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.