I’m on the porch at a condo at the beach listening to seagulls and a construction crew’s country music station. We are on vacation. While we’re here, I’ll attempt to keep from vacating my blog altogether. I don’t know that I’ll have anything sensical to say, but maybe I can post some pretty pictures.
I am a fan of contrast: of rough against smooth, of blur against sharp, of dark against light. When I saw that this week’s Daily Post photo challenge is to share a shot that captures a contrast, I knew I would want to participate, and I knew I would want to share photos from our trip to my childhood home in Georgia.
When I started looking through my photographs from the marshes, though, I realized the contrasts I was trying to tease out in the photos I selected – land against sea, wet against dry – were forced. Those things are not the true contrast I feel here. The contrast I feel here on the marshes is the wide expanse of flatness that is so different from our mountain home.
In our Appalachian home water is surrounded by land, is fresh, and falls from the sky. In my Georgia home land is surrounded by water, the water is salty, and it rises from the sea.
In our Appalachian home the horizon undulates. The sky shrinks and expands as you move through the mountains. On the coast of Georgia the horizon is flat and the sky is one size: big.
As a person who seeks out a strong sense of place, I thrive on the contrasts between my two homes: the one where we are raising our kids, and the one I was raised in. I am grateful that by growing up in the mountains of Virginia and visiting their grandparents on the coast of Georgia, our children will have the chance to experience both.
Rain rattled the tent last night and pinged on an overturned cook pot. The past few times we camped it stormed the first night and I felt panicky as I lay down to sleep, breathing deep to calm myself then feeling like I couldn’t get enough air, even though we were outside where there is all the air in the world. Generally I’m so tired and the outdoor sounds are so primal and repetitive – rain rattling, frogs croaking, thunder rumbling – that drowsiness trumps anxiety and I fall asleep before a true panic attack sets in.
This morning everything is damp. The thin nylon of my sticky sleeping bag clings to my skin; strands of hair cling to my neck. My camp sandals – a pair of Crocs and a pair of Rainbows – are cold and clammy. Outside the world drips. The poison ivy leaves that surround our campsite glisten with rain and their mocking oils. The charred wood in the fire pit shines a glossy black.
I used the backpacking stove by myself this morning. It was already assembled, but still. I used my notes from last night to boil water for oatmeal and coffee while B___ finally got a chance to sleep in. He lounged in the tent while I shooed a daddy long legs off the stove, pumped the fuel, lit the burner, listened to the hiss of a Whisperlite stove in the stillness of the campground morning.
It’s weird wearing glasses on a camping trip. They seem like an indoor thing not an outdoor one. They make me feel vulnerable to the elements – they get raindrops on them and get caught on my sweatshirt as I pull it over my head. When I take them off I hurt. My eyes work hard to focus and they blur and feel like I need to rub them to make them see the world crisply, but rubbing them does not help. My head begins to ache inside, behind my eyes, and at my temples, and so I put the glasses back on again.
The kids caught fireflies in the field across from our campsite last night. I sat under the trees in a nylon camp chair and watched them in the distance, reaching up with hands poised to cup around a lightning bug, like they were preparing to catch a kickball coming down from the sky. Or leaning down, knees bent, crouched and sneaking up on fireflies in the grass. The fireflies lit and darkened all around the grassy edges under the trees where the evening deepened sooner. Our children’s laughter drifted across the field to me till we heard thunder and called bed time.
In the quiet morning, my pen scratching paper while the campground sleeps, the sun not high enough yet to pierce the fog, all of us alive and the world gently dripping, the panic of the first night has gone.
Sunlight shines
on evergreens browning. River
rushes on below.
This entry for the Between photo challenge is in honor of my husband’s favorite tree, the eastern hemlock, which is suffering widespread death in the Appalachians due to an exotic insect, the Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). Where 20 years ago we ran our hands over hemlocks’ feathery branches on every Appalachian hike, all the hemlocks we see now are brittle and brown, denuded of their soft needles, or if they do still have leaves, they are encrusted with the egg sacs of the insects that are killing them (the skeletal trees in the foreground of the picture are hemlocks). If you have hemlocks on your property, please see this Nature Conservancy article for information on how to treat the infestation.
I have a close friend, J, who has never met a mirror she didn’t like. When we were teens, and later in college, and her eye caught a reflective surface – a shop window, a car window, a mirror in a mall bathroom – she turned her head this way and that as she looked into it, smoothed an eyebrow, tucked a curl, and watched herself as she continued to talk, completely unselfconscious about her mirror-gazing as she carried on the conversation. We teased her about it then, and we tease her about it now, 25 years later. She laughs at herself when we tease her, then flits her eyes to a mirror and winks at the best friend she sees there.
This past March, at our annual Girls’ Weekend, we talked about mirrors and who among us looks into them. The conversation was spawned in part by J’s mirror-love, but also, at least for me, by a deeper wondering about our comfort with ourselves. J is one of the funniest people I know, and also one of the happiest. At several points in her life, whether on a precipice with a boyfriend or on the verge of a life-changing move, she has shrugged her shoulders and said, “I dunno. I think I could be happy with anyone” in the case of the boyfriend, or “anywhere” in the case of a move. And it’s true. She could.
As we went around the table at Girls’ Weekend, we found that we all have very different relationships with the mirror. J is friendly with them – she sees her favorite person when she looks into one. Others of us use them strictly for pragmatic reasons: check the teeth, blow dry the hair. One of us doesn’t use them at all – says she can’t remember the last time she looked into one. “Not even to brush your teeth?” I asked. “I brush my teeth in the shower,” she said.
And me? It used to be that when I looked in the mirror, the person who looked back at me was a mystery. The image I saw in that silver surface did not match up with the person I knew from the inside. All my life my reflection has caught me off guard. Recently I brushed our daughter’s hair and when my reflection moved in the mirror I did a double-take – Who’s that? Oh. That’s me. The same face that’s been looking back at me for 40 years. Why does she still surprise me? Why do I not connect with her?
I told my girlfriends about this weirdness, about the disconnect between me and my reflection, and after our mirror conversation, inspired by J, I said, “I’m going to start doing mirror work. I’m going to figure this out! I want to be best friends with my reflection too.”
I tried, but still, we were off, my reflection and me. And then, something changed. I got glasses.
Now, I look in the mirror and say Oh! There you are! And I smile. The Andrea that looks back at me – the bookworm, the word nerd – is the Andrea I know from the inside. I just never knew she had glasses.
I see this revelation frequently in fashion, especially on the the TLC makeover show What Not to Wear. Contributors to the show are brought to New York, instructed to dispose of their entire wardrobe, and then taught how to shop for new clothes that fit their personalities and figures. It is always difficult for the women to let go of their former clothing – even if the clothes did not serve them and did not even fit them, those clothes were familiar – but once they let go and start finding clothes that do serve them, that do fit them, the women are transformed. There are often tears when they see themselves in clothes that match their personalities. The women look in the mirror at their new hair, the skirt that flatters their hips, the fun shoes in their favorite color, and they point and they say, “That’s what I always felt like on the inside – now I look like that on the outside.”
That’s how I feel with my new glasses. Now, when my reflection catches me unaware, when I’m vacuuming and I see myself pushing the upright in the wall mirror, I wave or I wink. She and I, we’re on our way to becoming fast friends.
This is my interpretation of finding something, the day 13 assignment for Writing 101. *Edit: added next to last paragraph after initial publication.
I was unloading the dishwasher the other day, and my wedding ring clinked against a glass bowl, making a sound so similar to a sound from childhood that I was transported instantly to a motorboat, zipping through briney rivers, the sun on my face and the wind in my hair. I even caught a whiff of salt air.
I grew up on a tidal creek off the coast of Georgia (on a small “hammock” island just before you get to Tybee Island), and we spent every weekend during the summers out on the boat. My mom was in charge of the beach bag, chairs, towels, snack foods, lunches, and packing the cooler, and my dad was in charge of everything relating to the boat and the dock – fuel, mechanicals, boat and dock maintenance, crab traps, lines, first aid/life jackets, and driving the boat. My brother and I would cast us off, then I’d take my seat in the bow, my head hanging over the side like a dog, and Adam (my brother) would hang out by the steering wheel with my dad. And as we pulled away from the dock, when my dad first put his hand to the stainless steel wheel, his wedding band would clink against it.
Throughout our hundreds of hours on the rivers, the clank of my dad’s ring on that steering wheel was as much a part of the weekend soundscape as the buzz of the motor, and it always, always made me feel safe, and secure, and loved. The sound, because it was made by his wedding band, was an audible reminder of my dad’s love for my mom, and for us, his family. And because it was tied up with my favorite thing on earth (riding around in the boat with my family) the clang of of his ring against the stainless steel wheel captured every good memory, every happy feeling of those childhood summers – the salt smell of the air, the warmth of the sun, the fun of the four of us being together, the freedom of the wind and the water, the thin crust of salt on our skin at the end of the day. Cold Cokes and salty snacks.
So when my wedding band clinked against a glass bowl the other day, that little sound filled me up. I could feel the warmth swelling in my heart til it overflowed. I was there again, as a kid in the boat, with my dad at the wheel. I was safe, and free, with salt air in my nose and the wind in my hair. It made me wonder what small thing, whether a sound, or a scent, will send my kids back to childhood when they’re grown, standing in their kitchen, remembering.
I wrote this in July, 2011 and published it here on June 17, 2012. I wanted to republish it today for Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!
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