Tomorrow is my favorite holiday, and while I can sometimes get a little Proustian in the long-winded the thing right now is to get Proustian in this way: "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."

Just now, nothing could be better than this.

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine lost his father quickly to an unexpectedly aggressive batch of cancer, and then a few days after that in a different part of the country another friend's wife had their first child. Sometimes I wake up wondering about their molecules and if they crossed, these two people who would never have known each other, related to two people who will never meet. I wonder if wondering makes it easier or harder.

Recently there was an article about how some Civil War soldiers after the Battle of Shiloh were surprised to find their wounds glowing softly in the dark. The soldiers with glowing wounds tended to heal better than the average Civil War wounded, and so the mysterious light was nicknamed "Angel's Glow" and everyone left the story there for 140 years. It turns out that the soil at the Battle of Shiloh had a kind of nematode living in it that hosts a bioluminescent bacteria that could live in a hypothermic body long enough to scare off the pathogens growing there. And so while falling wounded in Tennessee is not the best outcome that could have happened, it turned out to be better than most. A glowing wound is better than a dark one.

It has been a while since we've gone to Orcas, the magic a little depleted by a series of small interpersonal earthquakes out there two Thanksgivings ago. But the island was still there, just like it's been for all this time, gathering beauty and calm.

So when the car we were riding in broke down before we could make it to the ferry, in a pocket of road without cell phone reception, it seemed reasonable to at least consider just up and living there forever. There aren't any simple ways to get to or from the ferry or out of Anacortes on the other side, but we could probably find shelter and make enough driftwood art to live off of. Until the next big idea came around, at least. Until someone noticed we were missing and came looking for us.

While we waited for the tow truck to arrive we watched two bald eagles wheeling above the trees. Not hunting, from what we could tell. Just dancing.