Dear Darling Ones,

Here is the hazard of essentially spending a year alone + having a 20-year-old blog + being a forty-eight-year-old perimenopausal woman: your memory is not as reliable as it used to be.

Every day when I get ready to write I have to think really hard about whether or not this is something I just wrote about. It seems everything I think seems vaguely redundant to me as though I recently had a conversation with someone about it. Most days I spend a good chunk of time searching I Will Dare dot com for words I plan on using to see if I have, indeed, written about it.

For the record, I could not find the word bergamot anywhere on this site, nor bergamont as I like to misspell it. Weird, really, considering I had a huge crush on this lavender & bergamot hand soap from Target for a long time, and because of the song “Find the River*” by R.E.M., which is why we’re here today.

This afternoon two of my twitter pals were having a conversation about songs they’ve probably listened to more than all the other songs. One of them mentioned “Find the River” by R.E.M. and I got the wavy vision with the far, off dreamy stares.

A long, long time ago I can still remember how the TTHM would sing that song all the time. In my memory he sang it to me, though as I have demonstrated above I’m not exactly sure if that is true. What I do know for sure is that he sang it all the time and it made me super melty inside. The TTHM had a really good voice, the way really tall men frequently do and if I close my eyes i can hear him sing Me, my thoughts are flower strewn, ocean storm, bayberry moon. I have got to leave to find my way. Ugh, I get goosebumps remembering it.

“Find the River” is one of those R.E.M. songs that is super underrated in my life. I forget about it all the time. It gets overshadowed by all-consuming love for “Nightswimming.” It also gets forgotten because it sometimes lands in the “ceases to exist” file I keep a lot of things related to Exs.

Today, however, it was a small, lovely thing to recall the song and how I felt when a tall, tall, handsome man sang it to me.

And if I told you all this before, humor me. I’m a boring spinster who never leaves the house. I have to repeat myself.

All of this is coming your way,
Jodi

P.S. The shitty picture at the top is the actual, factual Minnesota River. I took it a bunch of years ago when I spent summers Tibblesitting. I had to crop Nolie out of the picture because my heart. My heart couldn’t take it.

•If I could smell like a song I would choose this one. Bergamot? Vetiver? Ginger? Lemon? Yes to all of this.