My Summer Vacation

What a jam-packed summer I've had so far, and it's just about to get busier. We've hiked and biked, painted some Zen works of art (ephemeral, with chalk on the driveway and with watercolors on paper with my little one, who immediately painted over my calligraphy), did some experiments in crochet, exchanged rock-craft skills with my mom, and just generally hung out and relaxed. (Oh, and countless rainy-day viewings of Horton Hears a Who!) All this time was spent far away from the computer and without the camera along, so there's not much photo documentation to share.

Next up is a week-long camping trip with the family and visits from grandparents. To keep up with everything, I'll be taking a blog break through the end of August. I hope to be back in September with the renewed energy that the start of a new season brings.

Before I sign off for a while, I'd like to share (very shyly) some of the writing that I have been doing in a Writing Circle this month. Once a week, a group of women gather in the moderator's living room and write for an hour straight. Then we read our work aloud (this is the terrifying part for me every week). There are some truly astonishing pieces of memoir, poetry, and fiction that I have been privileged to hear read aloud, and I feel so lucky to learn from these women.

Here's a piece that was inspired by three paint colors (see if you can pick them out), a photo of two little girls squinting into the sun at the beach, and a postcard of the idealized beach vacation, circa 1950:

Sometime around June, after the first wildflowers have faded, I start to hear the siren call of the sea. I'm sure most inlanders who live only a few hours' drive from the shore feel it too. It's the pull of dark mango sunsets and violet evenings; slow, free days spent in full sun with nothing but a bathing suit on; the breezes pushing worries and responsibilities far away. At least that's how the beach felt to me as a child, unburdened by the tasks of packing up the mildewed tent and piles of sleeping bags and endless mountains of squishy hot dog buns and jars of yellow mustard and pickle relish. That was my mother's job, of course.

When I was growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas, my family spent a long weekend at the beach just about every summer. It was a cheap vacation for my struggling parents. My father would pitch a tent right on the packed sand. Despite my mother's best efforts--a basin of water and a towel placed at the tent flap for our sandy feet--the sand, as sand does, would creep into the tent on the soles and between the toes of little feet. The wet sand clumped and then dried. At the end of the day, when we walked into the tent to plop down in our sleeping bags, our feet made a quiet zip, zip as sand was trapped between hot flesh and cool plastic. When night fell and we drifted off to sleep, human sounds subsided and the rhythmic waves--always there beneath our playful screams in full sun--filled the tent, our little world. I fell asleep touching the sand through the tent floor, asborbing the echo of the waves hitting the shore.

At first light we'd emerge from our tent to the quiet waves. Shedding pajamas and donning damp bathing suits, we'd race to the water's edge. The ocean had left us treasures in the night to discover: yellow seaweed with strange rubbery leaves and bulbs that looked like hollow balls; broken sand dollars; a plank of sodden wood. I searched for seashells and watched hermit crab holes bubble and fill as the waves touched my toes.

The sensations of being surrounded all day and night by salty water and sand are still so clear to me decades later. But one memory seems more like a dream, though evidence exists to the contrary.

One morning my mother led us out into the waves. We waded out until the water reached my chest and I felt that I would be pushed by the gentle swells too far offshore, where the water was deep and green. But the water gradually became shallow again as we faced the horizon, and I could see the sandy bottom clearly. My mother reached down into the sandbar and pulled out a perfect sand dollar, like an ocean bone alive against her palm. As my mom sifted through the sand again, I did the same, and we found sand dollar after sand dollar, enough that day to fill a pickle jar.

That jar full of sand dollars still exists somewhere, stored in my father's attic or garage, the remnant of a perfect day of discovery in which my mother had performed the magical feat of plucking rare treasures casually from the sea floor. I could not look at my mother again without a sense of awe.

* * *

I'll be dropping in to view my Flickr contacts, so I hope to see evidence of your summer adventures. I'd love to read about what you're up to, so please drop me a line or leave a comment to keep in touch. Have a great summer!

Tale of the Boggy Woods

Yesterday I sought out the boggy woods and made my peace with the rain. The skunk cabbages were happily submerged up to their leaves in water. Water is their essence, after all, and the hot August days will soon cause them to dissolve from within and turn into lacy skeletons.

Fern fronds waved lazily beside the skunk cabbages, and the duckweed swam upon blue sky and white clouds.

Green embraced everything, creating an inverted canopy as it enveloped the roots of a downed tree.

Frond upon leaf upon water--a verdant mosaic that wove a quiet spell around me. A spell so powerful that I stepped off the boardwalk into a boggy place and rooted myself in a dark pool. I became Green Woman, mute and still so that I could trace the water strider's arrowlike wake; count out the rhythm of the bullfrog's croak; feel the skitterings of squirrels and birds on my limbs and in my hair.

And then I emerged and sought out a dry spot under an oak tree. I followed a mossy trail and shrunk myself down to curl up under a bower of ferns. Later I will collect the acorns as they fall like raindrops.

Living in Macondo

"At sundown on Tuesday the water tightened and hurt, like a shroud over the heart. The coolness of the first morning began to change into a hot and sticky humidity. The temperature was neither cold nor hot; it was the temperature of a fever chill. Feet sweated inside shoes. It was hard to say what was more disagreeable, bare skin or the contact of clothing on skin. All activity had ceased in the house. We sat on the veranda but we no longer watched the rain as we did on the first day. We no longer felt it falling. We no longer saw anything except the outline of the trees in the mist, with a sad and desolate sunset which left on your lips the same taste with which you awaken after having dreamed about a stranger."

Excerpt from "Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo," in Leaf Storm and Other Stories by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

After weeks and weeks of rain, I was beginning to feel as if I were living in Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's mythical village of Macondo. The rain that I had initially welcomed turned our yard into a bog. It seeped into the basement. It permeated the folds of bed sheets, bath towels, and burlap bags. The saturated air inside our house breathed out a vapor of must and mildew.

Perhaps I exaggerate.

We dodged the daily rainstorms and thundershowers and managed to find patches of sun, especially in the mornings. The rain transformed waterfalls into gleeful cascades. It turned already lush vegetation into a summer rain forest. Evenings brought their own silent fireworks, when the lightning bugs--more plentiful perhaps because of the dampness--emerged and lit their echoing sparks.

The constant rain produced a bumper crop of smooth cherries, their hides having stretched gradually as they ripened into lushness without bursting.

Having done their work on the cherry blossoms months ago, the bees have moved on to other nectars.

The displays of fire in the sky on the Fourth of July seem to have brought back the sun, at least for a time. I'm off to explore while I can.