Sunday morning I woke up just after four AM and read.
People always say OMG about getting up really early, but if you know you can’t get back to sleep, what’s the point of trying? I often wake up between four and five, and sometimes I even give up and arise at three. I like hazy late summer days like this, when there is a slight decay in the overblown vegetation, when by the bogs with their water lilies, there are flashes of red and rust in the trees. On the highway, the staghorn sumac is scarlet, burnt orange and maroon. In Maine, there emerges that very faint, culturally pleasurable sense of shared suffering and endurance to come. Summer is fleeting, I told you so. Sunday I went to Mass, where the first reading, interestingly, talked about the Ammonites. On the drive home—296 North-- warm rain came down hard on the highway. Some of the out of state tourists—for once in the right lane—drove very cautiously and slowly, but this was a nothing drive, nothing like the worst of winter drives, when 18 wheelers splash great torrents of blinding slush and sand on your car as they roar past. Those are the drives where you can see nothing and carefully prize your white-knuckled fingers off the steering wheel when you arrive home. It was late morning by the time I got back home and promptly fell back asleep while thinking of a cottage my family once rented—for a week, the length of my father’s vacation from Providence Body, where he then worked. This summer place was near Bonnet Shores, a private beach colony in Rhode Island’s South County. “Private” was a relative term—it was built after World War II for the striving Irish and was populated by people like the Riordan’s, who owned a liquor store in Mount Pleasant. The house was set in the center of a meadow once part of a saltwater farm; the high grasses and wildflowers were surrounded by stone walls. The cottage was blue and white and smelled of mothballs, honeysuckle, and salt. I was seven or eight then. I liked the place’s chipped china, the rough grey army blankets on lumpy beds. How it got cool—the faintest hint of fall-- at night. One morning there was “confab” of field mice in the kitchen—all sitting in a circle, according to my mother. We had no pets, but I loved animals. I imagined that the mice gently spoke to each other as in fairy tales, with humor and wisdom. Outside the house, I loved the white cloud of mist that rose over the field in the predawn. I remember especially the narrow downward paths to the beach, through great tangles of beach plums, overgrown and far above my head. Down the cliff I’d scramble, the morning glories opening above the undergrowth, terns and gulls crying overhead. Suddenly I would emerge to the broad swath of beach, with plovers scuttling at the shore’s edge and breakers’ deep roar. So this I dreamed yesterday, I think, or maybe I was just held in musing, half asleep. Then someone called, a freelancer friend who had background on a project. I knew she was working, focused and intent; there’s no give on these deadlines, no give on the rules. This I fully understood; I know how you get toward the finish, rushing forward. It was strange, though, to encounter this, sleepy as I was, amid the hazy colors of the day. I seemed to swim up in light-filled water, emerging just below a hazy surface. But the dream state was still mine, and the other world, the real world—at least one version-- seemed unreal and far away. Like Comment ShareCommentsWrite a comment...
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