Author of The Sparrow Sisters
The forsythia is blooming so it’s time to prune the roses and plant some new ones. Of course, the forsythia starting blooming just as a whole wad of snow fell so I’m not entirely confident I can use this old gardener’s rule this year. Never mind, I’m hauling out the compost, the loppers, the shovels and the bonemeal and hoping for the best!
Dahlias, darling
kid gloves
It is a fact that I tend toward melancholy. This is not to be confused with having a sentimental streak. THAT I do not. At our recent yard sale—which nearly killed me and several of the shoppers—I all but threw merchandize (including vintage linen and quilts, 60-year old, pristine kid gloves, silver plate whiskey sour muddlers and a set of library steps) at the milling crowd. “Take it,” I screamed, “Just get it out of here!” When a particularly creepy man asked us if there was more to see inside the house I almost told him “Yes, just go in there and strip the joint!”
We are not necessarily hat people in my family. Except in the summer, of course. I mean, we care about our heads, we just don’t particularly care to adorn them. But, when I noticed that David’s lovely, smooth head was starting to speckle like a quail egg, I hauled out the hats. While the chic beach goers can be seen in broad, elegant straw hats I am most often found under a cricket hat. I have a beautiful straw hat given to me by my friend. Every time I wear it people comment and give me the thumbs up. My friend wears hats year round as needed. In the summer she has a perfectly-proportioned buttermilk colored straw hat with a broad black ribbon around the crown. When we went to Nantucket just before Christmas she bought us both cashmere cloches. My friend looked like a 1920s French gamin in hers. I looked like a penis in mine. No really. Anyway, the cricket hat. You know how they look, right? Bright white and stiff brimmed, pristine and evocative of long lazy afternoons, green grass and Pimm’s Cup.
It’s time to put on my reflecto-vision glasses. What? You don’t have a pair? You know, the ones you buy off the back of an Archie comic, right next to the X-ray Specs and the itching powder. Most people go for the X-ray Specs because the picture shows a lady in her undies. But, in case you haven’t wasted that allowance yet, they don’t work. The reflecto-vision glasses, on the other hand, are guaranteed to show you the past with a mixture of insight and nausea. I know, mine are hanging on the chain with my readers. January is as good an excuse as any to take a look through them.
My sister is visiting with her daughter, Lily. A more lithesome, light and lovely girl you couldn’t conjure–unless you grew up with Liza, her mother, who very nearly floated through her first 16 years on long legs and pointe shoes. Now, before those of you who know me too well roll your eyes and take bets on how long before Liza and I cross the Rubicon of sisterhood and kill each other, let me just tell you this; I have not stopped laughing since she got here.
I am slowly coming home. Every time my toes curl into the hot sand at the beach, my fingers pull at a weed in the garden or pluck the clothes pegs from the clean laundry snapping on the line I feel another little root take hold. We have a whole summer to find our way back, a soft landing a friend called it, a place that already feels safe and beautiful and right to us all. We are very lucky.
Still, September is only a month away and already, the sun rises later, the moon looks more golden, dahlias unfurling faster and faster, hydrangeas fading. It is time to think beyond the Cape.
Listen here, Rachael Carson, it’s not that I disagree with you about the effect pesticides have on our environment and future generations. No, I am 100 percent with you on that. It’s just that I have earwigs the size of Smart Cars and they are about to lift my entire raised-bed cutting garden and carry it home to their nest. Now, I picture that nest as a dark, stalactite dripping cave where giant earwigs in evening clothes recline on red velvet couches sipping silver goblets of hydrangea leaf nectar while smaller earwigs gyrate on a down-lit dance floor. Petals nibbled from my dahlias decorate every surface.
I am an early riser and by early I mean shortly after four am. I try to have a lie in, I really do. Don’t hate me because I am wildly productive. I’m not. Occasionally in those pre- or just post-dawn hours I get some stuff done. This morning for instance I folded laundry, made a list of editors that my ms. might appeal to, drank three cups of coffee (my teeth are now itching), went down to the beach to read awhile and then went to the gym. There, I fiddle-faddled around on one kind of machine or another for about 45 minutes before I lost interest in everything from my maximum heart rate to the New York Times Book Review podcast (who cares that a professor from Yale has written about how our reactions to things change depending on what we are told those things are–science of the obvious to me but then I don’t have a PhD.) At any rate, for every morning I use my time wisely, there are the ones where I paddle the internet (I scroll too slowly to call it surfing) checking on Lindsay Lohan’s SCRAM anklet, wondering what will happen to Larry King now that he isn’t CNN’s resident crypt keeper or saving dozens of recipes for complicated dishes I may or may not attempt.