Labor Day Weekend

          On Saturday, the tropical storm comes closer, transforming the morning air into the ocean, blowing the leaves of the trees back and upright like little green sails.
          A breeze furrows through the house like high tide.
          The northwestern sky is periwinkle blue, but a bilge of dark gray is cutting through from the south. I keep the kitchen door open and the copper pans resound like gong buoys.
          The barometer brings with it the first cool weather, flooding August off like an unreachable, insufferable island. Our noisy window units, on a rich diet of Kilowatts all month long, are silent.
          Between the houses the light is patchy and changeable. August was monochromatic, motionless, run aground—but in these first days of September we lurch then ride a small current forward.
          A lusty but casual relationship, summer took too long to end—I'm glad it's over. 
          But I think I'll remember one week in July—our cottage right on the bay, the lobster boats gliding on the flat aquamarine surface, the ice cold water splashing over my legs—for a long time yet.

Rumination While Pulling Weeds

          Is there a part of life that lies beyond the apparent? Have I been wrong to persistently, bitterly deny it?
          Are lives that ended still going on someplace, like the overpayment of a utility bill: money that finds its way back, an unexpected check in the day's mail—a beloved character, familiar energy, orphaned from its old form, randomizing the tides like the moon, putting the compass out of whack?
          I am too hard on myself. 
          I prepared for loneliness and received it. And now life goes on like a party across the hall. I smell the beer and the onion dip.
          Life asks for a certain generosity, a small down payment of faith. My flawless suspicion, a talent for mockery, didn't really come in handy, though I kept them laughing in college.
          The best thing you can do for someone else is to believe him: "So-and-so was right about that" is the truest sort of fame. I think what we ask from the past is validation. Unfortunately, it isn't coming.
          So we beat on with Fitzgerald, into this confusing, flawed middle age, a gallery of withholdings and hesitations—a chilly place.
          A couple of old photographs will have to suffice for warming the heart, and perhaps the idea, gingerly conceived, that we will receive a little generosity, too.

A Short Walk

          Piney Branch is not an easy street to cross. I avoid it subconsciously, like not calling someone back. I keep west, in the diminishing 'V' of car-less blocks formed as Piney Branch runs southwest to meet mighty Georgia Avenue—a blue collar road in a white collar city, check cashing places and windowless clubs with dancers.
          I wade forward in anonymity, dropping my pace and inhaling magnolia and English boxwood, atomized into the air by the afternoon sun. Children are in school. Everybody's at work.
          Each 4,000-square-foot lot tells a different story. Some are ringed by a simple iron fence, but others are cribs of chain link, the climbing roses poking through the rhombus gaps like yellow breakfast buns.
          At a large corner house, the weeds grow tall and the paint sags away from the concrete. The blinds in the windows belong to another time—eyelids shut with the dignity of well-earned rest.
          Across the street a canary-colored compound of bay windows and walled, unseen gardens is polite but reserved. A dinner plate of mulch mounds up below each crape myrtle, and the grass behaves.
          On a different block, a raised bed alongside steps puts armfuls of marigolds, cat mint, geraniums, lavender, asters, and Sedum at chest height, perfect for smelling. Along the curb, low branches of young trees brush you like dancers' arms. Up ahead, a single cat crosses.
          Azalea time has come and gone, exhausting and overstimulating as a college romance, and the bushes have resumed their green composure. June is here.
          My breaths are finally coming from deeper down, and my fingertips are purple and cool. I pick the mail up and unlock the door.
          It was such a short walk.

The House in the Middle of the Block

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities. 

—Frank Lloyd Wright 

 I.

          
          I stand at the sink sorting blueberries, tossing the soft ones into the compost pail habitually.
          We cannot keep the house.
          I am fertilizing someone else's garden.
          The idea seems obscene.
         After we've left, I swear never to drive by.          

II.

          Houses are the physical manifestation of our dreams, partners whose high traffic areas and familiar kitchen window views have grown as invisible, and as profoundly comforting, as a spouse. The rooms are half public facade, half private chamber—stylish but cluttered, the mail always sitting out on the table, the pendulum clock on the mantle catching the light. Daily, we are exasperated and privileged, embarrassed and proud. Guiltily, contentedly, dishes pile up.

First Month

Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

—John Updike

          Gangs of sparrows choke the feeders just outside the windows, swinging them like censers in a barren sanctuary—or like the tall fire escape at the end of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
          The neighbor's bathroom light goes on and off, meaningfully.
          The mailman is suddenly on the porch, in mid-conversation, and the dogs go wild. Who talks to him all day, block by block? 
          I talk to myself all day.
          I want to write the way Clara Ward sings "When the Saints Go Marching In," looking briefly skyward before impaling us with another perfect bar, flawless and confident. I want to make someone smile or cry without their wanting to, from deep within—as I smiled when, sitting alone in the row, I had my first take-off on a PanAm jet out of LaGuardia in 1986. As I cried on the first syllable of Gary's wedding vows.
          They are moments when the water and air is squeezed out of life, when it is crushed and concentrated like grapes, and rhythm lures the mind from indolence or compromise. 
          Every hello and goodbye is pressed between two brass bookends, every late sunny weekend morning in bed with someone wonderful and heartless, gorgeous and long gone.
          But gospel never fully translated into soul or pop, and its effect on us has just a single conduit, with an outdated premise. But like having a Sangria, we lift the fruit aside and swallow the contents.
          I have no stories to tell this month, and I will not write about myself.
          I look out the window at the birds, upside down, pecking at the seed.
          Apparently His eye is on them.
          But they're managing quite well on their own.

Downeast Again

          I started plotting the route in May, like a child connecting the dots—on the first page of a thick book—with a jaunty crayon. My favorite moment, memorized, was the golf course green sign for the Massachusetts Turnpike: East—N.H.—Maine.
          I always began smelling pine and saltwater when I saw that sign.
          When I was 7, it was my grandmother's big house and lawn in Southern York County. In the winter and spring of 1991 it was the North End of Boston, and the lithe reflection in the small accordion mirror above his kitchen sink as Gary shaved.
          But since the age of 34 my happy place has been Mt. Desert Island. My mother had insisted I join her on a trip back to her childhood home in Ellsworth, and I simply fell in love.
          By 42 I was going up twice a year, May and September—the two months property taxes came due, as my uncle dryly informed me. A series of Scotch-taped trail maps and my uncle's beloved sandwiches of luncheon loaf and Kraft singles had been my only companions on hundreds of day-long hikes ending with a boiled lobster dinner and blueberry beer.
          A single photo captures me, a tousled Adonis with a back pack, posing at the mouth of Hadlock Brook trail, about to disappear into the erotic darkness of woods highlighted by powder blue blazes painted on the granite or wedged into the slender birches, interrupted only by necklaces of tiny, noisy streams. The scented climb to the top of the treeline—and the view out to the Atlantic at the summit—often produced tears of awe.
          Now our Ford Escape faces town, and as we turn down into State Street I begin my recitation of history and fable: the bank where my aunt worked for 50 years, her first and only job; the headquarters of the historical society my uncle founded; the blinding white Congregational church; the five-and-dime where my mother had her first job; the house that was once the hospital in which my oldest brother was born; finally, in the beautiful old residence that became the Ellsworth library, I locate my uncle's history of the town, turning the pages of photos I took for him.
          As Gary takes the stairs to the men's room I sit on a bench facing the river. I'm pleased with myself for letting the pure September light and the joy of his first visit keep me from breaking down. Today there are no hellos in a town that, once, my aunt and uncle could not drive through without stopping to roll down the window—a minefield of school buddies and board members and bowling companions. My patience used to unravel, when I was 37 and trying to make it down onto the island for some hiking before the early September sunsets, when yet another old fart would pause at our lunch table to talk about the price of gas or somebody's granddaughter's baby.
          The past feels like a sweater I want to pull over my shoulders, even at noon—its familiar smell, the coat of a beloved pet, a phantom whiff.

* * *

          At the cabin the ducks gather at the bottom of the steps like trick-or-treaters, staring us down for the cracked corn they eat from our palms. They splash back into the pond with a sort of winged dive from the pink and green lichen surface of the boulders.

          Gary said he saw one, but I only heard the loons, screaming like kids, or laughing eerily at dusk.

          I built a fire in the pit but had to leave it to go inside and cook. I watched from the kitchen window. 

          Walking the dogs, we turned off the flashlight and marveled at the stars hanging above the tops of the trees, across the pond, that looked like a piece of black velvet cut with pinking shears. 

          Sunday began with steady rain but changed, as my uncle always said Maine weather would do, into a peculiar, blinding clarity. We drove down to Acadia and walked out onto the flanks of Cadillac Mountain—its lunar spaciousness studded with cairns, wild blueberry bushes, and midget spruce.

          Did you used to hike here? was Gary's only remark, slackly delivered.

          The place was too much for one person in one day, and I thought about the years it had taken me to memorize its summits and coves. 

          Yes, over there. I pointed to Bald Peak but couldn't remember its name. I said nothing about Sargent Mountain, like an old boyfriend too complex, too sensual, to describe to anyone else.

          The boardwalk trail around Jordan Pond was closed, but the perspective of the rippled water filling the glacial basin, crowned on her northern shore by the Bubbles dotted with climbers, delivered on its much-published promise.

          Monday night we packed for the long drive home.

* * *

          But now the dashboard sports a sheath of birch bark, taken from the two acres of wooded land we bought from my uncle's estate. The tract, still within the township, is all that remains, like a fingerprint on a silver case, of my delight and history in this place. 

          Its municipal, taxable reality seems assurance enough I am still a citizen of the ground I covered, in my New Balances and skinny black jeans, with such adoration.

          The promise of returning—for good—seems enough to keep in shape for.

Eating an Orange

          In a restaurant, my mother would scoop her painted fingers into the glass and bring out a slightly grayed, fully marinaded section for me to eat (along with the Maraschino cherry). 
          At home, however, she just reused a slice. pushing it through the evening's three or four Old Fashioned's then pitching it.
          Here I sit at noon with a navel orange sliced neatly into my Blue Willow bowl—so refreshing after lunch.
          But it still tastes like whiskey.