Dead Letter Department #95

weather report: returning home

Hello mountains, hello sparkling salt water, hello my own little apartment with my own little things in it & my own familiar bed.

I feel a bit as though I’ve rolled back the clock a few weeks: Vermont was in full summer by the time I left, my friend’s wildflower meadow in great glorious butterfly-speckled bloom, & the hydrangeas about to pop. Here it’s still late spring—summer in Bellingham doesn’t really start until after the fourth—though today is the first day warm enough to close up all the windows & start the mini split running so I’m not boiling by mid-afternoon at my sunny desk.

I slept a lot in Vermont, early afternoon naps in the deliciously cool, dim guest room, big windows showing me nothing but the green of J’s garden, & drank coffee from the fancy coffee maker, sat out on the back deck with friends long enough for the daytime moon to arc across the sky, or the entire light scheme to change, like the world was changing the sets just beyond the scrim of trees. My phone lay blessedly unlooked at, most of the time, except for when I was actively texting people, & instead I read Cloud Atlas & Dutch House & the first chunks of the Paladin of Souls.

We cooked—or rather J. cooked, expertly & deliciously: farro salad with salmon topped dill, grilled chicken in a lemon ginger yogurt marinade, kale that had somehow been tortured into edibility, home made pita & so much baba ganoush (baba goose, according to our toddler visitor) that we must have gone through a pile of eggplant. We bought pints of local strawberries, fat & fragrant, & flung the green hulls off the deck as we ate them. More than once there was a concoction involving watermelon, lime & coconut rum, blended with ice so a pink foam sloshed across the top of the coupe glass.

E. took me on the full tour: apartment, office, studio, so I can now imagine her moving through her day, her hilarious assortment of neighbors, the rushing Whetstone River just across the street, the soothing quality of the light through her green curtains. Now when we talk, divided by three thousand miles, I’ll be able to picture what she’s describing.

I finally met M.’s baby, who at first felt a touch uncertain, and twenty minutes was later confidently balancing her bottle on my chin while she drank, patting at my face with her unbelievably tiny hands when I said goodbye to her.

I got approximately forty-seven mosquito bites, largely on the night when we had a spectacular bonfire that encompassed some of the broken lawn furniture, and had to be thoroughly smeared with unguents & dosed with antihistamines to prevent me from scratching my legs off. We swam, or rather I waded, ungracefully, in perfect temperature river water, and then sat on a sun-hot rock, dangling my feet into the little pools where tadpoles & tiny fish investigated my crocs with great enthusiasm.

It was hard to leave—J & I talk all the time about how if things had aligned slightly differently for each of us, maybe I would have been able to live in Vermont, or she would have wanted to be out west. I can’t tolerate the winters there, need a higher sky & bigger water, and she is now, I think, firmly rooted back home, so instead we make do with visits, as frequent as we can make them. Our average has been pretty damn good over the decades.

Going from vacation back to reality, via the indignities of air travel, is always a bit of a wet fish slap to the face. As I approach the airport, I tell myself that I am becoming a digestive particle: my job, for as long as travel lasts, will be to enter and exit various apertures with all the rest of the particles in the stream, as we are carried along by forces out of our control, until I am finally (hopefully) disgorged on the other side. This helps, weirdly, with being knocked & wedged & smashed up against people much more closely than I usually prefer, with being patted down as I so frequently am by the TSA (I can’t tell if this is because my travel jeans are too baggy or my trans anatomy baffles the scanners we all have to be thrust through, but at least this last one was extraordinarily matter-of-fact & brief). I am only a little piece of gristle, carried along through various uncomfortable tubes, and my one job is to stay as intact & calm as I can until I am expelled into the open air again.

I recommend this approach, if you, like me, are afflicted with travel anxiety.

Once I did finally reach the final aperture, the automatic doors outside the baggage claim, C. retrieved me in her roommate’s minivan & heroically bore us into the ever-increasing Seattle rush hour traffic, all the way through the city, until we finally worked ourselves free of Everett & into the final stretch of beautiful green-lined highway that takes us home.

I unpacked in a chaotic whirl, feeling a little frantic to shove everything back in its place, like that was going to make me miss my friends less, and have been restocking the fridge & catching up on the small neglected chores, going through the mail piles, laying out my calendar again, with to-do lists & people to call & projects to finish. It’s probably good to have an extra short week, diving back in, since I always have to battle with the idea that I need to make up for lost time after taking days away.

one good thing

Listen, I did think it was possible everyone was exaggerating about the maple creemees. I’ve had soft-serve ice cream, & I’ve had maple syrup. Combining the two sounded delightful but not revelatory. I have to tell you I was completely wrong. It’s the perfect summer ice cream, particularly eaten in the car with the windows down, outpacing the melting drops down your wrist. It might be just as well I don’t live in Vermont as I suspect I’d be darkening the doors of the various creemee stands every other day as long as the hot weather lasted.

Thank you as always for reading, & especially to those of you who support these letters with a subscription. I’ll write to you again soon, probably about some new work habits/struggles, if past trip experiences have taught me anything, and in the meantime, may the perfect seasonal flavor, whatever it is where you are, be yours for the taking.