I’m having a lot of trouble believing in today’s date. Where did August go? How did it slip away from me so quickly?

Ans: August in Florida is hot and sticky and slow and profoundly un-motivating. I haven’t even been eating my stir-fried vegetables for breakfast, because by the time Sophie and I get home from our typical morning walk, the thought of standing over a hot stove is so unappealing.

That said, August in Florida might be un-motivating, but if you give in to the lazy (as I have), it’s also languorous and lovely. Sure, I’m moving in slow motion, but I’m appreciating my slow movement.

A few photos, attached to a few memories:

Sophie, saying, “Why try to write when we could be playing in the backyard instead?” I love the crossed paws, something about them makes me melt immediately.

Riker was away for most of the month, so first playdate on his return included some face licking. And a lot of running.

Birds overhead at sunrise on the Sanford Riverwalk. 

I love the sailboats at the marina. They feel like adventures-in-waiting.

A great beach day. The water was bathtub warm, but the waves were strong. I didn’t worry about sharks for more than a minute or two, because it just felt so good to be immersed in water.

Plenty of other pleasant things have happened this month. Lunch with family, ice cream with my friend J, some fun thrifting, and so much time spent in the backyard with Sophie. Lots of reading, lots of organizing of notes on happiness, lots of peaceful quiet time. Lots of sudden rain showers that make for cozy afternoons snuggling with my girl. Not much in the way of writing, but word-by-word, it happens.

One random other summer note that I’ve been wanting to write about for days: the cicadas are insanely loud. So loud sometimes that I’ve had to go inside because it’s like sitting in a giant static noise generator. So loud they’ve set off my noise safety alert on my phone. Not consistently! And I don’t understand why they’re crazy loud in the middle of the day some days and not other days. The reason I haven’t written about them is that I don’t have anything more to say about them than that, but I want to remember them — they have been the sound of this summer of 2024, and as it draws to a close (where did it go?!?), I want to remember that it was a good summer, despite — well, and maybe even because of — and the humidity and the heat and the bugs.

Last night, I woke up around four or so, needing to use the bathroom, and when I came back to my room, I had a text message from my brother, saying, “Got time to talk?”

Okay, it was 4AM, so yeah, I had time to talk. But could I? Did I want to? Really, I wanted to go back to sleep, but the Best Brother Ever wouldn’t text me in the middle of the night asking to talk unless it was important.

But if I called him, I’d have to talk in complete whispers or else I’d wake Jamie up. Our rooms are adjacent and it’s really easy to overhear conversations between them: I can basically ask him a question in a normal speaking tone and he’ll answer (during the daytime, obviously.)

Still, important, right? So I could go outside to talk to the BBE. But yesterday the side edges of Hurricane Debby were just skimming Sanford, so it had been rainy all day long. Also, of course, it would be completely dark and there’s no way Miss Sunshine would let me go outside without her. At nighttime, though, I put her on her leash, mostly to avoid wildlife interactions that might make both of us sad (aka skunks, rabid raccoons, coyotes). So I’d be juggling my phone, Sophie on her leash, in the rain and the dark… ugh, it sounded so unappealing.

And his message wasn’t, “Call me, please, it’s urgent,” so was it really so important that he would want me to be standing in the rain and dark to call?

But then it occurred to me — there’s a back room in the house that’s not currently being used. I don’t think of it as usable in the same way I think of the kitchen and living room as usable: it’s not shared space, it’s a bedroom waiting to be rented. But I could probably call from there without disturbing Jamie and obviously, I don’t think my landlord would mind if I used the spare bedroom to make a middle of the night phone call.

Perfect. Although I really would have preferred to go back to sleep, I would drag myself out of my comfortable bed and go call my brother.

And then I woke up.

The whole thing had been a dream, and I still needed to pee.

SO WEIRD! It took me a minute to convince myself that yes, I had just dreamed the bathroom visit, the text message, and the entire problem-solving thought process, but in fact, I had. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a dream that felt more realistic, and that had less of an aura of unreality about it when I woke up. I was literally dreaming that I was in bed, thinking. It felt like I’d slipped between multiverse worlds or something, that maybe in some parallel reality, the BBE actually had texted me to ask if I had time to talk.

I was honestly really tempted to call him. Or at least text him. But I didn’t, because it was 4:30 in the morning and I didn’t think he’d really want to talk to me right then either.

Instead, I went back to sleep and when I woke up, Sophie and I went for a beautiful walk down on the riverwalk. Some photographic proof:

I thought this bird looked so much like the night heron I posted last week that I was excited to discover that we had night herons here, too. But the Apple photos info says that it’s a limpkin. That is a word that you will have to fight with auto-correct to type. I type limpkin, auto-correct says pumpkin. Over and over again. Yeah, right, auto-correct, that bird sure looks like a pumpkin to me.

On the other hand, in an extremely cool piece of trivia, the limpkin call was used as the sound of the griffin in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and that is a fact I would never have learned if it had been a night heron. (Speaking of auto-correct, it also wants to say “heroin” every time I type “heron” and… what? I really think I’m a person more likely to write about herons, or even heroines, rather than heroin, but apparently I’m unusual enough in that for auto-correct’s default to be the hardcore drugs. Strange!)

Moving on, the construction project across the street is — oh, wait, have I mentioned that? If not, short version, they’ve taken the lovely green space and are turning it into a retention pond, which is exactly the kind of tragedy that turns people into NIMBYs. I understand the reasoning and approve in principle of proactively planning for more intense storms and potential flooding, but in practice… much sadness.

And more sadness because of the NOISE. Beep, beep, beep… please stop backing up your trucks. Just… stop. Don’t back up anymore! Go forward instead! Turn in circles!!

I strongly suspect that it’s only going to get worse, but I’m also mystified by the hours that they work. They show up, they do something, and then they disappear for two weeks. I’m not complaining, because I do think that I’m going to yearn for those disappearances long before they’re done ripping up the space and the surrounding roads, but I feel like it would be much easier to cope if I knew when they planned to work and could plan my own life accordingly. So far my coping strategy is loud music, which is good and bad, I guess, depending on the music. Not all music motivates me to work harder, but that’s what I need to find.

Speaking of which, I should get back to it. I’m jumping around all over the place in my course creation/book creation, with lots of processing of notes right now. I’ve got so much information, but it’s a struggle to keep from sounding like a term paper. I am entertaining myself with mixed metaphors, though.

In my latest section, I was writing about thinking of nutrition as basically a recipe for your body. If you want to bake chocolate chip cookies, you really can’t skip the chocolate chips. You’re not going to get chocolate chip cookies if you do. If you want to create a happy brain, you can’t skip the omega-3s and the olive oil: they are literally the ingredients that provide your brain with the building blocks to create neural connections and grow your hippocampus. No nutrients -> no connections -> shrinking hippocampus -> depression and dementia. If you want to be happy, you have to give your brain the ingredients it needs to thrive.

Here’s another one: iron is an ingredient for creating hemoglobin and hemoglobin carries oxygen throughout your bloodstream. Low iron = lower oxygen distribution = lower energy. You’ll never want to run around and have fun if your iron is low, because your body will be conserving its resources, and your conscious mind telling you to go out and get some exercise can’t win against a cautious body knowing that it doesn’t have the resources to do so.

Like I said, term paper. And probably a scientist would say that I’m oversimplifying. But simplifying to make information easier to digest and remember is where I’m at right now. (Oh, and my mixed metaphors are — is this ingredients, and a cooking metaphor? Or foundation plus building blocks, a construction metaphor? Or fuel and energy, an engine metaphor? Or maybe just all of the above, in their own places and times.)

But now I really am getting back to it!

I spent the weekend with four of my oldest friends, in Isle of Palms, South Carolina.

This is an activity I highly, highly recommend. And a place I recommend, too. What a great weekend it was. I sort of feel like I’ve been coasting on the high of good times with old friends ever since.

I was not the organizer, and, in fact, I might have missed out entirely due to never opening Facebook, but one of said friends (Lauren) reached out to me a few months ago and said, “Hey, we’re planning another mini-reunion on FB, if you want to come.” I immediately jumped into the messages threads and offered my two cents (Napa Valley in July: absolutely not. South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, all lovely possibilities.)

A friend more organized than me (Beth) found an airBnB in Isle of Palms (which is right near Charleston) with enough beds for six people, a swimming pool, and walking distance to the beach; all votes were yes, a reservation was made, and four friends flew in — from Vermont, New York, Michigan, and Wisconsin — while I drove up. It was a long drive, and totally worth it.

We did a couple obligatory tourist activities — shopping at a market for a couple of hours, visiting the night heron rookery and seeing the beautiful row houses in Charleston — but mostly we floated in the pool and talked, and talked, and talked some more.

A young night heron, eyeing me skeptically.

And ate good food, of course. The first night was grocery store salad for me and sandwiches for the others; the second night was deep-dish pizza and salad at a restaurant owned by Lauren’s family (cauliflower crust pizza for me, but the company made it excellent); and the third night was unsurprisingly, my favorite, at a restaurant that takes GF seriously, and had so, so, so many options including a really delicious chocolate cake for dessert. I had to eat the leftovers for breakfast the next morning, which was delightful. Chocolate cake for breakfast, two thumbs up.

I went swimming in the ocean a couple of times, and loved it. I’m not a huge fan of ocean swimming, because the ocean is enormous and powerful and filled with uncertainty. Also, you know, despite lots of practice in managing my anxious imagination, thoughts of sharks and riptides and jellyfish always pop into my brain when I’m in the ocean. But it was so incredibly nice. The water was a perfect temperature, the waves were a perfect height — lifting me off my feet, but never knocking me over. The second time I went I was in the water by myself (although with friends on the beach) and the sun was just rising, and it was so spectacularly gorgeous and vivid and serene. All senses fully engaged, all of me completely present in the moment I was in.

That was the morning that we were leaving, and when we got back to the house, everyone was packing up. But I was in my bathing suit still, and we had plenty of time for the limited amount of packing that needed doing, so I headed for the pool, and then everyone else came outside too, for one more hour of pool floating and chatting, much of which was spent focused on when and where we were going to meet again.

Next month, or maybe at the tail end of this month, it will be forty years ago that I met these women. We lived together for one year and then our lives veered off in different directions. On the surface of things, I’m not sure we have a lot in common. But it turns out that the bonds formed during that one remarkable year are stronger and more sustaining than I realized. It’s been five years since we last saw one another and they were hard years, in their own ways, for all of us. (Honestly, the COVID years were hard years for everyone, weren’t they?) But it felt so rejuvenating to share the stories of those pains & fears, and then to move on to appreciating the moment we were in.

Now that I’m home, I’m back to the usual stuff: playing with Sophie, writing with my writing buddies, mowing the lawn, laundry and unpacking, grocery shopping and cooking, and, of course, working on my Choosing Happiness projects. But among the things that I am definitely going to get to will be uploading lots of photos, and making everyone else share their photos, too. I took some beautiful sunrise pictures, but I was never the person who handed my phone to a stranger to take a picture of all of us, so I don’t have a single group photo. Birds and sunrises are nice, but I do want the reminder of the people, too, because the people were what made the weekend so special.