Ever since they said that, I post even more flower posts because it was a reminder to do what I want to do here – posts filled with whatever brings me joy mostly – instead of what snarky visitors want me to do. Apologies to those who deserve them.
Here’s yet another flower post because it’s May, and things are beautifully blooming, and I just want to share the prettiness and the joy with the world. It contains a number of favorites:
While the sights were pretty enough, Ogunquit also has some amazing food and drink, and even during our rainiest weekends the highlights have always been the dinners. This time around we found excellent meals at the Old Village Inn, Walker’s, The Front Porch, and Caffé Prego. Being near the ocean has a way of making me even more hungry than usual.
And oh what a delight it is to be on the sea – to look over the Atlantic reaching all the way out to Europe and Africa – to feel the vastness of the world, and also to dwell upon its finite expanse. We are so far and we are so close. To step into the icy water and think that this same body of water is lapping upon another shore halfway around the world makes me feel connected to this place in ways I don’t always feel. It’s a sense of belonging somewhere – something that has too often eluded me over the years.
Our time here passes too quickly, but it is just enough to satiate us until next time. There’s a calm and contentment that has been shared which I will access on more troubling days. We are always better for having touched the sea.
For our final breakfast, a warm dish of Shakshuka is the ideal antidote to the downpour of rain.
Arriving to a town in full bloom with pinks and purples and pastels, we were greeted to spring in full effect – from the lilacs to the azaleas to the trilliums that will play a part in later posts, it seemed like everything was in full bloom. We don’t always manage to catch it in such a state – the late start and colder weather had this as a silver lining.
For better or worse, a vacation is only ever as good as its accommodations, and in this respect we have an ideal home base at the Scotch Hill Inn, where Anthony has been taking good care of us and providing spectacular breakfasts for the past several years. Our most recent visit was this past winter – which was a rare jewel unto itself – but I think it’s spring we like best, when all the hope of summer is in sight.
This fabulous frittata started things off deliciously, providing sustenance for a day along the shore.
Back in town, everything else was in full bloom, including our emblem of this spring blog season – the lilac. Long borders of the shrub were on full floral display, scenting every step with their sweet perfume. Ogunquit cast its spell again, and the drone of the ocean kept gentle time to the weekend ahead…
A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes I screamed aloud as it tore through them And now it’s left me blind…
The stars, the moon They have all been blown out You’ve left me in the dark No dawn, no day I’m always in this twilight In the shadow of your heart
Flashes of light and gaseous alchemy, elements comprising life and energy, the stars seem so simple but they contain multitudes – meaning, magic, majesty – and though they seem to watch us from afar, we do not see where some might be now – so long does it take for their sparkle to reach our sight. The twinkles we see tonight were emitted long ago, depending on how distant they are, and the bending of time, the traversing of great distance, and the destiny apparently embedded in the sky might all play a part in how our lives will play out.
I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map And knew that somehow I could find my way back Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too So I stayed in the darkness with you
The stars, the moon They have all been blown out You’ve left me in the dark (you left me in the dark) No dawn, no day I’m always in this twilight In the shadow of your heart
When someone is completely and totally who they are meant to be, it’s a glorious thing to see, probably because it doesn’t seem to happen all that often. I’m certainly nowhere near that, though I’d be bold enough to claim I’m getting closer. Still much more work to be done, more to be figured out, even at my advanced age.
Only flowers and plants and trees seem to have it all figured out, and even they are prone to evolution and change – a shifting global environment is forcing that into happening as unfair as that might be. Leave it to humans to fuck everything up with global warming. Nature laid down finite and beautiful laws, but human nature is too often infantile and stupid. We ruin all the good things, sometimes sheerly out of boredom. What a sad set of circumstances… and so I retreat to the irrefutable safety of beauty – and the beauty of the natural world, such as found in this exquisite passionflower bloom.
The passionflower wants nothing more than to climb and bloom and spread its maypops to animals who might eat and later deposit its seeds elsewhere. The passionflower doesn’t worry about dying, it simply goes through its life-cycle one day at a time. I caught this one in glorious bloom, beginning its enticement of the bees to come by and pollinate, but if that doesn’t happen, the plant still flowers, it still produces this beautiful vision. A valiant effort, worth all its work, and we are lucky enough to see it happen.
Every moment can be ripe for a rest, and often that helps clear out the cobwebs, recalling what’s important and what matters, especially at a juncture such as we have reached between May and June. A more magical time of the year may not occur again until the magnificent return of fall.
The madness of today’s full moon is making the writing here a bit clumsy, a tad awkward. It’s not flowing the way I know it can, and it isn’t converting what I’m trying to say. Best to put it to bed when that happens. When things stall, let them be still for a while. Sleep on it. Sometimes they just need time. And silence. Let’s regroup here tomorrow.
A recent reading recommendation, ‘House of Leaves’ by Mark E. Danielewski, is proving to be both a challenge and an unexpected pleasure. It’s always a crap shoot when someone who knows me makes any sort of suggestion on a book or movie or show – especially if they boast that they think I will love it. Perhaps it is my contradictory nature that immediately sets up an internal bias against what people assume. Perhaps I’m just a dick who thrives on not being known or understood, a hardcore asshole whose nature has embraced its antagonistic fury.
A kinder reading of myself indicates I might simply be unpredictable, and very specific in what I like – it’s why I’ve never gotten into the ‘recommended listening’ predictions in places like Spotify – just because I love Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’ does not necessarily mean I like Paula Abdul‘s ‘Straight Up’. In most ways, I prefer to be unknown. Despite all the supposedly-revealing things I’ve put on full-frontal display here over the decades, I’ve kept a surprisingly vast part of my life private and unseen. If you think you know, you probably don’t.
“… I’ve come to believe errors, especially written errors, are often the only markers left by a solitary life: to sacrifice them is to lose the angles of personality, the riddle of a soul. In this case a very old soul. A very old riddle.” – Mark E. Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’
Once in a while, though, someone makes a suggestion for something that totally hits my sweet spot, which is the case with ‘House of Leaves’. It checks off most of my preferred boxes: challenging, ambiguous, infuriating, thrilling, mysterious, gritty, and disturbing.
The storytelling here is steeped in enough convincingly-academic structure to effectively immerse the reader in the impossible possibility that it might be real. More insidious is the way it might wreak havoc with the reader’s head, and once certain rooms in the mind are cracked open, you can never completely close them again – they remain there, holes of darkness, who knows how deep they go, and in the infinite capacity for black emptiness lies the seed of self-destruction just perilously within and without of reach.
Tomorrow’s full Blue Moon is reportedly one of the most powerful for manifesting, whatever you might take that to mean. It’s simultaneously one of shedding, where you can let go of whatever is holding you back. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a little Blue Moon, even if it is full.
This is the second full moon of May, which may explain the craziness some of us have been feeling this entire month. The past few days it’s been nothing but red lights, crazy drivers, computer cock-ups, and a bunch of things that went balls-up. If we can move the blame to the moon, maybe it’s not us. If we can harness some lunar energy in the process, so much the better.
This spring I didn’t go overboard with our patio planting scheme. A few salvias and hummingbird favorites – which are working as we’ve already seen our first hummingbird of the season – a pot of papyrus (with the drainage holes mostly blocked to keep its feet wet) – and a few pots of colorful annuals, including this little purple guy, are about all I could muster.
Missing are our usual showstoppers like petunias and coleus and sweet potato vines, so this purple beauty will have to put on the brunt of the floral fireworks, along with a lone begonia. This sleepy spring has been slow to wake – no word on whether summer will follow suit.
It’s a little too early for a tender song called ‘Nightswimming’ – that comes later, when we’re nearer to September. For now, another R.E.M. beauty – ‘At My Most Beautiful’ which almost matches the tenderness of ‘Nightswimming’.
I’ve found a way to make you I’ve found a way A way to make you smile
I read bad poetry Into your machine I save your messages Just to hear your voice You always listen carefully To awkward rhymes You always say your name Like I wouldn’t know it’s you At your most beautiful
Once upon a Boston autumn, I listened to this song right around the time I started dating a sweet boy. We would last for almost two years, and I’d move halfway across the country for him, only to come back heartbroken and alone before we had the chance to share another spring together. We were so young, so hopeful, so unrocked by the world at that point. Still, we weren’t meant to be, and we couldn’t keep it together. He was brave enough to say so; I was brave enough to accept it without a brutal fight. This song brings me back to our beginning – a little slice of happiness and heaven.
I remember sitting on the bed in my Boston place as the sun came in through the bay window. Fall was at hand, but it held on to the warmth of summer, the way cities sometimes hold that season’s heat well into October. Suzie was visiting and we sat on the bed catching up. Nervous to tell her about him, the way I would always be when introducing my boyfriends to her, my giddiness overrode the nerves and I remember smiling like a fool the entire time. The first inklings of love are unmistakable, and so adorably fun; I just wanted to share the feeling, to shout it and declare it and let the whole world know. It was easy to fall in love then, at least for me; my friends were much wiser – safer, too – but I didn’t care. Recklessly, ruinously, ridiculously, I would fall over and over and over again. And it was always worth it – if only for a season or two.
At my most beautiful I count your eyelashes secretly With every one, whisper, “I love you” I let you sleep I know your closed eye watching me Listening I thought I saw a smile
Lately I’ve been looking at long-ago romances and revisioning the hurt I felt at the end of any number of relationships. The endings usually left me sad and bereft, and in sadness there was bitterness. That’s not how I want to remember those love affairs, and so I’m shifting my view of them, choosing instead to remember how wonderful they were in their respective sections of my life. Hence the sweet song of this post, and the revelations – literal and metaphorical – of now and then.
I’ve found a way to make you I’ve found a way A way to make you smile
