The walks come when they will, when I wake up and make my way to the beach. The tides have their own rhythms, drawn from moon and sun and gravity.
When I stroll the beach, I’m part of the elements, pulled into their orbit, at one with sand and sea.
Time passes slowly. Eternal time, at least for an hour or two.
It tweets, whistles, sings and trills. I’m listening to it right now, though on my computer rather than in the field. In my wanderings on and near the beach these last few days, I’ve been spotting a gray bird with white markings. It’s the state bird of Florida, the mockingbird.
There are some who want to replace it with the flamingo, a bird more associated with the Sunshine State, though flamingos have been absent from the state until just recently.
Without wading too far into this controversy, let me say that the mockingbird is a splendid creature with an array of sounds that amaze and baffle. It finds a high branch on which to perch and sing its heart out. It has my vote, in case anyone asks for it.
(Northern mockingbird, credit Bob Baker via Cornell Bird Lab)
It’s what I notice first every year, even before the foamy breakers, the spun-sugar sand. It’s the sky: vast and blue and dotted with clouds.
Here at the beach the sky stretches out boldly to the horizon, no curtain of green to obscure it.
Were I to live always beneath such a sky, I’d feel bare and exposed. But when I’m here, for this precious week, it opens me up, enlarges my vision.
Here at the beach, the sky rules.
Eating local conjures up images of farmers’ markets and $12 quarts of strawberries. But for the last week or two, we’ve been eating hyperlocal.
Our chief suppliers are the basil growing in a pot on the deck, which just yielded enough leaves for a delicious pesto sauce — and mostly the next-door neighbors, with their well-tended garden of beans, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes.
The beans have been lightly boiled, salted and buttered. (I usually steam vegetables, but these thrive with a more old-school treatment.)
The cucumbers have been sliced thin and served in a peppercorn ranch marinade (this dish courtesy of yet another neighbor) or simmered in broth then whipped with yogurt and dill into a cold soup.
The squash have been mixed with onions and breadcrumbs and turned into a casserole. And the tomatoes … well, they’re yet to come.
I had another post in mind for today but I’ll put it aside for this one. Because into this cauldron of heat and humidity has fallen what I thought I wouldn’t see again for weeks: a rainy day.
It’s early yet, so it may not last. And a quick peek at the weather page tells me that we may not get as drenched as our neighbors to the east. But it’s a start.
Waking up to wet pavement and gray skies is usually not a recipe for joy. But given our drought, it is today.
(Rain falls in Manhattan, July 2021)
It’s automatic: I always hold my breath when I walk through a tunnel. Too many years living in cities, where most subterranean sites reek of urine.
But the tunnels of Reston smell only earthy or musty — and sometimes not even that, depending upon length and time of year.
Which leaves me free to contemplate the road I’m scooting beneath, the traffic above and the crushed leaves below. The overpass and underpass. Two modes of travel, two ways of life.
Reston believes in foot traffic, so it only makes sense that Reston believes in tunnels.
(One of Reston’s 25 underpasses.)
It’s been a while since I’ve seen running water, besides what I run through our taps. The streams in my neighborhood, the smallest tributaries of Little Difficult Run, have been dry for weeks.
Yesterday I walked a section of the Cross County Trail that has a notoriously (to me!) difficult stone crossing. It should be dry enough to skip over, I thought, and decided to try it.
Turns out, that shady section of the trail is one of the few places where I’ve seen running water lately, where I’ve heard the music of liquid sluicing over stones.
I paused for a moment and took in the scene, the glare of sunlight on stream water, the tracery of shadows. I realized what I’ve been missing these last hot, dusty weeks.
I’ve been taking a look at the categories in my blog, trying to whittle down a list that’s 160 strong, which is about, oh, 150 categories too many.
Doing this is an exercise not just in taxonomy but identity. That more posts are tagged “walking” than anything else is to be expected — but why so many posts tagged weather?
When I first realized this, I took myself to task: “Weather, Anne? Really? Can’t you do better than that?” But then I thought about it some more.
For a blog that’s about place, about noticing, what could be more elemental than the elements?
Whether it’s the snow that made this blog possible or the heat that’s even now telling me to finish my post and start walking immediately, before the pavement is truly sizzling, weather is not a tepid topic. It’s a living, breathing force we reckon with daily.
I think of them as book links, the way one book leads us to another.
An author’s voice speaks to us and suddenly colors are brighter, the world makes sense again. We decide to pick up another novel she’s written, and we are even more enraptured this time.
Or maybe one book mentions another, a nonfiction happenstance. I just finished Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg, which Oliver Sacks mentions in Everything in its Place. I was riveted by this memoir, a father’s story of his daughter’s mental illness. Here’s how he begins:
“On July 5, 1996, my daughter was struck mad. She was fifteen and her crack-up marked a turning point in both our lives.”
Now I’m on a mission to find another memoir by Greenberg. After a few minutes of googling, I locate a copy of his Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writers Life. I hope to have it by week’s end.
The book links continue …
There was a time when I played John Phillip Sousa music as we took down the Christmas tree. It was cheerful and made that seasonal task less melancholy than it would have been.
But I hadn’t listened to Sousa marches in a while, winter or summer, until day before yesterday. Looking for suitable accompaniment to my Independence Day walk, I streamed a recording of Stars and Stripes Forever, the Washington Post March, Liberty Bell, Thunderer and many others.
They certainly put a skip in my step, which would otherwise have been lagging due to heat and humidity.
It was a 45-minute trip to the turn of the century, not the last turn, the one before that. I imagined unicycles and bunting and girls with pigtails, all made possible by America’s March King.
Today I repeated the experience. It felt just as fine.
(Military observance at Sousa’s grave. Courtesy Wikipedia)