Well…hellooooooooo, September!
I know there are those out there that will want to shoot me for this, but I am not sorry to see summer fading in the rearview mirror in the slightest. I’ve been over the heat of summer since sometime in early July, though I do, indeed, know better than to tell people that.
I’m the reason they put the pumpkins out for sale at the grocery store Labor Day weekend…you know I’ve already bought more than one (along with pumpkin spice scented candles and cloves to put in the apple cider I’ll now begin buying by the gallon…stop. judging.me.).
The rainy season has also begun here in Seattle, much to the lament of every person I talk to. But I love it. It just begs for a second pot of coffee and homemade baked goods and a lit candle and a long day of writing…what’s not to love?…
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We arrived back in Seattle late last night.
What a trip.
In case you didn’t know this, driving the 3,000 miles from one corner of the country to the other when you have very little time to dally is…ummmmm…a lot. It’s a whole different ball game than having weeks to linger and explore and take your time.
The last week was a lot of 10-12 hour driving days, getting out of the truck just long enough to stretch for minute, gas up, pee, and get back on the road. Driving past mountains and rivers that called our name, meeting friends along the way for a quick lunch or a cup of coffee, and then moving quickly on…
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I’m writing from the car as we drive from central Pennsylvania towards Chicago, making the rounds of our friends on our way back across the country.
We’ve become masters of the drive-by visit and I have to say, it’s not a particularly satisfying accomplishment.
It took us five long days of driving to get from Seattle to New Hampshire in time to celebrate Justin’s parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. From there, we raced up to Maine where Justin continued on with a friend to run the 100 Mile Wilderness section of the Appalachian Trail (a feat the two of them have been planning for nearly a year…a self-supported 100-mile trail run is no joke, my friends!) and I remained in the greater Portland area to do some photo shoots.
I tried to squeeze in some visit time with friends between shoots. There was a long walk with one friend and a lovely brunch with another, time I cherished even as I longed for far more of it. Justin ended up stealing an hour with an old neighbor, but his run took up the bulk of his time in Maine and the days ran out long before we’d seen everyone we would have liked to…
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Three years ago today we closed on our home in Maine, selling our beloved space and all it contained.
We left the dishes we received as wedding gifts a decade earlier stacked neatly in the cabinets. We left the dining room table we built with our own hands (and those of our sweet friend, Emy, who offered not only her hands to the job but also her laughter) one sunny weekend our first summer there. We left the bookcases from Ikea that took hours to assemble and us to the edge of our wits.
The teapot handpainted in the Polish style that I adored and used nearly every snowy afternoon during our long Maine winters. The chest of drawers that had traveled with my Navy family as part of my parents’ bedroom set when I was growing up and I’d refinished during finals week my second year of law school. The canvas print of one of my very first photographs of Maine, a sunrise at the Portland Head Light where any doubts I’d had about our move were swept away with the crashing waves on that rocky slice of coastline…
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We are on the road as I write, making our way east across the country once again.
This trip is fast-paced. We have a deadline to make.
Justin’s parents are celebrating 50 years of marriage this year and the party’s on Saturday. We can’t wait.
But even though we are racing past mountains and valleys and winding dirt roads we yearn to drive down, there is a sense of peace that settles into my heart when we have a long stretch of highway laid out in front us. The music is on, the land rushes by, and even in these circumstances, it feels as though adventure is just around the bend….
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Mr. Hussman was my 11th grade history teacher.
His first name was Benedict.
He had very dark hair and very pale skin and glasses that made his eyes look a little buggy.
He'd once been well on his way to becoming a priest when he mysteriously left seminary to teach high school history in the suburb of Chicago I’d recently moved to. I’ll bet there’s a helluva story there, but alas, I was entirely too preoccupied with my 17-year-old melodramas to dig for it. And ol’ Ben was good with boundaries, so I likely wouldn’t have been able to pry it out of him anyway (I was definitely not allowed to call him Ben…as a matter of fact, it still feels super weird even to write it, so "Mr. Hussman" he stays)…
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I realized the other day that I haven’t posted to any social media platforms in almost 2 months.
This isn’t really a big deal, but it made me pause because I never made a conscious decision to go on any kind of hiatus. I didn’t go on any kind of intentional “digital fast” or suddenly boycott technology.
I just didn’t feel like posting. So I didn’t.
And then I sort of forgot about it.
We went to Vancouver for a long weekend so Justin could run a 50K trail race. I took some fun videos and photos with my phone intending to post them later, but ended up getting caught up reading a good book instead. Then I forgot about posting them.
We sat on the tailgate alongside the Skagit River in North Cascades National Park and ate lunch and made plans. But I was busy dreaming about our future and holding Justin’s hand, so I forgot to take photos and posting about it slipped my mind….
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Justin and I were moving slowly south, reluctant to relinquish the quiet of our time in the Arctic. Between the late summer snowstorm spent holed up in our truck in the Brooks Range and several days spent wandering along the Middle Fork of the Koyukuk river laughing over driftwood campfires, we glimpsed only a small handful of people from a distance as they raced one direction or the other along the Dalton Highway.
We relished the solitude. We relished the simplicity of concerning ourselves solely with the basics of life: warmth and weather and nourishment. We fell into the rhythm of the place, listening to the chalky river push around the rocks lining its bottom and watching the shadows move across Sukakpak Mountain’s massive marble peak as the days passed.
The last of August’s summer warmth fled the moment September arrived and we welcomed the signs of fall that greeted us everywhere. The alders and aspens and birches tucked in among the spruce were suddenly all golds and yellows. The blueberry and lingonberry turned deep garnet, the mountainsides and valleys rolling seas of fiery reds. Tessie’s fur thickened in the chill, but even so, we pulled out her down jacket so she could sleep alongside the fire in the sort of comfort to which she’d grown accustomed…
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One of my very favorite (possibly true, possibly not) literary anecdotes of all time is when Henry David Thoreau exclaims, “Simplify! Simplify!” in Walden, and his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson offers the feedback, “One simplify would have sufficed.”
Doh.
I think of this story often. It represents the bulk of what holds me back in life (and I’d venture to guess I’m not alone here):
I overcomplicate a whole lot of stuff that doesn’t need to be complicated.
I go on and on with two “simplifys” when one would have sufficed….
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I was running on the treadmill at the gym last Tuesday (not nearly as good for me as running on a trail, but sometimes done is better than perfect, you know?) and, as sometimes happens on the treadmill, I was really, really, really bored.
The music wasn’t helping. The weird tv screen six inches from my face that kept suddenly turning itself on (reminding me that at some point in the last year I’ve grown to need reading glasses) wasn’t helping. Making up hill workouts and speed workouts that would let me fiddle with the controls every tenth of a mile…you guessed it- not working…
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It creeps in sometimes.
The urge to revert back to old truths, old behaviors, old patterns that I know don’t work.
To buy into the “I’m so busy” mentality, running around like a chicken without a head and a sense of martyrdom wrapped around me like a a comforting straightjacket, justifying all the reasons I’m not doing what I said I’d do, why I’m not enjoying my days, my work, my life.
The urge to back away from the life I really want because it’s hard, because I’m scared, because I’m afraid I’m not enough or that I’ll learn something about myself that will unravel all the threads that hold me together…
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I can be impatient.
Like, seriously impatient.
Once I decide I want to learn something or accomplish something or build something or renovate something (are you getting the idea yet?), I impatiently want to dive in headfirst and DO IT ALL RIGHT NOW!!!
Which looks like motivation for about five minutes and then quickly turns to overwhelm (cue the “ohmygod there is soooooooooooo much to do here” voice of panic)….
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I have a weird fascination with morning routines. I’m obsessively interested in how everyone and anyone spends their waking hours and what works for them. It has always amazed me how varied routines are and how utterly different the things that people need to begin their day well really are. (I’m also obsessed with people’s work or studio spaces as well as their creative processes…I can’t resist any reference to them!)
There is a lot of advice out there about productivity and morning routines and I think just about everyone is now familiar with Tim Ferris’s famous “win the morning, win the day” quote.
While I suppose I’d like to “win” the day as much as the next person, I find myself less interested in the purely “productive” aspects of people’s routines and more interested in how their routines impact things like how they feel about their days, their work, their creativity…
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We drove north, looking for the quiet places in between.
We drove north, sometimes turned back by wildfire, or rockslide, or the suggestion from a roadside stranger of something not to be missed.
We drove north, unfurling that space within us that sometimes gets cramped, sometimes grows small under the pressures of paychecks and laundry and getting the dishes done….
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We lost our Tessie girl on Sunday and we are just heartbroken.
She was about 13 years old (it’s hard to tell for sure with a rescue of unknown origin) and has been slowing significantly over the last year (I mean even slower than she was…she was never what you might call “energetic”), but we thought we had more time than we did and this still feels quite sudden. We are still reeling, honestly…
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Have you ever come back from traveling somewhere and thought, “Was I really just in Bermuda/Nepal/ California/wherever or was it all just a glorious dream?”
It’s a feeling that has become so familiar to us over these last years of travel. Each time we settle into a new place, the last one feels like perhaps it was all just a lovely dream…
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I’m writing this from a cheap hotel room in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It’s -9 degrees fahrenheit outside, so we’ve been crossing our fingers and hoping for pet-friendly hotels open in mid-winter as we’ve criss-crossed rural Alaska, then the Yukon, and now British Columbia as we make our way south to Seattle, praying that we don’t end up huddled under sleeping bags in the back of the truck (just because you can doesn’t always mean you should)…
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