Ucrossing

I left Mathews early the morning of July 29 and arrived at Ucross Foundation on the afternoon of August 3. In between I bought apple cider donuts from a roadside stand in Virginia, played pinball in Lawrenceville, drank smoked bourbon on one big rock, ate a famous fried fish sandwich at Nied's Hotel, biked the streets of Chicago on a road bike at night, sipped rose and Hibiscus Ale to the tunes of Old Crow Medicine Show and Brandi Carlile, ate fish n' chips sushi and a chocolate chip cookie swirled in custard, hung out with a cat named Minion, spilled jalapeno hummus in my lap on I-90, camped on a mound of Sioux Quartzite in Minnesota, grilled steak and mushrooms to lantern-light and fireflies, found a bison herd, saw more motorcycles than I have ever seen or will ever see again, hiked seven miles in the Badlands backcountry by myself, saw bighorn sheep and one mean rattlesnake, climbed a ladder to The Notch, at Chef Boyardee and felt ten years old, rock-scrambled at sunset and sipped a beer on top, looked at Saturn through a telescope, crossed the Black Hills, drove through Sturgis on the opening day of the 75th annual motorcycle rally with along with 1 million bikers, and sailed through Wyoming singing Paul Simon, right to the foot of the Bighorn Mountains. 

Catchup

It has been over two years since I have left words on this page. Geographically, I find myself exactly where I was in my last post: still on Stutt's Creek, a creekrat. I went firefly hunting with Allie for the third time this June. She was nettle-stung in the Rappahannock last week; her shoulder is streaked with red beneath her chlorine-green and blonde hair. It reminds me of the scars of lightning-strike survivors, what are called lichtenberg figures. There was a thunderstorm Saturday that came on so strong the whole county lost power and I stood beneath the pines and let it soak me in chest-pounding bouts of rain. I still bike at night, a sweaty wide-eyed thing lit white in the headlights of lifted pickup trucks. I still drink Legend Browns and visit Southwind for jam night, though I haven't worked there in over a year. And I still love this county, its cornfields and marshes and left houses and honeysuckle. Its people, so many of whom are now my easy friends, my new-old friends, my Mathews family.

So what has changed?

In some ways my life more as it was than it has been in the intervening years. After living with a person for two years, I am alone again. My closet contains only my clothing, the fridge only my food. No more cowboy shirts and Coors Light. Back to dresses, back to grocery bags of cucumbers. It's strange and comfortable at once. I miss him without regretting the decision I made. I miss him without regretting the time I spent with him. But I was used to missing him, so that too is a bit of the same.

The biggest change, perhaps, has been to my body. In the early winter of 2014 I chose to make a change, to address an issue that has long bothered me: my weight. I've lost almost forty-five pounds to date. I began in the winter walking miles in slush and wind and snowdrifts. I'm now biking upwards of a hundred miles a week on the backroads through those marshes and cornfields I love so much. I find myself lean and muscled and tanned dark by hard hours under a hot sun. My closet is almost empty and my hair is longer than my shoulders. I still look in the mirror and startle: who is that? But I do not miss her, the person I carved this new me from. I do not hate her, but I am happy not to be her anymore. Not to live in a body defined by its trauma, its grief, its coping mechanisms.

But the real changes are about to happen. I often feel, these days, as if I am hanging my toes off the cliff edge, counting down to the moment I finally leap. In seven days I leave for Wyoming, to spend four weeks at the Ucross Foundation as a writer in residence. It is a scary, thrilling thing, and I am ready. I am ready, too, for all that will come after. After there may be a move to Austin, or back to DC, or to somewhere. After there may be all manner of decisions I can't yet imagine. After there will be changes, scary and significant and necessary. But that will all come after. All I can do now is plan, and bide, and enjoy what time I have here now.

Creekrat

I live on Stutt's Creek, where there are baby nettles and snakes that look like copperheads and two goldens who think they are deerhounds. I have a fern that's meant to live outdoors and a kitchen with empty drawers. The children next door call me Miss Carolyn and I have a date to look at some fireflies in the cornfield up the road with the eldest, Miss Allie, this Sunday night, her schedule permitting. We went on a bike ride and she showed me all the houses on her road (Miss Marlene, Miss Sally, Miss Kaykay who has a pool we can swim in). I work the floor at Southwind Cafe slugging unsweet teas with lemon and softshells and Terrapin ales. My shoes are different sizes. There are red, white, and purple flowers on the porch at Homagin and Joyce has died. The asparagus is past. Everything is strange and beautiful and I'm forgetting, forgetting.

Long Virginia Sleep

I started this blog intending to use it, in part, as a way to track my progress in writing the prospective novel from which Long Virginia Sleep takes its name. It really didn't turn out that way, and this blog became something else independent of my fiction writing. This became a means of confession, documentation, and more often than not, waxing poetic about the place that I love beyond reason: Mathews County. As I've come to know Mathews better and spend more time there, my need to write about it from a personal context has waned. I live there, in some sense, and though it remains utterly beautiful and magical and everything that made me fall in love with it as a child, it's also a real place populated by real people, many of whom I'm proud to call my friends, coworkers, and (of course) family. I spent the summer working the bar at Southwind in what I see as a sort of cathartic, circle-closing experience. To end up an employee at the place whose employees and customers were the first to welcome me, truly, into the real Mathews--one that isn't just herons and thunderstorms and bike rides by myself--means more than I can say. I met a boy who loves Mathews like I do, and he's real too. Though I remain inconvertibly a come-here, I feel a part of the place. It's my home. Even now as I sit in my apartment in DC with the National Cathedral rising from the red trees outside my window, I feel Mathew's tug on me, like tide.

Yesterday, I wrote the 100th page of the novel. This too feels like a circle closing. I am nervous and tired. But as much as I'm afraid, I'm ready.

Summerland

A report from the summerland. My shins are scratched and bruised and stung and my soles are hard as pine. I am burnt and bleached, all salt-cured skin. I find I think of myself as a summer critter. It is very July now, with scorching hot days and air you can see. A family anchors their sailboat offshore, and under the boom boom of far-off fireworks we float out to it on dark water. Revolutionary War re-enactors camp at the Civic Center, wool-clothed in 100 degrees, and I wonder whether they snuck into air conditioning overnight, or sweated in their side-by-side cloth barracks. I have a party, and neighbors arrive by kayak to eat sweet and sour grilled chicken and crookneck squash from the overflowing garden. The fireflies are thinning now, replaced by the daytime static of cicadas and horseflies. Somehow the flies get in the house and I hunt them, swatting at AC-cool air. I bike to the next point with a chocolate pie in one hand and a cooler of beers under my shoulder. Envoy, a band made up of four nineteen year olds, play live on the porch as people dance beneath sparklers and morning glories and a boy who looks like a centaur fishes croaker in the shallows beyond. A Good-Natured Riot rocks bluegrass in the corner at Southwind while I pour sweating Ranger after Brown after Wolaver Wheat and the banjo player is stony-faced-cool as his metal-tipped fingers fly. I buy an antique glass lamp at Holly Hill and rewire it as old paint flakes. Wild thunderstorms tear branches from the maples and blow the tomato cages over, scattering half-ripe fruit. Friends gather on the porch to watch the lightning. We paddle after dolphins at sunset, following them up the Haven as their backs break orange water, too fast to catch. The nettles are coming, and blackberries burst on the vines. 

Candid + Weary

The short of it is that my grandfather is dying. Our family became aware of his oral cancer's resurgence a few weeks ago. Operation was not an option worth considering given his age, physical strength, and mental condition. We were told he had somewhere between one and three months. Then, last weekend, a consulting hospice nurse projected two or so weeks. As we are a family of planners, this information was helpful; as a family of variedly emotional family members, this information was difficult. As much as we're able, we're adjusting to this new time frame. I was in Mathews last weekend, am back this weekend, and am planning to return every weekend until, alternatively: Granddaddy's death or the end of my semester, when I'll be coming down full time. I know full well that death, or the possibility of death, can make daily life feel crazy. A crew of nurses are seeing to my grandfather full time now, and everyone else is keeping busy in their own way, but there's this undercurrent of near panic to everything any of us endeavor to do. It's unavoidable; we know what's happening, or what will happen soon, and planting watermelons in the dingle and redecorating our bedrooms and stalking wild asparagus and eating pound cake (so much pound cake) isn't about to make us forget it. I'm glad I can be here, but I feel weary. Candidly weary or wearily candid, as Aunt Lynne and I debated last weekend. Grandmother is weariest of all. And we're all just getting ready, getting ready, getting ready.

Radishes

It is pouring like it's summer--like I could step out the front door barefoot into rain warm as the Chesapeake in August. Hop on my bike and ride soaking to Tin Can Alley to float on my back in the waves. A thunder-thick afternoon. I am islanding for the weekend, happy to get out of DC, get an eyeful of the new jonquils, and see Blue Line Highway play at Southwind. I've decided it's Spring, and no one can convince me otherwise. Even if the rain is freezing and the bay too cold for swimming.

I'm finding it difficult to focus on all of the many things I should be doing now, versus all of the many things I plan to do soon. For example, what I really need to be doing is: 1. Writing fiction. 2. Writing poetry. 3. Writing the two stories I've pitched for my Lit Journalism class. And I have been doing these things to some extent. For whatever reason, poetry seems to be drawing a lot of my focus. I found myself diving into a research wormhole early this week while writing a poem about ginkgo trees (which, incidentally, are even more awesome than I had previously thought.) Ginkgo biloba trees, or something very very similar to them, have been growing on earth for 250 million years. Dinosaurs ate these trees. The first mammals probably did too. And now we walk around complaining about how smelly the nuts that fall off them are. Suffice it to say that somewhere in researching ginkgo trees I found myself researching the entire history of life on earth. A wormhole, like I said. Anyway, I should also be devoting more of my energy to researching Put-In Creek and Old House Woods (Mathews readers: if you have opinions or stories concerning either topic please get in touch with me).

I find, however, I am more invested in planning my summer garden. I'm growing persian cucumbers and radishes this year; thrilling, I know. Other summer things: I want to learn to drive the boat finally. I'd like to take an art class or two at the Bay School. I want to entertain more. I also, more seriously, want to put myself on an intensive writing schedule for my thesis. A terrifying prospect, but I'm kind of excited about it as well. But for now, dreaming of radishes.

Lately

Last night I did the brave and scary thing of reading something I had written in front of people I both knew and didn't. The reading is something a graduate of the AU program, Mark Cugini, puts together, and he asked me to read and I said yes after months of being conveniently out of town. I think that I did well enough, given how nervous I was, but find I am mostly relieved that it is over. It's funny but inconvenient that I have no trouble reading someone else's words aloud; it's reading my own that makes my voice shake bad as my fingers. Still, I know that it's important to do the brave and scary thing once in a while, and am glad that my grandmother got to see me read. The bar was hipster-nasty, and Grandmother said, You take me to the nicest places.

Life between summers.

I finished my journal a few weeks ago. It felt very significant to have finished something that I had been working at for so long. The aim of a journal is not to finish it, of course, but it is a first for me. I started writing in the thing on December 15, 2005. I have been toting it around for seven years. I am sorry to have filled a book with so much sadness, but glad I filled it nonetheless. Rilke provided the last words: You must change your life.

I am in DC, and have been for almost a month. I've been a big baby about it, too. I managed to make it through the whole of my month-long winter break having spent only 72 hours in this city, and though it did me some good I returned to find myself feeling rather irritated to be here. School provided a welcome distraction, and I've been very busy. Still, I miss Mathews. I think it gentles me to be there, and in the city I find myself feeling less patient, harder. There are so very many people here, and so many situations to negotiate and avoid. I find I've been a bit reclusive. This is, in part, because I'm trying something new. I quit alcohol about three weeks ago, and, for the most part, have stuck with it. It's part break and part experiment. It also wasn't born of necessity; I haven't been particularly worried about the amount of I was drinking, nor was it out of control. I just woke up done with it, in the way I occasionally have concerning cigarettes, and thought, Well, hell, might as well try it. So I did. Three weeks later, still done with it. It's been unnerving more than anything--recognizing just how woven into my life a glass of wine or a beer had gotten. It wasn't dependency, but it was habit. I think the hardest part of it has been other people, to be honest. The people I tend to share time with are not what my grandmother would call teetotalers, and I love them for it. But, as one might imagine, my sudden refusal to partake of things bubbly and mouth staining represented a rather bizarre and baffling departure. I am left feeling like I'm not always sure what to do with myself, as I suspect are they. Still, I am happy with my decision and its results.

And I have been getting a hell of a lot done. Writing, cleaning, errand-running, cooking, reading. I have an excess of energy. The weather has been particularly enabling. This winter is suspicious in its warmth and total lack of horrific forms of precipitation (slanty rain, floaty rain, ice rain, ice, floaty ice, wet snow.) I fear that real winter is yet to arrive, and that I'm going to find myself trudging through snowdrifts in May. Fingers crossed that this isn't the case. I am, as ever, pining for summer with an intensity that I think people typically reserve for their lovers, or chocolate cake. I try to conjure it, sometimes, but my grown-up person skills of make-believe provide a sorry substitute. One of my junior high yearbooks had a title that's unexpectedly stuck with me: Life Between Summers. I'm sure it was meant in a sort of hah-hah school sucks we're adolescent sort of way, but I'll be damned if that's not just how it feels, especially in February.

Darlings

Writing is so hard, really. I think I used to think it came easily because I didn't know what I was doing. Not that I really know now. But, somewhere along the line, I think I've gotten accustomed to the act of self-criticism--something that absolutely eluded me during my time at Santa Cruz. Faulkner advised that we kill our darlings, and I think I'm just learning it now, after five or so years of writing with intent. It's horrifying to admit you've been so arrogant, but yes, absolutely so. I think some of this is coming up because I'm attempting to rewrite completely a piece I first tackled three years ago. It was part of my senior thesis for fiction writing at Santa Cruz, and I read a portion of it at the graduates' reading. And I thought it was pretty great.

It wasn't. It was chock full of darlings, so choked with them that I'd sacrificed scene for pretty summary and repetition. Just a mess from start to finish. An exercise in wordplay without an ounce of structure or restraint. What a nightmare. Also, it had the worst title imaginable, something I remember commenting on at the reading itself: The Winter Ham. Don't even get me started.

It's an amazing thing, to get some years between you and the things you have loved. Whether they be people or the ideas of people or the mere shadows of people you once met. Be they places or dances or songs, impermanent as tide. Some things get stretched and faded and some just get distilled. They come through time reduced but not the lesser for it. I took sick glee in slashing through that old piece today, wreaking havoc of all things beautiful and indulgent. Delete delete delete. It's probably a fitting project, given the nature of the week. I realize now, days after the anniversary, that perhaps what's bothered me so much about this one is that if Laura had lived, she would today be as old as I was the day she died. All of twenty-two. Someone asked me how old I am this week and when I said twenty-five I saw her half wince and force a smile. But it's okay, I wanted to say. It's well earned. I come through this week with some goals, better realized given the task at hand. I am seeking discipline. In writing, in trying, in hoping. Because these things aren't so easy, really, though we make them sound that way sometimes.

God. The Winter Ham. I can hardly believe it.

1095 Days.

She died three years ago. I was twenty two years old, and she was nineteen. There are a lot of numbers to associate with this kind of event. It seems easier, sometimes, to simplify it to the numbers. October 3, 2008. The hour of the day, the minute. But if I've learned anything in the three years since my sister died, it is that there is no simplifying this. It does not reduce. The grief changes, becoming more like an old, deep bruise than the fresh blood that it replaced.

Other things become stranger. It is strange to grow up without her. It is strange that she will always be nineteen years old. And it is strange that as I grow up and change and move I become less like the person my sister knew. When Laura died, I was twenty two years old. I was one year out of UCSC, and still living in an apartment in downtown Santa Cruz with Hannah. I was as a newly trained projectionist at the Nickelodeon. I had been dating Colby for about half a year. A lot has changed since that afternoon in October. I spent another half year in Santa Cruz, working at the Nick, dating Colby. I don't remember a lot of it, to be honest. I did what I had to do to get through. I went to a therapist, I cooked a hell of a lot. And then in April my therapist said, If you could do anything right now what would you do? I said, I would go to my grandparents' house in Virginia and live there. And she said, Okay. In July of 2009 I sold the bulk of my belongings, put my furniture in storage, and crossed the country with what little could fit in my car alongside Hannah, Alex and a fern. I arrived at Homagin on August 1 and spent the next year in the house. I spent a lot of that year by myself, a time during which I dismantled and rebuilt myself to the best of my ability. In the winter, between building fires and riding my bicycle on slow-laden roads wearing a man's bulky overcoat from the downstairs closet, I applied to graduate school. I got into American University's MFA program, and left the island for that in August 2010. I moved into my DC apartment on California Street Northwest and started school in a week period. In the year since, I've written upwards of one hundred pages, made a whole new bevy of friends, and come to value the little Virginia county I left behind more every time I've returned for a weekend, a week, a month this summer.

If my sister could meet me now, I wonder what she would think. It is an unfair proposition. It depends so much on the suspension of so much disbelief. It requires a lot of what-ifs, and those aren't something I readily indulge in anymore. In truth, I left them behind on October 3, 2008. There are some things that a "what if?" can't remedy. Some things are too hard to pretend your way out of. My sister died, and as the years grow between that day and today, I find there's a lot I can't imagine my way into anymore. I do allow myself to think that if she could, Laura would be proud of me. I would like to think she would like to know me. I can't say for sure, but I'm getting more used to that.

Joy

I am in search of joy--collecting it, hoarding it. It is an odd thing, because to be completely honest, the pursuit of joy was never something I gave much time or energy to in my before life. I revile the word, even. I associate joy with holiday greeting cards and insincere salutations from distant relatives and unfortunate names for children. It's a small word, but one that is so over-used and cheapened. It's used until it's bereft of meaning. According to the extremely reliable dictionary.com:

joy: the emotion of great delight or happiness caused by something exceptionally good or satisfying; keen pleasure; elation.

So that is what I am looking for, and I think I have been, without knowing it, for a long time. There have always been moments of incredible happiness, of course, even when I was at my saddest, or saddest-ish. I've had to recalibrate all that a bit since Laura died--"saddest." This all might sound very navel gazing and, well, silly, but this is a new realization for me. A lot of people talk about wanting to be happy, myself included. Just happy, which I suppose means that we all want to be happy most of the time. I think this is an impossible demand. It's a difficult thing to feel genuinely happy when you're in line at CVS on a Friday night. Sure, you may be contented. You may be satisfied with your life and what/who you've surrounded yourself with. With the layout of the little universe you inhabit. I think that is feasible, and something I hope for. But, to be happy. I just can't be happy all the time. Instead, I'd like to experience moments of true joy. I think this all comes from the idiotic bike ride I took on Saturday night, with Kathleen and Scott. It was totally a bad idea in every sense, but in that absurdity I found myself experiencing total joy. I think Kathleen and Scott did too. It was impulsive--a "hey.... why don't we just bike there?' moment followed by ten minutes of all-out hollering. But it was absolutely joyful. And, as I said in my previous post, I felt young. I felt my age. The inevitable result of what has happened in my life is the feelings of aging I've experienced. Laura died, and I feel older than I am. I didn't in that moment. I think this summer has been full of joyful moments punctuating long periods of contentment, which is really all I could ask for.

Joy: swimming in Barn Creek late at night while the low tones of Blind Willie Johnson and Billie Holiday float down from the house and Uncle David sits on the bench on the dock, making sure I don't drown. Biking to the beach and swimming to the sand bar just as the sun sets, with walnut jellies glowing where my hands hit the water. The barn party in Tick Neck, and standing outside looking in as two women try and force their friend to dance. Learning to hula hoop on the Courthouse green outside Southwind on a Saturday afternoon. Running down the escalator at the Dupont metro. A cloud covering the sun at Bonnaroo. Showering in a hotel outside of Manchester having just left four days of dust and sweat behind. Riding the second tallest roller coaster in the world at Cedar Point and crying from the wind. Watching Kathleen epically wipe out at the Black Cat on Saturday night, only to pop up bleeding profusely but laughing even more. Handing out a story to my workshop and knowing that it's really, truly the way I want it to be. Picking vegetables from my Homagin garden. Kayaking in the late evening, following the wingtips of cownose rays. Pulling into the driveway of my family's home on Gwynn's Island.

District

I've left my island refuge for my life in the city, and though I'll admit to some pining for bicycles and gardens and beers at Southwind, it is good to be back in DC, and to have a schedule. I have returned to school as a newly minted second year, which comes with a great deal less anxiety than I experienced as a fledgling, lost first year. It is raining in the city today, and I keep looking out my window to see if the leaves in the big tree are bouncing and finding nothing--just the city skyline. The tree was taken down while I was last on Gwynn's Island, cut off at its knees and leaving my view much altered. While my privacy remains largely intact given the height of my apartment, my neighbors across the alley must find theirs hugely changed. Today a striped cat in the living room of the house just below me stared up at me while I sat on my balcony--the first time I've ever been "seen" by any neighbor. I waved at it, unsure of what else to do, and went back inside.

I've got a story due a week from today, which means I'm spending most of my waking time worrying about it and slowly hacking away at the piece. By that, I mean writing. I find my approach to writing is somewhat like that of a sculptor; I spend a great deal of time considering what I am about to write, unwilling to write anything until I have at least a rough image of what is going to come from this great hunk of stone (meaning, all of the words in the universe and all the images and stories swimming around in my somewhat unfocused brain). And even then, I won't actually write down a word until I have the perfect sentence. It's all very perfectionistic of me, and probably doesn't serve me. This all used to be very effortless to me, and whether that indicates a change in my life at large or simply a change in my expectations of my own writing, I don't know.

What have I been up to, other than waving at cats? This weekend I went out with Kathleen, and we went to a party at her very good friend's apartment with the intention of leaving to dance after a few drinks. A few hours later, where do I find myself but whipping down 14th street on an oddly clunky red bicycle, rented from a Bikeshare kiosk in Columbia Heights. We wound our way through streets and among the usual herds of people going every which way on Saturday nights, whooping in delight, and I felt very young. We danced at Black Cat's Moon Bounce/Dance Affair until late into the night, and it was a great, great night. I met Azwa, my UCSC freshman year roommate, for brunch on Sunday morning and spent the rest of the day sculpting, with little to no result until the moment before I fell asleep. So, island-pining aside, my return is going well.

Walking After Midnight

Late August nights find me torn between contentment and mourning, for I know it is ending: summer. Fall is creeping in, at first a threat and then, inevitably, a fact. The light has changed, and the warm, saturating haze of summer days gives way to the cold edged evenings of coming September. The water cools and the nettles vanish, and with them, the ease I find overtakes me in June and July. There are hot days left, I know, and on those that the humidity holds its ground I could almost convince myself that it's not over yet. I harvest butternut squash from the quickly waning summer garden, and the tomatoes ripen on dry, brown vines. I do love autumn in Mathews--the wild persimmons and the rashes of brown and red in the island meadows, but for me, summer is the magic time. I find myself a bit nostalgic for weeks only just past. It has been a good, strange summer. Bonnaroo and Pittsburgh, hot District nights, and long sojourns here, on Gwynn's Island, a time I spent swimming at Tin Can Alley, biking along the lanes, and sitting comfortably at the new bar at Southwind, drinking cold pints of Legend Brown and Lager while listening to the Usual Suspects, Runaway String Band, and Mixed Grill. I can't complain about that kind of summer. The cooling days make it easier to leave, to return to school and DC friends and the little life I've built for myself three hours north of where I sit now, watching the sun bow out to darkness over Barn Creek. But I am sad to leave now, as I am every time, at any time of year and in any circumstance. My car will leave Mathews with Virginia plates, an admission on my part to my love for this place, and my anticipation of my return.

Some Sad Shit.

Sometimes, without any

real telling why, I become aware of a sadness. It is pervasive and real, and I sometimes fear that if I let myself stop to consider it that this sadness will overtake me. I know that people who have lost people as I have lost my sister know about this sadness. Maybe those who haven't lost anyone know it too. It's not to say that I am not okay. It's just to say that there is a piece of me now that feels like it doesn't belong to the rest of me anymore. Like I've lent it out. It's the piece where the sadness is and can stay and grow or subside as it will, given time and experience and age. And I keep it there because if I don't allow this place for it, I know that I can't do all the things I need to do: the grocery shopping and the metro riding and the dancing and the growing up that continues to put years between the person I am and the person I was the day that Laura died. We don't really have so much time to live, in all, and I am not going to spend my time circling around events that cannot be undone or a person who is not here. I fear I've teased this piece too completely from the tangle--that I don't allow it enough moments. It's difficult to negotiate the desire to be fun or funny or easy to be around with that to express who you are, when so much of who you are is determined by a terrible loss. I guess that I am trying to say: I miss my sister.

How We Go, When We Go

It has been a very busy summer, which is quite honestly ridiculous, as I have been neither working nor in school. At the outset I told myself that I would do Bonnaroo, visit California, and go to Nevada for the Air Sailing contest. The first is the only thing on that list that I've managed to do. And yet, I feel I've winnowed away the time in three day increments. Three days here, three days there, occasionally punctuated by a week long sojourn on Gwynn's Island. Between visitors and visits, I find myself in August, less than a month away from the start of my second year of graduate school. I visited my Yankee relatives in Pennsylvania over the weekend, stopping off in Springfield to pick up my youngest cousin, Marie (my mother's brother's daughter) before heading off to Pittsburgh, where my cousin David (her older brother) is enjoying the bizarre and fast-changing terrain of post-college life. Quite unexpectedly, I found myself in Ohio riding the second tallest roller coaster in the world. It was in Ohio that I realized that I'd never been to Ohio before, and I found myself mentally tallying the states I've visited since July of 2009, when I up and left California. What follows is that list.

Road Trip of Danger and Excellence, July 2009:

California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia

And I haven't seemed to slow down. In Virginia I lived, quiet and alone, and learned to recognize the trees. In Pennsylvania, I've slept in the bedroom my mother slept in as a child and trampled brilliant yellow leaves at my uncle's cabin in the autumn-lit Poconos. I've screamed upside down on roller coasters in Ohio and dressed as a pigeon at Jessica and Travis's Halloween-bedecked brownstone in Brooklyn. I've watched New Jersey and Delaware's backyards whip by from the window of the Acela, and cracked lobster in Maine. I've moved to DC and burnt brown under the dust-choked Tennessee sun, eyes trained to the stage, where the members of Old Crow Medicine Show stamp their feet. I have been tired and I have driven for eleven hours and I have flown and flown. I have grown to know the three hour drive to Gwynn's Island better than that to Santa Cruz from Fremont. I find I want to know this country and its cities and its hills, its deserts and softly sloping Eastern mountains. I used to wake nights in Santa Cruz with the most overwhelming urge to run, to step into my car and drive and drive until the past fell away. I am not running, I think. I am seeing.

Nettled

They have arrived. At first, they were phantom-like: impossible to detect in the water, but for the screams of the children inevitably being stung on shore (usually when I was way out in the water, uneasily imagining my voyage back to shore). I've not been stung since my time here with D'uncle, about three weeks ago. I was out night-swimming in Barn Creek, the dark water cradling me as David sat, monitoring my survival, when a nettle brushed against my torso. I could feel its tentacles brush my skin like ribbons, sliding across my side. It felt like burning and vinegar in my eye at the same time. I climbed out, threw myself in the hottest of hot showers, and recovered. I still find that I fear them, floating white and bulbous in the cloudy bay water. And they're here en masse. They are beautiful--I can't deny that. Odd, otherworldly. They really don't seem like they should exist. Jelly-like tentacled floaters that sting like hell, just wafting about the Middle Peninsula like underwater balloons? I sort of really do hate them, admittedly. I haven't had a proper swim in days, ever since I stuck one toe in the water at Tin Can Alley and jumped backwards, reeling at the sight of them, trailing across the surf.

But. Something else, that is amazing. At night, as harmless as the sea nettles are venomous, the sea walnuts slap ashore, emitting bright bursts of blue-green in the milky tide. The same beach that by day seems beset by a mean-hearted attack turns magical. Stingless and glowing, the sea walnuts, jostled in the waves, phospheresce. If I was brave enough to swim among their less delightful cousins, they would bump against me and the water would light blue and green. I find myself biking to Tin Can Alley at night to sit on the salt-worn wood and watch them spin and tumble in the water I'll avoid until late August, glowing.

Day of Attempts

Granddaddy and Lynne departed Homagin this morning, leaving me to my own devices. I'm islanding for a few days, recovering from the considerable exhaustion and excitement born of my recently completed trip to Tennessee for Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo consists of a multi-stage, 80,000 person music festival on a large piece of farmland in Manchester. I went with my long-standing California traveling companions, Hannah and Alex (of the cross-country trip that delivered me to this fair coast in summer of 2009) and we deigned to camp in the inconceivably huge, hot Tent City for four days. It stayed in the 90s for the duration, driving me to drink gallons of water, buy a cowboy hat, throw myself fully clothed beneath a huge mushroom fountain, forego proper showering for four days, and strip down to my bra in public. The music was amazing, the experience memorable, and the survival of it a matter of some pride.

Anyway, after returning to DC for a few days, I needed a break from the masses, be they half-naked hippie-hula-hooping Rooers or Blackberry-toting suit-wearing DC dwellers. The island seemed ideal for this purpose. Today I elected to be incredibly lazy (which is really very easy on Sundays in Mathews, as almost everything is closed), make a ridiculously elaborate meal, and spend time outside. Homesick Texan's Sour Cream Enchiladas were the pick, and I scurried off to Food Lion in search of corn tortillas. Sadly, corn tortillas were not to be had at either Food Lion or Best Value, and I could not in good conscience justify driving to the next county just to go to the Walmart Supercenter just to buy twelve corn tortillas. My rampant perfectionism somewhat frustrated, I bought flour tortillas, in what turned out some two hours later to be a fine substitute.

After dinner I decided I was going to take a swim in the Bay, despite witnessing several stinging nettle stings the day before (though no nettles, oddly). I am rather wary of stinging nettles, even after having been recently stung. Arriving at the beach, I found myself a bit timid. Standing waist deep in the decidedly opaque water, I couldn't help but be a bit nervous about the whole endeavor, especially given that I was alone and should I be dragged under by some kind of huge jellyfish monster there would be no one to report on it. Finally, it was the sight of the shark-like wing tips of a school of cownose rays (or skates, as they are referred to locally) some twenty feet offshore that drove me from the water. I have heard that rays are friendly unless stepped on, but again, alone, I wasn't so keen on testing that theory.

I returned home and climbed into the one person kayak, determined to get a closer look. A large school of rays has returned to Milford Haven this summer and tends to arrive in the water in front of the house right before sunset. I didn't see any wingtips breaking the smooth surface, but I clamored into my bright red vessel and made my way slowly up the shore towards Hole in the Wall, eyes trained to the water. No sign of cownose rays--not even a ripple. I lay back in the kayak with my legs inelegantly thrown over the hull and drifted, watching for rays but only seeing the occasional nose tip of a terrapin emerge from the shallow waves. Right around the time I was ready to give up, a looked up and noticed that the current had delivered me to the water beside the dock my as-of-yet unseen/unmet neighbors' new house, and a troop of rather oafish twenty-something boys were headed up the dock in my direction. I threw an embarrassing wave in their direction and took off. Ten minutes later, pulling up to the stairs in front of Homagin, I looked to the sunset and saw, in the water just off my own dock, a cownose ray's wingtips breaking the surface.

And The Livin' Is Easy

This is what summer is.

Barbecue brisket sandwiches with cole slaw and sweet corn, dripping on white china plates as we sit on the indoor porch, a wall of screens the only thing between us and the sun setting over Milford Haven, and the first summer mosquitoes. We eat them at the long kitchen counter the next day, washing back the settling flavor of the meat with long draughts of beer from the outdoor fridge. We bike to the beach at Tin Can Alley with full bellies and swim to the sand bar in the sun-warming water, and the Chesapeake smells of oysters.

Jam night at Southwind pizza. A circle of men sit atop stools playing songs they've played before, many times, some bedecked with new mustaches. The drummer turns forty, looking all of thirty-five, and everyone hollers and raises a pint. We eat fried crab bites, a stringy, delicious pot of artichoke dip, and petite pizzas with perfectly crunchy bottom crusts. People dance in the back of the bar, and it is the kind of loud born of people who not only know each other, but are happy to. Everyone sings the choruses, and the waitress pouring off pint after pint of Legend Brown Ale grins as people congratulate her twenty-four-hour-old wedding, and she is beautiful in her happiness.

Campground house party. The campground, empty and desolate all winter, fills with pick-up trucks and trailers and golf carts. Boys throw lines into the bay off the high-deck and old-timers park their carts side by side on the sand and gravel road, chatting over steering wheels as in the tent grove, country blasts and men whoop from the bumpers of their truck beds. Teenagers gather on the beach and smoke cigarettes and slurp at stolen beers, eyeing me suspiciously as I whip by on my bicycle, still wet from my dip in the water. A man yells at me: Slow on down, girl!

Billie Holiday and asparagus hash on the new creek-side deck. I poach eggs, smooth and white as pillows, to slice atop a hash of asparagus, bacon, and potatoes. We watch the sun slide down below the trees on the point and don't say much at all.

Jumping off the dock in the last light of the day. The dock is alight with rarely used lights, and from the water they look like strung lanterns dangling between the salt-beaten pylons. A small boat trawls for flounder in the shallows in front of the house, and I leap off the end of the dock, carefully tucking my feet up under me so I won't touch the bottom of Barn Creek, its mud as soft as pudding. I float around on my back and watch as the first summer fireflies draw blinking trails across the marsh and over the lawn. My gin and tonic sweats on the dock's sink, where brackish water pumped from the Haven powers a hose used to clean blue crabs, or spot, or trout, if we're lucky. A neighbor sets off high, illegal fireworks, and the water is lit red and white and gold and the forested shore rings with the pop and crackle. I cheer aloud, toes grazing the creek bottom.

Big Time Lightning

Today I became determined to go swimming. It hasn't been a warm May, and as such the water, though summertime briny at this point, has remained cool. Now, I'm no wimp about cold weather; I have frequented many a cold body of water, including the Pacific and Lake Tahoe. I've spent so much of my life accidentally falling into water (fountains, creeks, ponds, puddles, ditches, you name it I've fallen in it) that I have a pretty good tolerance for unexpected swims. Last year, I very gracefully fell into Milford Haven while trying to board my kayak in the middle of December. Everything you just read reflects extremely poor judgment on my part, though in my defense I think it was the darling dog, Zoe, that sealed that particular icy fate. Her excitement over what she was sure was going to be an unexpected, mid-winter ride in a one person kayak proved too much for my not-so-considerable ability to maintain my balance. Anyway, today I was bitten by a mosquito while trying to clean my car. If mosquitoes don't mean summer, I don't know what does. Swim-suited and bitten, I made my way down the dock. The osprey nesting on the platform some forty feet away shrieked at me, but I paid her no mind. I was going to swim, dammit. I boarded the boat, dangled my feet into the water, bracing myself, and just as I was about to slide into the smelly, murky waters of Barn Creek, the weather announced its intentions. An outrageously loud rumble of thunder almost sent me tumbling into the creek. I looked out across the haven to the mainland, and sure enough, quite without warning, black, dramatic clouds were rolling towards the island. Branches of lightning lit the clouds, and I sighed and ambled back to the house, feet itching with quick-drying salt. I would say summer has arrived.