For those of you following, as soon as I published yesterday’s post about my inability to figure out the coffee pot, I entered our rented beach house to the spurt and gurgle of morning brewing. As they poured me a cup, my girlfriends got a good laugh about me solving the coffee pot problem by going outside to write about it instead of waking someone up to help me.
Now, I’m sitting on a jetty with my friends. It is low tide, and our legs swing over the edge of the concrete finger. We watch seagulls drift in the evening sea breeze, kids splash in tide pools, and surfers bob up and down over smooth swells. One friend pulled out her phone, queued up music, and said she had a surprise for me. The next song that played was Bonnie Raitt singing John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery.” With John Prine.
As we walked here, a man pedaled by with his little dog in his bicycle basket. The dog’s ears flapped in the wind. Life is full of delight.
I woke this morning to the sound of surf. It was 7:37, and diffused light from an overcast sky seeped around the edges of the blinds. My body wanted to go back to sleep, but I wanted to see the beach. My girlfriends and I arrived at Folly Beach, South Carolina, yesterday evening around 6 o’clock, it was drizzling, and we needed to set up the bar and put groceries away for our annual girls’ weekend. Then it was dark, and we were too busy hanging out, drinking, and ordering fish tacos to do anything like walk the one block to the beach.
We stayed up late, of course. So despite probably needing a lot more rest, I was happy I at least slept this morning beyond my normal 5 am wakeup. Nobody else in the house was awake, and I couldn’t lie there in bed listening to the ocean and not go see it. I brushed my teeth, gulped down some water, pulled on a pair of jeans, and walked barefoot across the street to the beach. No coffee yet, I wanted to get out there immediately.
Now I’m back, sitting on the porch, and everyone else still sleeps. I’m listening to surf pound, processing my photos, and desperately hoping someone else will wake up soon. The coffee maker is this tremendous combination 12-cup pot / single-cup Keurig type deal, where it tries to do everything, and as a result can’t do anything. After 15 minutes of filling the water thing, pressing all the buttons, taking stuff out, putting stuff in, holding buttons down some more, and doing all of those steps multiple times, I can’t figure out how to make a simple cup of coffee.
I really really want a cup of coffee.
I want a cup of coffee and a piece of the key lime pound cake one of my girlfriends brought. I’m trying to buy time, but I don’t think I can last much longer. If nobody is up by the time I post this, I might need to get in the car and go find a cafe.
Path to the beach lined with dune flowersStand-up paddlers in the morning surfGood morning buttercup, or whatever flower you arePelicans are my favorite seabirds ♥️
Yesterday afternoon, I closed my laptop on work, went out to the garden to snip rosemary and thyme, and came back in to pull out two saucepans and the sugar. I made a batch of rosemary simple syrup and a batch of thyme simple syrup for two cocktails I want to try with my girlfriends this weekend: an Apple Cider Whiskey Rose(mary) cocktail and a Lemon and Thyme Whiskey Sour.*
I felt freed the other day when I wrote about cramming for the week. I didn’t realize how much I was holding inside until it was out. Laying out my stress, and acknowledging that I need to exercise and journal to help keep me balanced, changed the way I approached the rest of the week. I checked the driving distance to my Girls’ Weekend destination (6-7 hrs), our check-in time (4pm), what time the liquor store opens (10am), and when the pool had open lanes to reserve (9am).
The times work out perfectly. So now, this morning, on the first day of my five day weekend, I’ll throw all my stuff for my trip in the car, swim, shower at the pool, arrive at the liquor store at opening time, and then hit the road with a phone full of podcasts and music to listen to. I’ll arrive shortly after check-in along with one of the other early arrivers, and the weekend will begin!
*Thank you for y’all’s suggestions when I requested autumn cocktail ideas! If we can find everything for it, we’re going to try this Autumn Leaves cocktail. Another friend requested tequila on the liquor run I’ll make this morning. I’m scared about that.
At 5:40 this morning, in the dark and drizzle, we pulled away from the curb with my 15 year old daughter at the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat and watched the wet road, saw coppery leaves in a pretty drift under the tree they’d fallen from, undisturbed yet by cars driving over them.
Our daughter has 6am drylands practice for swimming on Mondays and Wednesdays. She’s gradually been adding more challenging drives to her practice: first around the neighborhood, then around other neighborhoods, then to the next town over by small roads, then on the highway. A few weeks ago, she graduated to driving to and from swim practice, during the daylight hours, on the highway. Then rush during rush hour. Then after sunset.
This morning, we went in the blackness long before sunrise. It had rained in the night, and was drizzling when we left the house. The brakes squeaked in the wetness — it’s been a long time since it’s rained here — and the drizzle was in that awkward phase where it is constant enough that you have to regularly use the wipers, but the lowest speed on the windshield wipers is too fast.
About halfway to the gym, we were swallowed by a fog bank. On the wet, hilly highway, in the dark, in the rain. She did great, but I, of course, worried. One day, she’ll be doing this without me in the passenger seat. Winter will come, and there will be snow and ice. When the kids were little, I worried about injuries. As they grow up and prepare to move out, I worry about their lives.
I leave Thursday morning for my annual Girls’ Weekend. Last week, I ended my workweek with a pile of stuff I wanted to get to but ran out of time for. Now I’ve got a three-day workweek with that pile of leftovers from last week, plus all the work of a new week, and there’s just not enough time.
I worked on Saturday to get some catchup done and to plan out my three days. As I looked at all I need to do, I made the choice to cut out exercise this week. It felt more stressful to try to tetris it in than to just skip it. But already, after two days of not running or swimming, and looking toward the rest of the week when I also won’t have time even for a walk, I feel the loss. It’s harder to focus on the positive, I feel stressed, even good stuff only gives me a momentary blip of “Oh, that’s nice” and then I’m back to “Gotta get this done.”
In addition to not exercising, I’ve also found myself not keeping up with my wellness journal these past few days. The end of the day comes, and I haven’t written down anything that made me happy during the day. Too busy. Must get through my list.
After building a habit over the past 18 months to journal things I’m grateful for or that delight me, the days feel gray and bland and all exactly the same when I don’t shine a light on the color.
It’s interesting to me to see this stark difference between what I feel like when I take care of myself and what I feel like when I don’t. In that sense, I appreciate this week of deliberate denial. I can clearly see the positive impact that physical activity and gratitude have on my sense of well-being, and the stress I feel when they’re not part of my routine.
I’ve got two more days of intense work. Then I’m off to spend four whole days marinating in good feelings. An extended weekend with my life-long girlfriends is totally worth the stress of cramming five days of work into three. Maybe we’ll even drag ourselves off the couch for a walk on the beach after our noon breakfast and before our afternoon cocktails begin. And then next week, I’ll add exercise and journaling back to my daily routine, and all will be well again.
The town pickup for fall yard waste is a week from Monday, and I’ve got a lot of clipping to do. I spent all day Sunday cutting back the brown Shasta daisy stems, yellowing lemon balm, broken Tithonia that fell over in recent rain, and about half of the blackened echinacea stems. I couldn’t bear to cut the echinacea all back — just this morning, goldfinches swayed on their crispy cones — so I left some at the back of the bed. But they’re really terribly ugly, and we only have so much room for composting; I had to cut some of them for the town to take away. My yard waste from today lines about 20 feet of our curb. Unless I get a chipper, I don’t have space to compost all the vegetation from the annuals and perennials in my garden.
I dug up a bunch of stuff I decided I don’t like anymore, like the wormwood that gets shaggy by the end of summer and that’s just not that interesting to me, and the lambs ears that grew so aggressively, they killed off some of my favorite plants. I dug out some lemon balm, too, to thin it. And I pulled out the tomatoes and their supports.
Mostly it just felt good to be out in the garden again. It hasn’t required much of me this summer, which is good, because I was off paddling and doing other fun things, and I didn’t have much to give. I enjoyed being among my plants again. Roses scented the air while I weeded their bed, and when I sheared the lavender and the lemon balm, the mint and the rosemary, I got to smell all their herby fragrances. Butterflies still float and flutter. At any given time, there would be three or four monarchs on the Zinnias and Tithonia. We still have one more chrysalis (that I know of) that we’re waiting for to release its butterfly.
After I cleaned up a bit, I took my camera out for some October garden shots.
Tickseed and purple salviaMumsDogwood berriesOak leaves trying to figure out what color to beMum and rosemaryLollipop vervain and RudbeckiaTithonia (Mexican torch sunflower) gone wild
Butterfly Mind 