A return to the ocean and its salt breezes, to palm trees and lizards that bask in the sun. A return to the beach.
I’ve grown quite fond of the subtropical climate and what it does to the muscles and synapses. In short, it relaxes them.
It’s tempting to end the post right here.
And maybe … I will.
Last night under the stars, a glimpse of the planets: At Wolf Trap Center for the Performing Arts, the National Symphony Orchestra performed Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” accompanied by NASA photographs, with my favorite movement, “Jupiter: the Bringer of Jollity,” scoring the most applause.
Jollity is defined as “the quality of being cheerful.” Can a planet be cheerful? Perhaps if it’s named after the king of the gods. Or if it’s a gas giant more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined.
One reason not to be jolly: what looks in photos to be a big red eye. It’s not the result of excessive interplanetary partying, but a centuries-old storm bigger than Earth.
And speaking of Earth, the only planet Holst omitted from his piece, today at 7:15 a.m. EST is the one moment of the year when most of its people are bathed in sunlight — an incredible 99 percent of us. A reason for jollity, to be sure.
(Photo: Courtesy NASA)
The skin is an organ. But it’s an organ that blushes. No wonder, then, that we treat it differently than we do, say, our liver or spleen. Specifically — and especially at this time of year — we protect it from the sun. Or we don’t.
For many years, I actively sought a tan. I was a member of the baby-oil-and-baking-on-a-beach crowd. I sunbathed on my towel in various parks in Chicago and New York City. I’d spend entire days outdoors daubing on only a little SPF 8. I even laid out on the hot tar roof of my Greenwich Village apartment.
Tans made me look better, I thought. They evened out my skin tone, gave me a rosy glow. They also, through the years, damaged my skin.
I converted to sunscreen years ago, 45 SPF or higher. But this summer, I’m redoubling my efforts. I reapply often. Sometimes, I even carry sunscreen around in my purse. I’ve become, if not fanatical, at least responsible. And so, I enter the summer pasty and white — or make that pale and healthy.
In the woods, the little bridges are still there, but the streams they cross are running dry.
In the meadows, the earth is bare, cracked, hard-packed. My shoes scuff up dust. Even the grass has stopped growing as quickly as it usually does in June.
As much as I extoll the practice, walking in the suburbs is largely for exercise and mental refreshment, for perspective. It’s difficult to run errands or visit folks without jumping in the car.
But yesterday I had time to amble through the woods to meet a friend, who lives on the other side of a county forest.
It felt like rain, clammy and portentous. I took my time, reveled in the mood and the moment. I wandered home.
The Pacific Northwest is a city of vistas, proof of the good things that happen when water and mountains meet.
Here on the other coast, a gentler, calmer, less dramatic form of beauty. My eyes adjust to it as they would a darkening room.
I snap shots of one fetching curve of a favorite walk, note how trees and grasses frame a small pond. This is not the vast expanse of Puget Sound, the white-topped Olympic Mountains in the distance. It’s a more humble, everyday kind of beauty. But it’s beauty, just the same.
Can confusion be knit into a landscape? Is there something about a particular topography, no matter how serene it appears, that can turn our heads? Would I be asking these questions if I didn’t think there was? Yesterday I took a path I’ve hiked several times before. Once again, I paused at the juncture of three trails. Once again, I chose the “wrong” path.
The rails-to-trails marvel that is the W&OD was nearby, and the path I missed intersected it. If I could find that juncture, I could take a loop walk. The W&OD was sunny, and I wasn’t sure how long I would be on it. Just when I thought I’d missed the crossroads, I saw the sign and escaped through a bright meadow into deep shade.
It was a different walk than the one I meant to take, but a good one just the same.
The first thing I notice is the scent. The air is perfumed, mid-May incarnate. Early honeysuckle? I don’t think so. Viburnum perhaps? I inhale as I walk, which supercharges each step.
The next thing I notice is the mud. It’s been only a few days since I last walked in the woods, but it’s rained hard since then, and paths that were packed are now spongy, pliable. My boots leave an impression.
The stream is gurgling. The forest has greened and expanded with the much-needed moisture. It has moved up and out. It holds me as I walk, sifts its stillness down, a gift, a benediction.
I picked it up from the library’s new nonfiction section, intrigued by the title: Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home. I wasn’t disappointed. Keri ní Dochartaigh’s memoir is a cry of pain, a poetic rendering of human suffering, as she turns her personal experience of Ireland’s “troubles” into a love song for white moths, ocean swims and her damaged island home.
With a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, Dochartaigh didn’t belong anywhere, a truth that became even clearer after her childhood home was firebombed. She never felt safe growing up, and the grief she carried as an adult almost drove her to suicide.
But Dochartaigh found solace in the very place that wounded her. After leaving Ireland as a young adult, she feels called to return to her hometown of Derry, arriving just as Brexit is threatening a hard-won peace.
Dochartaigh takes comfort in the natural world. “There are still places on this earth that sing of all that came and left, of all that is still here and of all that is yet to come. Places that have been touched, warmed, by the presence of something.”
The thin places she finds hold her, hollow and hallow her. She finds in them a reason to go on.
It has much in common with a wiki site, this woods I walk in; it’s the work of many. The invasive plant eradication I mentioned yesterday is part of it. But even the paths themselves are forged and kept alive by many footfalls. Given the amount of undergrowth out there, it wouldn’t take long to lose the trail.
And then there are the bridges, a motley crew if ever there was one: A clutch of bamboo poles, handcrafted spans made from planks and two-by-fours, and then the places where it seems people just laid down a few pieces of lumber.
Some of the bridges are for crossing Little Difficult Run, which meanders through the woods, steep-banked in spots. But others are for navigating the hidden springs and muddy parts of the trail. All of them necessary. All of them welcome.
It takes a village to make a woods walk.