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.
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.
I am at Barnes & Noble on a sodden Friday — my flex day. On the round Formica café table are my coffee, two gardening magazines, and a warm peanut butter cup cookie on a white ceramic plate (“For here, please”). The café hums behind me — I spent far too much time selecting my seat (in the corner? by the window? with a wall behind me? facing the tables or the bookstore?) — and in front of me a man in a cobalt blue sweater and well-worn sneakers browses the technology aisle. Rain drops run in rivulets down the store windows, and I am cozy with my coffee, cookie, and composition book.
I left my laptop at home. In this murmuring book store, on my day off, I am surrounded by physical media. Journals, books, magazines. Vinyl, compact disks. My pen tip scratching across the blue-lined paper of a wide-ruled Mead composition book (they didn’t have college-ruled, which is probably for the best now that I have old-lady eyes).
Before I left home, I opened my computer to pay a bill and look up some phone numbers (eye doctor, nail salon) and hours (library, book store). As soon as I opened it, Slack boinged at me, Telegram dinged at me, red notification bubbles glared at me, and browser and calendar banner notifications slid open in the upper right of my screen. I quit every application quickly so I wouldn’t see anything that might suck me in.
I managed to not work — a narrow escape! — but did not manage to avoid falling into the digital chasm. After I finished my online errands, I somehow spent 15 minutes searching for desktop wallpaper to satiate my craving for turquoise water, warmth, and a feeling of tranquility. I have no idea how I ended up there. I did not find satisfactory wallpaper before realizing the trap I was falling into. I shut the laptop and left it behind so I could spend my rainy day flex day at the book store.
Cherry blossoms are popping pink against the brown landscape, and I saw my first tulip of the year today, a spring yellow.
Today’s drenching should green the landscape quickly. I wanted to spend some time today weeding, but I’m not sad the rain is keeping me in instead. I haven’t started thinking about the garden yet this year, and with how warm it’s been, I’m finally ready. On the table in front of me are a glossy, staple-bound Virginia Gardener and a matte, glue-bound Gardening for Birds & Butterflies.
The green of their covers is fresh and alive compared to the dreary March grey outside. I fear I will leave here with a mind full of wishes, and a dangerous desire to spend a lot of money on flowers.
It’s that time of year again: time for the Automattic Grand Meetup. As a distributed company, with more than 450 employees in 45 countries, we all work from our home offices, coworking spaces, cafes, airports, airplanes, trains, RVs, and family and friends’ homes for 51 weeks of the year. But in this one week in the fall, we all converge in one place to learn and teach together, build new tools, and compress 51 weeks worth of Friday happy hours into 7 days.
This year our GM is in Whistler, British Columbia, and I’m so excited about it, I woke at 3:15, a full hour before my cab was scheduled to pick me up and take me to the airport. My cab driver, after asking where I was headed, said “Oh, Vancouver! I’ve never been there. I hope you’re getting to go for pleasure and you don’t have to go for work.”
I smiled and said, “I’m going for work, but it’s ok because I love my job.”
I’ve heard a lot of people talk about traveling for work, and how it’s exhausting, and at the end of each day they can’t wait to sneak off and get away from their coworkers, and that few people on their business travel like each other or want to hang out together.
That’s definitely not my experience. One of my coworkers describes Automattic business travel as like going to summer camp. That’s the most apt description I’ve heard of what it feels like. My husband and I were talking about taking time off from work to recharge, and he mentioned that I haven’t really taken much — not as much as I could with our open vacation policy, anyway.
“Yeah,” I said, “I haven’t taken a lot of actual vacation, but going on work trips is like vacation for me. They are long days of working and thinking and brainstorming, often from sunup into the deep night, but it feels more like hanging out with friends while also, oh yeah, we’re getting work done.”
One thing I won’t be doing much of on this trip, though, is photography. Despite my post about minimizing, my suitcase was too stuffed with swag for our support team happy hour to be able to fit my camera. I’ll do what I can from my phone, though :-).
All that work laying out flower beds, killing grass, shoveling mulch, and digging 150+ holes to drop plants into has paid off. I’m sitting under the dogwood tree, watching a hummingbird drink from pink salvia flowers not ten feet away while further down the garden a monarch lays eggs on the milkweed.
It has been weeks since I’ve had a chance to bring my chair under the dogwood to enjoy the flowers, but yesterday, beast though it was for all the chores, I got all of my must-dos done so I could do exactly that: sit under a tree and watch the hustle and bustle of a summer flower garden.
Writing and butterfly-watching
We’ve been getting more butterflies as August marches on, and I usually see them from the car window as I arrive or depart the house, or from the living room window while I type on my laptop for work. Not enough do I come out and sit in the fresh air with the mountain breeze and the insect sounds.
Yesterday, amidst all the chores and errands, I squeezed in some gardening in the horrid heat. I got to see everything up close again and engage with the flowers, the herbs, the bees, the dirt, the aphids. I waded through waist-high salvia to deadhead, chopped forests of thigh-high basil, cut milkweed so infested with aphids I couldn’t touch it without getting little orange bodies all over me, and pulled tufts of grass and dandelions until my fingernails hurt.
And in the middle of all that chopping, weeding, and squirting aphids with soapy water, I saw our first monarch caterpillar. That fat, squishy, striped baby butterfly made every bit of the work worth it.
Now, I hear the rat-a-tat of cicadas, the buzz of two fat bumblebees, the honk of a Canada goose flying overhead, and the shh-shh-shh of my husband sanding our canoe in the garage. A cool breeze lifts the pages of my pretty journal, and glassy dragonfly wings shimmer in sunlight over the grass. The butterflies weren’t out when I first came out. The morning was too young. But now they’re coming.
It’s Sunday morning and I’m under my tree again. These past days have been hot ones, but under the dogwood, I’m able to stay cool. This is my favorite place to be on weekends — in a camp chair, in the shade of my favorite tree, observing the garden.
A few minutes ago, from the chaise lounge inside, I watched a swallowtail drink from the milkweed for a good five or ten minutes. Its big wings beat furiously as it flitted from flower head to flower head and drank deeply. When it finally flew away, it staggered like a drunken sailor.
“Maybe it was a female and now it’s going to lay eggs on the parsley!” I said. “Or the rue.” I tried to peer farther out the window to see the parsley plants.
Then it occurred to me that the resident bird population might eat any caterpillars we get. “They’ve eaten all the blueberries, too,” said our son.
Oh well. This is the way of things.
I moved outside for a better view of the host plants, to watch for any signs of egg-laying. The swallowtail hasn’t come to the parsley, but a hummingbird is drinking from the bee balm about 15 feet away. It’s tiny body shimmers emerald in the sun, and its wings hum as it beats them fast enough to hover while it drinks from red trumpets.
Ooh ooh! Here comes the swallowtail! Towards the parsley, close to the parsley, will it see the parsley?
Nope, flew by without stopping. Dang.
It’s okay. Butterflies have been rare so far this summer. Now they’re finally coming. They’ve found the little oasis we tried to create, filled with host plants for caterpillars and nectar for adults. I see five flitting through the garden right now as I type.
Butterfly Mind 