I spent a lot of time offline this summer. Generally speaking, this feels like a net positive. However, I did have a few ideas I was looking forward to posting on here and now it feels awkward to do so without acknowledging my lengthy absence. Consider it hereby acknowledged.
At some point late in the summer I realized I had also neglected to take enough photos — or my definition of enough, anyway. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a Project 365 to rekindle my photographic eye. Once upon a time I was actually an okay photographer, and many of my framings now feel clunky. It’s frustrating, as a creative person, to feel that oxidation of second-nature skills, to know what’s now hidden under the rust.
But I digress. Today I’m going to share a summary of the summer in photos. This is not a comprehensive summary, nor does it represent any form of information hierarchy. Its structure comes entirely from the Photos app on my phone, and what happened to end up there during a whirlwind few months. Which feels like an interesting structure in its own right.
Early summer: South Jersey hikes, Baltimore book events, the beginnings of garden season
I consider Memorial Day weekend the gateway to summer even though it comes a month before calendar summer. For most of my adult life, my family has converged at the Jersey Shore for the weekend to celebrate my dad’s birthday. Memorial Day weekend down the shore is always a bit of a gamble. Sometimes the weather offers a stunning preview of the summer ahead, and sometimes it brings pelting rain and daytime highs in the fifties.
This time it brought the latter. I almost felt sad not to have brought my wetsuits. But instead I did something totally new and delightful. My sister joined us for a couple days and we went on a lovely hike in the Wharton State Forest. It took me until my thirty-eighth summer in South Jersey to do a proper Pine Barrens hike. I don’t know why. It was fascinating and beautiful (though I might recommend avoiding tick season).
The pandemic landscape this summer had also shifted enough to allow a return to in-person author events. I attended two good ones at The Ivy Bookshop right out of the gate: D. Watkins for the launch of his new book Black Boy Smile and Shawn Nocher for the launch of The Precious Jules.
It felt good to get out again and participate in the local book community. While I was already familiar with D. Watkins, Shawn Nocher’s event was a first introduction. I discovered not only do we live in adjacent neighborhoods, her work has a very comparable feel to my own fiction. A neighbor on two fronts!
Mid-May also marks the start of outdoor garden season. I putter around in the garden long before that, but try to have my annual plants in by around Memorial Day. By late June I had my first herb harvests and my tomato plants were growing taller. This was the first year I built net trellises, and I will definitely do them again next year. What a way to save space with tomatoes!
Bonus note: I made a lot of progress cleaning out our basement workshop and as a reward, finally gave my bedside table a makeover. I bought it many years ago with plans to restore it and just never did. Thanks to inspiration from my…second-cousin-in-law?…I made it super cute. Fun fact: my first job was in a furniture shop so these projects always feel like a bit of a homecoming for me. Also, it’s a fantastic way to get my head in the right place for writing.
Mid-summer: cucumbers, books, beaches
I love garden fresh cucumbers, but I’ve had bad crop failures the past several years. This summer was my first true cucumber success. By mid-July my cucumber vines had totally covered their three-by-six-foot trellis. We are still eating our garden cucumbers, in the form of quick pickles I made in July to preserve the excess.
In my other life as one-third of the team behind Harborview Press, I dove into book production stuff. Stacks and stacks of books accumulated on the coffee table, next to my desk, and on pretty much any other horizontal surface throughout the summer. We looked at comparable titles for ideas and inspiration on cover design, typesetting, trim size, even the copyright pages. Whereas spring was a marathon of developmental editing, summer focused more on the physical presentation of our debut title. Really cool work. It was a mess, but an exciting one, and I’m happy to report it’s mostly cleaned up now.
After that marathon of work I headed to the beach again, this time for a full week with the family. I made some huge mental strides in my surfing, even if outwardly my skill level looks about the same. I also met up with a dear friend, had a magical moment in the sea after a women’s surfing clinic in Margate City, and attended a Phish concert on the beach with my dad in Atlantic City. I don’t have many pictures of these things because I was so into enjoying them in the moment.
Late summer: a new fiction project, putting myself out there, spending yet another August mostly away from home
Once I tumbled into the second week of August, the start of the school year felt shockingly close. I think this was also the second August in a row where I spent more days out of town than at home. As an introvert who loves hanging out at home with my plants, this was exhausting, and yet I wouldn’t do a thing differently. Maybe because of the three trips I took in August, all of them involved the beach.
For the second year in a row, I headed to Maine in mid-August to do a writing retreat with my best friend and longtime (like, going back to the mid-1990s long time) writing buddy. He was working on a zine project between applying and interviewing for writing jobs, and I was bound and determined to (re)start the first draft of my next novel. It was a fantastic trip. Nice weather, a super restorative visit with an old friend, and finally a break in the dam with this new project.
Some photo highlights and memories include: sunrise as seen from the Amtrak NE Regional somewhere in New England, morning cortados in a Peter Rabbit mug, my new and very emotionally needy feline friend Jasper, biscuits, some lovely beach skies, and typing away on the couch with my hair yet-unwashed from a morning surf session in the spitting rain as a nor’easter rolled in.
Speaking of which, that felt like a real breakthrough for me. The surf was clean but/and kind of big, the skies were dark an ominous, and I was borrowing an unfamiliar and much-less-stable-than-my-own board from my friend. And yet. I didn’t catch any waves, but I proved to myself I could paddle out in it, handle myself safely, and paddle back in at the end. This felt instructive not just for surfing, but for writing and maybe life in general.
During my time at home in August, I did a few things to put myself out there and try new things and take risks — kind of a stretch for the introvert who likes hanging out at home with their plants. I joined our local winemaker‘s wine club, which prompted me to pick out wines I wouldn’t normally have chosen or tried. I signed up for a book swap and sunset cruise on the harbor even though I didn’t have a date. And I dyed my kid’s hair! With only YouTube and hours spent watching my own stylist do balayage highlights in my hair as a guide, I gave him purple tips that actually looked super cool and we both loved them. This also felt like a major “you know you’re the child of a 90s punk when…” moment. We were such rebels when we put Manic Panic in our hair!
Despite a worsening drought, a few more big herb harvests fueled my newfound interest in herbalism and tincturing. I also discovered a place down the streethttps://goodneighborshop.com that serves truly amazing fruit bowls and have vowed to return as soon as possible.
All told, it was kind of an epic summer! By the first day of school I was more than ready to return to a predictable, normal schedule. I spent Labor Day weekend visiting family, getting my last pool days in, and losing myself in a romance novel. Whew!
Hope your summer was memorable and exhausting and restful in all the right ways! I’d love to hear about anything you want to share in the comments.
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