summertime

It is deep summer and the noon times are stock still and buzzing with the sound of insects and the afternoons are too long and the evenings are sticky until the sweat cools. The beach is a few blocks away, but the roads that lead there are paved black and so we stay in, hiding out.

While making supper, I leave the stove, stepping out into the strange haze-filtered yellow light to collect herbs. Basil, dill, mint, tarragon; all of them, for every meal. Peaches, corn. What more do we need to live on?

We escaped the heat and went to the East Coast, where a steady breeze blew and every night was right for a campfire. We lived in an orange tent under spruce trees for a few nights and my three year old fell asleep easily listening to Jerry Muskrat try to save the Smiling Pool and the baby's face was pale and round and cool and moon-like in the little snowsuit she slept in. During the day, we drove together in a rented mini-van, stopping at roadside farm markets and unpacking sandwiches from the cooler in the back.

Earlier this summer, my neighbour left a stack of books — six or seven at least, paperbacks, bestsellers — just inside the screen door at the back of our house. I'm on the last one. Despite the heat, summer's nearly over.

Online I've been reading Lily Stockman's dispatches for Vogue. "During the day I painted and tuned out the pornographers and set my sights on MFA programs, and at night I read Joan Didion and wondered, as I lay awake in the dark, if the man I loved would be killed in combat. Portrait of a marriage in wartime." Which, come to think of it, seem to be updated as often as this blog. So there.

it is spring

It is spring. It is spring now, and I accept that. I believe it, really and truly, despite the fact that it was only 5 degrees above freezing on Sunday.

Still, we went to the donkey sanctuary. My love loves him some donkeys, so we went on his birthday. A donkey sanctuary is a place for sad donkeys, and we listened and nodded as volunteers told their stories, and we walked under low cloud with a cold wind, and we drove home listening to the end of the basketball game. We lost in the last few seconds.

Jasper wakes in the morning, nurses, rolls off the bed, slides down the stairs, eats a few bites of banana and slips his pajama-footed feet into his rubber boots. I try to keep up, begging him to wait and to put on a hat and eventually I end up outside at dawn, wearing my winter coat over pajamas, listening to the birds.

I am reading Love Medicine before bed, and I am experiencing nostalgia for the present. I am jealous of myself because I know this will be my only opportunity to read this book for the first time. I try to savour it, but I find myself racing on. I go to bed every night with a headache from holding my breath.

It is spring, and I know it because the first of the seeds I've planted are starting to uncurl into twin leaflets. We'll have salad someday soon.

waiting for Moody Road

Late last winter, with the comfortable prison of breastfeeding adding to the usual feeling confinement that comes with this time of year, I was incredibly grateful to stumble upon another world in Kelly McMasters' essays from her rural bookshop, published on the Paris Review blog.

They were monthly dispatches describing the local goings-on, the current season, and how business was. They were also far deeper and wider than all of that: the trauma of a car accident; the New York City left behind; pregnancy and death.

When the summer came, and the dispatches stopped coming, I was truly disappointed. I'd be pen-pals with this little bookshop in Pennsylvania for life.

I think these pieces read best in the season they were written for, so get on over and read about March, or Waiting for Redbird.

Then check out their amazing online shop.