A new year, a windy beach, a light rain, a meeting of old friends.
Category Archives: Texas
Ode to the Waning Summer
As August reaches its end and the mornings turn cool, I’m thinking of summers past, of porch swings and balmy nights, of railroad tracks and aimless adventures.
Some years ago now, a very close friend and I went on an impromptu trip to the charming town of Jefferson in East Texas. We stayed in an old mansion with five course breakfasts served in crystal and silver. In the morning we explored long streets, bayous and byways. In the afternoon we drank milkshakes at the Drug Store, and in the evening we got locked in an old antique store (but that’s a story for another day). At night we sat on the porch swing as the stars came out and the cicadas sang, and our thoughts turned to love and fairy tales and summers of long ago.
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Happy Birthday, Blue Mesa
Blue Mesa Blog turns 1 today! The biggest thank you to all my loyal readers. I’d like to raise an imagined glass of your libation of choice to you for all the kind words you’ve shared this year.
In exchange, I’d like the share a few words by Edward Abbey that have always served as something of a guiding evocation for my travels…
May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you – beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
— A Prayer for the Traveler
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Camp
To be honest, summer camp was nothing short of traumatic for me – a disastrous combination of flooding, spiders, sunburn, starvation and serious injuries. For years it tainted my relationship with camping, until my faith was restored by a summer-long stay in a little tent in the wilds of New Mexico.
Although I learned to get along just fine with tents, I admit my feelings towards summer camp remained less than friendly. And then one summer my sister and I found ourselves back at the closest thing to summer camp we’d experienced in some fifteen years—a canvas tent in Marfa. Some details still harkened back to our old harrowing experience—spiders in the tent, cold showers that showed a marked absence of concern for human modesty in their design, blazing hot afternoons, dust storms, and rains that rendered everything into mud—but then there were all the benefits of adulthood—freedom, good food, and margaritas.
We spent our days out in the shady hammock near by, or sprawling over the bed and gazing out at the pretty sunlight filtered through the canvas. In the evenings we took walks around the campground and read stories aloud by lantern light. We even sang a song or two from our old camp days: “The coffee at the camp they say is mighty fine, it looks like murky water, and tastes like turpentine…”
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The Apricot Picker
One morning in early summer she smelled apricots in the air. She followed the sweet scent through the closed gate of someone else’s garden, and found three trees. Their branches were heavy with the blushing fruit, and she picked them one by one and concealed them in a paper bag before tiptoeing away.
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Swingers
If I had a hammock I’d never leave it. They always remind me of long, enchanted childhood summers, of good books and dappled sunshine. I’m a little beyond the age of summer vacations, but here’s a little glimpse of a hammock that I lived in for a few stolen days of sororal bonding, stories read aloud, cold water and afternoon dozing. And of course, endless writing.
