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Onwards

View from the shed apartment lounge that we lived in this time last year. Photo by Madz.

It is strange to be in a new year, after so much anticipation.

It was a year, as comedian Dave Chappelle commented in a podcast John and I listened to last month, while driving across Nevada, when for better or worse, we have all lived in close proximity with the decisions we have made in our life up until now. Our choice on the color of our couches and kitchen walls, to our careers, businesses, and spouses, was now under careful scrutiny as we have come face to face with them each day, often under serious stress. I told my cousin about that quote today and she laughed that she had just gotten rid of a dining room table that always went back to being wobbly, no matter what repairs she did to it.  She had thought it was quirky up until recently. She finally realized that 2020 was the year she needed a solid table to lay her head down on for a good cry and then get on with it.

For many this has been a year of heartbreak and tragedy, confusion, grief.  For others, this has been a season of hustle, as redundancies and cancelled plans have led to opportunities that wouldn’t have been available in 2019. For others it’s been a combination of all of this. Some have commented that 2020 has accelerated trends that we were moving towards anyways, like working remotely or ongoing independent study for those of our kids who have ended up being happier and more productive outside the traditional classroom.  We have all felt lonely, scared and a little lost without actual face time with our communities and families at some point in the last ten months.

In our house, 2020 has been a mixed bag that I’m still sorting through. This time last year we had just settled into summer in New Zealand in a friend’s beautiful shed apartment. I threw myself into freelance projects and worked at a pub at night while hanging out with Jessie – then just six months old – during the day as John fished and explored the rivers around the South Island. The idea was that we were setting ourselves up to do this every northern hemisphere winter, for as many years as we could. We barely made it back to the U.S. before both countries – and the rest of the world – shut down indefinitely in March. We had unexpected weeks with family in Colorado in quarantine, as Jessie had long nights of teething and we slept in shifts, drank endless pots of coffee through the snowy late mornings, ordered take-out, and took solitary walks by the creek when we needed a breather and a big-picture perspective of what was happening. It was all going to go away by Easter. Then the middle of summer (which, unexpectedly, exploded with work for both John and I – turns out that everyone in the U.S. wanted to be in Montana). Then it was September. By then we knew we had to put the plan to return to New Zealand on the back-burner, maybe indefinitely.

Instead, as the months have gone on and work has calmed down, it was replaced by plans for another adventure this winter that has become more and more certain.

It’s a journey that might be closer to home, yet no less nerve-wracking than a move across the world. And if you’ve run into me in the last few weeks, you’ll see that I’m well on my way.

At 32 weeks pregnant, with an 18-month-old toddler running laps around the couch I’m beached on like an exhausted mammal looking up at photo collages of the rivers, lakes, mountains and oceans of New Zealand we were exploring this time last year, I’d put my hand up to agree that this has been a year when we have lived in tight quarters with our collective life decisions that have motored us along to where we are now, then screeched to a halt, dumping us here in 2020: Surprised, messily joyous, overwhelmed, hopeful, exhausted, grateful, tougher and thicker skinned than we were 12 months ago.

At a work meeting on December 31, going over wines and a tasting menu that evening, we talked about where we all were as 2020 came, maybe mercifully, to an end for each of us. The theme for the night, with fire-dancing, a bonfire and fireworks, was “the rising of the Phoenix,” which has never felt more appropriate. I said that I felt like my own theme word for the year was “pivot.” I’ve had to release more than I’ve ever had to release this last year. Ideas of myself. The vision board I had for our future. I had to learn to relinquish myself to the rest that my body and mind had actually been craving, after months of traveling and living in transition. Then turn around and throw myself into work. Then turn around again and re-accept the gift of rest when our workplace shut down for 10 days in August, as Covid cases rose in Montana. I had to learn to incorporate fatigue and morning sickness into my summer and make peace with collapsing on a couch at the end of the night to eat frozen grapes and watch Below Deck. I got to learn the joy of having a wonderful community of parents and childcare pros around me – literally, my neighbors – who adored Jessie and helped shuttle her around and give her a beautiful summer with a wee tribe of adventurers that she will be growing up with.

In all of the unexpected twists and turns, the releasing of plans and control of the future – whatever that looks like – I’m okay with where our household decisions have landed us, even close up – scratched wood floors, tiny kitchen, toys, abandoned sippy cups, peeling siding on the front that I’ve covered up with a wreath and wind chimes, and all.  Winter and darkness is very acute in Montana. Solstice on the 21st felt appropriately somber. And comforting – like a heavy duvet had been thrown over me. As the holiday cards still strung up around the house tonight remind me, 2020 has been “a year to remember.”

Ha. Yeah it has.

Now bring on 2021 from the ashes.

2 Comments California, Montana, New Zealand

The Blue Tent

I bought this tent I’m falling asleep in nine years ago this month. I had just finished up co-guiding a two-week trip around the South Island of New Zealand and I hadn’t slept more than five hours a night for that time. I was fit and grimy and all of my clothes smelled like sunscreen and citronella. I had a $1,600 wad of tip money and nowhere to really be for 13 days until my next trip. Bedding from my last apartment I had occupied was still tucked into the trunk of the 1994 Toyota Starlet I drove everywhere in those years, with a chandelier Christmas ornament dangling from the rear-view mirror.

I remember going out to breakfast and ordering something really expensive to eat. Then I went to chain store called The Warehouse – the equivalent of a Walmart – and picked up this tent in the outdoor aisle, just over from the gardening section. I set it up in the front yard of the farm where all of the hiking trips were based out of; where all our packs, food and trailers were stored between trips and where the guides often crashed on floors and in twin bunk beds, with outdoor gear laid out to dry.

The blue tent was like a safari photograph, with blankets and pillows from the Starlet arranged. I read a borrowed Hunter S. Thompson book all week and figured out the new laptop I had also purchased, starting my Homefires blog with the thin flap unzipped, and a view of the dairy cows grazing as I lounged on throw pillows and tried to describe my life at that time, going into the staff kitchen every so often to brew another cup of tea to take back out to my space.

That tent would get pitched in the back yards of friends all over the island that summer. It wasn’t hardy enough for big, high altitude, multi-day trips, but for what I needed – a small space of my own to block out the rest of the world – it was perfect.

Two years later I would take it with me to Spain when I walked the Camino de Santiago for two months, quickly learning that it was unnecessary weight to carry when I could just stay in the convents and guest houses along the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path for about six dollars a night. So I sent it to my parents’ house in California, where it would live in a closet for another four years, forgotten.

The blue tent was discovered and loaded up in the green Saturn I bought when I came back to the U.S., later in my 30s. I had one car-less winter in Big Sky, where I met my now-husband. Packing up the leftovers in my childhood room that late April and driving north and east back to Montana was a risky move, but it felt right – more so as John and I would unfold and pitch that tent by rivers all over the West that summer and fall. Each time I rolled it out I felt like I was coming back to an old, familiar room I had once lived in.  It was a piece of myself I was returning to, only now I was learning about sharing it with someone else.

Two years later it would go up at a sandy campground at Refugio Beach for me and my friends to sleep in, the night before John and I got married. And we would break it out on our honeymoon back to Montana through Big Sur and the Lost Coast in northern California, Oregon and Washington.

Tonight, the blue tent is pitched beside the East Fork of the Bitterroot. The sound of the creek is deafening. There is a large stone holding down the right corner of the tent where it has ripped – but other than that the canvas walls are still in good shape. In the morning, we will go on my first float of the season, in the spring sun, stopping at a river island for John to grill the antelope tenderloin we’ve defrosted for this trip, as our dog runs up and down the banks, in and out of water and we will have strawberries for dessert.

But right now, listening to the spring runoff outside, wishing desperately that I had thought to bring my water bottle in the tent with us because I’m so thirsty, I just think about every kind of soil these tent pegs have been hammered into. Our dog, smelly with river brine and dirt, nestles between us, buried in blankets. And I am strangely comfortable, even at 8 months pregnant, though every time I turn on my side I feel like a rotisserie chicken, with each move needing careful planning and a strategy.

When I do make it upright and then outside, the stars are bright and there is a layer of ice on the flap as my headlamp scours the picnic table for my water bottle. Nine years ago was another life. Sixteen hundred dollars in a wad of cash. That is so much to me right now, I think, as I chug water. And I wish I knew what I had done with that chandelier Christmas ornament that dangled from the rear-view mirror from that long gone Toyota Starlet on the other side of the world, because that chandelier seems ironic now. I was obscenely wealthy and I didn’t even know it back then.

But I remember that this tent made me feel rich in those years when I’d crawl into it. It still does, I think, as I settle in. There isn’t much to these canvas walls, but it’s ended up being a tent for all seasons.

Comment California, Montana, New Zealand

Traditions

I’ve always marked the birthdays in my family with the holiday it’s been conveniently tied to. My little brother symbolized new birth at Easter. For my mother it was the last of the long summer beach days of Labor Day Weekend. For my father, it was Thanksgiving.

Celebrating gratitude and my father have always gone hand and hand, pulling my brother and I home from wherever we were that year; more so than Christmas. Thanksgiving Day always seemed to be the natural prelude to Dad’s birthday – a big gathering of extended family that ate all the traditional American food Dad had never experienced until he married my mother and settled with her in California: the turkey, the stuffing, the pumpkin pie, cranberry sauce, a Jell-O salad from my grandmother’s 1950s-era plastic mold, Hawaiian rolls and buttered walnuts from their trees in the backyard. Before we’d start, my brother would always recite the same Thanksgiving-themed poems that he had learned by heart by age 11, involving football and turkey-carving, and we’d all sit patiently through this, rolling our eyes, then pass around the bowl of corn kernels, putting as many as we liked on the bare white plates to symbolize what we were grateful for, before a prayer of thanks, led by Dad if we were the hosts that year.

As lovely as that day, crammed with traditions, has been, it’s been the aftermath that I love and miss in the years that I’m not there. The lounging around in pajamas the next morning, eating pumpkin pie and coffee with leftover whip cream, going for bike rides and hikes, having friends stop by to say hi and watching All Creatures Great and Small episodes by the fire in the evening with bowls of ice cream. In the morning there was often a layer of fog over the field across the street from the house. In some years they grew pumpkins there, horses and cattle grazing on the hill marked by oak trees just beyond this, and I’d sit on the couch with a coffee and watch condensation burn off. Dad would either be up and raking walnuts outside or bringing out the tandem bike from the garage that he and Mom would do their morning ride on – her way of keeping them both in shape.

In many of these years, Dad’s birthday was a post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas road trip an hour up the coast to San Luis Obispo, all four of us crammed into their car, listening to holiday music mixes my brother had put together. We go out to breakfast at the Apple Farm, where we’ve been going for vacation breakfasts for about 30 years, and go find a Christmas tree at the farms that were starting to pop up. One year we went to the beach and Dad and my brother threw footballs and frisbees back and forth, while Mom and I read in beach chairs. Dinner on Dad’s birthday was often just grazing through the free samples at Costco – his choice – while Mom bought us socks and underwear and coffee in bulk. We’d drive home that night with a tree tied to the top of our car and Dad and my brother would set it up in the living room. If we were ambitious, or if one of us had to leave the next day, we’d decorate it that night.

As adults, the last weekend in November was often the only time we were together for, so it was all crammed together in one Frankenstein-ed holiday weekend. Maybe it’s weird, but that was just us. To me, it was wonderful.

My brother, who is in the Navy, is stationed on a ship touring Asia and the Middle East until next April. I won’t be able to make it home to my parents this year for the holidays. I think it’s in these years when we’re missing each other, that we value the memories of Dad’s Birthday Weekend the most.

1 Comment California

Going home at 40

This morning I went for a run, sun on my bare shoulders, the smell of damp eucalyptus trees around me, the sound of crows picking off the last of the walnuts in the branches above.

All around me is the neighborhood I grew up in. My feet crush shriveled olives, persimmons and walnut tree leaves as I move. It is winter and 75 degrees outside before noon.

I used to always want to arrive home in California with my life full of sureness. To appear together, visibly going somewhere. There have been years when it’s felt like I’ve been obedient to how my life is supposed to look. Most of the time though, instead of a triumphant return, it’s a collapse. Those are the years when I’ve loved this place the most.

When I go on these runs it is like swimming blind through memory lanes. I drift in and out of time lines. I’m too old to be nostalgic for my childhood here. Instead, there’s this tenderness for the long stretches of time I spent here in my 20s and 30s, usually arriving broken and beaten up by life, sullen, ready to sleep for 16 hours straight, then sit in the hot tub and grumpily drink coffee brewed hours before, when my parents first got up that morning.

Different scenes will come back to me at different times, and hardly ever chronologically. When I sit at the Corner Coffeehouse and eat gelato, I remember pacing the sidewalk outside, walking back and forth during a phone interview for a job in northern Montana that I didn’t take. Then hanging up and having that feeling that I could go anywhere I wanted when I was 36.

I drop off our rent check in the mail box outside the Los Olivos Post Office and walk past the gate to local hotel that we used to climb over to swim in the pool, a few months after I turned 33 and thought that life was all downhill at that point for me.

There were the hours I spent sitting back in a backyard chair made out of a wine barrel, tasting syrah from the hills around me, mourning the loss of the redneck ranching town that this place used to be – but simultaneously realizing that I was totally comfortable enjoying it’s trendiness as the new Napa. That I had changed just as much as this town of 900 people had. It was impossible not to alter, to adapt somehow, in order to survive and grow.

I drive with my mom to the next town over, and I think of myself, biking in flip flops and shorts and gas station sunglasses, to get peaches and nectarines from the farmers’ market on Tuesday afternoons, having just come from winter in the southern hemisphere at 28, uncaring that I was getting passed by serious cyclists, in proper, padded, cycling shorts.

This week I am back for the first time in this new decade of my life. My husband and I are here for five days, to drop off our truck in my parents’ backyard while we go overseas. Winter in Montana feels like this Narnia-esque dream we’ve woken up from. In the afternoons I walk outside barefoot and lace up my running shoes in the driveway. Before I leave I see John helping my dad rake leaves in the front yard. Later they will watch football in the garage. John and I are going over to our friends’ house tonight to barbecue in their back yard and drink cocktails at their kitchen island, surrounded by their girls, who I’ve known since their infancy.

Maybe in another 20 years, I’ll remember the ordinariness of the visiting times just like this one. When everyone we love is just down the street, or a phone call away.

Sometimes it takes a run through the neighborhood to bring it all home. I’m older now, so I feel released from having it all together when I return. Instead, this is what I wrap my mind around: The sun is out. I’m able to run. My lungs inhale and exhale air. There is my husband and dad raking leaves, with a game on in the garage and my mother cleaning out the filing cabinets in the office while listening to an audio book. Later, there is dinner with old friends just down the road.

That is as together as I need to be.

Comment California

New shores

Philipsburg, Montana is hundreds of miles behind us as we drive, wipers brushing off the driving rain, sports radio commentary analyzing last night’s Saints vs. Panthers game on, as we hurtle towards California in a muddy Toyota Tundra.

Winter as we know it is also behind us. Today is Nevada. This is high desert grasses, bail bond billboards, isolated agricultural towns fronted by blinking lights advertising 24-hour casinos. We pass prisons. My eyes follow white, bare houses on tussock hills, then stay on the trains that smoothly parallel us as we move alongside lines of oil tankers. We are all going west.

There is no snow here. When we stop at gas stations and get out of the car, there is a smell of damp earth, shrubs and trees, all the earthiness that gets buried under white in Montana for most of the year.

We’ve been working steadily from mid-December to prepare for this getaway, and yet it was nine hours into this road trip before I felt the cut and release that always comes when I leave a place. I feel that flick of addiction. There’s a reason that people stay on the move all their lives.

Is it change?  A fresh start? New territory, maybe, or a return to a piece of ourselves that gets forgotten or put on the back burner until life slows down a little bit. And out here it does. Suddenly there is nothing but empty hours to let our minds churn things over, to take an idea and run with it.

Such as: getting out at the gas station in Elko, I think about what it would be like to live here. To work at a hotel reception, or the blackjack tables, or the supermarket checkout. Then there is this playful, new fear – every time our GPS tells us the fastest route would be to take this narrow dirt road on the left, just up ahead –  that surely by now there is a serial killer tech-savvy enough to lure a road-weary couple right over a cattle guard and onto his compound, where a gate will clang shut behind us.

We pass by oil fields, steam springing up, and I think back to a short story I read in my early 20s, about a woman who takes a job in a place just like this. I remember how that story made an impression on me. It was lonely and had a sense of bridges that had burned behind this woman. The theme was isolation. But I remember it was also a story about escape. She had survived something. As we drove, I just couldn’t remember what that something was. Or what the story was called. Or who the author was. There is no cell reception or coverage out here, so I can’t even do a Google search. So I sit back, trying to piece that tale back together from memory.

That’s what this time is for, hours and hours on the road, relishing in the rarity of being bored and seeing where that goes.

In another five hours we will be at the ocean. In seven hours we will pull into the gravel of my parents’ driveway where a porch light will be on, and bowls of ice cream will be brought to us by the fire. In the morning, I’ll be able to go for a run without putting on snow boots and three layers. I can slip on running shoes.

Even writing that last paragraph reminds me how wealthy I am in time. When it passes this slowly, I can’t help but be aware of it slipping by.

And this is just the first leg of a five-week journey. We are going west and south, and then really, really south. Southern hemisphere south.

But before all that, there is this. A slow re-awakening to a world outside of winter.

2 Comments California, Montana

One weekend in November

wedding.johncrying.judi.bumstead

Just over a month ago, I had what felt like a really crazy dream.

It was the kind of dream everyone has had at some point, where distance, dimensions and time fall away, and all these people in your life collide in one place.

This is how the dream went: I woke up at a beach in California on a Friday morning, surrounded by friends I had known from pockets of the world over 39 years. We buried our feet and the palms of our hands in the sand, sunglasses on, bleary, happy and disoriented to wake up in this place that was completely other from the Northwest autumns and Southern hemisphere springs we had just driven or flown in from the night before. We made coffee, went swimming in the Pacific, marveled at sun – not rain; not snow – on our skin, then we packed up our sleeping bags, roll mats and tents and went to Ellen’s Pancake House in Buellton for breakfast and ordered all the things – waffles, biscuits and gravy, blueberry pancakes, Danish sausage – we would have pointed to on the menu when we had each just gotten our driver’s license in 1994 and learned how easy it was to ditch Phys ed.

Then suddenly we were all on this plateau as the sun was setting over the oak trees, vineyards and the hills where I was first taught how to ride, on a quarter horse mare named Lucy. I was eating perfectly barbecued tri tip, drinking wine from the vines around us, and all the same people were there, plus more, and so was the man I loved and both our families as the sun finally disappeared.

And then, just as suddenly, we were all at the Maverick, which hadn’t changed since two high school reunions with Cristi Silva by my side, who was still by my side, as the same dollar bills dangled from the ceiling above us and the same old guys propped up the bar. And there was a country western band, and suddenly I was line dancing with Kelli Ramsay, who I’ve slept next to under stars on both sides of the equator, then I was dancing with Andrea French, the hitchhiker I met in Ireland when I was 18. Wagon Wheel was playing – the same song Andrea and I danced to in a tent in Glenorchy four years ago when we ran into each other again, then rode horses the next morning through the same scenery Andrea had kept in two tiny photos in her wallet when I first met her on the Beara Peninsula in 1996. And Kathleen Sieck, who I’ve sat next to on piano benches and built imaginary worlds with since I was four, was right there too, and dancing with Madeline, who I last saw when I sat by her potbelly stove in a shed in Fiordland in 2013, wrapped in a blanket, eating stew as South Island winter rain pelted the tin roof. Then, weirdly, Chris in the Morning from Northern Exposure was hanging out in the background in a black cowboy hat pulled low, and Madeline was asking him to dance, while Kathleen two-stepped with Craig, the wrangler who gave me a ride home in Big Sky, Montana in his truck one December evening three years ago, and whose front seat passenger had been a fly-fishing guide/bartender with beautiful blue eyes and a deep, gentle laugh named John McKinnie, who opened the door for me when I got in and out; the same guy I was now slow dancing with in this bar in my hometown on a Friday night, and who I planned to marry in a meadow by an old barn on a friends’ ranch the next day.

Everyone always says weddings are a blur and that it goes by too fast to grasp – but really I don’t think I had any idea how true that was until November.

That long weekend beginning with family and friends arriving on a Thursday and spilling over into that beautiful, long Friday of gatherings that led to more gatherings and finally into a Saturday that I kept wanting to find a freeze button for, was full of so much love and beauty, I couldn’t stand it. I loved that along with Cristi –  who as the maid of honor did everything from moving hay bales, to makeup the morning of, to putting together a most spectacular going away gift –  I had Angie, who I first met in Europe after we had both left our small hometowns to travel for the first time; Whitney, my Los Olivos Elementary School bestie who met me for a weekend in New York City last October, where we toasted more than 33 years of friendship with jalapeno-laced cosmos on a rooftop below the Empire State Building after nearly dying in a bicycle taxi ride; Megan, my sister-in-law who lives just down the highway from us in Montana and puts all the strength and stamina she once used to jump out of planes and fight wildfires into raising two gorgeous, strong-hearted twin boys who carefully carried our $30 rings (that’s a collective amount) hand in hand with their dad;  all while Kathleen sang so perfectly Patty Griffin’s “Heavenly Day” on her guitar at the front, as we walked towards an arbor of walnut and oak branches and eucalyptus she had spent that week collecting and putting together along with her mother, Maggie, one of my mom’s best friends who stepped in as wedding coordinator in the last months and saved us all, and Kathleen’s sister Anna Taylor who actually does this for a living and got roped into the chaos to cast her special magic over it.

At one point the day before I watched Anna organize us all, directing where the arbor should be placed as wooden benches made by a friend my brother went to high school with, were unloaded and placed on the grass. At the barn behind us, John, my dad, and my brother, Sean, were laying out the dance floor with Norm, the ranch manager. In Anna’s arms was her infant son, Wills, adopted just days before. She was no-nonsense and so chic as she gave directives with her one free hand, never setting Wills down, but all I could think of was the Anna I knew at age four, long before she became kind of a big deal in the wedding world, when she was my fierce, spunky protector at Garden House Preschool in Ballard and pushed a kid who was bullying me up against a wall, wild west style with both fists clenching the shirt under his chin, and told him to back off.

I had about a thousand flashbacks just like that during the weekend when I looked around at the beautiful send-off we were getting. Friends gave us so much of their time and talent to celebrate, it’s astounding to look back on. And their homes: John and Georgia Wiester hosted a wonderful rehearsal barbecue for us on their Buellton ranch on Friday night that welcomed in the wedding party. Ken and Bobbi Hunter were so kind to allow us to be part of a handful of friends and family who have had a wedding in a restored 1880’s barn on a Los Alamos ranch. My friend Rachel who married us, gently and joyfully coached us through the ins and outs of saying our vows and making sure we had all our paperwork in order. Jeff Sieck, Kathleen’s husband – brewed a hoppy brown ale and an Irish Red “Hold Yer Peace” beer in our honor that we toasted with (he’s not brewing professionally at this time, but he should be), and then MC’d the reception while he and Kathleen managed to still get their three beautiful daughters, Vera, Fiona and Clementine, into cowboy boots and gowns to be our flower girls. Long-time family friend Judi Bumstead made sure my husband was photographed weeping in both color and black and white; while Nick Kelly, Angie’s husband, and a breathtaking landscape photographer, made a special exception to do photos of a wedding; and my parents’ friend Julie Moss, as well as Cristi, and our friend Michelle, all graciously showed up with cameras and made sure that so many moments were captured in pictures and video.

And our parents: Steve and Doris McKinnie road tripped from Colorado and were there for the first dress fittings in August to silver polishing and walnut cracking for the pies on the dessert table in that final week. And my parents, Ken and Judy Hyndman who hosted such a beautiful and perfect day, taking care of so many details – outdoor toilets, insurance, catering, alcohol, heating lamps, manicures, hair, invitations, a surprise bagpiper after we said our vows, and took on so much stress – so that John and I could just roll into town and get hitched and be on our way back to Montana and life as we know it. People kept saying that I was the most relaxed bride they’d ever seen. There were a lot of people who shouldered the load that so we could be as chilled out and happy as we were that weekend.

In the final hours of Saturday night as I was saying goodbye to friends who were packing up and leaving, I looked back at the dance floor and saw John, double-fisted with bridal bouquets, dancing to California Love on a near empty floor, my brother going crazy in the background, both of them hands up to Dr Dre, and without even thinking about it much, the words for the first time, just came out: “And there’s my husband.”

It was a wonderful to be blessed and sent on our way. Both into a long honeymoon roadtrip up the West coast but also the life we are in on this dark December night, utterly other than where we were six weeks ago: Sturgill Simpson playing in the kitchen, Swedish meatballs in the slow-cooker, John reading one couch over, a Christmas tree we cut down last week off Black Pine Road shimmering with lights and ornaments in the corner – including the Joy sand dollar given to us as a wedding present –  our new dog softly snoring on his bed on the floor, snow swirling outside the windows and -20 temperatures predicted.

I do feel the joy from the sand dollar ornament. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be right now.

(Below are a few pictures taken by our wonderful friends from the weekend. Top feature photo by Judi Bumstead).

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John also did a day by day travel log of our honeymoon- “How a fly fishing guide and a writer spend their honeymoon” – that you can find here, done partially so we can remember how we spent the honeymoon funds that were gifted to us by friends, as we veered off the initial itinerary a bit. Also for anyone getting married and too broke for a honeymoon: Traveler’s Joy. It’s game-changer for the nomadically-inclined.

2 Comments California, Montana, New Zealand

An end to an endless summer

summer, poolside

 

It was a late start to summer this year, but once it arrived for me, I gripped and then chased it like it was the last summer I would ever live through.

I slouched into the season at first, leaving Montana, and my job, in the second week of June for two weeks in California. I was tired and still preoccupied with work at the newspaper I had just left behind when I arrived at LAX at midnight on a Monday, my fingernails bitten down to the skin. I had wanted to be filled with a sense of release as the plane descended over the city lights that night – the precise opposite of the landscape I had just taken flight from – but no dice. My mind was stuck in that dense, dark puddle of navel-gazing that I back myself into when I’m worn down. Getting up and out of it is just wheels spinning in mud until traction is found.

A few days after I got back to my hometown – with days of late sleep-ins, long mornings of coffee on the back porch, nights in my parents’ hot tub under walnut trees in the backyard – I was house sitting for friends who live on top of a hill that looks out to one of my favorite mountain ranges. Doing breaststrokes in their pool is like swimming towards Figueroa Mountain; in the morning when I walk down to feed the horses and collect The Wall Street Journal at the bottom of the long, winding dirt driveway, a cup of coffee in my hand, the morning on my eyelids as I pass under the shadow of oak trees, every fourth step is a prayer (Thank you. Thank you. Thank you). I have looked after this house and its occupants – kids, now grown; beloved spaniels, now passed away; horses, forever on guard in the front corral; rose gardens, miraculously still here in the blistering Augusts – during summer and winter vacations, down times between jobs, and long weekends since I was 15. I am 39 now. This house on the hill has always been a place of rest. I dreamed of that long walk down the driveway when I was working late nights on the third floor of a grey building at a city newspaper in New Zealand, during the long, dark winters when the coastal winds ripped the car door handles from my fingers as I’d be loading groceries. Now the house is, for the most part, in my time zone when I arrive from Montana, but the sense of distance from my own life is still there every time I arrive.

I always underestimate the power of that distance – as well as sleep, sun, and a portal into a fictional world – to give me just that little bit of grip that I need to pull myself together. I took this photo towards the end of my second day, feeling like I was drunk with the time I had on my hands, but also, I realized, just plain drunk. The friends had left an opened bottle of Champagne in the fridge for me. It was a Tuesday – normally my hell day at the paper as we prepped it to go to print the next morning, with last-minute decisions and judgement calls to make; errors to search for when your brain was already shaved off into a hundred paper thin cheese slices to care for all the details that begged for your time, followed by board meetings that night. The day before I had cycled down to the Book Loft in Solvang to find a novel I had been thinking about, and the fact that I had all this time to make such a leisurely decision about how I was going to spend my leisure time seemed so reckless. I swam and read, swam and read; ate peaches with Greek yogurt; then read some more. I decided to have a small glass of Champagne after napping in the sun. I read and sipped and watched the sun change. It seemed like a fine idea to have another glass to celebrate hitting the halfway mark on the book by 3 pm.

As I stood a little while later, setting the book down in the pool chair to have one final dip in the pool, a cautious voice in my head asked: Have we had too much Champagne to go swimming?

I sat back down on the pool chair, put another layer of sunscreen on, and then my shades, and lay there, grinning. Have I had too much Champagne to go swimming. What a glorious day, that this was the only significant question I had to ask myself.

It was Tuesday, and it was the beginning of my summer. I think I’m writing about it to remind myself how good that day was.

Today is Thursday in October and I woke up in Montana as the sun was just coming up over the ranch land outside the living room window as the heater crackles to life. Two mornings ago, I parted the curtains to snow falling. Since that Tuesday in June, I’ve swam in rivers, lakes, and two oceans, mowed my weed-laden lawn three times, returned for one last stint as editor before turning over the job to a young, bright journalism graduate. I’ve become deft at swiftly changing white linen tablecloths so the table never shows, delivered margaritas by jeep to guests as they pan for sapphires, cycled like mad across an island for my first Atlantic lobster, and sat at a desk in a white room with white-washed floors in an old whaling town for two weeks and wrote until the made-up world I had whipped into existence – marching it along each morning that summer before my 6:30 a.m. breakfast shift started – finally awakened and began to shakily walk along towards an ending all on its own.

It has been the longest of summers. Sometimes you have to grip that season of great freedom and happiness while you have it, give it one last tight squeeze, then release it to make room for the good things to come. I’m ready.

(Also: Put Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter on your reading list, by a pool, by a fire, on a plane, on a train, wherever. It took him something like 15 years to write the novel and it was one of my favorite reads in the last five years. I finished it in a bar on Flathead Lake, crying, the night I came back to Montana.)

 

 

 

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