s a liminal space, where, between biomes, where one environment and another overlap.

I love the suburbs. They seem to be full of ecotones, for better or for worse–the places where nature tries and tries to take over. The place where man beats it back. Dandelions push up through the cracks of the sidewalk. Tall grasses edge along the highway. Overpasses thrust up out of temperate rainforests.

I’ve always been a country mouse, ever since I read The Secret Garden as a girl, went out with my plastic recorder and pretended to be Dickon, trying my best to romance the New Jersey wildlife. But it wasn’t until seventh grade that I discovered that the wild world was there, too–not far from the cars and exhaust fumes. Ashley M. and Caitlin H. and I walked our bicycles out to the woods, where the boys had worn down paths and sprayed graffiti on the edges of stones. Brooks snaked their way through wild forests. Everything was green, green, green.

Two years later, Nicole and Robbie and I built a paracosm in the same woods, the last great imaginative gasp of a too-long childhood. We came home and tracked mud across my mother’s new carpet. But it was worth it; it was our kingdom.

I think you’re supposed to give up on these wild worlds at some point, when you start to become an adult? I haven’t. A few years back, I managed to get Lyme disease because every day I left the library where I worked and disappeared into the forest. I took off my shoes, dipping my toes in clean brook water. I watched the light filtered golden between branches. I flicked away mosquitoes. I breathed in emerald air and reminded myself I was still alive.

Now, I live in a suburb that’s so little boxes. And yet I’ve still managed to find a twisting, overgrown path. There’s the remnants of a castle there. Bamboo groves worthy of a thousand battles. Eagles (eagles! Bald eagles!) make their nests. I work all day behind a screen but every day I do my best to go out and breathe in the wet, woody air. Every few weeks a tree goes down, blocking the path. Nature still tries to take over.

I can’t blame her. In fact, I understand.

My husband turned 33 on Wednesday, and to celebrate his encroaching agedness, we decided to honor the big ol’ little kid in him and went to the Air and Space Museum to look at some airplanes.

Jordan is proof positive that you can retain your sense of wonder well into adulthood, as evidenced by these photos:

Jordan points out his favorite satellite.

I have to admit: I’m not quite so bowled over by mere airplanes. Oh, I do my best to see how such technology actually touched history, how people flew inside them and died or lived depending on the pilot’s action. But even staring at the Enola Gay, I have trouble wrapping my head around it. The size and the gravity. In a way, I feel the same way as I do when I look at a truck, or a bus. It’s hard to reconcile those rivets and metal with wider historical events.

No, what I liked most about the Air and Space Museum were the little things–the tiny artifacts of every day life, particularly the every day lives of the cosmo- and astronauts who were the first brave people up in space. I can see how a tube of spaceborscht or spacecoffee could fit in someone’s hand, imagine what it would look or feel like as they tried to apply make-up despite weightlessness. My fascination with these objects led to what could be considered a photo series: stuff . . . IN SPACE!

Scrabble . . . IN SPACE!

Tubes of soup . . . IN SPACE

Sausage . . . IN SPACE!

Darts . . . IN SPACE!

PF Flyers . . . IN SPACE!

Awesome boots . . . IN SPACE!

Solid gold . . . IN SPACE!

And my favorite, Spider Anita . . . IN SPACE!

Today’s not a Tuesday, and so this isn’t supposed to be a post about writing (it is also not a Thursday, when I was supposed to post this, but we don’t need to talk about that, do we?). But I have to say that I think this fascination with the minutiae of every day life–and my inability to wrap my head around these big technological innovations–is evident in my SF. I know what kinds of knives are in my characters’ galleys. I know how their toilets work, and the kind of games the kids play on the ship. I know what kind of food they eat, of course. But ask me how the artificial gravity works on their ship–I can’t tell you without squinting and stammering. Part of this is because I don’t really have much of a Science Brain (and part of it is because it’s impossible! Really, go read about artificial gravity sometime), but part of it is because I’m less interested in that, too. I’m not so sure what my ship is fueled by, and part of me Does Not Care. But whether there are dogs on their ship, and where they get their leather, and what the little babies in the hatcheries drink? That’s the stuff I find fascinating.

One of my readers (Hi, Pat!) got in touch to ask what I’ve been up to lately. He was worried, you see, because I hadn’t been blogging much and I hadn’t been posting on twitter. So I thought I’d update a little and reassure you guys that I’m not, in fact, dead.

Quite the opposite, actually. Now that autumn has truly set in it Arlington, VA, I’ve been really busy reading, working, writing (which I’ll update y’all on tomorrow), and just generally living.

Like yesterday–I woke up and the sky was beautiful, that kind of cool, cloudless blue you never really saw in Florida. And so the husband and I decided, just like that, to go apple picking. It meant a day of little writing (500ish words, as opposed to my usual thousand-word goal). It also meant a day full of happy.

Now, I’m going to get a little mushy for a moment. You’ve been warned: if you’re anti-mush, just skip the text and look at the pretty pictures. Last weekend, 10/10, was the first anniversary of the Etzel-North Corporation. A month before that saw our anniversary of eight years together pass. Now, things aren’t always perfect. We’re broke and we fight sometimes and sometimes he leaves his socks in absurd places, like on the bookshelf, and sometimes I forget that he hates when I leave seltzer cans in the sink and do it anyway.

But I love him.

Only, maybe that shouldn’t be a “but.” Maybe loving Jordan is an “and”–a fact of our togetherness and our usness. A week ago, on our anniversary, my mom called. She asked how married life is going. I told her that it’s like those sleepovers you had with your best friend when you were a kid, but better. Lots of giggling, watching television shows we both love, gossiping, conversation. More than anything, we have so much fun together.

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So I guess it’s not really a question of where I’ve been, but how I’ve been.

And how have I been?

Really freaking happy.

It was a rainy day when we first arrived in Gainesville, only that’s an understatement, as “rainy” is always an understatement for August in Florida–just miles before we crossed the state line from Georgia into Gainesville the air seemed to shift, becoming heady, humid, and then it started falling in silver sheets. August 7th, 2007. We turned onto Gainesville’s only cobblestone street and slowed to a stop in front of a house I’d never seen before and we ran out, cat carrier in one hand, into the soaking storm to sit on the porch and wait for the landlady to let us in.

A summer later, my first living alone in a second-story apartment that I called my “tree house,” I began writing fiction. The story wormed its way into my head on my walks home from my summer classes, and then it germinated during afternoon naps and then I’d pull myself from sleep-sticky sheets to write while the world outside turned pale and shivery with the force of wind and rainfall.

This is what I’ll miss best about Gainesville: the August storms, the feeling of tension in the air, the thunderheads mounting in the sky above. I won’t miss the heat that comes on minutes after the storm ends. I won’t miss the humidity, thick as the air in a foggy bathroom. Or the bugs or the way all my spices turned into solid lumps in the cabinets. I won’t miss sunburn or two showers a day or the zits and heat rashes that I get here and nowhere else. But I’ll miss this about Gainesville summers: I’ll miss the rain.

And the restaurants, and the greenness, and how in spring I’d be sure, sometimes, that I lived in paradise. The bluepink sky overhead. The interminable clouds. The lizards fucking in the fronds. The graffiti and the overgrown lawns–the unexpected, wild places.

This was the setting where I grew from a girl to a woman. This was where I missed Jordan for two years, a world of painful goodbyes, like my heart was being squeezed out through my throat. This was where I changed from a sparkler–slight, fleeting, trembling–to a signal flare, searing up into the star-splattered sky, leaving white-gray smoke in my wake. This was where I wrote hundreds of poems, a handful of stories, uncountable letters, and four novels. This was where I learned the value of female friendships, of coffee talk. This is where I learned that my heart still was tender. This was where I was first, truly married. This was the hard, strange, beautiful place where I became harder, stranger, and more beautiful. This was the last place I’ll ever pull myself into a closet to cry.

On Wednesday morning, our belongings packed into a Budget van, we’ll leave. For new places, new adventures. In August of 2007, I wrote in my journal that leaving New Jersey was like being skinned alive. Gainesville taught me that we have nothing to fear of new beginnings. Before coming here, I had some vague philosophy that everything works out in the end. Gainesville is where I learned that this was true.

Thank you, my pretty, little city. And farewell.