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Back to the Beach

Back to the Beach

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You know the ocean is there before you see it. And you would know it it even if you didn’t know it. The sky is lighter, and there is a vacancy to it. The surf is calling.

The roads that lead to the beach are in a hurry. The cars that ply them are laden with suitcases, floats, bicycles and kayaks. The cars are in a hurry, too.

But not the people. Those already here have traded hurry for calm. They saunter down the boulevard, amble idly down the strand.

But not this person. The beach rhythms are not yet mine.  I want to check in, lug my bags up the stairs, throw them in a corner, pull on my suit and run to the beach.

So that’s just what I did. And now I’m becoming one of those calm beach people, too.

Two Years and Counting

Two Years and Counting

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Claire and I escorted Suzanne to the train station when she left for the Peace Corps two years ago. It was Sunday, and not much traffic. Inside the train station, another story. The ancient rituals of leave-taking. Ours loomed large. As well it should. I haven’t laid eyes on my oldest daughter for two years to the day. When I tell people how long it’s been, they will often ask, “Skype?” “Once,” I tell them. Only once. It’s a lack of electricity compounded by a lack of bandwidth compounded by, well, Africa, I guess.

But I have seen Suzanne through the eyes of her father, sister and friend, all of whom have visited.  And I hear her every week or two on the phone.  And between these first-hand accounts and my mother’s ear listening for tone, inflection and the spaces between the words — I know what I need to know. She is, for the moment (God willing, “Inshallah,” as she has taken to saying), happy and healthy (minus — or plus! — an intestinal parasite or two).

Last year when I write “One Year and Counting” I thought Suzanne would be home by now. But she will stay another year in Benin, take on another Peace Corps job, another challenge. Still, my count-down to seeing her is only months, since she’ll be back this fall on home leave.

One observation I’ll repeat from last year’s post, because it only deepens with time: Suzanne is the happiest person I know.

(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

They’re Back!

They’re Back!

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“I don’t like hummingbirds,” said Celia as we finished up dinner on the deck a couple nights ago. “They look like big bees.”

And they do. In fact, it often takes me a moment to figure out which one I’m seeing — a big bee or a  tiny bird.

For the last few weeks we’ve had plenty of both as the wood bees (their fat bottoms wiggling into holes in the pergola so they can chew it to pieces) and the hummingbirds (back from southern climes) flit around the house.

Hummingbirds winter in Central America, I learn, and often return to the same feeder on the same day. They gorge themselves on insects beforehand, often doubling their body weight (which still isn’t much, of course) for the 500-mile (18- to 22-hour) flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

So this little bird and its ruby-throated mate are world travelers, intrepid souls that whir and wing their way thousands of miles in pursuit of nectar and insects.

With knowledge comes admiration.

Stopped in Their Tracks

Stopped in Their Tracks

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On the High Line yesterday nature-starved New Yorkers clustered around a red bud tree as if it were a work of high art. It halted them mid-promenade — the beauty of the nubby blossoms, the radiant color against the neutral palette of lower Manhattan.

I compare this tree with all the wild red buds I saw driving through the hills of West Virginia ten days earlier. Brilliant volunteers alone and unnoticed, living out their bloom on lonely hillsides.

Not this tree. It’s well loved, earnestly photographed. And it’s no volunteer. Even its position — pushing up through the rails of an abandoned railway— is no accident.

New Yorkers stride nonchalantly past soaring skyscrapers — but a single tree stops them in their tracks. It’s a reversal worth noting.

Flight

Flight

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I’ve flown more in the last year than I have in the previous three combined. I’m not jetting off to exotic locales, but riding regional jets to places like Charlotte and Chicago en route to Lexington.

While the experience is still impressive — the roar of engines, the compression of space and time, the glide through clouds — there is, as any frequent flier knows, much to dislike about modern air travel. The last trip to Kentucky brought several of these to the fore: the crowding, the delays, the crazy and demeaning check-in process. Sometimes you have to remove your shoes and sometimes you don’t. Why is that?

All this is to say that the other day, as I watched a jet stream in the sky, I was ready to start rhapsodizing about the freedom of flight, being above the clouds, the amazement of it all. Then I remembered Monday evening in Chicago — a couple hundred people waiting on a single flight attendant. Or the delay a few weeks ago in Lexington when the airport ran out of de-icing fluid.

Suddenly, I was back in 11 B, knees knocking up against the seat in front of me, stomach churning, certain we would never, ever reach O’Hare Airport.

Next time I glimpse a plane in flight, I’ll imagine the people inside, legs cramped, palms sweating, heads aching. It may seem they’ve “slipped the surly bonds of earth” … but they haven’t.

Armchair Travel

Armchair Travel

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Time for a mental vacation, which for me means remembering a physical one. A drive through the European countryside. That’s canola, I think, a bit blurred on the bottom, shot from a moving vehicle.

A few miles down the road, the fields gave way to a village.

And then, a city.

Like any foreign travel, it was a revelation. I strolled on ancient streets, laid my eyes on sights I’d always longed to see. There was time to write and to blog and even to get lost.

When I came home I was not quite the same person I was when I left. Travel is like that. Even armchair travel. 

Ancient Rhythms

Ancient Rhythms

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A bounty of photos means that Africa is still on my mind.

I imagine the roads at dusk, red soil, the shadows lengthening. A river beside the road, or maybe still water, a small pond.

Ancient rhythms, still alive.


(Photo by Katie Esselburn)

Gifts from Africa

Gifts from Africa

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The human heart is a funny thing, what it withstands, what it does not. I’ve long since accustomed myself to Suzanne’s absence. She’s been in Africa well over a year now. She’s busy, happy, completely at home.

But last night, the worlds collided. Suzanne’s friend Katie came to visit “bearing gifts” from her recent trip to see Suzanne in Benin. Things Suzanne had bought and wanted us to have:

There was a leather wallet, a small wall hanging of a woman carrying a jug on her head and a set of hand-cast ladles made of an indeterminate metal (maybe aluminum?).

For some reason now, I can hardly look at these gifts without a tissue nearby. That Suzanne chose them with her own hands, arranged for their passage here — well, it just got to me.

It’s always that way, isn’t it? The small, thoughtful detail; a glimpse of the eternal within the everyday.


(Photo: Katie Esselburn)

The Places In Between

The Places In Between

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It’s a pit stop, a place to get gas on I-64, a hilltop station with rocking chairs on a little front porch that provides this view as respite for white-line fever.

Well, almost this view. To snap this shot I walked down the road a few feet while filling up the van. But still, this is more or less what you would see if you had a few minutes to while away.

I paused only long enough to take this picture. An impatient driver, I allow myself no more than 10 minutes at a stop — and I don’t spend them sitting!

This photo reminds me of the journey not the destination. It reminds me of all the places in between.

Liftoff and Letdown

Liftoff and Letdown

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of going through airport security twice for the same flight. I’d left something in the car. Later in the day, while waiting for a connection in another airport, I walked past an even busier security checkpoint, people rushing to lace up their shoes, stuff toiletries in bags, zip laptops into cases.

That flying is an exhausting, dehumanizing experience is news to no one. But you forget just how exhausting and dehumanizing when most of your trips are by car.

In exchange for the miracle of flight, we have the humiliation of full-body scans, the inconvenience of unpacking what we just packed and stuffing it into gray bins, the thrill of padding barefoot along the airport floor.

A reminder that even though we soar through clouds, our fears and troubles usually keep us earthbound.