I am a friend to the sand, to the swath of washed up coquina shells, to my long shadow that stretches down the beach towards the ocean. I am a friend to my notebook pages that flap in the sea breeze, to the bright orange swim shirt my son wears, to the jagged choppy waves.
I am a friend to my mom’s red-strapped canvas L.L. Bean bag that says Mamma S? The single letter after Mamma is worn off — I’m not sure if it was a B for her first name, an S for her last name, or something else. I am a friend to the red folding nylon chair I sit in, with its mesh cup holder for my phone, and its carrying bag with a strap I can put over my shoulder to tote it hands-free when we go back to the car and I need my fingers for flip-flops and fun noodles.
I am a friend to the bubbles the Atlantic makes as wave remnants swash up the beach on their journey across great distance: they’ve travelled to the edge of the sea. I am a friend to the white froth of the crashing waves, the green-brown-blue water of the Georgia coast.
I am a friend to the dead reeds washed ashore, to the sand castles made from carefully dumped buckets, to the cobalt blue shovel and the hot pink plastic pail. I am a friend to my son’s black soccer slides, my daughter’s watermelon flip-flops, and my brown leather Rainbow sandals with the braided straps.
I am a friend to this olive green surf skirt with pockets for my phone and car keys, this skirt that has been with me to Hawaii, Tybee, Anna Maria, Sarasota, the Outer Banks, Mexico, Claytor Lake, that has covered bathing suits and birthday suits, that has faded and needs to be retired but I can’t bear to let it go.
I am a friend to the black hairband on my wrist, to the gray cap on my head that contains flyaways when the wind is blowing and I want to focus on writing instead of pulling strands of hair out of my eyes and mouth.
I am a friend to the white wisps of cirrus clouds high in the dome of the atmosphere. I am a friend to the teal of the evening sky, the tan of the beach, the shell pink of my toenail polish. I am a friend to the black ink that gives form to my thoughts on these white, blue-lined pages.
This was a 10-minute free write inspired by Natalie Goldberg’s prompt to list inanimate objects in response to the phrase, “I am a friend to…” The intention is to pull us outside of ourselves, to wake us to our surroundings and help us pay attention. The angle of the prompt — “I am a friend to” — also helped me have gratitude for these simple, beautiful things that I might otherwise just observe (or not observe) and move on with my life.
Boating life revolves around weather, and here on the coast of Georgia, it also revolves around tides. We spent all day yesterday waiting for 2pm to come so we could catch the sandbar — our ultimate destination for the day — at a time where the tide was high enough to get the boat out of the creek, but low enough that there would still be a sandbar left. At high tide, which was around 4pm yesterday, there wouldn’t be much island to land on.
To kill time we wandered around Tybee for goggles, lemons, and sugar. Vacation necessities. My mom and daughter also passed the morning making a caramel cake: a three layer cake with a frosting that requires two caramel pots — one with cream and one without — that must arrive at the correct temperature and color simultaneously, and then must be beaten together at exactly the right time and then rapidly spread on all three layers of the cake before it gets too thick to work it anymore. The frosting was complex and required two (and sometimes three) people to do everything as quickly as the process demanded. It also took two attempts (one pot of caramel burned) but boy was it worth it. The final result taste likes pralines.
Throughout the morning, the weather darkened. Rain, rain, more rain. For several hours we watched the radar. We watched the sky. We ate lunch while it poured. We talked about a Plan B. I rooted around in my parents’ game closet and found a Young Players expansion pack of cards for Trivial Pursuit. The kids had never played Trivial Pursuit, and I got a bee in my bonnet to play that, but then I couldn’t find the original Trivial Pursuit box with the board and the pie pieces. We killed another hour searching the entire house for the missing board, which led to Mom cleaning out the guest room closet where we did find Boggle and Scrabble, but by that point the kids and I really really wanted Trivial Pursuit.
We were about to get in the car to make the trek over to Savannah to buy the board when my dad said he saw blue sky and the radar was clear. Five minutes later, we were in our swimsuits, slathering sunscreen on ourselves at the end of the dock, ready to go.
On the way out of the creek, we saw a neighbor’s dock, destroyed by last year’s Hurricane Matthew. About halfway from land to the river, the dock falls away into the marsh like an exploded train bridge in a movie. The owners can’t get out to their floating dock, which has a second layer of collapsed walkways: the ramp from the raised deck at the end of the dock to the floating platform on the river is now dangling in the water. The floating dock and the grounded dock are no longer connected.
We saw another hurricane casualty on our approach to the sandbar. A 25-30 foot black-hulled sailboat lay on its side, about 100 yards into the marsh, behind a hammock of land, its mast at a 30° angle to the ground. There’s no way to get to the boat. There’s no waterway and no path over dry land. It is stranded, lifted by the high water of a hurricane and deposited in a place a boat cannot get to.
When we arrived at the sandbar, the sky was still gray. We were the only boat on the water, and we had the sandbar to ourselves. Our daughter jumped off the bow with the anchor, and as soon as she stuffed it into the sand, she and our son were off running as fast as they could, free on an empty beach.
We went to the sandbar a couple of years ago, and the excitement that summer was the cannonball jellies washed up on the sand. This year it was horseshoe crabs.
“Mom! I saved a horseshoe crab!” Our daughter ran across the beach to fetch me so I could see. “I flipped it over — it was on its back — and now it can get back to water.”
Rescued horseshoe crab
We watched as it made its slow, prehistoric trek across the sand. Then the kids were off again, splashing first through ankle-deep shallows that quickly deepened as the tide came in, then swimming in the steeper drop-off over by the boat on the river side of the sandbar, then finally moving to their favorite spot: the ocean side, where the waves are. I watched ships come and go at the mouth of the Savannah River. The tide was right for them, too, to enter and exit the port.
Ship coming into port
My favorite part of the trip to the sandbar, besides the kids’ joy, the warm sand, and the isolation, besides views in every direction of islands and water, the clearing sky, and the sound of the waves, my favorite part of the trip was watching the tide rise over the sandbar.
On the eastern edge of the bar, the part facing no island, only the open ocean, was a spit of land drenched in shore birds: pelicans on the oceanfront reach, their feet in the water; sand pipers in the splash zone facing north, towards Tybee and the shipping channel, chasing receding waves to dip their bills in the wet sand and catch coquinas, being chased by incoming waves back up onto the shore; seagulls on the dry land of the isthmus, all facing south, towards uninhabited Little Tybee; terns flying, black skimmers mingling with seagulls, willets hanging around the sand pipers.
Water coming over the spit
Sandpipers catching coquinas
Water is getting higher
During the couple of hours we were on the sandbar, I watched the dry spit gradually become submerged by the incoming tide. Where the birds were spread over a large amount of land when we first arrived, the gradually clumped closer together as the land beneath their feet disappeared.
Spit and sky
We left at high tide. There was still plenty of sandbar left, but my parent’s dog had worn herself out, and it was time to get her back home. We left the sandbar as empty as we found it, and we headed home for a dinner of blackened fish, dessert of caramel cake, and after-dinner entertainment of board games thanks to a post-boat-trip quest in Savannah for Trivial Pursuit.
Last night on the back deck1 was cool and breezy. Wind blew wisps of hair from behind my ears, and it brought the briny scent of salt marsh and air blown across the Atlantic ocean. This morning when I stepped out of my parents’ front door — the front door of my childhood home — the world was still and muggy.
On the empty street, surrounded by palmettos and palm trees, Lantana and azaleas, I started to put my ear buds in. I hate running, and the only way I can get through it is by listening to music.
But just as I began to muffle the sounds of the outside world as I slid the second white ear bud in, a cicada started up, then a hundred more joined in until my ears rattled with the buzz of cicadas in the still morning air. Island and marsh birds joined in with their morning calls. I pulled the ear buds out and stuck them in my sports bra.
Up by the bridge, a white-haired man in madras shorts and a plaid shirt walked along the edge of the black pavement, a lit cigarette dangling from his fingers. He moved with the agility of youth, but his face looked like he was 1000 years old, deeply wrinkled from a lifetime of wind in his eyes and of sun and smoke on his skin. He rasped out, “Good morning,” and I good-morning’ed him back. I don’t usually hear when people say good morning because of headphones; it was quite nice.
Near the highway, afer a mile of running on a narrow snake of land surrounded by Spartina grass, sea ox-eye daisies, marsh mud, and puddles of salt-water left behind at low tide, I saw a brassy-haired woman walking up ahead of me. Her hair was loose and yellow-orange. I remembered that color from a childhood on the coast, women and men both trying to lighten their hair. Lemon juice, peroxide, cheap home dye jobs. Natural blonde is not an easy color to recreate, and the southeast coast is filled with brassy blonde instead.
On my way home, I heard the scuttle of hundreds of toothpick-tip legs tapping green fronds: fiddler crabs scurried for cover on the dense palmettos when they heard my clomping approach. Listening to music, I’d never heard the scampering of fiddler crabs despite dozens of runs along this stretch of road.
Now I’m back on Mom and Dad’s deck, this time in the screened portion. I’m covered in salty sweat and mosquito bites, and the air is still not moving. The piling driver on the river, here to repair docks blown apart in Hurricane Matthew, has started its metallic ka-thunk, ka-thunk, ka-thunk of pounding pilings deep into marsh mud. The sound echos across the water. It might be time now to put the ear buds in.
We woke Sunday to chilly temperatures and strong winds: awesome weather for a ferry ride to the Statue of Liberty. We bundled up (though not warmly enough) and rode the subway to the southern tip of Manhattan to catch the first ferry of the day. Our tickets were for 9AM, but we were through security by 8:20 and were underway on a boat that wasn’t even half full by 8:30. Cold wind whipped hair into my eyes on the upper deck of the ferry, but it was worth shivering to have an unobstructed view of the statue as we approached.
Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skylineWe were the first to the island, and therefore had it mostly to ourselves. As the later ferries began arriving, filled to capacity with tour groups, school groups, family groups, church groups, and large groups of all sorts, we were glad we had that first half hour or so alone with only 10 or 12 other folks to enjoy the quiet and open spaces of Liberty Island before the masses arrived.
Lady LibertyFrom Liberty Island we rode the ferry to Ellis Island and witnessed the Great Hall where immigrants were processed upon entry to the U.S., along with the 750-bed hospital complex — the United States’ first public health hospital — for quarantine and infectious diseases.
Great Hall at Ellis IslandBy this time I was quite cold, and the sky darkened with spitting clouds. We made our way from the southern tip of Manhattan up to the 9/11 memorial, which was a sobering sight: two city-block-sized holes in the ground, the footprints of the twin towers, now pools with water that falls forever into unknowable, unseeable depths. From the memorial pools, I looked up to see the new, One World Trade Center
9/11 Memorial Pool One World Trade CenterThese were heavy to behold, and we spent time in quiet to absorb them before moving on. We were cold and hungry after a morning on the windy water and under clouded skies, and we both wanted a hot lunch. We had no real agenda after the Statue of Liberty and the 9/11 Memorial, except that we both wanted to visit Little Italy, so we started walking away from Ground Zero towards where we thought we could find the subway that would take us near Little Italy. It was these wanderings that were often my favorite parts of our trip because we happened upon unexpected wonders, like the intricate, decadent Woolworth Building, when we did so.
Woolworth BuildingWe arrived in Little Italy and sought refuge in one of the first restaurants we came to, where it was snug and warm. I ate a plate of lasagna, and my mom had eggplant parmesan, and I was toasty and content. The small, cozy restaurant, the hot food, the warm Italian staff were exactly what I wanted. We stopped next in a pastry shop where I ordered a cappuccino and ate amaretti cookies while we waited out the rain that started as soon as we dipped into the cafe. Finally, we were exhausted after our big and somber morning, and after our full first day on Saturday, so we walked back to our hotel, stopping off in a couple of Italian cheese shops, and accidentally happening into Chinatown on our journey.
Cheese, meats, breads in Little ItalyI snuggled under the blankets to get warm, and we both napped in the quiet of our room. We had nothing else planned, and once we were rested, we both thought it would be fun to close out our trip with Times Square.
Immediately on exiting the platform, we knew were in the liveliest of all the subway stations we had been to. We heard music — trumpet and trombone and drums — and it was toe-tapping and good. These guys blew beat up brass and played plastic bucket drums, and the lack of fancy instruments did not stop them from producing fine boogie woogie music. They played with heart, with fun, and with passion.
Buskers in Times Square subway stationThese street performers were the perfect introduction to Times Square: vibrant and high-stimulous. When we exited the station onto the street, we were assaulted with the visual loudness of it all.
Snapchat ad, Times Square Crumbs Bake Shop, Times Square
Times Square Ball DropTimes Square, and a walk over to the Empire State Building, were the perfect way to close out our NYC touristing. We headed back to Soho for a taco dinner, and went to bed early, exhausted from our two big days. This morning, we said goodbye with a great delight of the city: there’s always an excellent coffee shop nearby. One block away from our hotel, I enjoyed a final cup of coffee, and a surprise doughnut (the shop looked too small to have treats, but they had an amazing, if tiny, selection of doughnuts and pastries — my mom selected a delicious ham and brie croissant).
That’s my favorite thing about New York City: the happy little surprises.
My mom and I are spending the weekend in New York, one of the places on her bucket list to visit. She’s never been, and I’d only been briefly for work, so we are here as full-on tourists these two days. I didn’t bring my laptop, but here’s a quick photo tour of our first day from my phone.
We started our Saturday with a walk east from our hotel in Soho to Katz’s deli near East Village. Mom wanted a NY bagel with lox; I wanted blintzes like my friend’s mom used to make when we had sleepovers at their house.
Katz’s deliCheese and blueberry blintzesMom sent home a salami from Katz’sWe walked north through East Village before embarking on my Mom’s first NYC subway ride. We both love all the fire escapes in this part of the city, though I didn’t get a great picture of them.
From the subway, we crossed Park Avenue, then Madison Avenue, then Fifth Avenue to arrive at the Museum of Modern Art. Once inside, I found a docent and said, “I’d like to see the Warhols and any Rothkos you might have. Do you have a Rothko?”
He tapped some things into his computer and smiled up at me. “We’ve got two Andy Warhols on the fourth floor, and Rothko is on the fifth. We’ve only got one Rothko, though.”
I was giddy. “One is enough.”
Rothko at MoMA Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans at MoMA Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol
We stopped at the fourth floor first, then the fifth floor for the Rothko. I had no idea the treats that awaited us there. At the top of the escalator was Wyeth’s Christina’s World. Then the Jackson Pollock painting everyone knows. Then Dalí’s melting clocks, Monet’s three-wall wide Water Lilies, Mondrian’s New York inspired Broadway Boogie Woogie, Picasso’s Three Musicians. Whole rooms of Picasso. And then, to my great surprise, van Gogh’s Starry Night.
Starry Night. I had no idea it was here.
From MoMA, which I adored, we walked north up Fifth Avenue towards South Central Park and our next stop for the day: afternoon tea at The Plaza hotel.
Roses in The Plaza; their scent filled the entry Tea menu, The Palm Court
The ceiling in The Palm Court The New Yorker tea
Tea at The Plaza was our great splurge, our Mother’s Day gift to each other. Mom drank champagne and I sipped the best Gin Sling I’ve ever tasted. Crystal chandeliers glittered above us, and we took our time savoring the sandwiches, scones, clotted cream and lemon curd, hot tea, tiny desserts, the clinking of porcelain tea cups, and the atmosphere of luxury.
After filling our stomachs to bursting, we walked and metroed again (accidentally taking the express towards the Bronx, and having to hop out far beyond our destination so we could get on the right train to go back), this time to Central Park West and W. 72nd Street for another item on my mom’s bucket list: the John Lennon memorial.
“There are three things I remember exactly where I was when they happened: JFK’s assassination, September 11th, and when John Lennon was shot,” she told me.
We came up onto the street from the subway and there was The Dakota, where John Lennon lived and where he was killed. We wandered around Central Park trying to find Strawberry Fields. In its center we would find the memorial. We walked and walked, having turned the wrong way when we first entered the park, but we knew we were close when we heard a guitar strumming and a voice singing Beatles songs.
John Lennon memorial, Strawberry Fields, Central Park West
We sat for some time there, watching the pilgrims and listening to the man on the bench singing John Lennon.
Still full after our tea, we rested in our room for a while. We skipped dinner and drank cocktails and ate sweet potato fries back in Soho instead.
“I really want to go back to that book store in Greenwich Village and see if they have the book I want,” I said.
It’s a John Cheever book, The Wapshot Chronicle, for my Massachusetts reading project. Our library doesn’t have it, and I can’t find it for my Nook either. I didn’t have high hopes that this little book store would have it either, but neither of us was ready to go back to the room, so we walked over to bookbook after drinks, just for fun.
My book from Greenwich Village
They had it! I’m pretty excited about my single take-home purchase, my souvenir from New York.
Once back in our room, we set our alarms for another big day in the city, and then we slept the deep sleep of the weary.
Last month, when my poor family suffered snow and wind chills in the negative digits, I was in Mexico for work. We worked hard, I swear. And we also played hard.
After a full week of training, testing, troubleshooting, and writing, we took one day to go exploring. My teammate booked a private van for our group, and we piled in it on Friday morning, March 17, for the 2.5 hour drive west, from Playa del Carmen on the coast to the Mayan ruins at Chichen Itza in the interior of the Yucatán peninsula. I’d never seen archeological ruins before — not outside, in real life, in the physical place they existed.
Temple of the Warriors
Anything I’d ever seen was a photograph or a recreation in a museum. It was a wonder to walk around this ancient city that so little is known about. There was the massive ball court, with a ring 30 feet off the ground.
Ball Ring, through which players must hit or bounce the ball in ancient game
There were pyramids.
El Castillo
Serpents.
Stone serpent
There was a temple of warriors. I wondered what sorts of sacrifices might have been made there.
Temple of the Warriors
We walked for three hours around this ancient city. I tried to imagine it populated — the smells, the industry, the royalty, the wildlife — lizards, serpents, predatory cats. There was an ancient observatory, and the understanding of astronomy and geometry seemed quite advanced. I tried to imagine the city at night, how dark it would have been. I tried to imagine it through all the days and nights, without books or light or electricity (or electronics!), when they watched stars, solstices, moon phases, equinoxes, eclipses.
I wish I could have taken my family there. There was much history in the stones, the air, the blinding sun, and soaked into the earth in that place.
Butterfly Mind 
