(why I am sitting here smiling right now)

It's the way my skin is warming in the sun. The aroma it has of coconut oil so I don't burn. The way my lips feel, desperate for chapstick but I can't bear to get up and relieve them because out here it feels too perfectly like a pool-side, like a patio by a sea. The long green leaves and branches of plants around me rustle gently in a light breeze; they rustle in my peripheral vision, and if it were a book or magazine rather than a laptop that kept my attention, I might almost believe that I was at the seashore in summer; that this wasn't work but liesure; that I could lie here through every inching of the sun across the clear, cloudless sky and think about nothing except how good this feels, how much I am like a plant in my need for sunlight and how tall I am growing in this climate that is so good for that. On a day like this after first moving here, I wrote an email to my friends back east and titled it "So this is January." Today I repeat that refrain. So this is February. This is heaven.