I am a Romantic…

I am a romantic, and what I mean by that is I look at every sunset and I take it in.

Not the way you glance at the weather. I mean I stop. I let the sky do its slow, impossible thing — the pinks bleeding into orange, the sun lowering itself behind the marsh like it has all the time in the world. The other night it was a clean red circle dropping between two sailboat masts, and I stood there on the sand with a little fire going and a marshmallow on a stick, completely undone by it. I will never get tired of this. I hope I never do.

Being a romantic, for me, has nothing to do with grand gestures. It’s smaller and quieter than that. It means I make tea in the sun and it comes out golden and a little wild, and it’s always beautiful. It means I pull over for rainbows. I pull over for roadside bakery stands and try one of everything, because what is a life if you drive past the warm bread and the hand-lettered sign and tell yourself you don’t have time.

It means I will stop the car for a tortoise.

I did this not long ago — saw one making its slow, ancient way across the road, and I pulled over beside it and talked to it, the way you’d talk to someone you’d been waiting to meet. I asked my husband to stop traffic for it. He di

d. He always does. That’s its own kind of romance, I think — being married to someone who will hold up a line of cars so a tortoise can finish crossing, who never once makes me feel silly for any of it.

This is the way I move through the world. I see the bees in the orange trees when the blossoms open and the whole yard goes sweet. I see the grasshoppers tucked into the sand. I notice the gaillardia opening hot pink against the dune fence, the rose petals frozen into the ice of a drink, the lemon wheel catching the light. I keep every shell. I keep every small, perfect baby shark tooth my fingers find in the wet sand, holding it up to the window like treasure, because it is.

I even love the mushroom that appeared overnight in the soil of my houseplant — a tiny pale thing on a slender stem, unfolding its cap among the leaves like it had somewhere to be. Inside and outside of my home, the small living things keep arriving without asking permission, and all they require of me is that I pay attention.

And that is the whole secret, isn’t it. The attention.

I think we’re taught, somewhere along the way, that an extraordinary life is something you have to chase — that it lives in the big trip, the milestone, the once-in-a-lifetime view you have to travel far and pay a lot to stand in front of. And those things are lovely. But I’ve come to believe the extraordinary was never hiding out there. It’s been here the entire time, in the ordinary hours, waiting for someone to look at it long enough to call it by its name.

The tortoise. The bakery stand. The bee in the blossom. The red sun between the masts. None of it is rare. The rare thing is the looking.

So when people ask why I live the way I do — slowly, deliberately, refusing to rush through my own days — this is the answer. I am not trying to escape ordinary life. I am staying awake inside of it. To raise my children in a home where we stop for the tortoise. To build a body of work, hour by quiet hour, that’s made of exactly this kind of noticing. To embody a life where you can have a full and present and peaceful life and still produce something that matters.

I am a romantic. I see all of it — the shells and the mushrooms and the grasshoppers in the sand, the small sacred things inside and outside.

And that is what makes it extraordinary.

If this is your way of moving through the world too, I’d love for you to stay a while. I write here about the quiet, intentional life — and the work that grows out of it.