iced tea.

One happy surprise of working at home is that I can make (and drink) gallon after gallon of sun tea.

Although I am still working, and still staring at a computer screen most of the day, I feel a little more connected to the world around me here. Cubicle walls are isolating and demoralizing. So I sit in this brown chair in the morning (where I’m also sitting now), and I drink coffee and write, and this room is cool and a little dark. The sun is hitting the front of the house, rising over Route 6, and coming through the windows across the living room, and the big window on the front door. The stairs, directly behind the front door, are practically glowing in the morning when the sun comes in.

Eventually I make my way to the dining room table, spread out my piles of papers and notes, turn on my computer. The room gets lighter, lunch passes by, and around 1pm, the sun starts to hit the windows in the dining room, the ones facing west. So I get out a giant mason jar (or the kickass glass pitcher I just picked up at Atlantic Spice Company) and I fill it up with cold water and tea (right now a rotation of earl grey, gunpowder green, or spearmint). It sits in the sun there for a few hours and gets golden. Meanwhile I drink two or three or four glasses of the iced tea I made yesterday while I work in the afternoon.

I love having rituals. I also love iced tea in the summer, on the Cape.

An important note:, all of the above teas are wildly good with a splash of saffron and cardamom lemonade concentrate in them. We came back from Turkey with quite a haul of saffron, and I’ve been sitting on it, saving it up for something really special. This is the perfect way to use a little bit.

complicated.

Last night, I wrote:

I’m sitting in the dining room, where I’ve been sitting all day, staring at a computer screen, working. It was overcast and rainy this morning, but the sky is clear now. The cool air is still blowing, though, and so the window is only open a crack. I’m sitting in the big armchair now, in the corner of the room next to a window that the sun blasts through at this time of day. Richard says that his father used to call this the Florida window. 

I’ve been trying to write about religion lately (although not here). I’ve been thinking about it all the time, turning any of dozens of topics over in my head, raking through memories, thoughts, fears, etc. I wish I could approach it objectively, more logic than emotion, but I can’t. So I just do my best, make sense of what I can, think, write. I’m listening to NPR, listening to the coverage of today’s Supreme Court decision, listening to coverage of the funeral in Charleston. I’m listening to representatives of socially conservative organizations expressing disappointment and fear of the consequences of legal same-sex marriage. I remember what it’s like to believe that God says being gay is a sin. I remember what it’s like to believe that. It twists my stomach into a knot. And I’m listening to President Obama’s eulogy at the funeral in Charleston. I’m crying at the song, Amazing Grace. It's making me feel hopeful and safe. All this on a Friday night, on a sandbar, in a sunny armchair.

Life is complicated, people are complicated, I am complicated. It can’t be any other way.

unplanned.

Today slipped by leisurely, and I did almost nothing I planned. I believe this is how summer is supposed to feel. Working from home reminds me somehow of being in school. No matter what, I always had the nagging feeling that I should be studying something. Now I have the nagging feeling that I should be working, at least just a little.

One of my goals for this summer was to practice spontaneity, and in that vein, I had told myself that each week I’d set aside at least 4 hours to do nothing. Unplanned hours, no to do list, free to spend my time however I want in that moment. Its a little bit trickier in practice - I’m terrible at leaving time unstructured. But somewhat by accident, I spent the entire morning drinking iced tea and reading a book on the front lawn. I had an impromptu lunch with a friend. J and I went to the beach and then made a side trip to the nearby pond, jumped in, and swam around with the fishes. I made brownies, I made dinner, I made more iced tea. I dutifully delayed every task on my to do list to another day. It begs a fundamental question that I rarely ask: what constitutes the value of my day? Is it the number of things I’ve checked off the list? Is it my productivity? Or is it the time spent with people I love, the time spent talking and thinking, the easy feeling of being totally at rest? Well, all of those things, I think.

Today is just another day. But it felt full and good.

An aside: I’m really enjoying The Rumpus’ Make/Work podcast these days. I’ve listened to Episode 29 twice this weekend.

screen time.

I’ve always struggled with writing under circumstances that feel less than ideal (to me). I have a hard time writing in coffee shops and restaurants, on the bus or the train, when I have a few minutes in between meetings or projects. And of course, when I feel zapped of energy (creative or otherwise), it seems impossible. But the fact that these words are on the page right now means that, It’s impossible, is a lie.

I finally listened my way through the Invisibilia podcasts last week/end, and I really loved them. But I particularly can’t stop thinking about the episode about computers and whether they are changing our human-ness. I can’t even remember the context of the line, but at some point, one of the producers acknowledges that in the times we live in, the reality is that most of us spend the majority of our days in front of computers or other screens. And suddenly I realized (with a little horror) that I spend the majority of MY day starting at a computer. My job requires it. And when I’m done with that, I write or do other work on the computer. I’m doing it right now. I don’t know that I feel unequivocally terrible about this, but I feel sort of shocked that it’s only just now dawning on me that most of my waking hours are spent staring into the void of a screen.

Most of my books got packed into a cube and shipped across the country last month, but I brought a small stack with me to Wellfleet, intending to read each one. They were carefully chosen. In the two weeks since we arrived here, I’ve read at best 10 pages, which isn’t really the pace I was aiming for. If I substituted even one hour of screen time each day with one of those books, I would be blowing through that stack. Meanwhile, I have the nerve to think I’m somehow different than the rest of the masses, looking at their computers and tablets and phones.

But oh well. It's Monday, it's rainy, and I'm tired from staring at my screen all day. Every day is the same matter: making the best of the circumstances we're in. And awareness counts for something.

your local library.

A few days ago I dropped J off at work in the evening and then drove up the road to the local library, the first time I've been there since we got back. When I lived here years ago, I would be at the library multiple times a week. I lived in a crowded house full of people, and the library was a quiet, peaceful escape. This particular library has amazing books, and always an incredible selection of new books. There’s a wall of great movies. Back then, before I had an iPhone or iPod or any device, I would still check out a pile of CDs every week to listen to in the car while I drove around the Cape. And there’s a small performance space at the library - an airy room with a grand piano and art hanging on the walls. I would practice and play the piano back then, and the librarians kindly allowed me to come in and play that beautiful piano when the room wasn’t being used for something else.

But my clearest and most profound memory at this library is one particular aisle in the stacks, towards the back of the library, against a wall. There are three shelves of poetry (where I first read Mary Oliver - a local here, so well represented). There’s a shelf of essays and a shelf of literary criticism. There’s a shelf of athletic guidebooks - I once checked out a marathon-running guide from that shelf. And finally, there are two shelves of writing guidebooks - nonfiction, fiction, children’s literature, poetry, and so on. I can distinctly remember standing in front of that shelf, back when I had only the inclination that maybe I wanted to write, and picking up Writing Down the Bones. You know by now that this book is basically one of the great love stories of my life (thus far). I checked it out, and not long after, I went to Newcomb Hollow with a black and white composition notebook I had bought at the Staples in Orleans.

walking, unnerved.

I hadn’t realized how much I’ve come to take for granted my ability (in a city) to walk everywhere. It feels natural and obvious, and there aren’t many obstacles. Even when we traveled last February to Prague and Istanbul, we never really questioned each other - we would walk everywhere. Three or four miles was nothing. If I could see my way there on the map, I was fairly sure my legs could get me there.

There isn’t a highway in Wellfleet, exactly, but there is a main highway-like road. Route 6, the path through the center of the entire Cape. In Wellfleet, the speed limit is 45 MPH (although cars certainly drive faster). The house we are staying at is perched right on this car-filled non-highway. To get into town or to the post office, I have to walk a short distance on the sandy/grassy shoulder, all the while listening to the near constant hum of cars passing me. It’s surprising to me how it unnerves me. The difference between 30 MPH on the city streets of DC and 45 (really 50, or 55) MPH on Route 6 is great. The cars are fast and inhuman. I feel like an alien or an ant or some other creature trapped where I don’t belong, looking out of place and small.

It’s hard to ease into the rhythm of walking with that constant rush of traffic at my shoulder. I walked to the post office today in the beautiful sunshine and salty air, but I felt unsure. What ordinarily would have given me a burst of energy, gratitude, and life, instead gave me a burst of uncomfortableness.

work.

All my life I have moved away from places and never returned. Houses and schools and streets become faded, blurry, then mythic and dreamlike. I don’t know that I even want to go back to disturb their perfection. Once I got the idea to pull up the street view on Google Maps for a street I lived in on when I was 11 years old. There was a corner with a shady hotel and a man who sat out front and sang, and there was a sour-smelling Chinese restaurant that we never ate at. I pulled up the street view and everything looked so small and artificial - not at all how I remembered.

But Wellfleet is something different. I lived here for three years, and I left, but somehow this place has got inside of me. The mythic and the dreamlike mix with the reality. I leave and come back, and leave and come back. I’m not blind to its imperfections, and I know why I left. But I can’t stop coming back. Right now it feels like I’m here, and I’m not here, and I’m on vacation, and I’ve never left. I can’t even attach a word to the feeling, some complicated mixture of homesickness and loneliness and familiarity and relief. I have the space I need here, space inside my own head.

I have been writing, though not as much as I mean to, and not here. Last month was emotional and heavy. I spent my time being anxious about work and moving, or trying not to be anxious about work and moving. As always, my worries accomplished nothing, and I’m on the other side, and everything seems so clear and simple now. And now I’m in Wellfleet, and I have work to do.