My last berries

July isn’t quite over — I’ve got two days to go — but I also know what I’m going to be doing on those two days, so I feel I can pretty definitively say that they are not going to be the best days of the month. Today is going to be proofing/editing followed by uploading files. Tomorrow is going to be a long, long drive. Neither one is going to come close to Saturday’s simplicity and delights.

So July of 2018 was spent entirely in one place — Pennsylvania, specifically my brother’s places. I bounced back-and-forth between the yard of the unused 1850’s farmhouse (aka the garden house) and the street in front of the house he actually lives in, with a few days actually spent inside the real house, taking care of the dog while the family was away.

For a while, I was pretty sure that my dog-sitting days were going to be my pick for the best of the month. I took baths. I watched television. I used the internet without ever considering connection speeds and data usage. I let the water run while I washed the dishes, and I even cooked bacon! I should have grabbed the opportunity to make some fish, too, but I didn’t.

It was interesting, because I really loved it for the first two days. Maybe even the third. Life in a house is just so easy. Taking a shower whenever the fancy hits as opposed to when I’ve heated the water or feel comfortable with my environment is a serious luxury. When I wanted to cook something, I didn’t have to consider whether I was running the AC and whether another appliance would blow the power. Not needing to strategize about washing dishes, plan out the cooking so as to minimize the mess, think about water use, question the tank levels, balance the electric load, was all so relaxing. But by the fourth day… well, it was kind of boring. I was glad to get back to the van.

I moved the van back to the garden house and settled in. And I’m going to pick Saturday, July 28th, as my favorite day of the month. There were other good days in the month. I took Zelda swimming once and she got to play with a basketball, which was joy for both of us. My niece spent the night and we played board games and had conversations and went out for ice cream, also joy. On July 17th, I finished Grace, which honestly, sort of deserves the award just because it was such a long, long time coming. Of course, I then went back and wrote another chapter a few days later, but still, there was a moment when I thought I was done that felt pretty damn amazing.

But when I woke up on Saturday, Z was snuggling with me. The van was a comfortable temperature, not too hot, not too cold. Outside the window, the sky was blue, and a hawk was sitting in a pine tree. I spent probably twenty minutes lying in bed watching the hawk hop around the tree. It was remarkably ungainly.

When I got up, I took Z for a long walk. My feet got unreasonably wet, but she was super bouncy and energetic, and I scolded her for dragging me. Then I remembered how three months ago, I was pretty sure she was going to die and I got a little teary with gratitude for my dog being obnoxiously energetic. Then she dragged me some more and I scolded her again, but with pleasure that I was having the opportunity.

I settled into work — reading aloud the chapters of Grace for a proof-reading pass — and felt very productive. The day was beautiful, though, so for most of the morning, I had the windows open and the fan running, instead of needing to sit inside the air-conditioning. I felt productive while enjoying nature, which is my favorite way to feel productive.

A little after lunch, my brother came by to do some yard work, and I got him to take me to CoreLife Eatery. The only people who will truly understand my deep, deep, deep love for this restaurant are others with food allergies. It’s such a luxury to have options. They were having a BOGO on a watermelon-feta-mint-chicken-quinoa salad. It wasn’t something I would have ordinarily picked, but it sounded interesting and hey, buy-one-get-one is nothing to scoff at when you’re talking full meals. So I got the watermelon chicken salad and also a flank-steak salad that comes with falafel, wild rice, roasted vegetables and pickled onions, to go. I snacked a little on the latter in the afternoon, but for dinner I ate the watermelon salad and it was delicious, absolutely delightful. The flavors had mingled while it sat and the sweetness of the watermelon went beautifully with the feta and the mint. It was such a pleasure to eat something delicious and surprising. Delicious I manage on a pretty regular basis, but surprising doesn’t happen all that often.

In the evening, I took Z out to the blueberry patch. The season is mostly over, although that’s partly because we’re not defending the berries from the birds. Every time I look, there are plenty of unripe berries, but they never make it to ripe because the birds swoop in and eat them during the day. The one exception is a few of the bushes that are netted. So I went to the blueberries to see if there were any left on the netted bushes and instead I found a bird, trapped in the netting. I wish I had thought to take a picture. I don’t know what kind of bird it was, but I sort of think it might have been a young starling. It was much bigger than a sparrow or finch, and its feathers had a grey fluff look to them that made me think they were maybe not entirely fledged. (Not sure that’s the right word, but the internet is not cooperating with my desire to google.) It was surprisingly challenging to rescue the bird, who was much too scared to understand that the big holes near the scary person were more use to it than the tangled netting away from the scary person, but I finally managed to steer it to freedom. Watching it fly away was lovely. I felt filled with happiness.

And while there weren’t a lot of blueberries, I managed to find some nice raspberries on the way back to the van. That night, while I was going to sleep, I saw a firefly. One lone last firefly to close out a July that has been a very simple, but very pleasant month.

Seven driveways, three parks, and plenty of miles. Four states with overnights (Florida, South Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania) and another four drive-throughs (Georgia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Maryland). Lots of good friend and family time; some good work (including a fun non-writing project that I will tell you about tomorrow, I hope); and some unexpected pleasure playing with graphics software which reminded me of how satisfying it is to be learning.

Also — for the truly honest reckoning of the month — a tremendous amount of worry and fear about Zelda.

But the highlight, the “best of”, can only be one thing: R’s graduation. It was joyous and beautiful and fun and memorable. I’m not posting any pictures of my beloved lobster, because I don’t think he would appreciate it if I did, but here’s another shot of that incredible sunset:

If the best day of every month is the last day of every month, does that mean that I’m really good at living in the moment I’m in or that my memory remembers things worse than they are? Or maybe that thinking about my best days reminds me to appreciate my days making them better than the days that I’m not thinking about? Maybe it’s just that I’ve randomly had a couple of really good campgrounds at the ends of recent months.

But April 29th, 2018 was the peak of a remarkably nice month. The month started in Arkansas, took a brief dip into Oklahoma, and ended in Georgia. With one parking lot, one random field, two national campgrounds, three state parks, and five Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds, it included the luxurious baths at Hot Springs, a sprinkling of snow in Dam Site Lake, a waterfall in Oklahoma, a very mellow and peaceful birthday that was highly sociable considering I spent the entire day alone in the van, and a lot of good writing.

But my favorite day was this Sunday.

Cotton Hill Campground, Georgia

In part, it was because the campground was absolutely beautiful and at a beautiful time of year. I definitely regretted giving up my inflatable kayak, because it was a perfect campsite and perfect weather for kayaking. The day started cool, but warmed up to the mid-70s. I spent it… well, puttering around, really.

I’d finally found gluten-free oats at a grocery store in Alabama, so I baked granola in the morning and was very, very happy to be eating my own granola again. This version was heavy on the ginger and the pumpkin seeds.

I didn’t have a lot of food in the van, so wound up making a quinoa bowl with steak, avocado, cucumber, red onion, and a dressing of Greek yogurt, mint, lime juice and chili garlic sauce for lunch. It sounds wrong, I suppose, that not having much food led to such a tasty meal but I was out of salad greens and most of my usual vegetables, which is why I was relying on quinoa to fill me up. It did and it was delicious, too. And also just a really nice little cooking project of the “and what can I do with this?” ilk. I love that experience of feeling like there’s nothing to eat and then discovering that in fact I have everything I need to make something delicious. Maybe the only thing I ever really need is the imagination to put the pieces together?

I had a water hook-up and empty tanks, plus knew that I could dump the tanks the next day, so I was absolutely profligate with my water use, washing my dishes in hot water and rinsing them thoroughly, and then washing some dishes that I hadn’t used but that couldn’t hurt to be a bit cleaner. When I owned a dishwasher, I never knew how satisfying truly clean dishes could be.

I read books that I’d read before, I sat in my outside chair in the sun, I snuggled Zelda when she’d allow it, and I took a couple very mellow walks — more like saunters, really. I’m pretty sure I spent a couple of hours on a jigsaw puzzle; I’m quite sure that my writing was minimal, just journaling. I had a lovely conversation with R, in which he told me that we had to change our Mother’s Day plans, because he was not going to spoil my day with a movie that would make me unhappy for hours, ha. (We have a long-standing tradition of superhero movies on Mother’s Day. This year’s is maybe too grim for me, however.)

And I appreciated the air and the birdsong and the water view and my life. It’s so easy for the days to blend together — even when they’re good days, even when I like them. One good day follows the next and the highlight is a good meal that’s a lot like some other good meal from a week earlier, and I remember to be grateful but I don’t remember to savor the moment I’m in.

I forget to breathe and return to worry.

But after two long days of driving and with more driving ahead of me, a peaceful day in a beautiful place where my biggest ambition was to talk Zelda into eating some dog food was golden.

Sunset over Lake Chicot

For quite a while this month, I thought the best day would be the first day. It wasn’t that there weren’t many other nice days, interesting places, and good people along the way, but on the first day of the month, I picked up my friend E at the airport and we sat on what used to be her back porch and talked for hours. I don’t get to see E very often, so it was simultaneously extremely nostalgic of another time in my life and really nice in the moment. I probably made us some food and it was probably salad of some sort, and I’m quite sure we drank kombucha.

It set a high bar for the rest of the month.

Various other moments along the way gave it some competition: I had a lovely afternoon in St. Augustine with C; I had a day in Reed Bingham State Park in Georgia that I described as “joyful, exuberant, grateful,” which is a pretty nice day to have; and I loved wandering the dirt bike trails with Z in in Trace State Park in Tennessee, which is where I found my blue jay feathers.

But as the month came to a close, it looked like my Best Of was still going to be Day One.

Until yesterday.

It started yesterday morning when, after days of rain, the sun rose into a clear blue sky. The temperature was about 50 degrees, so it was chilly, but spring was just exploding all over the place. All the trees are shooting out leaves, so fast that they look different from one day to the next, but they’re still in the stage where the leaves are tiny and elegant and beautiful. Feathery fragile leaves, instead of an indistinguishable mass of green.

I took Z for a good walk and we finally found the nature trail. For obvious reasons (rain, rain, more rain), I hadn’t looked for it too hard earlier in the week, but it was such an incredibly beautiful spring day yesterday that we kept walking until we found it. Of course, I shouldn’t have been remotely surprised to discover that it was mud central. The whole point of a nature trail is dirt and all the dirt in this campground was sopping wet. Despite the mud, we started down the trail, into the woods, and within fifty steps, I knew we wouldn’t be going much farther. White dog, black mud, limited access to water and laundry machines… I wanted to explore but I did not want to spend the next hour trying to get Z clean before she jumped onto the bed.

So I was just about to turn around, with my eyes focused on the muddy ground, when we startled a herd of white-tailed deer. Not a huge herd — maybe six of them? Maybe eight? They went bounding off through the trees, splashing into the puddles, toward the east, into the rising sun, with the light reflecting off the water and the green all around them… It was surreally lovely. It was like a scene in a movie that you know has been filtered and faked and never really existed like that. Except there it was, existing like that, so incredibly purely gorgeous that I just stood there in the mud and blinked.

I thought fleetingly of grabbing my phone to try to take a picture, but it would never have worked. I wouldn’t have captured it — not without also somehow capturing the chill in the air and the bird sounds that completely surrounded us and the smells of spring and the movement of the deer and even the way my heart was pounding a little from the surprise of discovering that we weren’t totally alone in our little wilderness.

Later in the day, I met a kid in the road. I use the term “met” loosely. I passed a kid in the road. I smiled and nodded and said, “Hi,” and he smiled back at me and said, “I like your dog.” I wanted to clap my hand over my heart and swoon and say, “YES!” The kids who said “I like your dog” were one of my favorite parts of Arkansas last year. I’m so glad that’s just a thing here. I find them so endearing.

And then still later in the day, well… the sun set. See above.

Along the way, it was a delightful day. I did good writing, including writing sprints with friends online, which I always love. I ate good food. I defrosted the freezer and cleaned out the fridge. I washed dishes. I wrote some more good words. I worked on a project that’s exciting and a little bit scary that I will tell you more about later. It was a good day, bookended by incredible beauty.

Today I woke up to the sight of the full moon shining on the water. I’ve read books where moonlight makes a path on the water. I’ve probably even seen pictures. But seeing it in real life was almost as startling as the deer. This picture doesn’t do it justice, because it looked huge in reality and the colors were much more vibrant. The path of yellow looked solid and bright, instead of just a trace on the water.

And so, Lake Chicot State Park and the very last days of the month (I’ll hope for the best for the rest of today!) become my Best Of for March 2018.

January of 2018 included three campgrounds — one local, one state, and one Thousand Trails — and four driveways/streets.

I love staying in people’s driveways because it’s so nice to visit with them, but it is seriously terrible for my workflow. No driveway day ever includes good writing. And now I’m thinking back over all of the driveway days of the past year and I’ve found one exception: my friend J’s driveway. But that’s probably because I’m not actually writing in her driveway, I’m writing in her comfortable living room, in her perfect writing chairs, and she’s writing with me and then occasionally bringing me snacks and beverages. Writer paradise!

I’m currently in my friend L’s kitchen, sitting at her kitchen counter, obviously writing. L’s driveway ought to be a good driveway for writing, but we talk too much. I love the talking — we spent a good long while this morning on post-apocalypse books and movies, pandemics vs disasters, the death penalty, human nature, the ability to kill and the consequences of killing — but in terms of actual words on the page, I’ve been here for most of two days and not made a word of progress on Grace. Actually, worse than that, I deleted a bunch last night. So no points for writing at L’s house, although I suspect if I were ever to stay here for an extended period, I’d get onto a schedule and get loads done, because she’s an encouraging fellow writer.

Traveling, in general, is disruptive to writing. My fantasies of living on the road and producing novels like clockwork are just never going to pan out. I made great resolutions in the beginning of the year, of course. But I’ve already broken them, because my brain is always too busy with thoughts of where I’ll be spending the night and how I’m meeting basic life needs. (Is a shower a basic life need? It feels like one to me, but that’s probably evidence of what a privileged life I still lead. But I definitely find feeling dirty to be an incredible distraction, and a major obstacle to being able to live in my imagination.)

Despite the lack of good writing progress, it was a productive month. I didn’t earn much money, but I spent tons of it — on dental work, on vet bills, on van maintenance. In other words, it was not a terribly memorable month. My adventures were mostly mundane, the sights I saw the same daily things that life offers all of us.

This morning’s super moon — a once in a lifetime experience! — looked pretty much like the moon to me. If I hadn’t known that I was having a once in a lifetime experience, I would have thought that there was a weird shadow from the nearby palm tree or some dirt on the window, and either way, the moon dropped below the horizon before there was actually much to see. Which doesn’t mean that I didn’t appreciate it, but last week, I built a campfire and I admired the moon in the trees above my campfire just as much as I did this morning’s moon.

Still, even in a mostly mundane month, I had some beautiful moments.

The moon at sunrise over Sarasota bay. Not once-in-a-lifetime — I hope not once-in-a-lifetime! — but beautiful.

Sunrise in Lake Griffith State Park. No moon, but a lovely stillness.

Bartleby on the beach in North Carolina, July 2017.

A very different animal on a very different beach: deer on the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, August 2017.

A windswept desert dog in Arizona, September 2017. Not sure why I loved this picture — September had plenty of beach shots! — but I do.

Sunrise on a city street in Albuquerque, New Mexico, October 2017.

A misty morning in Wekiwa Springs State Park, Florida, November 2017.

Sea birds on the Sarastota bay, Florida, December 2017.

I think I probably took more photographs this year than I had in my entire previous life, so looking back over them was remarkably time-consuming. But it was really fun to pick one image for each month. I tried not to use images that I’d already posted, so I can’t say these are the best photos of the year, but I tried to pick the photograph based on the quality of the image, not on what I remember of the month.

If I was selecting based on highlights, September’s photo would have been a beach in Arcata; August’s photo would have been a truly horrible snapshot of P & R laughing by the campfire; June would have been blueberries. December would have been photos I didn’t even take, of Christmas socks and flaming Bananas Foster and a sweet dog face peering out of the perfectly-sized hole she created in the window blinds. May would have been an entire album of the Best. Vacation. Ever.

And if I wanted to do a single photo of the year, it would be a crowd shot that never existed: of friends and family and relatives, all of the people I’ve visited this year, from blog acquaintances and writing buddies, to my oldest and dearest friends, to the extended family that I treasure beyond words, and the nuclear family that keeps me anchored when I worry that I’m drifting just a little too much. Of all the places I have been and the things that I have seen, I am most grateful to have had the chance to spend so very much time with the people that I love.

And now I’m going to get back to writing Grace. Well, no, first I am going to try to resolve my email troubles — I haven’t been able to make my main account work since before Christmas and I’m feeling guilty about the things that are probably in there that I should be responding to. My apologies if I’ve ignored any emails! It’s definitely time to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. And then I’m going to get back to Grace!

Happy New Year and may 2018 bring you much joy!