I am currently in Reno, Nevada. I don’t know a soul here – not even Russell since he flew out yesterday on a business trip.

Just after he left, as I was hitting my work stride for the day, Otis decided to revert to newborn puppy mode with a vengeance and pee all over the RV – starting on the bed, moving to the hallway and ending in the lower bunk bed, including one of my nearby ballet flats in the mix because, why not?! Flash forward through an hour of strenuous cleaning, during which I ran out of paper towels, and it was finally time to drag the laundry over to the RV park machines and be gouged $3 per load in washers only large enough to fit one sheet each. And then I realized….I was out of quarters. I’d tried to procure some earlier in the week but, you would be surprised how many places are phasing out coins entirely. I glared across the room at the giant change jar filled with pointless pennies, nickels and dimes and decided to just bite the bullet and take it to a nearby bank to exchange it for useful quarters.

I arrived at the bank in full scrub mode with my Ole Smoky Moonshine jar weighed down with change I presumably gathered from trash cans and street corners, sporting flip flops despite the snow on the ground. Turns out they don’t have machines that swiftly count your change…you have to hand-count it and compile it into rolls first. The kindly teller took pity on me and handed a stack of rolls to fill and a counting tray to help me. Honestly, a simple task of counting and organization was exactly what my frazzle, weary brain was craving so I dumped the entire jar out onto a large coffee table and got to work.

I will admit that I have a touch of the OCD in me when it comes to cleanliness and that handling a bucket full of coins is extremely low on my list of birthday desires. But the thing I hate the most is pennies. With the silver coins, you can at least pretend they aren’t as dirty as you think but, when it comes to pennies so marred and tarnished that you can no longer even make out the design…..well, the mind runs rampant with horror stories about the life of squalor this penny must have led to bring a special cocktail of dirt and disease directly to your precious palm. Plus: FIFTY of you only gets me TWO quarters!! Pointless.

So there I sat, diligently sorting, counting and rolling for close to an hour until suddenly, I came across a penny so perfect and shiny, it stopped me in my tracks. It was still in pristine condition and it’s rosy copper face gleamed with all the promise of an adventurous life of travel and purpose ahead of it. Despite having marinated in that jar of muck for months on end, surrounded by dull coins that had given up on shining, this penny was untouched by it’s surroundings, oblivious to it’s meager circumstances and amazingly untarnished.

Being the person who unwittingly looks for hope and meaning in all things, I could not help but see a quiet wink from the universe encouraging me to continue to shine, despite loneliness, despite aging, despite frustration or hardship.

Honestly, it is a bit tough for me to even comprehend the idea of 34 years. MID 30’s.

In many ways, I am far behind the curve society assigns for someone my age: I have no spouse, no children, no mortgage and I am still struggling to build a successful career as my own boss.

After fleeing a decade of stability and routine, I have been living wild and free on the road for two years now with no end in sight. I traded comfort for long solo sunsets where I feel like the only person witnessing the sun sneak away. I traded a supportive community for constant anonymity, lost in a sea of strangers. I traded rules and boxes for the snaking bends in rivers and roads. By most standards, I am completely flying in the face of any reasonable metric: some woman-child who has yet to grow up.

But I have love and health and happiness. I have adventure and wonder and spontaneity. I see more new things in a month than most people get to see in a handful of years. So, at the end of the day, I am at peace with all of the things I gave up. I am at peace being a work in progress, still unfinished, still unmeasurable.

I traded predictability for possibility. This is best 34 I could be.