summer solstice

and you were there, too

Jun 20, 2025

bear with me?

what i’m listening to

what i’m reading

The White Album by Joan Didion (a birthday gift from my friend Olivia)

When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance by Joan Baez (audiobook, read by Joan)

add me on Goodreads and Storygraph so we can have a #bookworm #summer

what i’m writing

Strangely, waiting around for a fiction book to materialize in my brain with a perfect plot and dynamic characters has not worked. My dad said Stephen King just starts writing sometimes and lets his characters decide so… let’s try it.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

On the seventh day of rain in a row, the rusty boat whirred to life again, as it would tomorrow. You are in that boat, as you were yesterday. Beneath you the metal whale swims up, down, up. Water, air, water. Life, death, life again.

No one had asked it of you. Because it wasn't ever a question. All winter your father stood at the bay window staring into a gray mastless and massless world, lips moving wordlessly. Until March, when he and the crocuses would crawl from their shells with life in their limbs and almost from nowhere declare, “It’s time.”

There is no real season for clamming anymore, you'll find out when you helm the ship yourself decades later. Not with these mild winters. Today the morning is hazy and timid. The bay is soundless. The seagrass shuffles across the surface of the water and it sounds like a phantom child’s secret carried on duckback.

Back before there were roads on this island, your father caught the largest striped bass in 1958 during a 57-day fishing derby and won himself a Ford Skyliner with a retractable hard top. And you were there, too; 12 years old, weighing in with the 19” striper, and taking home a bicycle. A winning son born to a winning father.

Back before there were this many people on this island, your family was something important. At night when yellow squares glowed from beyond the dunes, and only the most distant clatter of silverware could be heard, it was your father’s fish that sated the bellies, that made it so the island slept silently, like a switch going off, on, off again. Life continued, life tripped over itself to test how fast it ran, who could get there first.

But no longer. That was the time of forever summer. You went days, weeks without needing to locate a pair of shoes; you went months without needing to call on visitors, because they were always around. Your family home, always teeming with people; whether they were asleep on a floor, a couch, or a deck mattered little, because tomorrow, there would be another dawn to awake for, another reason to sleep now. Another everything tomorrow.

You lived for those days, waking up with the heat before the sun even appeared, skin pink like a baby from yesterday. Proof that you were there, too. Being alive in the world that early made you feel unstoppable, like you were less of a kid and more of a critical player in the unbreakable chain of this island. If you and dad had a particularly good morning, you’d be back in dock by 2:00, and on the beach by 3, toes scraping the bottom of the sea floor as you caught your breath between waves. Falling asleep in the sun. Thinking little of anything. Just the water, drinking you.

Life was easy when you were that boy. You wonder now whether you romanticize even that, forgetting the lack of sleep, your father’s fury on a bad day, the dollar bills counted singularly in the green dark of the kitchen late at night. Rich indeed, then not.

But the world itself was different when you were young. These waters, this bay, don’t recognize you anymore. And your family…was nothing you could get into now.

Now, it was clams. Clams, as many as possible, for the markets and the restaurants that still cared about fresh caught. Before the sun comes up to burn your veil away, but never disturb the loop, never break the chain.

A heron dips its long beak into the glass of the bay. Life, death, life again. The fog like the breath of the water, hiding you from the world. And the world from you. As the night lifts, the bay reflecting the sky, you recite the words. Again, again.

the disturbed universe

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