July Ramblings

1. Last Friday, when the world-famous heat wave was giving its grand finale and I was driving home I noticed that the red maples in the bog on my road were starting to fade from green.  It was the first twinge of "oh my god summer is almost over and now all there is to look forward to is 11 long months of cold, darkness and misery." The twinge began to bloom into outright conviction yesterday when I woke up to an icy 60-degree house with the windows all open.  Now today it's gray and gloomy, with a coast-like pea soup foggy misty sort of thing hanging everywhere and I'm convinced.  It's all over!!



2. I forgot to tell you my poem Mix Tape was published on VoxPoetica a couple of weeks ago as part of their If Men Had Ears contributor series.

3. I've been feeling so sad and sickened by the massacre in Norway. Imagine sending your kids off to camp only to have them gunned down? I always think of Europe as a bastion of clear thinking and rightness (and no, not right-wing-nut kind of right, as this guy apparently was, but right as in do the right thing rightness), but I guess deranged people are everywhere.

4. We spent the weekend on Mount Desert Island, visiting friends who live there and friends visiting from the West Coast. I was a little apprehensive about seeing the visitors, whom we haven't seen in years, because I always think of their lives as so perfect--perfect jobs, perfect living situations, perfect kids, perfect marriage--and feeling so discouraged about my own situation right now with regard to work and general direction in life, I expected to reach new levels of feelings of inadequacy.  But, really, they are super nice super interesting people (that's why they're our friends), and everything is not perfect for them, either, so I had a great time, and look forward to visiting with them again soon.

While we were there we stopped to visit our Alma Mater, College of the Atlantic (both C and I and the husband half of both couples we were hanging out with graduated from there).  When we stopped by the community garden and I got a whiff of the powerful reek of the community gardens, it put me right back to that weekend just before C and I started dating when he and I turned the compost as part of our community service as garden plot lessees.  Ahh, love.

Between our three families and a fourth who came for dinner Saturday night, there were seven boys and only one girl. She held her own pretty well, but when she needed to escape the mayhem, she and I made friendship bracelets.  This was another crafty activity that I had planned for our unrequited cross-country road trip.  I figured the boys could make them in the car and give them as gifts to friends we visited along the way (I stopped in at Michaels before the weekend to lay in a store of pink and purple pearl cotton--I had only grabbed reds, blue, green and orange for the boys--and was pleased to find this was a girl who did NOT favor pink, though she did make use of the "lavender" and was disappointed that I didn't have yellow (how could I have forgotten yellow, my own childhood favorite color??).

The boys, meanwhile, did not slow down long enough to make bracelets or anything else.  They were perpetual motion machines, playing baseball, frisbee, slip & slide, swimming and trampolining.  It makes me tired just to type about all that action.

Before heading off the Island, we actually stopped and played mini golf at Pirate's Cove--my inner hippie college self cringed (ak, the blasphemy!), but it was super fun.

Hope you're enjoying July and not feeling that end-of-summer creep too strongly yet. Peace.