Leaning into the Lull

July is lull season here in Maine. May and June's headlong rush of flowering and leafing and mating and pollinating and singing has settled into a comfortable summer's pace of more hidden fledging and seeding.

I've had the pleasure of catching some new birds shorty post-fledge: house wrens, white-breasted nuthatches, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, chipping sparrows, common yellowthroats. Our neighbor left most of his field un-mown, and in addition to giving me a front-row seat in watching the progression of grass to hay, this meant the bobolinks got a chance to raise their babies. I missed the swallows' maiden flight, though I watched the biggest baby in each nest box hog the opening (and the bugs) for two days. Bluebirds moved into one of the boxes as soon as the swallows moved out, but they're more shy, not making a spectacle of flight and feather collecting like the swallows.

As the birds wrap up their parenting duties and the flowers turn to seeds, I'm trying not to panic ("winter is coming"). After all, until this week the temperatures barely topped 80 degrees (and the nights dropped down into the 50s or low 60s, even down to 53 one night last weekend), and my trips to the beach so far have involved sweatshirts and very cold, quick dashes into the water. Which has got to mean there's a whole lot of summer left, right? 

After a big flurry of book launch events in late June, I too have hit a bit of a lull with few events scheduled for July. Which is a relief, since I lost a whole week to a tooth abscess. Though I powered through two book readings, two book signings, and four days of alumni weekend activities, most of those events bookended the worst of it, not counting one reading that took place the day of my root canal. In between, I spent a week lying on the couch watching TV all day and night (I was in too much pain to read or sleep or do anything else).

I won't say it was more painful than childbirth, but it lasted a lot longer. I've always thought the washing machine and the window screen were the most valuable of modern inventions, but now I'll throw in antibiotics and anesthesia. When I wasn't numbing my pain and brain with television shows, I thought a lot about people who lived prior to modern dentistry, especially the Ancient Puebloan people of the American Southwest, who apparently died at a relatively young age because the sand grains ground into their corn wore down their teeth. Now I know they didn't fade away from malnutrition but suffered in agony from exposed roots.

Once the pain and swelling subsided, I made it my mission to get out hiking and kayaking as much as possible. I also resumed on my morning pajama bird walks--which have grown a lot quieter of late--and daily search for butterflies. This month is, too, supposed to be a lull for butterflies. Much of the variety of last month is down, but I've seen more monarchs drifting around our property than ever before, and the pollinator garden, which I put in two summers ago, is seeing a lot of action, with six fritillaries, two skippers, and a monarch on one plant during one pass-by alone this morning. It won't win any garden club awards, the plants too close together and of crazily varying heights and colors, but the butterflies and other pollinators don't seem to care.

For what's left of this month, I'm leaning into the lull, in the vain hope that reveling in the slow pace of mid-summer can slow down time and the butterflies fluttering a little longer before it's time to face another season.

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Thinking of You

Despite the fact that I got snowed on while bird watching earlier this week and it's an as-warm-as-it-gets-in-April high 50s, it feels like summer here. The kind of summer no one has experienced since circa 1982, where days unspool one after the other with no real demarcation between one and the next. I can almost hear a housefly buzzing halfheartedly against the screen and taste Country Time Lemonade mixed with tapwater in a tall glass of translucent red plastic.

My job has ended for the season, as it would have without the pandemic, and my life's not that much different than it would have otherwise been, except my kids are home and I don't ever go anywhere. M works afternoons at the farm store, boxing up curbside pickup orders. In the morning he challenges his brothers to endless two-square tournaments. E has been pulling up the roots of weeds and small trees in the yard, expanding the lawn and making a duck-friendly copse of carefully thinned sumcac trees. Z is building a sailboat out of an old canoe. Both are energetically avoiding any acknowledgement that school is, indeed, still in session. They may have reached that "useful boredom" stage, the absense of which has been lamented by so many child phsychologists and educators. 

I, meanwhile, cycle between extreme anxiety and relaxed acceptance, while my two volunteer "jobs" help me keep a toehold in civilization via zoom meetings and reams of emails. It is, I know, outrageously unfair how unevenly the burden of this disease has been distributed, not only between those who are getting sick and dying and those who are merely bored at home, but also between those whose work load has been catapulted into the stratosphere—health care workers and teachers especially—and those toward whom endless articles about how to keep busy and stay sane while home with nothing to do are geared. Which adds another stage to my cycle—guilt, because I'm one of those, not bored, not in need of someone to tell me what to do, but not on the terrible front lines or trying to wranle 30 students from afar (having mostly failed to wrangle the two students who live with me, I know how hard their job is). 

So I seek a balance—don't lose sight of those who are facing extrememe hardships, but don't dwell on things outside your control. Stay home, wear a mask, try to make the best of it, and hold dear ones tight, even if it's from six feet, or six hundred miles, away.


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Slow Down, Summer!

This is the time of year I start to panic. Midsummer should be all about sun and fun, but as July creeps to a close, I think, "Winter is coming. My kids are growing up. I'm getting old. We're all going to die!" 

That's not true. I actually start freaking out when the lilacs blossom in early June. It hurts too much knowing they'll only be around a couple of weeks. Each subsequent bloom and fade is one step closer to THE END. 

It doesn't help that this year, in addition to the back-to-school sales that seem to start before the previous year of school has ended, I'm being bombarded with dorm-shopping listicles. I haven't even made it to the beach yet, and we're talking clip-on lamps and shower caddies? It just doesn't seem right.

This is the point in the essay where I say something wise, about how the caterpillar in the photo above doesn't worry about the first frost or hungry birds or an early death. It just spends its days munching milkweed, splitting its skin, and emerging bigger and stronger, working its way toward that final split, the spinning of its gold-trimmed chrysalis, the metamorphosis, the trip to Mexico on delicate but strong stained-glass wings. A lot can happen between here and there, but the caterpillar makes the most of the days it has.

But I don't feel wise like a caterpillar. I feel petulant, like a child who doesn't want to leave the park. Only unlike a child, I start worrying about the moment I'll have to leave as soon as I get to the swings, when instead I should just pump my legs and fly through the wind, for as long as I can. But really, what I really really want, is for every day to be a summer day.

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Learning to Sail

This week I've been taking sailing lessons. I've lived in Maine for more than twenty years and have only been on a sailboat once before, and I spent most of the time napping in the cabin. I wouldn't have even thought of sailing now except that a friend had signed up for the lessons and invited me to join her.

The first day, we helped rig the boat, learned words like sheet, halyard, and boomvang (which I hold dibs on for a band name if I ever take up music), and manned the jib while our instructor, Will, maneuvered the boat out into open water. We hadn't had any classroom instruction, and, though Will did his best to convey the relationship between the boat, the sails, the rudder, and the wind, it was a lot to take in wile putting it into practice. When it came my turn to skipper, a gust of wind caught the mainsail with the sheet cinched tight, we heeled over, and, feeling like I was sitting in one of those rocking chairs that tips over backward, I forgot everything Will had told us.

Water began to pour into the cockpit, and I looked up in time to see Will sitting on the gunwale, arched over backwards in a vain attempt to counterbalance the tilt of the boat. "Release the mainsheet," he said through clenched teeth. I did, the boat righted, and we spent a long time bailing the water out.

The next day we had much calmer breezes. A bit too calm, as we petered out in the doldrums near the end of our lesson. Day three there was a chance of thunderstorms, so we stayed on dry land, practicing tying knots and studying the points of sail. We were learning backwards, but on a boat you have to take what Mother Nature tosses your way.

By day four, I started to put all the pieces together—tiller, mainsheet, wind direction, points of sail—and managed a successful man overboard drill (rescuing Taylor, the moldy boat fender) and docked the boat.

From our first day, I was struck by the many variables involved in sailing—the wind, the water, the boat itself, gravity, waves, the sails, the lines, the shore, other boats—more moving parts, I thought, than any endeavor I'd ever before attempted. Then I remembered writing. There's plot, character, narrative arc, emotional arc, description, dialogue, point of view, theme, structure, rhythm, word choice. All must work together to keep the whole sailing smoothly.

A couple weeks ago, my sails were full and I was gliding effortlessly, making revisions to my book, starting a new essay. Then I had to change direction to work on projects for other people, and though I tacked fairly smoothly, when I finished the other projects, my bow nosed into the wind, and I found myself in irons, sails luffing. I'd lost momentum, and, moving backwards, my rudder steered the boat in the opposite way I wanted it to go.

My only choice is to scull until my sails catch wind—that means put my butt in a chair and pick up a project, even if it looks about as appealing as a swamped boat, and fiddle with it until I start to pick up speed again. I fully intend to bail out that essay—but I will probably wait until my sailing lessons are finished.

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Paddle Away With Me

I slide the kayak off the roof racks and balance it on my left shoulder—it weighs less than the double stroller I heaved in and out of the back of my car for three years—and ease the boat into the water near the culvert. Bullfrogs thrum in the wetland across the road, and green frogs twang on the edges of the pond. A small painted turtle hovering in the shallows dives away at my approach, and I hope I've frightened it away from any ideas of crossing the road.

I bought this boat on a whim a few weeks ago. I was mad because I'd been made to work on the Sunday of Memorial Weekend, and the sporting goods store was having a sale. So I decided to treat my ill humor with a little retail therapy on my lunch break. Only it wasn't a whim, because for years I've thought how nice it would be to have a little kayak for exploring the ponds and bogs and swamps near my home. But I thought that if I had one kayak, I would need five, plus some enormous vehicle in which to tote both boats and family.

The boat glides through the tall rushes of the outlet channel and out into open water. Usually I like to paddle along the northern shore, nosing among the pickerel weed and lily pads and watching whirligig beetles twirl, but today I've been staring down a threatening thunderstorm, and now that the dark bank of cumulonimbus clouds has passed on, I have only half an hour before I need to hurry home, cook dinner, and drive kids to their soccer game. So I paddle straight across the pond, heading for the northern shore.

It's easy to forget, when you're a mom, that you can do things by yourself. By "can" I mean both "are cabable of" and "are allowed to." The latter makes some sense; after years in which peeing alone is a triumph, you tend consider the people you gave birth to extensions of your own body. "Whither thou goest" and all that. But the former is crazy. Motherhood is a job that requires the knowlege of a complete set of encyclopedias, the organizational skills of a NASA ground crew, the control of a drill seargant, and the patience of Mother Theresa. Yet somehow raising children makes us feel unequal to other tasks. How much of that feeling is inherent, I wonder, and how much dictated by society?

I paddle northward, into a wind that rumples the dark surface of the water, calling gelatinous core muscles into duty. This pond is only two miles from my house, and it's small, only about 22 acres in area and 18 feet at its deepest point. But there are only five houses on its shore, all on the southwest corner. With the road and the houses at my back, I might be paddling into the wilderness. The eastern shore is edged in hemlocks and, beyond, a wooded hillside. To the north stand the spindly forms of larch trees, rising from a sphagnum bog. Tree swallows perch on the bare upper branches of the larches, chittering and making forways over the pond to snap up bugs.

Sheep laurel grows dense along the boggy shore, bright with magenta blooms. Turqoise pond damsels dance along the edge between water and land. I nose my boat between two hummocks to get a closer look at a pair of alien-shaped pitcher plant flowers and notice a small pink blossom, then another and another and another. Calopogon orchids have come into bloom in the last two days.

I take photos and make a few quick sketches, but all too soon duty calls me back across the pond. I paddle straight and steady, the breeze now at my back, my abdominal muscles remembering that they once had structure. I lift the boat out of the water and onto the car, cinching it down tight, and drive home with the wind blowing through my hair.

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A Poncho Out of Season

I've never owned a poncho before. The ponchos of my youth were brown, nubbly things with unsightly fringe. Not at all attractive. And besides, how would you do things, like ride a bike or climb a tree, with your arms trapped underneath an acre of crotcheted acrylic. Fast forward a few decades to the two recent winters I spent working at home, where, too lazy to start a fire in the wood stove, I would pile on sweaters and blankets. I started to think a poncho might not be such an impractical garment after all. Then, while I was working on my quilt of red concentric (consquaretric?) squares last year, I started dreaming of more red squares—knitted ones.

In late winter, I found myself free for an afternoon in Belfast, Maine, after a friend I'd planned to meet up with had to deal with a houseful of sick kids. So of course I made my way to Heavenly Yarns, in its new, upstairs, airy location, and set about searching for the right yarn. I didn't yet have a pattern, but I knew what I wanted—mitered squares, knitted together (no sewing!). And I wanted red, or mostly red, with some other colors, because just one color would never do. And I wanted worsted weight (no more lace weight, not for a while).

I found some almost just-right yarn, in shades of red, purple, and blue, and picked up four skeins. But there was also a turquoise-to-teal colorway that I found irresistible, so I took two skeins of that. To drag the whole thing back toward the warm end of the spectrum, I added two skeins of red-magenta-pink-peach. When I got home, I found the perfect pattern online, and after I cleared the decks of other projects (a certain hat, and another hat), I got started.

The pattern is extremely easy to follow, the mitered squares knit up a dream and don't require any counting of rows and only one purl row to every three knit rows. Yet the stitch work is varied just enough that, along with the suspense of wondering how the colors will come out, it keeps things interesting. I also learned some new knitting skills: picking up stitches (which I've been doing wrong for 20 years), three-needle bindoff, attached i-cord. The whole thing went together much more quickly than I expected (due, in part, to watching a lot more TV than usual; there are a lot of murder mysteries knitted into this project), but not fast enough. I finished it on the second day of summer, a bit late for wearing woolens. 

It also makes a useful headdress.

Fortunately, we had plans to go to the movies that night, and since movie theaters are cold in all seasons of the year, I got to wear the poncho, and I loved it! It's all the best parts of a sweater—warm and wooly—without any constricting arm holes or cuffs, no annoying buttons or zippers. It's like a blanket you can wear. I can't believe I've never thought of making—and wearing—a poncho before!

Ravelry notes, such as they are, are here.

Seah Kayaking and Nature Journaling

The very first thing I did the first time I came to Maine was go on a five-day sea kayaking trip. I went on another a year later and took kayaks out for shorter adventures during my two years in college on the coast. I bought a used ("tupperware") boat many long years ago, but only had it out on the ocean once or twice before I had kids and my kayak became a dust- and spider-collecter. I've gone out sea kayaking maybe twice since we had kids (one of those trips is chronicled here). And I didn't know how much I missed paddling, that salty film on my skin, even lugging heavy boats over mudflats.



Then I had the great good fortune to have been invited to teach a nature journaling workshop for Northstar Adventures and I spent last Saturday paddling with a small group of people in beautiful Penobscot Bay, from Castine Harbor to a pair of islands in Brooksville.

There we explored the shore, did a variety of writing and drawing exercises, and ate a delicious lunch (some of our group even took a swim in the cold water).



It was a pretty divine day and I was so happy to be back out on salt water (and wondering why the hell we live in Maine but inland). With each workshop, freelance gig, and piece of writing sold, I feel one tiny step closer to my career goals (which I once articulated as, "Go canoeing and write about it.") Yet, as we speak, I'm sending out resumes, because the demands of three teenage kids (all of whom have stomachs, feet, and teeth, three expensive body parts), a house whose appliances and fixtures are all exactly 16 years old and therefore all meeting their demise at once, and two 20+-year-old cars mean that the necessity for "real job" is becoming unavoidable. Which means that going canoeing and writing about it will once again become a weekend/evening/lunchbreak/interstitial pursuit. I won't say I'm not sad about that.

But in the meantime, if you want to join me for a THREE DAY!!! nature journaling workshop, I'll be teaching at Little Lyford Lodge in the Greenville area for the Appalachian Mountain Club. See here for details.

Summer Round-Up

I thought summer wouldn't go by so fast this year, since we didn't take a three- (or eight-) week road (or hiking) trip in the middle of it, but, if anything, I think it went faster. After the first day of "Hey Mom, hey Mom, hey Mom," I knew I had to sign E and Z up for a LOT of camps, which I did, which was nice for me (and probably for them, too, but they won't admit it), but it also resulted in a lot of the same kind of rushing around to get places on time that characterizes the rest of the year and is, I believe, a huge contributor to making time fly by. But, this summer was not ALL rushing around. Since my last, 4th-of-July update, we took a weekend trip to Vermont (for a funeral and some college tours, but also a bit of sight-seeing and hanging out in swimming pools; I have no photo evidence of that trip, however).

We also went to the beach.



And I, without kids, did some bird-watching.



And saw Maine's peculuar red-billed tropic bird.



And some bonus seals.



We went to the beach again.



And we went on a 5-day camping trip.


With 4 other families, for a total of 21 people, 12 of them being males under the age of 18 (five of those being males 13 years old).



While there, we climbed a small mountain.



Then we went to the beach again.



And we went hiking again.





And, finally, we celebrated the nominal (though not calendrical and, this year, not even weather-wise) last day of summer by taking a gorgeous boat ride among harbors and islands and coves.



This summer may have gone by too fast, and it may not have been marked by an epic vacation, but it was still pretty darn nice.

(Long) Weekend Things ~ Fourth of July

We usually stick close to home for the Fourth of July, but this year C's step-siblings were in town, so we headed up to camp for a few days.

But first, of course, we hit our town's parade, which was somewhat diminished due to new safety rules (no uninsured floats; no throwing candy from moving vehicles).




The rules didn't stop the fire truck brigade.




Nor the annual walking social justice float.



The fourth was hot and sticky, as I think it was all over the world, so afterward we found our way to a new swimming hole (which was an improvement over our original plan of running through the sprinklers). Afterward, we had a low-key cookout in the back yard.



I had thought this would be the year we finally made it to a firework show, but my brother-in-law showed up with a load of backyard fireworks just in time to save our children from a) having to leave the house and b) having to share space with strangers. Somewhere between the swimming hole and the cookout, the auto focus on my regular camera lens quit working, so no photos of the fireworks.

The next day, we headed up to camp, where the weather was perfect for soaking in the lake, canoeing, cooking out, and just general relaxicating.




We arrived home on Saturday, just in time for C and I to head out to a gala and performance of Pride@Prejudice (yes, the @ is intentional, and no, I did not even notice it when I bought the tickets; it refers to a device—literal and figurative, as in the actors made use of cell phones, laptops, etc.--the playwrite used for clever asides that explained some ambiguities to the audience and summarized bits of the narrative to scrunch the story into play length).

I was so excited about the gala (period costume optional), that I made a semi-regency dress to wear. I say semi because I bought a period-style pattern, but, taking one look at it realized it was way more complicated than I wanted to deal with so instead adapted the design of a blouse I have with an empire waist and raglan sleeves.

Beach Day

This is the first summer in four years that we don't have a big vacation planned. No three week road trip. No five-hundred mile hiking trip. And I've been feeling kinda sorry for myself. Whenever anyone asks what we're doing this summer, I sigh and say, "Nothing."

We do have a camping trip with friends planned, and a few days at in-laws' camp, but nothing epic, and I'd pretty much resigned myself to a summer spent puttering around the house, tackling some projects we've been thinking about for a long time. One of those, is painting the kitchen, and I would have spent all of the last two weekends doing that, except I was persuaded (with little difficulty) to attend a bird club trip the first of the two Saturdays and we were invited to E and Z's best friend's birthday party—at the beach—this past Saturday.

My kids are some kind of mutants who, whenever I say, "Let's go the beach," say "No! I don't want to. I hate the beach." But when a friend is involved, they change their tune. So we piled in the car and trundled off the to beach on what promised to be a hot, sunny, beachy kind of day, and hit the waves.

Sitting here, writing in 90 degree heat, 900 percent humidity, I feel cool just looking at this photo.

And it was pretty spectacular. It doesn't mean I won't have to coax and cajole them next time I want to go to the beach, but at least they admitted to having had fun.

In other coastal news, my essay "The World in their Hands," which takes place in part at the beach, and which appeared in The Maine Review last year, has been republished on Nature Writing for your reading pleasure.

Hermit Island Retrospective

This year's Memorial Weekend trip to Hermit Island marks the twelfth year in a row we've gone  camping there. While I don't anticipate it will be the last, I was feeling nostalgic for all our past trips and felt like rounding up a few several photos. Over the years, we've gone with various groups of friends and by ourselves, for the boys' birthdays and (more recently) for Memorial Day. One year we went in September. Each trip is a little different from those in the past, but every one includes: frisbee on the beach, dinner over the campfire (often grilled pizza, but this year I decided to forego the large amount of labor ahead-of-time that involves), sometimes a hike to the north end of the island, once or twice bicycles, always digging in the sand and chasing waves. But it's always fun and though I dread packing and unpacking the camping gear, it gets easier every year.

This year was extra different because M (yeah, that tiny kid standing on the log in the top photo) had to work Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, so he drove himself down to join us Sunday evening. We brought a friend of E and Z's with us, but none of our grownup friends were able to go. The weekend alternated between rainy and cold (but thankfully not both at the same time) as it often (but not always, as evidenced by lots of blue sky and sun in these images) does, and we spent a lot of time huddled around the fire, Z heating up smooth rocks for people to hold and me reading out loud. It wasn't our most active camping trip ever, but it was relaxing and fun and wonderful.