lemon tart diary

Yesterday, I noticed the smell for the first time this year—the smell of the good life, the wonderful scent of summer. The season may not have officially arrived, but I know it is summer because the seashells have spoken, or odored, or whatever. Someone should invent a word for the smell of old seashells when they come to life as the temperatures reach a certain level.  The word should probably be a combination of “fishy” and “dirty” and “sand” and “love” and “happiness” and “sunshine”, but I don’t think anyone has come up with it yet. Probably because a word like that would be too big and require such a great volume of heart.

To me, it seems that they lie dormant all winter in their pails and buckets and mesh bags, but once June comes, they experience something like longing, something like a need to be close to home, and so they generate a little love that reminds them of where they came from—the smell of the beach. I think we all do that. We all reach that time of year when we need a little taste of our home. Fortunately, most of us don’t do it by emitting a fishy stench, but “to each his own”. Maybe it’s the rhythm of a specific song or the tanginess of an ice cold margarita or the feel of a silky vintage kimono, but we all make our way  back to our homes, back to our shells, and back to life when the time is right.

xoxo

Dear God,

This is a picture of Travis.

Right now he’s on the ground in Joplin assisting with rescue and recovery.

We love him very much and ask that you protect him as he goes about the heartbreaking work before him on this very sad day.

Amen.

* “Excuse me, sir …”

   ~that’s what Travis used to shout to get the attention of the officials at soccer games … seemed appropriate <3

Searchers continue to look for Joplin tornado survivors – from Kansas City Star

Lightning, gas leaks, hail don’t stop first responders in Joplin – from CNN

That is what a Louisiana resident said in an interview a few nights ago when questioned about record flooding and the possible decimation of his small rural town. He didn’t rail about social egalitarianism or the conceivable (and hopefully temporary) loss of his home and land. He was an older gentleman, sun-leathered with a ragged beard and the voice of a blues singer, and his words have stuck with me for the last few days.

“The water’s got to go somewhere.”

He said it so matter-of-factly. No pity. No Pollyanna.

I think I internalized his words so quickly because Mother’s Day had just passed. I am a member of what my friends and I call Dead Moms Club—girls who’ve known the flood of sorrow that skinned up like milk fat, that wouldn’t be washed away with good soap or fine bourbon or a mouthful of religion, that clung day and night as a birthright or a birthmark, doesn’t matter much which; it was to us as forever is to God.  For days, it thickened and soured, tainted every minute with a slick, rotting film and the stench, oh the smell of it was unbearable. It crawled in our noses and had a million babies that marched up and down our throats like spiders on parade. And we cried, bawled our bloody, burning eyes out until we collapsed on piles of stale laundry and dirty dishes and accepted our fate—we were in our twenties or thirties or forties and our mothers were dead; ravaged by The Big C and bad hearts and cruel acts of nature.

But that eventually passed, was washed away by a sea of tears that finally dried up and evaporated into their blue skies, resplendent with pure white clouds and a blinding yellow sun, and then … we laughed. We howled for lives well lived, for no stone left unturned, for courage and the irresistible light of happiness.  We laughed because it made us feel alive in the face of death or because we didn’t know what else to do, but the important thing was the laughter itself – our saving grace, a blessing that poured down from the universe.

The laughter that engulfed our souls was and remains the living, breathing piece of their legacy –those fantastical women who wore red lipstick and bikini underwear with Candie’s platform stilettos; that danced on the boardwalks and and in our avocado-colored kitchens. They were before their time and after everything.  They bought turntables with S&H Greenstamps and recycled cartons of glass Pepsi bottles to buy their records.  They chewed gum in church and wore satin pajamas and sang Bruce Springsteen songs in the shower. They drove too fast and were always late; loved beach sand and mountain air and backyard flowers. They were early bloomers and late-Boomers that cut their teeth on the Stones and the Beatles and thought Seven Spanish Angels would make a perfectly appropriate eulogy.

“The water’s got to go somewhere.”

It’s like this—bad things happen. Unfair things happen. Innocents are injured and the guilty go free. There is imbalance, bigotry, and prejudice. There are miscommunications that hurt and outright lies designed to destroy. We live in a world with free will and compromised freedom. We can build walls and levees and fill a million sandbags, locate ourselves far from the spillway or right in the middle of it, but eventually the flood is going to come. How we handle it is up to us.

“The water’s got to go somewhere.”

It’s more like a zip-lock baggie with a hole in it.

Wednesday was a slumpy day for me. At one point, I was actually too fatigued to watch television. Gah!

But I did accomplish this: ENDOMONDO
So I don’t feel too bad about it.

Then I treated “Arthur” (what my darling mother-in-law calls my arthritis) to a nice cocktail of anti-inflammatory and pain meds and things picked up a bit. I typically try to beat Arthur into submission with exercise, but sometimes he is just a rampant assclown and forces me to hit him with a tranquilizer dart.

To keep myself from falling asleep before five, I got Bahar (on the phone) to keep me company. We solved world hunger, cured all forms of political malfeasance, and she informed me that battered and fried asparagus is delicious.

As usual, the conversation led to: What are you reading?

I said that I was reading Mirror Ball Man (meh) and she asked if we had read something by Gregg Olsen in the recent past. Immediately, I thought he was the guy who wrote the book about the woods. I can’t remember if The Woods is the title or not, only that the first line of the book is “Every morning I watched my father take the shovel into the woods.”  Creepy right?

That didn’t seem like the right book, so I looked up the Gregg Olsen covers. I quickly found the cover of the book we’d read (and now I can’t remember the title but it was NOT the woods book) and read the blurb to ‘Har. We agreed that we had, indeed, read and loved that book.

Then a weird thing happened. (In case you haven’t noticed, I have practically no short-term memory.)

So I tell Bahar that the thing I  remember about the book is that the mother’s ringtone is Watching the Detectives by Elvis Costello.

Why do I know that? Why do I know that first sentence about the woods book? It got me thinking about other books I’ve read, bizarre little bits and pieces of characters and plot that don’t necessarily drive the story, but have embedded themselves in my brain.

All I know is that I want to do that thing as a writer … leave something behind, a grace note that floats in and out of memory or a sticky little detail.  This is me telling you in advance that I am trying to subliminally indoctrinate you with anomalous references and off-beat particulars.

Consider yourself warned. There will eventually be a quiz.

If I can remember to make one.

An orange thread hangs from an abandoned beach towel in the top of the linen closet, the same color and texture of a bathing suit I wore when I was nine years old. Looped terry and faded tangerine, it was my favorite; the bandeau top held in front by a plastic o-ring and the seat picked to a colorless fuzzed mass by nubby concrete and ragged picnic tables.

We camped then, my parents and my brother and I, along the lakes of southeastern Virginia—near the dams where the fishing was good and the water was deep. Family after family, some friends, some strangers, stretched out side-by-side in temporary homes with trashcans full of fishing rods, lines of canoes and john boats, rubber lawn chairs and badminton nets.  We lived out of coolers stocked with slices of country ham, ringed bologna, and dense wedges of hoop cheese; on Wonder Bread and orchard apples, cans of chili, sardines, and pineapple rings. A craft paper grocery sack of bagged marshmallows, graham crackers, and Hershey bars appeared each night as if by magic, brought in on the wings of fireflies or the tails of shooting stars.

I loved arrival day at the site best and even as a small girl understood the cutesy domestic pride of setting up a home from nothing. My father would stabilize the camper and then pull things from the back of the truck while my mother and I cranked the handles and flipped out the wings, stowed paper dishes and plastic flatware in the tiny cupboards, and made the foam mattress convertible beds.  There was always an abundance of vinyl table cloths and plastic floats, wind socks, pennants, and twinkly lights. Our camper wasn’t fancy like some, but it more than accommodated our family and was still, by any standard, quite nice.

Quite nice—that distinction is my forty-something year old memory talking, not my nine year old self.  As a child I don’t once remember thinking we had more than or less than. We went camping in a pop-up trailer and my mother drank rum punch and sang Hot Legs with Rod Stewart on a battery powered FM radio. My father worked all week to sweep us away to this cove or that park where he could fish the sun right out of the sky for a day and a half and resuscitate the dried up pieces of himself in the murky water. We were not better off—we just were.

I don’t know if those little excursions were an extravagance or not, I suppose it doesn’t matter; the heart of it beats the same whether they were offered up as sacrifice or indulgence or pretense. I think back on that now, on me in my orange terry cloth bikini bobbing on a real tire tube in the hot Virginia sun to the plunk, plunk, plunk of my baby brother tossing rocks into the tepid lake, and see my SPF-less face against the silver glint of the sun on a wake and know I was deliriously happy, drifting, without status or validation, as free as a thing might ever be.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere about threads and ties and pulling strings that light up an overcast suburban world; the reclaiming of a third grade mindset that allows a flood of freedom to pulse out through the arms and fingers, pound deep into the heels and toes. Tied down and untied, strings and runs and lines, to leash one’s self to something new, to something old, to a distant memory and to the future—to the living,  sunkissed dirty water of youth, to self and to children, to now and then.

But, metaphors are messy … in reality, an orange thread, as thin as a whisper, hangs from an abandoned beach towel in the top of the linen closet.  It won’t suspend a swing or pull a wagon, strap down a canoe or string up a line of crappie. It’s not a bathing suit or a whole summer, the smell of Coppertone or another life all together. It’s not melted chocolate or a momma in cutoffs screaming, “I love ya, honey,” from atop a weathered picnic table.

It’s just an imperfection.

But, it is damn beautiful.

See this:

This is delicious. It looks like this on the inside:

It is ten in the morning and I want to eat these.  If eating these blueberry and brown sugar cookies is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

But. It is only 10:00 AM.

But. They taste just like the delicious light flaky pastry top of a scone.

Scones are breakfast food.

Suitable for 10:00 AM consumption.

I put them on a plate to make them more “breakfast” legit.

Nothing is less breakfasty thank scarfing “cookies” right out of the package.

But.

There’s always a “but”, right?

But, something was still missing.

Butter.

Now, that’s what I call a cookie. I mean BREAKFAST.

I mean Scone. That is totally a scone. With butter.

Deal with it.