Wednesday, September 30, 2009

The Summer Wind

Someone recently asked me what the difference was between August and September. Being from California, he couldn’t possible know the subtleties that distinguish the months on the east coast, seasons in California being broken up by the Santa Ana winds, a spotty rainy season, and if you’re lucky enough to travel freely, snowy Sierras. 

When you live in Summerland, you cannot experience a true sense of  the season and all of the delectable trappings that go with it. It’s like Fried Clams without Tarter Sauce.

Fifteen years in Los Angeles has not eradicated the imprint sandy Cape Cod summers have left on my soul or the 5 AM departures from our Sudbury home, five kids piled into the Volvo wagon with my Mother at the wheel, crisscrossing the country to her mother's in Fort Dodge, Iowa where loads of adventures awaited us at house Grandma Sue called "The Diggings".

These were my family traditions that finely tuned themselves to the inner mechanics of my body clock.  September always marked a beginning, perhaps due to the anticipation of a new classroom, new clothes, new notebooks and binders, the definition of “crisp”.   Lining outside the door on the first day of school were the dreams that filled the last nights of August leading up to that magical day when the ice cream man, Mike, would trade in his musical truck for the yellow school bus.


This summer, I rented a cabin out in the sleepy township of Davis Park on Fire Island with some friends.  It has the secret allure of being steps away from this meglo-metropolis, only fifty minute on the LIE to the Ferry Terminal.


Our cabin was sheltered by canopy of shrub oaks covering seemingly ancient wooden walkways to a shoreline so pristine and speckled with families who have taken ownership of the sun, the sea and the sky.  Everyone is happy and at ease. The beach is my unifier. I connect with the horizon, the movement of the waves rolling in, and the groups that populate the shore with the usual blankets, coolers, toys, and the requisite novel.  My father toted “The White Lotus” by John Hersey to every vacation of my childhood, restarting the book each sojourn, having forgotten the plot as soon as he put it down the previous August.


After a week at the beach, we are hit with two back-to-back Hurricanes. The wind shifts direction, the ocean is turbulent.


The skies clear within two days and for a brief moment, stragglers will get glimpses of summer's end, keeping the glow of the sun and sandy mementos like shells and starfish stored safely away. As I head back from the beach August 31st, the leaves on the wooden walkway give away the reality of change.


We easterners hang onto the warmth in preparation for the winter months ahead,   dreams to keep the home fires deep in side smoldering.


Starbucks has announced that Pumpkin Spice Lattes are back. The UN is in General Assembly.  Disneyworld’s attendance drops for the first weeks of September. Apples orchards are ripe for the picking. A mass exodus floods the ferries, bridges & small craft airports that pepper the vacation areas of Martha’s Vineyard, Cape Cod, and Long Island and other waterfront utopias.
 
And just like that, summer is over.

Shameless Crushes...

find life experiences and swallow them whole.
travel.
meet many people.
go down some dead ends and explore dark alleys.
try everything.
exhaust yourself in the glorious pursuit of life.
-lawrence k. fish

Yoga For Peace

read much and often

Cleopatra: A Life
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Never Let Me Go
The Angel's game
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Bel-Ami
Dreaming in French: A Novel
The Post-Birthday World
A Passage to India
The Time Traveler's wife
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Catcher in the Rye
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Kite Runner
Eat, Pray, Love
Slaughterhouse-Five
Les Misérables
The Lovely Bones
1984
Memoirs of a Geisha


read much and often»