So Many Stars

Every morning my job is to make the coffee. Here’s how to make the coffee: push the ON button. The trick is it takes an hour for the water to heat up and the coffee to brew. (This is an enormous coffeemaker. It makes 60 cups of coffee. So I have to get down there early.) 

Down there is the dining hall. Where I am is a kids’ camp somewhere in Maine. My son and daughter-in-law are hosting a big party over Labor Day weekend. They’ve invited all of their family and friends and organized what basically amounts to a Camp for Adults. We’re assigned cabins and bunks. There’s a daily schedule with activities. Hikes. Swimming. Meals in the dining hall. A sign up sheet for volunteer help. 

My big contribution: Push the coffee button. I’m supposed to do it by 5:30 am. Day one, I’m forty-five minutes late. A miscommunication with alarms. When I realize it, I’m tearing out of my sleeping bag and half running down the dirt road toward the dining hall. No big deal, Mom, my son tells me later. Turns out my son-in-law had beat me to it on the button-pushing, and anyway, the rest of the cabins didn’t wake up and get moving until after seven. Whew. 

Day two, I’m a pro. A quick walk under the trees in the growing light, past the lake, the docks jutting out onto the water for the kids. I am having flashbacks to Girl Scout summer camp. I only went twice. One week when I was eleven, a week when I was twelve. But the two weeks take up an outsized space in my memory. For example, I still remember the lyrics to the songs we sang around the campfire. The names of the girls in my cabin and the camp counselors. The recipe for a dessert we were taught to make called Peach Yum Yums. 

The funny thing is I hated camping. An accumulation of crappy and occasionally traumatic experiences on so many ill-fated family camping trips. But Girl Scout camp, I loved. It suddenly occurs to me that it wasn’t camping that bothered me. Night at the Adult Camp, we have a bonfire and toast marshmallows for s’mores. The sun has just gone down and it’s hard to believe how many stars there really are in the sky. All this time and every night. Family and friends around me, I have never felt so comfortable in my life. 

Last morning off to push the coffee button, I walk slowly down the road, past the lake. I am not afraid of the dark anymore, and I am making progress on my fear of the woods. If everyone wasn’t still sleeping, I would belt out the happy song that is playing in my head. 

 

Trail Thoughts

Hiking, and I can’t take my eyes off the ground. This is supposed to be a birding walk, but I am having a hard time listening for birds. I am watching my feet. 

The tree roots, the loose stones, a mucky area on the path. The other day I was on a different hike and the trail turned straight up. You had to climb over rocks, crawling in places, to reach the top. My husband and I were laughing. This was listed in the guidebook as "moderate" in its degree of difficulty. What’s the hard trail? we wondered.

Listen, the birder guide says. Do you hear the loon? She describes it as a scream. You might think you’re caught in a slasher movie, but no, it’s a loon. Someone in our group points out a bird, far away across the lake. I can’t see it. What I see is on the ground, mushrooms. Perfectly mushroom-shaped and bright orange. Now that I’ve found one, I'm finding them all over the place. The entire woods is suddenly filled with orange mushrooms.

The other trail, the one that went straight up, reached a peak. When we finally made it to the top, the view was mountains, lakes, trees. Someone had erected a cross on the ledge. A stone marker said that in 1864 a twelve-year-old girl fell to her death when the wind blew her hat off and she leapt to snatch it back. I was sad thinking about this girl. A hat. Who cares? But I have done dumber things in my life and I have definitely taken stupider risks.  

Back on the birding trail, we are talking about the mushrooms, how most of their growth is underground. This is like my ferns. I tell the birding group the story about how I tried to move all of my ferns from an open area in my yard, where they were continually burning up under the sun, over to a shadier place. It was a lot of work and it ended up being for nothing because all of the ferns I moved died, and later, new ones sprouted in the original sunny patch and predictably got scorched.   

There is a lesson in this story. Dig deeper. 

In my old life I trampled the mushrooms. I wouldn’t even have seen them. In this one, I pause to take a picture. Beyond the trees someone screams. It’s the loon. But what I hear is a girl reaching for a wind tossed hat. This time she catches it. 

Gratitude

Up on the summit it was cool and breezy. From there you could see the little town where we were staying on this vacation, the harbor, the island that we walked out to during low tide. Now, the path was gone, underwater, and a sailboat glided by over the same place where we'd picked stones. I was looking for heart shaped stones and I found them everywhere. 

Who lives in the big houses overlooking the harbor? How do you get to be one of those people? This was the conversation we were having as we were looking for stones. We continued the conversation as we drove up to the summit. 

The point you kept coming back to was why can’t WE be one of those people? Lucky, you meant. On the summit we walked along the ledge. A stranger offered to take our picture. The light is so nice behind you both, he said. I looked at the picture on my phone later. He was right.  

The next day we rode e-bikes along trails through the woods. We coasted past a pond splotched with lily pads. Around a bend, an old stone bridge. More ponds. More stone bridges. Had we ever visited a place so quiet, so still? We ate lunch in a picnic area and watched the other tourists coming in. The young families. The older couples like us. And some much older. See, that can be us, you said. And I could picture it, the two of us roaming around in our retirement through National Parks.  

Biking back, we got lost, looping around the wrong way and having to loop back. The road signs made no sense. And then your tire went flat. We had to abandon the bikes and take a bus back to the visitor center, but we felt lucky. There was a bus. There was a visitor center. 

This is another conversation we had: how can we be grateful for what we have? Well, we’re on vacation, was number one on the list. We were walking along a shoreline and watching our shadows flicker in the water. I used to feel unlucky. And then I grew up and felt like the luckiest person in the world, but there would be a kernel of fear lurking, a What if it all went away and I was back where I started. Wait, you said, look. 

We stopped by the water’s edge and took a picture.  

 

Vacation Mode

This beach is like every beach and I immediately love it. The expanse of ocean. The sand. What’s different are the perfectly smooth black stones. They’re everywhere. I want to take all of them, but I limit myself to two. It’s only the first day of vacation. I should pace myself. 

It’s the same at dinner. The restaurant is known for its blueberry pie, but I pass on it. I can’t eat a piece of blueberry pie! I just ate a lobster roll! My husband is flipping through the guidebook, and we’re both overwhelmed by all the things to see and do. We’re still in travel mode, the packing and cleaning, the last-minute odds and ends you have to take care of before you go out of town, such as water the houseplants and buy dogfood, and speaking of the dog, will she be okay with the dog sitter?  

Also, I’m still stuck at the airport where the woman in front of us in the security line got flagged because she didn’t have an ID with her. She seemed genuinely confused that she needed one. Do you have anything with your name on it, the security guard asked. A credit card? A medication bottle? No, the woman said. See, her traveling companion pointed out to her. I told you! 

I was half laughing as my husband and I were waved past them. Feeling smug, I took off my shoes and belt like a pro, expertly set up my basket with my carry-on bag and laptop. Two minutes later, I was flagged by security for walking through the scanner with my cell phone in my back pocket. Someone had to pat me down. She was really nice about it.

I promise I will never judge anyone ever again. 

Back on the beach with the smooth black stones, it is warm and you can smell the ocean. My husband and I walk along the shore for a few minutes. We have a whole plan in our heads of how this week will go, the hotels picked out, the little towns we’ll stop in along the way. But I already know we’ll veer off the plan. A few days in and fully in vacation mode, we’ll take a third stone. I’ll eat the blueberry pie. 

To Do

My husband is out of town for the week, and I make a list of things to do. I want to be productive while he’s gone. Grow something, is one of the things on the list. Cook something. Throw something out. I check the items off dutifully. Pick the tomatoes that are finally ripening in the garden and turn them into a spaghetti sauce. Pull out the spent cucumber vine. (That counts as throwing out, I decide.) 

I add more things to do. Paint the kitchen trim and finish reading the book I’m reading for my book club. Write every day for at least one hour. Clean the house. I am a Crossing-Items-Off-My-List machine, powering through the week like an Olympian sprinting across the finish line, arms raised and barely out of breath. 

What else can I grow, clean, cook, paint, read, write? Wait, am I running from something? The quiet house, my strange, random thoughts in the middle of the night, the dog draped over my feet. One night the power flickers. The fan clicks on, the doorbell rings (this is a thing with our doorbell, the ding-dong after a power outage. It’s funny during the day, but a little scary at three o’clock in the morning.) 

The dog sleeps through it, but I stay up for a while, wide awake and squinting at the ceiling, relieved that I am no longer afraid of the dark. The old me would’ve tripped down the stairs to check the front door, done a frantic whirl around the house to test all of the locks. It is a gift to lie in bed alone and know that you are safe. 

End of the week and there are more things to do. (There are always more things to do.) Instead, I spend hours writing this post. Mostly, I am staring out the window at the squirrels running across the powerlines, how the sky darkens, and one white moth flutters over the yellow flowers along the fence. 

The other day when I was out there pulling weeds, I lifted a stone and found a dead toad, its body shriveled up and stiff, but before I dropped the stone back over it, a fluid-like substance squirted out of its rear end, and as I watched, the body inflated and the toad came back to life. I am not lying. It blinked at me and hopped away. 

I immediately looked this up online and learned that some toads go into a kind of hibernation during droughts to conserve energy. Cool. But now, I'm worried that I’ve interrupted this process and must add another item to my list: Leave water for the freshly rehydrated toad. 

This morning, I set a dish out. A gift for the toad, a gift for me. We have done enough for today. 

Quiet Walk

I used to listen to music or audiobooks or a podcast (interviews with authors and artists on NPR or Pod Save America or Behind the Bastards, which alternately make me laugh and get my blood boiling. SO many bastards you wouldn't believe it), but lately I’ve been walking alone with my thoughts, 

letting the dog do her sniffs while my mind wanders, trying to think of the next line in the book I’ve been trying to write for two years or the topic for today's blog post 

Five Good Books I read in the past few weeks (Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, Consent, Grief Is for People, Between Two Kingdoms, and Idaho.) 

Or 

Things I Love about Working at the Library (Over 2000 people participated in the summer reading program at our small branch, and we're giving away free school supplies, and every Friday Ted brings donuts.)

Or

Notes from the Garden, and how the cucumbers are finally petering out, but now we’re overrun with tomatoes, and look, there’s a random moonflower popping up in the corner, which always makes me think of my father-in-law (he gave me the seeds and I scattered them around without knowing what I was scattering. He told me they were pretty, "purty" was how he pronounced it, and he was right, and every year when they come up, I am surprised and grateful

and 

Speaking of Grateful

the unexpectedly pleasant weather, the sun warming my face, okay, I am getting old and sometimes I am sad or cynical or stressed out or pissed off, but all of this leaks away in the silence that isn't really silence with my sneakers slapping the ground, the cicadas rattling, the kids whooping it up as they ride past on their bikes, the dog prancing along beside me. Listen

remember how I told you she lost her hearing and how sad I was about it--no more coming when I call her to come or wagging her tail when I gush at her what a good girl she is, no more playing with the squeaker toy because she can't hear it anymore so why bother--well, 

I taught her two hand signals! (Come, with my hand curled, and Sit, with my palm faced down.) It only took two days of gesturing and effusive petting and treats, and now she is a pro, an old dog learning new tricks, 

like me. 

Thirty-Four Things about Us

Two kids

Five houses (plus, 

Two apartment rentals, the first with the mattress on cinderblocks, the hand-me-down furniture, the green shag carpet, a scraggly plant) (the house we live in now with the real beds and the furniture you made, the hardwood floors and multiple gardens overtaking the yard)

Two dogs

Two cats

Three fish (two orange, one blue) 

Eleven vehicles (one stolen, but that was before we were married) (three of the cars, generous gifts from loved ones) (I am not counting the kids’ cars.)

Speaking of the kids. They are not kids anymore, but sometimes, when they tilt their heads a certain way, you can see the baby in them, the fat red cheeks, the chattery toddler, the school aged body weighted down by a backpack, the slouch of a teenager, the swing of long hair, the wave goodbye at the airport, the graduation caps, the weddings, the gathering into our family

a second daughter, a second son 

add another dog

Have you been counting? We are up to 30. Okay, I’ll wait while you check the math (Two dogs?—you’re forgetting Handy the greyhound. Three fish?—remember our son had the two orange ones, Goldie and Fishie. Our daughter had the blue.) For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse, and we haven’t even gotten to the sickness and health part yet, 

the Three scary hospital stays, the divvying out of pills, the chicken soup, the cups of tea; the bad times (we lived through a global pandemic! and mourned lost family members and put beloved pets to sleep and fought over money, screaming at each other and stalking off to sulk, how stubborn we were and how silly), the good times 

because aren't there so many more that are good? Not only the vacations and celebrations, the school concerts (why do we still own three violas?) the hikes through the woods and walks along beaches, the fancy dinners, 

but also, the everyday meals, hundreds of them, thousands? (the chocolate chip pancakes and the spaghetti sauce, the lunches packed, the hotdogs on the grill), the walks around the block, the long car trips, the nights curled up in front of the TV. 

Thirty-four years ago, could we ever have imagined now? Could we have known how lucky we were at age twenty-two and twenty-three, when we promised to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, 

when we said, I do.