Sweet, cold air.

Steam rose hot and white from our mugs every morning. Space heaters softened the chill.

We greeted neighbors, shared persimmons from our tree and pawpaws from theirs.

Bought fries on the empty boardwalk but had to pay with cash.

Passed rows of headless meters and ducked into stores to stay warm.

Read books cover to cover under scratchy woven blankets.

Sat with silence and ghosts of summer.

Grains of sand on our feet

from a warmer time.

Lord do I miss these spots.

La Colombe Rittenhouse

Dilworth Park

The Continental Midtown

Graffiti Bar

Bud & Marilyn’s

Mission Taqueria

I took another trip to Philly for work last week. I love filming in cities, because the energy/people/sounds are so different from my daily experience. When I got home I noticed that most of my favorite clips were of some mode of transportation or other (with the exception of the part where I try to get my colleague Joy on camera and hilarity ensues), and so I combined them into one short little movie that makes me smile (and laugh at that silly part) every time I watch it.

I text her a photo: pictures of her life hang from clothespins on my kitchen wall.

“It cracks me up that you took pics of all of the messy places,” she texts.

“Those are all of the beautiful places,” I text back.

And it’s true. Every corner of her home held beauty. All things burst green with the late northern spring in the Oran Valley. We stayed at her place even though she was away, but her family memb[…]

Bruce gathered eggs from the hens’ favorite corner of the barn (why they don’t lay in their coop, no one understands, but chickens are complicated people) and served them up for our Saturday m[…]

And then there were those chickens. I couldn’t stop myself–I took about 900 pictures of chickens that weekend. Why? I have no idea, but who wouldn’t take pictures of giant pet birds that w[…]

When we were away from the house doing family things, attending the events for which we’d made the trip north in the first place, we talked about what Tilly, Monty, Jag and the chickens might be[…]

Weeks later, I stand in the kitchen while the tulsi steeps. I reach out and touch each picture and remember sweet birdsong, the squeak of trampoline springs, the crack of a bonfire, the quiet of a[…]

Thirty minutes before closing. The grounds are dotted with little houses, each one filled with whispering old objects.

Electric fans move the air inside the main building and I wander through three levels. A man browses through silverware on the ground floor. I see him again on the second floor, looking at a small wooden puzzle box. And then we’re on the third floor where the air is thin. We are spirits looking for lost possessions.

Eyes closed, my hand wraps around a small glass bottle that once held a tiny bouquet of buttercups.

All of the silver, all of the linen, all of the brass and the wood and the glass, every small and large thing wears a fragile coating of dust and soul and each thing wonders
who will ever love me again

I sat on that very same flat hometown rock when I was her age, on the side of a rushing cold water creek filled with crayfish and bubbles.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/DNZGlcfXM14

I watch my heart trampoline hard on the wake, tethered to me with the thinnest rope.

He swings wide, an inked stylus recording a round swell of current, then jerks left and right, scratching thick and black the sharp spikes of my fear. A final jolt, and he slips under the dark water.

Later, we thump hard and fast back to the marina.
His brown skin glows a life vest orange,
his blue eyes closed against fat rain drops.
He scratches his jellyfish stings.

Portland in July was a temperate, low humidity heaven on earth. Bungalows, restaurants, cape cods, bars, and flower shops are mixed together and spread out across the straight line of Southeast Division Street. I sat at a tiny outdoor table at The Woodsman Tavern, sipped a coa de jima and thought if I lived in that little house across the street, this would be my regular haunt.

Just spent four days in Syracuse to attend a loved one’s memorial service. I am pretty weary. We made little excursions to favorite places, and I saw some of my most favorite people, but really, I am just sad and tired.

My older sister invites me to come stay at a house on the beach to celebrate her 50th birthday. I rent a Ford Escape that has Bluetooth and satellite radio and cruise control, pack up my two kids, a suitcase and a cooler, kiss my husband goodbye and head for North Carolina.

We stop too many times for too many potty breaks, get too deep into the country to find a Starbucks, I drive too fast and get a speeding ticket five miles from the house, but eventually we pull into the driveway as the sun is setting behind Salter Path Road.

She meets us at the door and we hug tight and long. She has our mother’s eyes, different color but same shape.

We file through the doorway, take in the view, drop bags on our beds and have dinner with our brother and my sister’s friends from work that have come to celebrate, too. That night we fall asleep to the ocean sounds coming through my sister’s open window across the hall.

The next morning we rise at dawn and look for shells, pick through deposits of brown sea lettuce, lengths of rope, wilted plastic bags. Little white piles of dried and empty sand flea skeletons are everywhere, as if swept into neat heaps by the sandpipers. Our collected treasure swings at our sides in green buckets.

We return to the house, hose sand off of our toes and heels and make coffee, make small talk, make chicken salad and salsa. We spend the day moving between inside and outside. We play cornhole and Frisbee and Quirkle, listen to Jimmy Buffet and Steely Dan, drink pitchers of sangria and chilled Coronas, swim in the pool and the ocean.

Later we make dinner, then her friends head out. The rest of us settle into an evening of cards and chatting. During a game of Greek Poker we disagree about something unimportant and my sister starts to mother me, gently correcting me. I stare down into my iPhone and read a random email over and over again, angry. I look up and it’s my mother’s eyes that are looking back at me from across the table, and when my sister’s friends suddenly pile into the kitchen, back from one bar and ready to bring her out to the next, I make my apologies and follow the kids upstairs to get ready for bed. Asleep, I don’t hear her slip into her room when she gets back from her night out.

I am scrambling eggs when she comes into the kitchen the next morning. She pours herself a cup of coffee and then begins to move around the room, tidying up while I cook, and we talk about nothing, really. I want to know if she saw my face flush angry last night but I don’t ask. I step out of the kitchen onto the deck, into a chill morning wind, and look out at the beach.

The sky is grey, the sunrise blocked by clouds. A large pod of brown pelicans is feeding in the shallows right in front of the house, all wings and distended pouches and flying spray. A lone adult glides in from the south and approaches the flock, sailing over the dark waves, and as she reaches the group she hurls herself towards the sea with great purpose, plunge-diving they call it, a precision strike meant to catch the living thing shimmering like silver just under the skin of the water. I hold my breath until she emerges from the deep.

Spent another three days in Portland last week. The city has become more familiar to me. I have a favorite coffee spot. I got lost slightly less frequently than I did a month ago. I barely noticed rain-soaked hair and hem. And I found a nice warm place to have dinner that feels like my dining room at home. All of these small comforts combined made the separation from my family a little more tolerable.

A shaggy-haired guy with a toothbrush in one hand and an empty plastic gallon-sized milk bottle in the other approaches me as I walk down Stark Street and asks if I know where he can find some water. I tell him I have no idea, and he gives me a smile and thanks me and keeps walking. At Pioneer Square a man with a blue face leans against a bike rail and smokes a bowl of weed. I ask to take his picture and he smiles his yes, and after I take the shot, he blows smoke in my face. Head spinning, I cross the street and stop near the Starbucks to watch a game of chess. People gather in groups, talking and greeting passers-by, so different from how people act where I live that I just stand staring in awe until they start staring back. On my way back to my hotel I pass a musician playing buckets with a friend.

http://youtu.be/c5sC_n5f4Xs

We managed to slip out of town to the beach house and have enjoyed a few warm and sunny days, but now a cold front is rolling on in. At the ready are Playmobil sets, plastic Civil War soldiers, vintage Hardy Boys hardcovers, two decks of playing cards, and a variety of other wet weather beach house staples. I have good chocolate and a good book on hand, and am snuggled underneath a fleece blanket, so I say let the weather come.

I’m headed to Portland today. I’m listening to jazz on satellite radio, looking out the window at the canyons colored with dawn and just feeling so in awe of creation. A dirt road carved into the deep red earth below folds into a sharp angle, looping around a little town as an afterthought.

On a day trip away from Surfside, we walked around historic Charleston, SC. The air smelled of horses and ocean. As we walked up King Street from The Battery I peeked through countless wrought iron gates at the lovely private courtyards, which were my favorite part of the entire visit.

My mind and heart were bleached clean by the sun and salt water during one June week in Surfside Beach, South Carolina. I found myself wanting to use my Canon again after years of disinterest. I’ll be sharing a few sets of shots from that week in the next few posts.

When we are here there is no hurrying and no herding and no lunch-packing, no prying small hands off of my body, no pushes toward the school door, no blue eyes full of longing to be home. We walk along the bay bottom at low tide and dig, and we poke at slimy things with long sticks. We pick up the hermit crabs, and we talk about how we love our visits to the beach, and we don’t talk about the times in between. We are different people when we are here.

John’s late grandmother would sit here in her Jordache cut-offs and read in the evenings, her feet propped up on the ottoman and a glass of watered-down wine beside her. At low tide, a warm breeze would come to her through the sliding glass door, smelling of muck and mussels and ruffling the pages of her book.

We weren’t really lost; we could see the house just across the cove. But the fields were so very cold and muddy, and the winds came off the water and whipped stinging sand at our eyes and mouths, making the evening seem desperate and epic. And so our thoughts and conversation turned to fire and food and warmth and shelter. The Muscari pushed toward the sunset, unfeeling, insensitive to our struggle for survival.

I found it at the edge of the Atlantic, lifeless, grey, sliding in the foam. The pain of the frigid waters shot up my legs as I darted in to pluck the ocean’s dead from her shallows. The white last now sits on my window sill, the trophy of a landlocked housewife.

Last night I had such a vivid dream of the beach house in December: huddling against the bitter wind blowing through the uninsulated front wall, trying to coax water to flow through frozen pipes and out the tap. The winter will be long.

A classic dinner scene at the beach. I am honored that this shot was chosen as photo of the day today over at The Maternal Lens.

As I watched this day end I somehow knew that I was really watching the end of a season. When we left the next morning, the air had turned much colder. The leaves that lined the turnpike with fire on our way down turned brown and curled in the wake of our speeding northbound minivan.

Tomorrow evening, the kids and I will be at John’s grandmother’s place, watching the sun set over **the** **bay**. This is probably the last summer we’ll be able to spend time at the beach house: John’s grandmother passed away in December and the house most likely will be sold at the end of the season.

Ten random traditions we’ll be observing over the next ten days:

:: **Morning coffee** on the dock
:: Saying **goodbye to the sun** on the dock
:: Midnight visits to the dock (can you tell we like the dock?)
:: A large pie with onions, sweet peppers and mushrooms from ***Nicola Pizza*** in Rehoboth
:: **Fisher’s caramel corn** in Bethany (can you tell we like to eat?)
:: Book browsing at **Bethany Beach Books
**:: Letterboxing at **James Farm**, which is within walking distance of the house via road or squishy bay bottom at low-tide
:: $1 toy shopping at ***Fun For All*** in Rehoboth
:: Clamming at low tide, followed by our famous clams casino (again with the eating)
:: Wading to the far shore of the cove to hunt for dessicated baby horseshoe crabs (not for eating)

I’ll miss you while I’m away, but I promise to send you a postcard. Or a **picture**. Better yet, hop in the car and drive on over. We’ll be waiting at the end of the dock.

I want to need to remember:

:: a pod of dolphins hunting for their breakfast in the waters across the cove

:: the smell of laundry that has dried in the salty bay air

:: laughing and carrying on with old friends over wine and clams casino

:: a funky haircut that heralds a new season in my life

:: rounded triangles of moonlight reflected off the backs of thousands of waves and minnows

:: linguine con le vongole made by my former chef of a husband using clams dug from the bay with our own big and little hands. so. very. yummy.

:: reading sonnets under blankets after the weather turned much colder