June arrives.
May recedes.
Summer peeks around the corner, then disappears, frightened away by the fucking weather of the past week.
Here’s to sunnier days, warmer temps, and this traditional weekly blog recap…
A moment aflame began things on a fiery note.
It ended, began, and continued in rainy fashion.
The very first peony bloom of the season.
Riding into the sun begged the question, ‘What sun?’
To pass the day, a pretty little flower.
At our most skinny-dippingly beautiful.
A full, Blue Moon, a last day of May, and a resuming of cafe culture in a steaming cup of peppermint herbal tea. It’s bee a while since a proper cafe culture moment has been documented, and with the insanity of the past month – admittedly mostly in my mind – I pause to re-group, re-evaluate, and rethink some things I thought I already knew.
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.
Narcissus: “May I die before I give you power over me.”
Echo: “I give you power over me.”
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.
“We all create stories to protect ourselves.” – Mark E. Danielewski, ‘House of Leaves’
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.
The hummingbirds are already here, though, and I’m taking solace in that.
A new night in spring…
when every spring night feels new,
even as we move toward summer, even when spring is near its end.
The pool glows eerily on spring nights, or maybe it’s just the moon on the verge of being full.
And Blue.
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
Spring nights somehow manage to be romantic, no matter if it’s raining or clear, windy or still – and love is always right when the moon and the night conspire to create beauty. It’s there in the warm water, in the perfume of lily-of-the-valley riding on the breeze, in the clouds moving over and behind the moon. The pool is almost like the color of a jade vine bloom dangling in the night of some forest in the Philippines.
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’ve found a way to make you
I’ve found a way
A way to make you smile
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
A flower fills the afternoon post, for when there are no words.
My father’s resting place may house his ashes, but I don’t usually feel his spirit there. That’s partly why I don’t visit it that often, choosing to mostly mark his birthday or holidays with a stop-by, and not much else. I feel him elsewhere – in the garden, on a warm breeze, in the shadow of a a tree. Lately I’ve been missing him so I stopped by his grave to say hello. The stone was warm from a day of sun, and flags lined the place in honor of Memorial Day. A few other cars with visiting loved ones of lost ones were scattered throughout the place, but none in my vicinity. As is usually the case, I didn’t feel my father there.
Even in the shade of a row of ancient evergreens, where he might have been found on a hot day, my father was missing. I looked for him briefly, knowing he wouldn’t be there, and hoping that it was the looking that mattered. As is often the case, I drove away from the cemetery feeling empty, feeling robbed of something, feeling the fact of my father’s absence. And as is occasionally the case, I wasn’t ready to let him go, so I drove to the place where I’ve gone whenever I find myself missing him: St. Mary’s Hospital. My Dad’s most regular ‘office’, where he’d be at work at all days of the day or night trying to save someone’s life and make the world better for other families, the hospital is where I remember my Dad being at key points in life.
I always return to the same space near the entrance of the cafeteria, before a locked door of offices now, but which once housed a conference room where my Dad kept me when I came home early from school one day and he had to be at the hospital. My social anxiety had worked and wreaked its havoc, and I couldn’t handle being at school with the other kids anymore that day – I thought I just missed my parents, and this was the only way to be close to them. I’d expected Dad to be angry for me making him have to pick me up early, the same way I expected him to be angry when I broke one of the garden sprinklers as a child, but he was gentle with me that day, perhaps sensing that I was only there out of fear. The memory recedes at that point, fading away to a slight ache, an emptiness. But I felt my father’s presence there, in those halls he walked, near those vending machines that offered the sandwiches he’d get when his work required him to stay beyond any sort of reasonable hours. I could hear his laughter with Hector the head janitor, his joking with the OR nurses, and his caring comfort for a little boy who mustered all his effort not to cry from missing his parents and growing up.
I love when the phone refuses to focus – a reminder of the grainy way we used to have with film.
When life loses focus it feels less lovely at first.
Spring clouds portend spring storms.
The sky looks tumultuous.
Torturous, tortured nightwind.
Swirling clouds, shredding leaves, dancing wind – it all conspires to compose the season of spring.
Because it was just barely dusk.
Because the moon was not quite full.
Because the spring had not yet bloomed.
Because the summer refused to promise.
Because, because, because, because, because…
Because of the wonderful things he does.
These columbine blooms recall this post from earlier in the spring, a time that feels so close and already so far. A fancier and more petalicious white version of Columbine may be found here – proof that there’s a blog post for everything. When I think on that, it feels exhausting. We all live so many lives, mostly without even realizing it. One life is never just one life.
How strange that such a pretty flower elicits such difficult thoughts. Try getting your head around something like the multiverse. Younger people do it with ease, but they’re afraid of other things. Older people can make sene of it if they think long enough on it, but who wants to think very long on anything these days? For those of us somewhere in the middle – of life, of death, of the past and present – there’s something between grace and acceptance, a balance that is precariously perched on the bloom of the columbine, and such prettiness was never meant to last.
Looking for another place
Somewhere else to be
Looking for another chance
To ride into the sun
Returning from Maine, the road turned from rainy to sunny.
Summer whispered on the scattered days when the temperature reached into the 80’s.
In some cities there is already the bane of a heatwave, driving the warmth into the concrete, into the labyrinthine subway stations, into the headache-inducing unbearable afternoons where the only relief is in a cold shower, in lying very still as a fan does its damnedest to no real avail.
Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun
Ride into the sun
Somewhere, this song was here before. In a melody, in a riddle, in a dreamscape between sleep and wake. That first brush with sun and heat after a cool spring is disorienting. Giddiness and loveliness and a pretty little mess as we adjust to the new intensity in the sky. Sun – my sun – my beautiful sun – shining solely on my way…
Where everything seems so pretty
When you’re lonely and tired of the city
Remember it’s a flower made out of clay
While I’ve often found myself in New York for at least one summer weekend, the only city I find summer somewhat bearable is Boston, where the bedroom offers easy respite from the hottest part of the day, and the nights cool down enough to allow for restless, aimless walking. It’s the only thing to do when summer heat prevents easy sleep. The only thing to do in a city…
To the city
Where everything seems so ugly
When your sitting at home in self pity
Remember you’re just one more person
Who’s living there
The roads lead back to summer.
The journey that started in the spring…
How far will it take us, how hot will it get, and how will we get there from here? Impossible to make out the twists and turns to come, even if the end – the destination – is in the beginning, in those earliest days of spring, when houses of glass and green gave the only glimpses of hope on those nights still so cold.
Summer rises from the other side of the ocean bed, laps at the harbor of Boston, and stretches out across the Atlantic from the docks of New York – connected by salty tears, ocean droplets, the crying of the sky…
It’s hard to live in the city
It’s hard to live in the city
It’s hard to live in the city
There is something special about the very first peony bloom of the season – that initial intake of its perfume is a collision of beauty, nostalgia, and all the hope of summer to come. It brings me back to Suzie’s childhood birthday parties, to the garden in her side-yard, where I’d escape when the other kids proved to be too much for me to take. Despite the risk of ants in the blooms, I’d always lean over and deeply inhale their magnificent fragrance.
The Itoh peonies are full of bud and ready to burst, but that’s a show for another day. For now, this one single peony is enough. An old-fashioned bloom who is nameless but no less beautiful in its anonymity.
This is the time of the year when a little linden tree grove near my office building comes into its own, budding with the inconspicuous green blooms that will soon shower the area with its gorgeous perfume. No one gives the linden tree its props, mostly because no one knows that it’s the source of such enchanting fragrance. I also happen to enjoy being one of the only people I know who love the linden tree – like some little secret known only to me, so no one else can ruin it. The last thing I want to see is the linden tree go the way of the Bradford pear – overexposure never helped anyone.
The next few weeks will find these trees in bloom – seek one out and sit beneath its bee-buzzing brilliance – it’s the perfect welcome for summer.
