Um, right, so, yes… a new month happened and I missed it. Didn’t notice at all, in fact. The days just slipped into being a different month and this morning I woke up and thought, “Did I ever do a Best of March post?” Nope, I didn’t. The only regular post I do and I forgot it! Oops.

So, yes, March 2019. It started in Arcata and ended in Arcata. It included one driveway and a single camping trip, which held a national forest and a state park.

It was a lovely month. Although I didn’t go a lot of places, I did a lot of things: yoga and roller-skating and kayaking; visiting the farmer’s market and the beach; listening to live music at the coffee shop; walking through the community forest; soaking in the hot tub at the Finnish sauna place; meeting a potential new writer friend for coffee; playing with puppies at the neighbor’s house… Plenty of great meals, too, most of them cooked at home, but good sushi in Arcata and the fantastic Mayan Fusion in Fort Bragg. I told S it felt like we were living a vacation life in the midst of her real life and she laughed and agreed, but that is what it feels like — lots of activity, punctuated by laundry and cleaning out the storage shed and working in the kitchen and trying to write. It’s been great.

And it’s fun to experience a true spring. March started out gray and cold — I wore my plump eggplant coat everywhere, and barely even opened the door of the van if I didn’t have it at least clutched in my hand. Mornings began with frost on the ground and I had to abandon all hope of avoiding walking Z in the rain: it was always raining and we were just going to get wet. Last night, though, we went out to dinner and I left my eggplant coat at home. And the flowers are amazing! Flowering trees everywhere, tiny wildflowers scattered along the railroad tracks, yellow blooming weeds springing up in the cracks along the sidewalk. Florida, of course, has plenty of flowers, most of the year, but there’s definitely something about the sudden abundance of blossoms everywhere that makes the world feel fresh and beautiful.

I did realize while taking the above picture that I’d totally abandoned my New Year’s resolution of working on my photography skills and taking photographs every day. Oh, well. As with every resolution, I’m allowed to start over again. But I suspect that April is not going to turn into a major photography month, largely because my April plans involve writing many, many words, and I don’t want to get distracted from Fen’s adventures by pretty flowers and beautiful skies.

Back to the best of March, though — in a month with a lot of great moments, the one that is currently sticking out to me took place last weekend. The day before our river kayaking adventure, I took a beginning kayaking class on Humboldt Bay. I went by myself, because S had to work. It was a small class, just four students, and the instruction was very focused: we were given a stroke or technique to work on, worked on it for fifteen minutes or so, then had another few minutes of instruction and went back to work. By the end of the class, we were paddling our way around some big pylons, like an obstacle course for kayakers, and it was ridiculously satisfying. It was a gorgeous day, clear sky and sunny, and being out on the water, feeling in control of the kayak, feeling like I’d learned something and was improving at something… yes, it was awesome. Possibly not the best idea in the world to stretch a lot of typically unused muscles right before the river adventure but totally worth it. A highlight in a month of very good moments!

With four driveways, two guest bedrooms, two Walmart parking lots and one state park, October 2018 was not a month of scenic trails and beautiful sunrises. Instead, it was a month of much sociability, at least by my standards. I started in Boston, went to Cape Cod, Maynard, and Allentown, and eventually made it back to Florida, with quick stays in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.

Autumn color

But I’m struggling to come up with highlights. In my journal writing, day after day begins with “nice day yesterday” before I start writing about Fen, brainstorming where she is and what’s she doing and character motivations within the scenes I was working on. I know I ate some good meals; I had some good conversations; I took time for breathing and meditating and appreciating my life as it was happening…

And I guess that’s the summary of the month — “Nice day yesterday.” I count my blessings, everyone should be so lucky as to have a month or two that can be summarized that way.

Things that I’d like to remember about the month:

Hanging out with my niece, watching Doctor Who and discussing books, writing, politics, life, social conventions, school. Watching her discover the world as a passionate 8th grader was amazing & so rewarding. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get that with R because he wasn’t nearly so interested in having actual conversations at that age, probably especially not with his mom. Talking with an aunt is not the same.

Going places with my brother. Out to lunch, to a coin show, running errands. It’s so nice to get to be part of his life in a mellow way. Not visiting, not packing a year’s worth of conversation into two days, just hanging out.

My incredibly peaceful, pleasant, warm day in Georgia. I was exhausted but a day spent puttering around the van, with the sun shining and a light breeze blowing through the windows, birds flying by, the sounds of wind rustling tree leaves, was so much what I needed. Nature rejuvenation.

Enjoying autumn, eating apples from my brother’s apple trees, taking brisk walks — and then getting to drive into summer instead of sticking around for the quick hit of winter. As I write this, it’s too hot in the van: I’m either going to have to turn on the air-conditioning, or go inside, and while three months ago that would have frustrated me, today I don’t mind. Nothing like a taste of winter to remind me of why I prefer to be warm!

The same tree, two weeks later, from a different angle

September 2018 included one farm, one national park, two provincial parks, four independent campgrounds and two driveways, for a total of ten different places.

Best meal of the month is easy: my friend B fed me swordfish in Rockport, MA, baked with olive oil and thyme, and it was the best swordfish I’ve ever tasted, one of those meals that you keep thinking about. I’m not going to start buying swordfish because I’ve had swordfish before and I know it’s not usually as delicious as B’s swordfish. But I’m definitely moving swordfish much higher on my mental “worth the risk if you’re at a fish market and it’s really, really fresh,” list.

Best event of the month: also pretty easy. Yesterday my friend C took me to a concert at the Gardner Museum, to see Sergey Malov. I enjoyed the music, but I enjoyed wandering around the art museum afterwards even more. They had a painting by John Singer Sargent on exhibit that I loved so much that when we got back to the house, I spent a solid hour on the internet trying to learn more about one of its subjects, Rachel, the daughter. In the painting, she’s eleven years old, and she looks like a rebel.

Um, yep. She has no wikipedia entry, no web sites dedicated to her story, in fact no stories of her history online at all, but glimpses of her can be found in various Google book entries from the twentieth century. She went to Radcliffe, married an archaeologist in 1914; worked with him in New Mexico; excavated human remains in California; travelled to Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras; and during WWI, was a paid intelligence agent for the Office of Naval Intelligence in Costa Rica — a spy, in other words, reportedly the only female overseas paid agent for the ONI. They had at least two, possibly three children, but divorced in the late 1920s. Sometime after that, she may have written a children’s book with Rhoda Power, possibly about Peru, or at least she’s on a copyright page for a children’s story called “The Baker and His Neighbor.” She basically disappears then, until in 1950 — at 58 — she married Robert Barton, an Irish Nationalist, politician, farmer, and judge. I’m not a biographer, not someone who’s willing to spend the next year hunting down primary sources, but I seriously think she deserves a novel. And it was fun following random links to try to learn more about her.

But back to my September! Favorite campground — I loved Campbell’s Cove on Prince Edward Island and Glooscap on the Bay of Fundy, but Glooscap wins, because the view from my site was so fantastic. That said, Prince Edward Island was hands-down my favorite place and if I had to pick a campground to go back to — with no ability to control my site location — I’d go to Campbell’s Cove in a heartbeat.

Overall, my September was an incredibly lovely month. It had a few bumps in the road, of course. I had to cut my last post short because all I really wanted to do was spew rage and fury about the state of politics in the US and that’s not something I want to have on my blog, even when I’m really feeling it. But listening to music and wandering around the museum yesterday reminded me that human beings have been creating beauty and sharing it with other people for hundreds of years. And during all of those hundreds of years, terrible things have also been happening. Some terrible things are happening now, but the world is still beautiful and people are still creating beauty. And I am still incredibly lucky to be living the life I live.

More Glooscap, because why not?