On Waves

Vacations, obligations, negotiations; turkeys (of course).

1. Back from Florida, a whirlwind, a lovely retreat, perfectly chaotic (I’d have it no other way). Forty-eight hours of indulgence and salt and sand, chocolate croissants and flat whites, peanut butters and jellies, cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents, bookended with half-days of travel (deserving in themselves the vacation). A restful trip, it was not — the kids slept almost fourteen hours our first night back — but one that gives hope for future travel. How lucky we are!

2. While there and exploring the grounds — my watch tells me I averaged thirteen thousand steps each day — we saw: gopher tortoises, marsh rabbits, brown pelicans (no whites, even though we were at the transitory zone at the boundaries of each species’ migratory patterns), pipers, coquina clams (“they tickle!”), brown anoles, crows, laughing gulls, Herring gulls, ospreys, dolphins breaching off-shore. Kiddo and the Warthog were fascinated by palm trees, remarked on the greenery which hadn’t yet made its way north.

3. I took in all this and thought about the constant ebb of the world: birds shifting up and down and across meridians and parallels, seasons changing, plants budding and blooming and fruiting and dying, transmissions ever expanding and retracting. An epiphany — the circles grow ever wider.

4. Peter Korn writes how “through creative practice we are investigating existential questions such as ‘Who can I become?’ and ‘How should I live?’” How such a practice “exercises one’s innate capacity to reform the given world in ways that matter.”¹

5. Who can I become? How should I live?

6. Back home, back in the maelstrom. I shift my thinking to bricks, to mortar, to the trade of real things. Korn apprenticed under a carpenter on Nantucket who refused to do new construction, only restoration: “He didn’t want to contribute to the overbuilding of… that lovely, quiet, open-spaced island that… was doomed to overdevelopment.” How do you reform a two-hundred-year-old building into something new, something that matters? How do you make something worth building?

7. Dropped off to be developed the 108 frames of film the Kiddos and cousins collectively took in Florida. Waiting with bated breath for the resulting images (“seven to ten business days”), our existential creative practice already on to the next roll.

8. Writing this before I head north, to Maine, to hunt turkeys with John Gonter. High hopes, aspirations — a lingering melancholy to be away from home again so soon. The Warthog told me he thinks, maybe, that this time, I’ll get the turkey that guards the pot of gold — Kiddo nodded in agreement. The Monkey just smiled.

9. The Irish word cáithnín means “an atom, a husk of corn, a snowflake, a minuscule smidge of butter or anything tiny that gets in the eye and irritates it.” It means also the goose-bumps you feel when “you ponder the interrelatedness of things and how small we are in relation to the whole.”²

10. The waves ebb and flow.

11. Spotted a group of birds as we started toward the blind Wednesday night — spooked, they scattered back into the woods. Tried to loop back around them, failed. Sat in the blind for another thirty minutes, until sunset, trying in vain to blink a black fly out of my eye.

No turkeys for me in Maine, even though John and I played a game of catch and release with a tom for most of yesterday morning.³ I didn’t leave Vacationland empty-handed, though — besides cooking an inspired dinner, John gifted me two ducks, a grouse, some turkey breast from his own bird, a landlocked salmon, Amish butter, a bag of ramps, a recurve bow, and taught me how to forage for fiddleheads (or, rather, Ostrich ferns). It’s the only time I’ve received a “guest’s gift” — and I’m extra motivated to return the favor next time we hunt together. John, you are truly a man of generosity — thank you.

Now, back home, preparing for another weekend, for Mother’s Day, for a foray into mid-May, warmer weather, time spent outside, love, gratitude — maybe a plant sale, ice cream, roast duck, and more. We cherish Mrs. CWD and all she does more than she’ll ever know.

However you’re spending your weekend, I hope you spend it appreciatively.

We’ll see you back here next week.

1. From Why We Make Things & Why It Matters.

2. From Thirty-Two Words for Field.

3. And by “catch and release,” I mean he caught us with his gobbles and released us into despondency by not coming in to our return calls. I envisioned that bird picturing Drizella and Anastasia — the ugly stepsisters from Cinderella — as he listened to John and I hammering away on our calls, the turkey waiting for us to come to him to see just how hideous we really were.