I was out early today, pounding the hard pavement instead of the hard sand. Hard sand softens footfall; hard pavement does not.
But here in the suburbs hard pavement is often the only choice.
I’m glad my thoughts are not yet hard. They are still vacation thoughts — dreamy, slow and in no hurry to return to reality.
So here, in their honor, a vacation photo.
Foot traffic on a beach goes two directions— up and down along the strand and back and forth from towel to surf.
When I walk the beach I take the former. I’m a woman on a mission, moving quickly, arms swinging. I’m not alone in this purposeful movement. There are bikers and runners and beachcombers, all of us with goals in mind.
The bathers, on the other hand, amble easily toward the waves. They stop and start. They turn back. They pose for photographs. They brake for sand castles.
Yesterday on the beach a man performed the slow, intricate steps of tai chi. He summoned up the calm of the ocean into his arms and legs. He was going neither up and down nor back and forth. He wasn’t going anywhere at all. He was simply being.
This is what I take with me from the beach.
Gone are the oaks and maples I know at home. Here instead are palms, palmettos, banyan trees and mangrove swamps. Humid, lush, bright.
Alliteration aside, these critters really do leap. This little guy did. I was inching close to another reptile, a slender, smiling chameleon (they’re all slender and smiling to me), when I was startled almost to camera-dropping by this lizard.
One moment he was on the pavement and the next he was on the trunk of a palm tree, where I snapped this photo. And he stayed there long enough that I could snap several more.
There are no lizards where I live so I’ve been enjoying the fauna here. I probably look as strange to natives as the squirrel-gawking visitors to D.C. do to me.
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.
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)
“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.
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.
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.
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.