Every night of the Summer I find myself sitting on the deck under a phosphorescent sunset; nice and toasty from the lingering humidity, bidding my warm friend the sun adieu for the evening. Silly birds send their final squawks of the evening in to the trees before their nightly retreat, offering airspace to the clumsy, erratic, starlit flight of the bats. These are the times that I am both the most pensive and appreciative for the persisting excellence that is my life.
Lately, the reflective quality of Facebook has revealed, night after night, daily experiences that open and magnify and replicate like a magician's multi-colored hankerchieves, ceaselessly being drawn from a magic hat. The magic in my life, these days, is bottomless. It's a funny feeling to be compelled to share with hundreds of faceless people (ironically through an instrument named Facebook) my delight in an evening, or a meal, or a shared experience. But it's there and it happens, the social outlet, the emotional adaptation of my generation. The other night I offered, "My daily routine: Go to work with awesome friends selling fun things to (mostly) happy and interesting people, come home and lay in the sun, read out loud to myself, go to the gym, relax in the sauna, come home and cook a delicious fresh meal, eat said meal on the deck, take a walk with my man, sleep 8 hours, repeat. There are not enough happy emoticons to express the pleasure I enjoy in life." It's nothing earth-shattering, and I'm certainly not changing the world, but these small daily stepping stones are important. To me.
So what's important, really? Simplicity. Being present. Looney as it may come across, I genuinely smile when a pigeon roosts in our chimney, I do thank the sauna for being such a warm friend after a long, hard, rewarding work out. I do. I just love things and people and places and specific cognizant moments exactly the way they are. Lately, I've been living a Groundhog Day of awesome. Allow me to share some highlights.
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Silence is so important. Solitude, the kind that doesn't even co-habitate with the faintest puff of a lazy morning breeze. In silence a person is able to process everything and absolutely nothing in simulcast. What does your silence sound like? What does your silence smell like, or look like? My favorite moment of silence gives me goose pimples because the sun hasn't quite shown her face beyond the edge of the roof and the air is still damp from wee-hour dew. It smells like rain, even on a day that promises to reach dry, Hell-hath-no-fury temperatures. My silence is tempered with a distant, low vibration, the hum of morning rush hour traffic; it's the lullaby of adulthood. There's an extremely enthusiastic rooster in the neighbor's yard that has also cawed a corner in to my silence, and his corner is the one that most effortlessly tugs at the indices of my sleepy smile. He's just so excited for the day. Crow! Crow! Unbridled jubilation. He does the dirty work for me. Silence is dirty, too, as my naked toes curl and stretch over spilled soil from my potted plants. My silence smells like fresh black coffee and fresh mown grass, but tastes like nothing.
But I'm not a creature that's cut out for silence. My mind turns somersaults of phraseology and my ears do linguistic back flips all day long; the simplest verbiage, the slightest hint at poetics and the most stone-faced prosaic utterance are all banked in my linguistically titillated mind. Lately, I've found it boundlessly rewarding to read out loud. In the summer I need a read that mirrors the season, something lyrical and fecund and romanticized and celebratory. At the moment I'm re-reading an old favorite, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. It is poised to be the first full novel that I've ever read out loud to myself from cover to cover. Oh but it just can't be read any other way. I was a paragraph in to my silent reading when I had to start over, carefully articulating every syllable to reveal the masterfully nuanced character of her prose. Take this passage, and please, read it out loud, if only in a whisper: "The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff."
Snakelike. Slippery. Languid. It lingers and expands over your open lips. Doesn't that feel divine and cleansing on your tongue?
Try this: "We can't take the lightning, the scourge of high places and rare airs. But we can take the light the reflected light that shines up the valleys on creeks. Trees stir memories; live waters heal them. The creek is the mediator, benevolent, impartial, subsuming my shabbiest evils and dissolving them, transforming them in to live moles and shiners, and sycamore leaves."
My mouth bubbles over when I verbalize Dillard's prophecies of the natural world, sometimes so much so that I actually blubber over a syllable or two. It's that active on the tongue. If you can't identify with even a shred of one of these passages, I beg of you to go outside, or if that's not your thing, then to find your own healing creek in this artificial rat race.
It's one thing to claim that I undergo a strange series of mental revelations and re-calibrations, and on most days that may be so, but I have to remember that I am a corporeal being, too. I learned this past winter that if my body is not physically challenged, I become a lazy, snack-obsessed, moody little mass of melted muscle. This is a realization most recently born of age. Laura Read pre- 26 could eat, drink, and exert as much or as little as she wanted with little to no physical side effects. Oh, but Father Time and Mother Nature really collaborated on a doozie of a lesson this past wintertide as I emerged from my cocoon of Seasonal Affective Disorder wearing several (not so) luxurious pounds of cold weather baggage. "Get thee to the elliptical!" I cried, and for the past 4 months I've been more fit and even tempered than ever.
If there's one time that I'm willing to shatter the glass jar of my otherwise meditative, tree-hugging, Damn-the-man-and-his-airconditioned-comfort mentality, it's at the gym. There, I'm an animal. I resent the gym for stealing me from my outdoor perch and happy sun-tanned existence, I revere it for whipping my s'more lovin' butt in shape and for keeping those endorphins pumping happiness through my veins. I sweat and sweat and sweat but never blink. I dance in a hurried shuffle from one weight machine to the next, in as rhythmic and orderly a waltz as I can perform around the other (more leisurely) Y-goers. It's kind of nerdy, but often times I flex and squeeze my own muscles, particularly my biceps and quadriceps. In the locker room mirror I admit, I watch the way my shoulder blades glide across my skin, and how my shoulders heave and ripple. The fruits of my labor, work that I have done solely for myself and to myself. And to bring things full circle, the greatest reward for my efforts is warmth. Oh to slink in to that sauna, bow my head, take a really deep burning breath, and sweat it out all over again. I lean in to my muscles, I feel my pores expand and force my limbs to expand in unison. I thank heavens for the bodily response I draw from heat. Sucking, drinking, sighing, panting, smiling, heaving, and softening. My time at the gym is both an adrenaline high and a sensual time of repose.
When I can't appease my bag of bones with the embrace of balmy air, I tend to cave to whatever innate instinctual craving possesses it. In winter my body laps at carbs and red meats, and I usually oblige. Save investing in a physiology course, I'll never understand the correlation between my warm month and cold month comforts. However, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that the common denominator is food. When the 50's tip in to 60's I abandon heavy starches and proteins. Everything must be fresh fresh fresh. Due in large part to this newly adopted fitness routine, I'm increasingly noticing my own deepening appreciation for food. I'm no Julia, but I absolutely love to cook, and I cook simply. On any given day our kitchen is brimming with fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and herbs. I've never been good with fractions, ratios, or division, but I can calculate permutations of flavor by the millions per minute. I can't always take credit for my concoctions, as Pinterest often lends a heavy hand in my dinner decision, but almost never without some adjustment or substitute. I love the layers of scent that manifest from my chopping knife; green onion, basil, garlic, ginger. Those scents waft through the house and stain my fingertips in the same way that they linger on the palate. The olfactory experience paired with good music and sun beams through the skylights bisecting the kitchen are enough to compel me to dance while I wash, chop, and roast. It is my firm belief that everyone should dance in the kitchen. You're releasing all the goodness and abundance of your food stuffs, might as well release your own righteousness while you're at it!
My earliest memory of taking pleasure in food revolves around summertime and the outdoors. Mom and I would sit on the screened-in back porch my Daddy built playing word games in rocking chairs. Our neighbor often made huge plates of BLTs, which she was always well-obliged to share over the chain-link fence that separated our backyards. I remember biting in to that crisp, glistening bacon and the cool watery lettuce, with tomato oozing down my chin and buttered bread crumbs speckling my upper lip, and thinking I'd never tasted anything so fine or fresh in all my life. Ripeness, smoky flesh, flooded my child palate in a way that surely made my pupils dilate a little. As an adult, that connection between one's sense of taste and the air breathed between bites is tantamount to my nightly dining. I'm mindful to season my meals through the filter of the outdoors when at all possible. Food just tastes better, every subtle note and earthy tone unravels in each bite, reminding me that what I'm ingesting is whole and good, as is the setting in which I feast.
Outdoor dining brings me closer to another great vernal joy, outdoor growing. I'm no gardener, no amateur farmer, and I certainly don't grow enough to sustain Sean and I for even half a season. Ours is not quite the bucolic existence of my idealized city girl dreams. Still I grow, and I enjoy the process. My potted garden on this third floor deck has grown from 8 pots to 32 in the last 3 years. Each new Spring my green thumb comes equipped manifold with brand new dreams of tea gardens and vegetables, multiple varieties of herbs like basil, lavender, and garlic chives, and as many types of peppers as I can get my mitts on. As a little girl Mom and I took one annual trip to the greenhouse, purchasing mostly ornamental flowers, but always tomatoes and mint. She let me dig the holes with a dull-edged spade that once belonged to Grandaddy, and carefully cupped her hands over my hands which cupped the root ball of our precious new verdure. I loved rubbing my fingers on the leaves of those plants and inhaling. It was every bit the scent of summer as a squished lightening bug or a glass of sweet tea. I dreamed of someday growing my own tomatoes to slice and enjoy in my own outdoor space, and well, the dream has mostly come true.
I share my plants with the neighborhood critters. Squirrels and possums in particular love our potted food, and I love them. Do I get frustrated when a nearly-ripe tomato is plucked from the vine and boldly decimated on the deck stairs? Yes. Does it bum me out when I find half eaten green peppers and pole beans strewn about the rail? Mmm hmmm. But, at least for now, crazy as it sounds, it's part of the fun. I get heapfuls of basil, rosemary, chives, fennel, mint, and lavender, many delicious peppers, and the occasional orphaned tomato all to myself, even after the animals abscond with their share of the bounty. This year I'm hoping that Easter Egg radishes, zucchini, lemon cucumber, squash, pole beans, and arugula evade the clutches of my furry ones and find their way to my dinner table. In the mean time, I emerge with sleepy eyes each morning to dutifully water my leafy darlings. They're well-admired and oft the recipients of praise and admiration. In fact, when I pull my lawn chair close to my basil plant to catch the farthest rays of evening sun, I deepen my breath to steep in the spice. "You smell so good!" I sometimes exclaim out loud. I'm surrounded by my plants. Even when my gaze wanders down toward the landing, my tea garden and miscellany veggies are reaching up toward me all showy in green abundance. Whether they feed me or a hungry critter is inconsequential.
As an only child, this is the lone instance of sharing on which I have never fought to retain what was rightfully mine. That notion simply doesn't exist in the natural world. Despite that self-important only child mentality that occasionally creeps in to my adult psyche, I'm very quick to share when in good company. And company is, perhaps, the final square on the bingo board of fulfillment. Company is the free space, the one that completes any combination of winning lines. I recently read an article in Food & Wine about a couple who owns a vineyard in California. They gathered a group of friends to help them build a clay, wood-burning pizza oven on the edge of the vineyard's garden. For weeks the couples labored over heavy slabs of clay and brick, at one time having to rebuild the entire upper dome of the oven after a catastrophic cave-in. But what they ended up with was a beautiful rustic vessel that fired fresh, collaboratively invented pizzas week after week, all Summer long. Their weekly gathering was magnified not only by good wine and free spirited banter, but by the tangible recompense of their crafty resolve. I should not have read that article. I am already daily on the brink of undergoing a major upheaval, rejecting the bulk of my belongings in favor of inviting new comforts in to my life. Let me tell you, the prospect of a weekly gathering over food and libation ails me; I would gladly sell off trinket after tired trinket in favor of slabs of clay to commune over. As it is, I enjoy an already fortunate degree of time among friends, and I am more than happy with that. But part of life is dreaming, and that is the dream ahead.
The best time to talk about dreams and aspirations and fun things that I've seen or read, is, of course, with my wonderful bearded partner. Sean and I work similar hours and have different post-work routines, so our catching up time, especially this time of the year, is twilight. Walking hand in hand, under a darkening, lucent canopy of rustling tree tops and emerging stars, Sean and I spend as many evenings as we can taking a little time before bed to reconnect, and to share. It is astonishingly easy to feel connected to a person with the immediacy of a cute text message or an intriguing Facebook post, but conditioning one another to speak freely, seeking advice with earnest trust, and taking time to only listen, or to only laugh, if priceless. It's a time to invent cocamamy schemes, lofty future lives, and ways of melding the practical with the desirable. One foot in front of the other, one laugh after the next, one pregnant pause punctuating one perfect moment. I would walk with that man forever, and I just might. We certainly have the practice.
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It's hard not to self-aggrandize these days. The sentiments and observations set forth in these paragraphs are as intrinsic and intricate to my cognition as waves of light being processed by the complicated system of sight that performs it's own biological locomotion. The optic nerve sorts, defines, and reports what the eye sees almost instantaneously. I don't feel it or will it. But the writing process has one up on the optic nerve. Writing requires reflection, the lending of hundreds of intangible words and thoughts from a cerebral library. I can't help but draw from this library infinite times a day, almost with every blink, inventing ways of articulating my fortune to match the messages of splendor being sorted by my brain. It's a splendor that shoots straight to the soul. Happy Summer.
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