Notes From Maine and NH

We spent about two and a half weeks in those locals this summer. As the title says, these are just some notes:

Today we walked around a pond where beavers broke the water with loud warning waps of their tails on the surface. A Great Blue Heron swayed with the reeds and Mountains watched, their tops rounded with time and experience like old men's bellies.

Yellow and purple wildflowers grow reckless. My kids do the same. Rocks are picked up and dropped and traded for new ones and traded again for flowers.

They put on the most amazing magic show. A show where one magician saws herself in half, and the other transforms into a shark, a monster, an orange fish.

We applaud wildly. Appropriately.
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 Backwater homes in Vacationland. Grey shacks with window glass made of plywood and rusted tin roofs look out over rolling meadows of yellow wildflowers. Where whole families of broken people who eat squirrels hunted in the trees and bread trapped at the food pantry make room for smug summer citizens with straight teeth and chubby kids. Families who manage even to swim with entitlement.

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She looks so strong in the water. Tiny, wispy body transformed. it suddenly has gravity, authority, lean muscle, confidence. She's a water sprite. Fast and strong. Ethereal and beautiful.

The sky is the blue of dreams and a cloud low and gray like smoke sinks behind the hills, chasing the sun.

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They went skinny dipping this morning. It wasn't planned. We couldn't keep them out of the water and at that point, the clothes were just in the way. I went in fully clothed. The sky was light blue scraped over indigo.  Joy Joy Joy.

The water felt like summer and the sky smiled down.

We talk about moving here a lot. 

I don't know that I could take this much happiness.
 
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I know this is random and discombobulated and a departure, but this is what I got tonight. You want coherent and intelligent, go read the New Yorker.

HM