Summer Places, 2018
If nothing else, this could be a lesson. That I’m no good at being halfway anywhere and it might be best I keep my work and play separate lest I grow to resent one and feel like I’ve missed the other entirely. Is “life’s too short” just an excuse? Or are questions like that the problem? If not this, then what? I don’t have a roadmap for a plan that isn’t full steam ahead. This week’s tension is pulling me in ways that make me want to cut cords altogether.
The greens and blues of a New England Summer are different, a color palate less cloaked in golden light than Northern California, but somehow more sure of itself. Less fleeting. Hospitable, because every inch is crawling with life, a reminder that there are roots here. Busy. Itchy.
Rustling leaves in second story windows and views you have to climb and climb and climb for. Homes without level floors, ghosts still making dinner in the fireplace. You’d burn the house down if you used it now.
The woman who jumped our car (the battery dead from days waiting) in the parking lot of the tiny Bar Harbor Airport drove an old Toyota Highlander. Her license plate read “UFO ME”. You thought maybe she worked at the Harpoon Brewery, but I’m sure she’s hunting unidentified flying objects from the dark sky of Mount Desert Island. If I was from outer space I would land here.
You just can’t be with the Pacific the way you can spend time with the ocean in New England. The Atlantic is slimy and rocky and smelly but still it says: sit, swim, sail.
In Half Moon Bay, we walk down the road to an encounter with an enormous, cold, great thing. Perch on the edge of a giant sink. It isn’t a place for gentle growth; it speaks only to the wildest and most courageous parts of me. The parts that reject the drudgery of daily life, the volume of the scenery always turned all the way up. The piece of my soul that has blossomed in California, turned toward the sun without thought of the fault lines that wait below my daily commute.
