Time out from the world.

[Calypso St Barth satin flamenco skirt + H&M vest + J.Crew lamé blouse + J.Crew Panama hat + Golden Goose Charlye boots + vintage squash blossom necklace.]

I have to think there’s something in every person that longs for the frontier. Manifest destiny. Even now that every inch is charted, plowed and paved, something made us do it a hundred years ago—the landscape has changed, but the urge can’t have gone too far. It’d be inhuman not to want to press on.

And not just geographically, although that’s the most acute for me right now. I can’t settle into anything for too long; I should share Bond’s family motto: Orbis non sufficit. The world is not enough. And with that comes conflict. So sang Doves, “Our ambition cuts us down.”

My physical frontier of choice? South America: Chile, Peru, Argentina. Can’t get it out of my head. And it’s something I love about these photos, like they could be shot somewhere at the foot of the Andes—not to mention I look like I’m about to go on horseback, like Tracy in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Lately I’ve taken to disappearing from the house without word and going on jaunts. I’m a little like the pacing snow leopard at Lincoln Park Zoo I used to visit on Saturdays. The zoo was right across Clark St. from my apartment building in Chicago, and I’d watch families and runners and couples from my vantage point at the snow leopard habitat. He’d lope back and forth, looking forlorn, pausing to nose at an empty pizza box.

Yesterday I slipped into the woods under the guise of getting the mail. I took my shoes off by the sluice at the bottom of the Bromley snowmaking pond, set them down in the grass with a stack of bills, and waded in. The boots stayed off for the rest of the walk, and I ended up padding barefoot down the gravel roads, through grass still squishy from snowmelt, and over the mossy forest floor for close to an hour. [For more on summer feet, please see my favorite post ever.]

If this all sounds familiar, it should. [I did it a month or so ago when the snow was still hip-high in this post.] A wild hair is growing, this much I know.

Right now I’m looking out the wall of windows to the south and I can’t see past the first bank of pines across the road. We’re totally socked in with fog, like a little house on a cloud. If only we were that mobile. But with the fog comes a redeeming level of green that is almost pulsating. It’s neon. I’m curling and uncurling my toes in anticipation of a sopping wet stroll through the woods.

I hear the laundry apparatuses whirring, so might be able to slip out the back undetected—time out from the world—

-Carey