Over drive time traffic noise on a gray city morning, a cricket claims the streetside culvert with an energetic chirp. I wonder if I am the only one that hears.

I want to be sitting at a table drinking too many cups of coffee on a gray NY sidewalk. I would read the Times and watch the pigeons and smile. But it’s Tuesday and I am miles away from the city.

… to Danielle LaPorte’s burning question.

What money resentments do you have that you could let go of?

My biggest is this: Hard work doesn’t equal financial ease. I want to be the woman who finishes a novel and writes for a living every day - but on my agenda. My financial dependence on my 9-5 job makes me resentful. Why can’t I write for a living on my own terms and make a living doing it? Not sure I can let this go until I actually make it happen.

I guess, then, that I didn’t really answer the burning question. I can let go of the resentment that I wasn’t born rich. Okay…it’s gone.

Eerie quiet in the house. Alone is foreign. I long for it and mourn its loss until it appears. This stranger and I are being reintroduced. It’s presence will never afford me the comfort of my son’s laughter.

Yesterday’s fog was a harbinger. The days dense and heavy cloud my vision. I cannot see what’s right in front of me and take the wrong direction again and again. Only the light will clear the air and my head. But it is nowhere and I am sucked into the gray.

He wasn’t feeling much like saying goodbye this morning, so I gave him a piece of rose quartz that I usually carry with me. 

“You can keep it for me while we’re apart,” I told him. “Whenever you feel sad, you can just reach in your pocket and touch it, and it will remind you of how much I love you.”

“Mama,” he said when I walked in the door after work, “today when Mikey and Milo were playing together, and I wasn’t playing with them, I touched your rock, and it made me smile.”

My heart melts. It and the quartz are his.

Fourteen below and the black and white dog rolls in the ice-crusted snow. What does he know that I don’t know? #smallstone 01-19-12

What is black and builds up behind the tiny fingernails of four-year-old boys? The remnants of a backyard adventure? A mystery solved? The discovery that right below the surface is a treasure waiting to be found? As I run a file gently underneath each nail, I hope to remove the grime, leaving the memories intact. #smallstone 01-18-12 

Regular day, splintered with unwanted interruptions, betrays my frustration with an unexpected bit of joy. #smallstone 1-13-12