Daughter Nature

The creativity of kids leads to a seemingly endless number of ways to enjoy a day at the beach.

This past weekend I watched a blond haired girl about five years of age filling her plastic blue and yellow watering can with sea water. Once filled, the watering can must have weighed nearly as much as the girl herself but she resolutely carried if up to the sun-bleached sand and sprinkled circles around the feet of her parents, brothers, and grandparents.

Some twenty minutes later I looked back and saw the girl was still transporting water from ocean to sand with limitless energy. I nicknamed the girl Daughter Nature. Though on a much smaller scale, she was copying what Mother Nature does on a tireless basis - lifting moisture from bodies of water and raining it down on land.

7 O'clock on a Thursday

7 o'clock on a weeknight- the changing of the guard at the shoreline.

It's a gradual procedure because when you're on the beach time is never finite. But during the 90 minutes between 6:00 and 7:30 there is a definite change to the beach. Sunbathers and skim-boarders cede there places at the water's edge to dog walkers and treasure hunters.

I'm not sure if it's the lowering of the sun or rumbling of stomachs but on unspoken cue darkly tanned boys with hair swept back by wind and sea salt lose interest in the waves and head inland. Mom's gather up a dozen beach towels, six pairs of sunglasses, three bottles of sunblock, tuck them all in a cloth bag, and begin their mental rundown of the dinner menu as they call to three of their own children and half a dozen friends that it's time to go.

In their place come folks in cargo shorts, tee shirts, and sneakers with dogs on the end of twenty foot retractable leashes. Tennis balls are thrown into the waves and the dogs dutifully fetch the prize. While the dog sports are underway, folks armed with metal detectors, shovels, and cloth bags of their own work their way across grids of sand in the hopes of uncovering a unique gem.

The next shift change comes at moonrise. Perhaps we'll peek in on those folks another time.

Going Home Again

There's a saying that you can't go home again.

The truth is... we can go home again.  It's just that home isn't there anymore.  Oh sure, we'll find the roof and the four walls.  We may or may not find the tree the rope swing was tied to or the honeysuckle bush where the robins nested.

But the memories - the events and emotions that made the place home - those left when we did. They're the weight that pulls on us after we leave, calling out in hopes we'll remember. The problem is we put so much effort into making the new place feel right we forget there's more than just clothes and furniture to unpack.

If we'd only take the time to spend time with our memories we'd find that home has come right along with us.

First Generation Air Conditioning

The sign in front of the hardware store announced a sale on garden hoses and box fans.

I flashed back to my childhood years when the combination of those two items equaled climate control.  We would hook up the sprinkler in the back yard, run and jump through the streams of water, and when we were totally saturated head into the house to lie down on the hardwood floor directly in front of a twenty four inch box fan.

I wonder why no one ever thought of moving the fan on to the porch, directing the hose at the fan, and creating a continuous high velocity spray?

Oh - I guess the whole electricity thing had something to do with it.

Melting Hot

Much as I love summer, I have to admit the last couple days have been over the top.

Every time I opened the patio door and stepped onto the deck I found myself thinking: This is what a piece of glass feels like when first thrust into a furnace by a glassblower.

Visits to the beach were out of the question. Instead I developed an intimate relationship with my air conditioner.

What I wouldn't give to go back in time and meet the inventor of air conditioning.  I'd kneel down and kiss his feet.

Defiant Cicada

One lone cicada continued to buzz defiantly.  The rest of the world had gone silent.

Trees that had been rustling in the waves of stifling heat now stood silent and unmoving.

Apart from the single buzzing insect, all other forms of live held their collective breaths.

Just a few miles distant a boiling wall of purplish-black clouds moved relentlessly forward - periodically throwing out silver-white daggers of challenge and sounding the rumbling drums of invasion.

The fountains of ornamental grass first took up the whisper - catching the breezes of advancing lines and alerting all to the imminent storm. Then the trees bestirred themselves and bent beneath the onslaught of wind as the first heavy raindrops fell.

The lone cicada finally abandoned hope of being able to continue to sing of heat mere seconds before the wall of water rushed over everything.

New Generation Entertainment

There we were sitting in a booth in a restaurant: Motivated Mom, Media Girl, and I.  At the end of our booth, in a wooden high chair sat.... a baby (well, the girl is 18 months but close enough to baby status to be identified as such).The baby was the charge of Media Girl who continues to provide babysitting services for fun and profit.

We adults dutifully stuck food in the baby's face - and the baby dutifully consumed the offered food, giggling all the way. The giggling having a Pavlovian effect on the adults who offered still more food which led to still more giggling.

And it occurred to me... a baby who's not your own is a source of free entertainment.  Why should I go to the movies when I can watch a mini-person paste herself with french onion soup while regurgitating the unexpected crouton?

Life Is Like a Box Of Chocolates

The phrase made famous by Forrest Gump - Life is like a box of chocolates - was a subject of discussion in our writing group tonight. 

As happens whenever a group of people get together, there were as many interpretations of the phrase as there were people.

Perhaps the most telling interpretation was... the person who ponders which pieces in the box are most likely to provide the greatest and least satisfaction is a person who has experienced more than his (or her) share of trials in life.

Nature's Sentinels

It occurred to me the other day that I spend a lot of the year anxious for leaves to appear on the trees and bemoaning the falling of the leaves - but rarely do I stop and say Wow look at all of those trees in full leaf.

So I've been making a point of studying the trees an appreciating the depth they add to the landscape.  In fact one of the first thoughts that came to mind as I looked out across acres of forest was that area looks so three dimensional.

Yeah, I know - DUH!

But as I studied the way older trees towered over younger growth and the stout trees filled in the gaps between their narrower brethren, the layers of all that growth challenged my eyes to stay in focus. I found myself looking right past the nearest trees, searching out the distant giants that grew five feet taller followed by others five feet taller yet, until the difference narrowed to inches (at least from my perspective).

It gradually registered on my sometimes slow moving brain that those older trees were miles away and that the front lines I normally noticed took up only the smallest piece of the land that I whiz past every day.

And it occurs to me that beyond stopping to smell the roses I need to spend more time walking beneath nature's sentinels.

Book Zen

I've decided I'm going on a buying spree. I'm going to buy books while they can still be bought. Real, honest to goodness books.

My decision is spurred by Borders Books going out of business - apparently because electronic books have pushed demand for the real thing lower than low.

While I understand the convenience of one of those electronic book reading gadgets, there is a loss associated with those things. Absolutely nothing is more relaxing than being in a place filled with bound volumes of paper; nothing more comforting that than the feel of heavy paper beneath your fingertips; nothing more Zen than sitting with a hardback book in your lap.

I envision the furniture in my home office being moved out one piece at a time until all that is left is a small writing place and a comfortable chair. Everything else will be sacrificed for floor to ceiling bookcases. Bookcases along the walls. Bookcases back to back in the center of the room. Bookcases filled with books of various sizes and shapes. Bookcases providing a retreat where, after a long day, I can inhale the scent of print on paper, run my finger along creased spines, grasp a favorite book just as I would shake hands with an old friend.  There in my office I will know that at least in one corner of the world the rightness of things still remains.

Vacation Biking

For those of us who live in a tourist destination, our source of entertainment is - watching the tourists.

Oh sure there are days when we "locals" curse the gridlock brought about by the influx of transients, but such frustrations are offset by watching those same visitors when they're on foot - or on bikes.

The beach seems to favorite place for bike riding. For those tourists who don't ride two wheeled conveyances on a regular basis - a pedal powered surrey eliminates the necessity to maintain balance.

For those of you unfamiliar with the four wheeled surrey - it's essentially an adult size version of the pedal cars toddlers ride in. Only adults seem to lose the common sense children are born with. As evidenced by the foursome who took their pedal car down the main drag of our beach town today.

To avoid being driven to the curb by traffic, the foursome in the surrey were forced to pedal as furiously as nasty old Almira Gulch in the Wizard of Oz.  Hunched over, legs pumping, brows dripping with perspiration, the "sensible" adults were in danger of collapsing from heat stroke.

I thought the idea of vacation was to get out of the rat race.

Memories - Old & New

I'll be away from the internet for a few days and offer the following for your consideration:

Trying to relive a golden moment from the past is like trying to scoop water with a colander.

Relish the moment for what it was - and live each successive today with the hopes of creating a new special moment.

The Original Facebook

Sitting in a chair near our community pool, I was watching a girl of about ten hanging on the pool's metal steps and trying to get her mother's attention.

Mom, come into the pool with me.

Mom, come ON!


Mommmm, you promised!

Finally the girl climbed from the pool, stalked across the concrete, and with hands on hips stood in front of her mother.  MOM  what is taking so long.

Her mother raised a cautioning finger. I'm taking dear.

Talking?  All this time? How boring is that?

The person talking with the girl's mother looked at the young girl and said.  "Dear, swimming pools are the adult version of Facebook."

Oh, the girl said - the peevishness gone from her voice.  Well send my Mom over as soon as you're done.

Severing the Cord

How long has it been since wireless internet connectivity became a household standard?  Surely no more than seven years and already we take it for granted. At least I do anyway.

Tonight I sit on the back patio sending typewritten words sailing through the air and remember back to when even a telephone conversation required an umbilacle cord - that curly elastic cord that connected the handset to the black box hanging on the wall. The same cord that teenagers tied in knots as they dared to ask someone out on a date. The same cord that parents swore over when they struggled to untie the knots their kids had tied - and discovered in the midst of the coils the two #2 pencils that had disappeared from the kitchen message center days before.

What will the "standard" be seven years from now I wonder.

Weebles Wobble

Weebles wobble but they don't fall down.

That jingle from a television commercial has been running through my head recently - resurrected from the memory vaults by a young'in that has been roaming our house recently.

Media Girl has been doing some babysitting to put some extra money in her pocket. One of the tykes she's been watching eats anything - whether it moves or not - and consequently has the physical appearance of a two foot tall Buddha.

It seems impossible that a child with a belly big enough to hold the face on a grandfather clock doesn't topple over on her own face. Yet somehow, despite an occasional wobble in her step, the little girl manages to remain upright.

I'm very nearly convinced that were I to tap against the back of her head, the baby would fall forward only to bounce right back to her feet.

Meal Menu

Ah, the summertime diet: garden salad, fruit salad, cucumber salad, potato salad, and seafood salad.

Yes, we had a saladfest this weekend. It seemed the kitchen counter was perpetually littered with squeeze bottles of mayonnaise, assorted spices, piles of chopped onion and celery, and of course mixing bowls filled with garden-fresh blends.

You might think we had a house full of people but that wasn't the case. It was just Motivated Mom, Media Girl and I. It wasn't until we reached to the back of the bottom kitchen cabinet for the very last tupperware container that we thought to ask ourselves - whose going to eat all this stuff?

Forget the meat and bread - this week's meal menu is salad alacarte. The eating doesn't get any better that this.