On my way to breakfast, I found four ripe blackberries, courtesy of my morning walk. It’s a bush I’ve known for years, quite accessible to deer and other passersby.
I feel like a kid who finally has to come inside because the street lights are on. For the first day this week, I’m working inside. It was quite a run: four straight days of al fresco work.
Yesterday, the neighbors had their driveway sealed, which meant that I was whisked away to a place I used to love more than any other — Joyland.
Here in the outdoor office, where I just completed several major tasks and am taking a brief breather before starting another, I often find my eyes wandering to the hummingbird feeder.
Today we celebrate the birthday of a daughter who is about to become a mother. It has me thinking back to the day when she was born, a most glorious day, as all three of the days were when my children came into this world.
It made sense that I finished this year’s “beach book” just hours before firing up the work computer. It made sense, though it made for less than 40 winks. That’s the way it is — or can be, when the book is good enough.
It was a grand country, a country to lift the blood, and he was going home across its wind-kissed miles with the sun on him and the cornfields steaming under the first summer heat and the first bugs immolating themselves against his windshield. But going home where? he said. Where do I belong in this?
…Where is home? he said. It isn’t where your family comes from, and it isn’t where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat.) Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself?
…To have that rush of sentimental loyalty at the sound of a name, to love and know a single place … Those were the things that not only his family, but thousands of Americans had missed. The whole nation had been footloose too long, Heaven had been just over the next range for too many generations.
The several loads of laundry I’ve done since returning home are a good re-entry point. Cleaning and folding make me feel at home. And being on the deck as my nightgown blows in the breeze helps me remember the freedom I felt at the shore.
That feeling of freedom is more important now than ever. It’s so easy to feel hemmed in by the pandemic, to think only about what we can’t do, where we can’t go.
Of course we must take care always to protect ourselves and those we love. But we must also find our own personal balance points, the tradeoffs we will or won’t make to ensure that we not only keep our bodies intact — but our souls as well.
This year’s beach read is The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner, a family saga as broad and as deep as the western horizon. It’s been a fine book for this year’s trip, accompanying me on the plane and on the strand.
There aren’t many readers on the beach these days. There are plenty of people on their phones, and, believe it or not in this age of air buds, plenty of people listening to portable radios loudly enough that everyone nearby can hear them, too.
But I spotted only three or four people reading books on yesterday’s walk, though the day before I happened to park myself by an entire family in thrall. But though few in number, readers stand out. There they sit in perfect communion with the printed pages, as waves break and gulls swoop. They could be anywhere — running through an airport in Bangkok or driving cattle through a freak spring snowstorm in Montana.
I like to think that these readers have discovered what I have: that when you travel with a book, you travel twice.
When you’re at the beach it’s easy to be seduced by it, to think there is nothing else to see or do. But there are other pleasures. The pool, for instance. I’ve spent many hours lazing by it, reading or writing, and many hours in it, as my body cools and my fingers shrivel.
And there is walking around the little village center here, where you can people-watch, pick up a salad for dinner and buy a souvenir or two.
Finally, there’s the mental vibe of the beach, which expands beyond the sand and surf into the light and the wind — into the words I write, the thoughts I think and the dreams I dream.
I guess that’s why I keep coming back.
I noticed it in late March, when mask-wearing was still rare. I noticed it when I spotted a woman in the supermarket, between the dairy and meat section.