[shouted from next room] “Wait– did… did you get rid of the Facebook button on your… your bookmark toolbar?!”

“Yeah, why?”

[silence]
[faint click of typing]

“Do… do you remember the URL?”

“Ye-es.”

“Okay, good.”

Did anyone else catch how clear the air was on Saturday in the Hudson Valley? Coming up on the train to Campbell Hall in the morning, I could see the Shawangunk Ridge (or whatever it’s officially called) from Washingtonville! The last storm’s snowfall is at that translucent dusting stage: it’s still there, no longer whiting everything out, but, rather, it gives detail and depth to everyday landmarks that normally fade into the background, and suddenly you’re like, “Whoa, I never noticed that that particular stone wall cutting through that farm-turned-wood extends so far out into the horizon that it appears to reach Infinity. Or, well, at least Walden.” Or you glance across the Hudson from Newburgh, as I did, thinking, “Did I unknowingly push through the back panel of a wardrobe to get here? Why does it feel like I’m the only one who can see those mountains over yonder? How can more people not be standing here gawking at them?”

I never thought I’d be saying this, but you start to understand why city people don their North Face gear and fill up their Nalgene bottles with organic electrolyte water before boarding Metro-North: it can appear that country folk don’t ‘preciate what they got. Of course, as a country gal myself, I know that that is a widely-held misconception, and I’ll continue to remind myself of it no matter how much Suffern’s main drag looks increasingly like a set straight out of Deadwood every time I pass through on the train.

The air was so clear and the sky was so blue that day that everything — literally every color, visible anywhere — was either brown, white, or blue. And not just any old everyday hue of blue, but the most Crayola-perfect of textbook definition “Sky” blues imaginable. It was reflected perfectly in every lake, stream, pond, and puddle, and I was driving around crying all day — half over the beauty of it all, and half totally inexplicably, though I’m starting to think the latter half is just my body finally completely giving out and refusing to cooperate with the way that I mistreat my mind.

A friend of mine told me recently that she now experiences post-MS instead of PMS, and I was like, dude, I can totally relate, thanks, because I experience both. And each lasts for, like, a week & a half, leaving me with approximately three & a half seconds of sanity per month. And then — since it’s the only time I can be sure I’m experiencing a true emotion — if anything significant happens during those three & a half seconds, the result can be even more severe than it would be if it were experienced during either the post- or pre-, because it’s like, Holy shit, this is real, it can’t be written off as a “symptom.” Act now. Act. Decide. Do something. Now! 10, 9, 8, 7, 6… 5… 4… 3, 2, 1 and a half… 1 and a quarter… 1!

Such was the case on Saturday, when I was driving, walking around Newburgh — and the greater Orange County area as a whole — feeling what can only be described as the perfect mix of nostalgia, contentment with the here & now, and a dread-free vision of the future. I blinked, surveyed the domain, pinched myself. It didn’t go away.

5, 4, 3, 2… quick, act now! Do something! Decide! But the sun was going down, and conveniently there are only two evening trains back to the city. One leaves at 6 something, the other not until 9:30pm. If I dashed to catch the earlier I’d be back in motion — in the opposite direction — before I could even change my mind, and by then it would be too late. Too late for that day, anyway — that only day that will ever exist in the history of the world, forever and ever. There will be other days but never that one again.

There will never be another perfectly clear day in February 2010 where the snow dusts everything just so and the sky-reflecting mud puddles are such a heartbreakingly sky blue and I’m 2.5 weeks past 33 and can see the Shawangunk Ridge from Washingtonville. There was only that day, it was stunningly beautiful, and I miss it already.

When I got back to the safe, routine expectedness of the city, I quit Facebook. It was the least I could do, and to paraphrase Brenda Hillman, “I realized that there were so many in my heart / only one of us had to change for there to be a change.”

I need to start thinking in the first-person again.