You know that feeling when you use a new toothbrush for the first time? The bristles are still perfect, and if your teeth could sigh with pleasure, they would. Hello, new friend. I can tell this is the start of a long and glorious friendship. We shall be friends for a whole three months!
Or, the feeling when you start a new book and the pages are all crisp and the binding unbroken? You slip between the leaves cautiously – or perhaps boldly, if you are of the more intrepid variety – and meet the characters that you will spend the next several hundred pages with. Will you like them? Will they like you? You know you are in it for the long haul, so it is with a mixture of trepidation and excitement that you settle in and wait to see where this story takes you.
I love those feelings, the feelings of firsts. And today, today was a day to celebrate such firsts.
Today, I took my first car for our first road trip. I’m headed back to New Mexico – back to my “home”, you could say – after spending the holidays with my lovely family in Idaho, and it is the first time I have driven there. Well, unless you count the time I took a Greyhound bus and a guy named Alan asked me to get off with him in Laramie, Wyoming.
“Your ticket is good for a week, you know,” he tells me.
Um, no. “Thank you,” I said, feigning flattery. “But I have people waiting for me, so I really must get to where I’m going.”
He was silent for a while after that, which was a relief. Up until that point, every blessed moment of silence was filled with him asking me, “What was I thinking?” as if he really expected me to know but wasn’t sure he wanted to hear.
But no, this is my first time driving to New Mexico.
Today was also the first time I saw a Golden Eagle in the wild. I have been a rabid fan of these majestic birds for as long as I have been a fan of flying things, but I had yet to see one in the wild. And oh, how I ached to. We have lived minutes away from the Birds of Prey National Conservation Area for years and Goldens are known to nest in the Snake River Gorge, yet still, I never saw one.
Well that goal can be crossed of my To-Do-Before-I-Die list, because today, driving down I-84, a large, immature Golden Eagle flew out of a field next to the road. And that almost was the last thing to cross off of my To-Do-Before-I-Die list because I was so excited I kind of forgot I was driving for a split second…
Happy Thursday* to all, and to all a good night!
*The first of the year!
6 comments:
A Golden-Eagle! That is an experience worthy of a To-Do-Before-I-Die list. And I'm glad it did not become an experience worthy of a To-Die-For list :)
A new toothbrush and a new book--I got both for Christmas! Yes, I know the lovely feeling.
Congratulations on your first car and first road trip. They are fun, aren't they? (Even in winter...)
Hey, I got a new toothbrush and book for Christmas too! We have so much in common.
I love that feeling of a new toothbrush but esspecially love the smell of a new book. I melt just thinking of those things!
PS Road trips are awesome!
I got a new book for Christmas, but no new tooth brush.... :( I did buy myself a new one because I was sick for a while, and this new one has weird rubber scraper things between the bristles. It is an odd sensation, but not altogether unpleasant.
I've had those rubber scraper things. They're weird, but once I got used to them, I liked it. My new toothbrush is...electric! (It was the big gift this year. Hee hee)
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