Writing in the morningI’m sitting in a beach chair 4 inches off the ground, a cup of coffee in the soft white sand by my right hand, watching perfect tubes of waves run up the beach like zippers closing. I’ve written another pen out of ink, am talking with my husband about sailboats and the physics of ocean waves, and I am happy. I love vacation.
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.
I’m going on vacation today, and one of the things I’m most excited about is that I’ll have free time over the next few days to write, and to play with my blog(s). Before heading out of town, I opened my laptop to add my other sites to the menu here on Butterfly Mind, and as I added them, I realized I have five blogs. Five.
If you’re interested in sailing, gardening, words, or American literature, I’ve got blogs for you! While Butterfly Mind is the place where I share whatever thoughts alight on my screen or notebook pages, these other blogs chronicle journeys on the water, on the land, and in books:
Andrea Sails: these are the logs of our adventures on the water. The entries help me keep track of what I’m learning as I venture into this new-to-me world of wind- and human-powered boating.
Andrea’s Gardening Blog: this site is often the result of me blogging with dirt on my hands, from my phone, in the garden, right after I’ve put plants in the ground. I love having a searchable record as each month comes around where I can take a look to see what the garden was doing this time last year: what was blooming? How has everything grown since then? When did I sow those seeds?
Andrea’s Lexicon: these are words I collect that I think are cool. Sometimes I hear them in conversation, sometimes I find them in books. Most of them appeal to me because they’re fun to say. Haberdasher! See what I mean?
Andrea Reads America: this is the chronicle of my journey through the US in literature in three books per state. The three books must be set in the state and be written by an author who is from the state or who has lived in the state. For each state I am reading men, women, and non-Caucasian authors. I’m going in alphabetical order. I’m reading Michigan now, though I still need to write up my Massachusetts reads.
Alright, time for me to hit the road. I’m going to have a hard time deciding which one(s) of these to write for while I’m gone.
On my smoothie break from writing, I started eggs boiling for the kids to dye. I often forget about eggs once I place the pan on the stove and set it to high. I’ll wander off while waiting for the water to boil, then an hour later realize, “Oh shit! The eggs!” This time, I brought Writing Down The Bones into the kitchen and read while I leaned against the counter and sipped my green smoothie.
As the water began to simmer, and the eggs rattled against the metal pot in excitement, I came across this line, which describes the fulfillment I’ve noticed since I began writing again:
I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.
— Natalie Goldberg
That real work may be writing. It may be sticking my hands in the dirt; studying about the bottlebrush plant I think I may have killed; nestling on the couch before bedtime with our 11 year-old daughter, sipping orange tea and looking at pictures of butterfly plants in a magazine. It may be cozying up to a fire under the stars while the kids toast homemade marshmallows and poke sticks into the fire then pull them out to watch their tips glow. It may be snuggling with my husband and our kitties while I listen to birds twitter through our open bedroom window.
These past few days of writing again, of observing the world, of carving out the time to enjoy being alive, have made me feel very rich indeed. I may be writing about nothing, and the plants may not survive my care, but I am happy.
I ache in every muscle of my body. Even the joints of my fingers are sore. It’s that good kind of soreness, though, the kind that reminds me I did manual labor yesterday. I must have trudged up and down that hill sixty times between mowing, pruning, going back and forth for tools and iced water, going up and down for food and to consult my gardening books, turning the water off and on to water in seeds, and finally, wheeling barrow after barrow of mulch.
I also broke the hoe. Hoeing is hard work. Too hard for the hoe, apparently. I feel pretty good about my body outlasting a metal and wood tool, but my back feels it today.
The hill is very steep. It is too steep to push a wheelbarrow or lawnmower directly up the face. I pushed the wheelbarrow in switchbacks to get each load of mulch to the patch I was covering.
But it is done! The hardest part of my vacation gardening ambitions is now complete. As I suspected I would, I did go to the nursery.
“Just to look,” I told myself.
“We’re not going to buy anything,” I said to my daughter when I asked if she wanted to go with me.
And as I suspected I would, I bought something. A goldenrod. I’ve been wanting one for two years! How could I pass it up? We’ve never had one because we’ve never had a meadow garden, and it would look silly in the flower beds we do have. But I’ve always really really wanted one.
“We need something to anchor the hill while we wait for the seeds to sprout.” That’s how I justified it to myself.
“It’s good for butterflies and birds,” I told our daughter. That’s how I justified it to her.
So I bought a goldenrod that was bursting out of its pot. When I shook the plastic container off, there was hardly any soil: it was nothing but a tangled mass of roots. “I think I can make four plantings out of this one purchase,” I said to myself. I couldn’t pull anything apart to divide the mass, so I cut through the pot-shaped root ball instead. I hope the plants survive. I really don’t know what I’m doing in the garden. I’m shocked anything lives under my care. Goldenrod is supposed to be pretty hardy, though, so I’ve got my fingers crossed it’ll be okay.
I transplanted some bee balm from out front, and then I called our daughter up to plant the seeds. I spread cleome (spider plant) seeds next to the fence since those plants can get to be 5 feet tall. Then our daughter scattered milkweed, dill, liatris (blazing star), zinnia, and the wildflower mix. All of these should be good for butterflies and hummingbirds.
After I cursed the hill with every single wheelbarrow full of mulch, and swore under my breath every time I slipped or almost fell down the hill trying spread the mulch, I finally watered it all in at about 6:00pm. I inspected my fingernails as I watered. They were shredded and filled with dirt.
After my shower, I stood on the porch and observed my work: a big empty patch of yard that is now a different shade of brown than it was before, rough at the edges because I was too tired to cart one more load of mulch up the hill. It does look better, I suppose. I just hope those seeds sprout.
One more day until the mulch arrives and my vacation begins. I am as jittery with excitement as a child before Christmas. My to do list for the garden is growing: mow, cut back forsythia, read about when to plant the seeeds I want to plant, check on the last frost date, sow seeds, mulch, weed, transplant bee balm.
I don’t know how I’m going to make it through six days of vacation time, at home, in warm spring weather, without buying plants. We saved the rest of the garden budget for May, when it’s truly time to plant, but sowing seeds is going to make me crazy with impatience to see green stuff in our garden.
I need to take a step back and be grateful for the green that’s already emerging. The lilac is leafing out, and I see flower buds like tiny grape clusters on it. The indigo salvia is leafing as well, with flower spikes forming. The cat mint is already a fluffy knee-high mound; the lemon balm is returning. The yarrow, the bee balm, the rue: these all have new growth. And the first tulip finally opened down by the mailbox! They survived my amateur attempt at transplanting last year!
So there is some leafy life. But there’s way more bare brown earth than growing green flora. I’ll have to wait weeks for seeds to sprout, and more weeks for them to grow, and more weeks for them to flower. When it’s warm and sunny, and birds are chirping, and tulips are blooming, and I’ve got dirt under my fingernails, I’m going to want flowers. I will want to fill our flower boxes. I will want to plant roses. I will want to put annuals in the empty spaces in our flower beds. I want something alive and new, and I’ll have six days of freedom in which I’ll have to restrain myself.
Sandpipers catching coquinas
Water is getting higher
Before mulch
After mulch
Pile after mulching hill
Butterfly Mind 