In my Carnival jacket and Valisia lipstick, I danced

I dreamed that my daughter and I planned a birthday party for my son, and everyone from all the different circles of our lives was invited. It was held at a large gracious wooden house where in the dream I lived with my husband, and we set up a tent in the front yard, and people danced all day long, from morning and far into the night, bodies gyrating with abandon in the yard and on a deck of the house overlooking the yard, faces alight and turned up to the sky,  and my subject and her family were there, her daughter deejaying the music with two of my son's friends, one of whom had traveled all the way from England, a skinny pure-hearted guitar-playing boy who is a favorite of mine, and all night in my sleep people kept dancing, the joy unalloyed, nothing anxious or wrong, and I woke up this morning with a bemused smile and then it came to me that I was celebrating all night having completed this huge work, which when I started a year ago seemed not just daunting, but impossible, but I knew even then it had already been completed in a parallel universe, and last night in my dreams that universe and this one partied. That picture of me is from when I had dinner with the book team in Washington, D.C. last year. It is my current favorite picture of myself because the light is gentle and it is cropped just so, and I am wearing my carnival jacket and Valisia lipstick, which is always a bold choice. Here's to more bold choices before and to the festivities after. There are still trailing details to fulfill, like photo inserts and formatting end notes and chasing permissions, but as my soul reminded me last night as I slept, I did the thing.