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Earthquake last night, a 4.7, a nice long jolt–roll. Lala and I went from sleep to a very animalian huddle. I don’t know how long it took me to realize that it was an earthquake, but it wasn’t more than a second or two, because I had time to enjoy it a little. There’s still fear, but there’s also a strange frisson of “what’s going to happen next?” I’ve always assumed, and I could be wrong, that the Big One will start so violently that I’ll be in no doubt about what’s going on. So if I wake and feel an earthquake and understand what it is, I’m allowed to just kind of enjoy it.

I did like the way we clutched at each other. Felt like we were in a cave and there was an animal outside. Very prehistoric. We didn’t have to think, “find my partner and hold on,” we just did. I was wearing my earplugs as usual, so Lala got up to see the damage since she’d heard something falling. It was her TRS-80, still fine of course. For some reason, I find this HILARIOUS.

Then I rolled over and prided myself on being such a staunch Californian that I could go right back to sleep, and of course, I didn’t. Up for another hour, trying not to imagine carnage. It was so roll–jolty (that’s the technical term) that it felt local, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was Baja or Oregon, having an eight? I was a five–hour drive from the Loma Prieta and it felt like riding a wave of land that made me panicked and dizzy at the same time. So I had to check Twitter, which roundly woke me up. Then I dreamed of natural disaster for the rest of the night, which is completely normal for me, and something I still sometimes wonder if I can’t get fixed. I love that I dream a lot, but I hate that I have nightmares every night. Gory, bloody, violent, grief–filled ones. I’ve had them since I was a child. Someone told me I can get hypnosis to help, and I’m almost at that point. Speaking of that, I heard yesterday about someone who got hypnosis for sugar cravings. Sign me up. I wonder if I can get a two–fer?

I spent New Year’s Eve and Day in bed with a wicked cold (caught from the germ-tastic aquarium, no doubt) and I’m a little wobbly today, but I’m up. Not quite up to leaving the house yet, but at least I’m (literally) standing at my standing desk as I type this.

And I’m thinking about my word of the year. Lots of people do it–I certainly didn’t come up with it–but this tool has been helpful to me in years past.

This year it’s easy: REPLENISH

It’s easy because that’s what my new collection of essays is about. Each month, I’m trying a new creative endeavor in the hopes of replenishing my spirit, body, mind, and soul, and at the end of the month, I write about how it went. Without spoiling the last essay which I sent out on the last day of the year, the Reading Month went way better than I’d expected it to.

This month, January, is about Home, making and shaping it into the best place it can be. It’s funny, yesterday was the first day of the new year, and my reading challenge was officially over as the home challenge geared up, but because I was sick, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I just wanted to read, because the refound habit of reading deeply really sunk in over December.

And I wanted to read, specifically, a memoir about building home (DO leave me a comment if you know a great one). I loved Dee Williams’s Big Tiny, and I wanted something like that. I found Hammer Head by Nina MacLaughlin, a book about a journalist who becomes a carpenter when writing clickbait got too much. It’s exactly what I wanted. It wasn’t until I’d click Buy that I realized I was feeding the January challenge–I’d completely forgotten.

I loved realizing that the reading challenge will follow me into each of the next eleven challenges. This should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, and it was delightful to discover. (For people new to the challenge, I’m replenishing my creative spirit by doing things I want to do in my downtime instead of reading social media or frittering away time watching TV or other mindless activities. One reader thought I was doing this as my job, which I wish I was wealthy enough to do. Nope, still working 40+ hours a week writing. But I can’t complain about that because I love love love love it.)

So. What’s YOUR word for 2018? Leave a comment – I’d love to know.

At the Monterey Bay Aquarium:

I stood alone on the upper level, facing the kelp forest, watching the silver sardines swim in their schools. They were a murmuration, the swarm of them moving together over the course of split seconds, their scales flashing gold and red sometimes. Turns out you can’t call it a murmuration when it’s fish – it’s called simply shoaling or schooling, but schooling is too simple a word for that gorgeousness of flight I watched. I could have stared at it for hours. They moved like conversation, to and fro, parts splitting off to make new sentences, flying back into each other to complete paragraphs and whole pages. It looked like song, visualized.

Other creatures in the tank were mesmerizing, too, of course. I love the leopard sharks and the kelp bass the size of my car that stays near the front round window as if he knows he’s the star of the show. But the flight-song of those sardines is my favorite aquarium magic. Yes, I love the cuttlefish, with their chromatophore skin (I feel them – with my hot flashes and tendency to blush, I can’t help but think they wouldn’t choose to be so showy and placed in an aquarium for it, but that’s my anthropomorphism showing). The octopuses this time finally seemed kind of amazing instead of gross (Lala is wearing off on me). We watched a day octopus sleeping, and we watched it dream. Scientists struggle to agree on whether they dream or not, but this layperson can tell you with assuredness that they do. He was tucked against his rock, all creamy and pendulous, his one visible eye tightly shut. He puffed out his siphon. He wriggled. He twitched, his arms uncoiling and then coiling back up again. His skin mottled quickly, brown spots, and then flashed back to cream. He twitched again, his eye shutting more tightly closed and then relaxing. His siphon panted. He was obviously chasing cars.

But still, those sardines were more magnificent. I’d always thought they swam together for safety in numbers – some might be picked off but not all. But in fact, they actually look like one big fish making the other actually huge, predatory fish believe they’re tiny and weak in comparison. There’s a lovely metaphor there – stronger together, etc – but what I really love is watching that shared brain in action. Like watching wind, if wind was silver and had intention. And there, in the middle of a Christmas holiday week, surrounded by approximately 400,000,000 children, I was alone with the magnificent, awed and hushed.

(Not the kelp forest exhibit, but from the Open Ocean exhibit.)

Five days from Christmas! How I would have been freaking out as a kid. Christmas was everything. It was the lottery. Anything could happen, and though each year, every year, I felt the small taste of disappointment in my mouth when I didn’t get everything I’d asked for, I still hoped that this would be the year, this would be the one.

I thought of it, quite literally, as wishing season. I could sit around and wish and wish and wish and tell my parents my wishes, and maybe they’d all come true. It was astonishing, really, how many times they were able to come through.

I remember the morning I came down to find that bicycle. I think the reason I go back to this memory over and over again is that I couldn’t believe it was happening to me. I’d wished for this perfect bike with the banana seat and plastic streamers at the handle’s ends, but I knew it wouldn’t happen. I wouldn’t get it. My folks didn’t have the money. And somehow Mom had convinced me that Santa couldn’t meet all children’s requests, either, that he just didn’t have enough money. This I understood. It made sense that Santa couldn’t afford to give gifts to the whole WORLD without scrimping a little.

So it didn’t bother me in the slightest that it was a used bike under the tree – I completely understood why the rims were scratched and why the banana seat (o blessed banana seat) had a tiny tear along the saddle stitching. Santa had done his best and his best was perfection. It was all my dreams come true in one swoop, and I believed that Christmas was the most magical and selfish of all days, and sometime’s a girl’s dreams really could come true. I flew down the driveway on the bike, still in my nightgown. I pedaled hard up the gravel to ride back into the courtyard. I was a princess; I was a knight; I was a soldier. My bicycle meant freedom, and I wanted to ride that freedom all the way to the village to buy candy. But honestly, that was a long and scary ride, so instead, I did another loop to the bottom of the drive and back up, dodging the Corvair and beat–up VW bug parked next to the falling–down barn. I could still feel that freedom while reading my new books and eating gilt chocolate while glancing outside at my new steed every few seconds.

Magical, selfish lottery. I don’t regret a single wish. I still don’t.

Yesterday I worked at Mills and got my words done quickly, and instead of doing something more productive, I drove to the coast. I felt the need.

I loaded up my phone with writing podcasts and headed for Pescadero via Half–Moon Bay. I found myself at the yarn store, where I bought more Noro for my blanket and some sock yarn. A girl can never have too much sock yarn, ever.

After the yarn, I went to the lighthouse to see about renting out a full building for a retreat next fall, but there was no one around, so I just wandered the property a little bit. I searched for whales but was happy with pelicans.

Then went to Duarte’s, where I sat at an old brown table in the corner. The waitress seems to know me now, though I don’t go in more than once or twice a year. I sat and read Ink in Water, a graphic memoir about anorexia which is just great, and it turns out, is illustrated by Lala’s teacher (all hail the Mills library letting alums check out books!). I read and read. I ate my crab melt sandwich. Oh, god, it’s only tuna fish on steroids, really, that’s all it is, but on the crisp white bread, with the melting cheese, it’s heaven. Then I got a coffee (in the afternoon! Decadence!) and ate olallieberry pie a la mode. All while reading. I devoured dessert, of course, hoovering it up in what felt like seconds, but I made the coffee last. I didn’t check Twitter. I didn’t look at email. I just read. The reading was as delicious as the food. The air smelled like pine from the big Christmas tree in the lobby, and I could hear two waitresses gossiping about overbooking tables for Christmas. There was a couple seated near me when I arrived but they cleared out by the time my food arrived. I had the whole dining room to myself. I hid in my wee corner, listening to the noises of the attached bar, the old building, and the staff, and I was there. My happy place.

Then I drove the wrong direction, just five minutes south, to climb down to the rocks and tide pools. I managed to catch magic hour.

A post shared by Rachael Herron (@rachaelherron) on Dec 18, 2017 at 7:19pm PST

The golden sunlight filled up the holes in the crazy rocks, and the sun melted into the ocean. The water was a blue I can’t remember ever seeing before – a milk–pewter, with sunlight trailing silver sparks.

A post shared by Rachael Herron (@rachaelherron) on Dec 18, 2017 at 7:24pm PST

I breathed. And I took some pictures, of course, because it seems almost impossible to be somewhere amazing without doing that. And I don’t mind – I have thousands of ocean pictures, none of them ever capturing what it was like, but I love the attempt and the memory of the day the photos leave behind. I drove home before the sunset but noticed it happening to my left as I drove up PCH, so I pulled over just as it plunged into the sea. It did that crazy melting–flattening thing as if someone had stuck the whole sun back into the fire and was pounding it out. The glowing, dripping ball of hot yellow metal slid right underneath the ocean’s top blanket. I clapped once, and then started the car and headed for home.