Hello

from the Angel Oak.

Strand Feeding

It's cold here, thanks to air conditioning. I wear sweaters and head rags inside, then peel off to something normal outside. It rained early this morning when we went to the beach at 7 a.m.,



though wasn't raining precisely at the beach, which was wonderful. We walked in early morning light under pensive clouds, the low tide laying its fingers softly on the shore then withdrawing, leaving round cat's eye shells, coraled conchs and bits of gawky sea trash.

We walked to The Point where the landscape has changed since last year, and you can no longer cross the land and chase the resting birds up into the sky. But we did see an amazing dolphin event, something done only by a certain species, called strand feeding.

We noticed several dolphins thrashing by the shore, maybe 6-8 of them. As we drew closer they suddenly crowded near the place we were about stand and thrust themselves flat, belly-up, on the shore, all in a pile together. It was one of the most shocking sights I have ever seen. They were almost totally out of the water, their pleasant smiling dolphin-mouths looking up at us, a writhing mass of wet gray dolphin bodies, fins and tails waving.

I ran to the shore, Max ahead of me leaping the caverns of sand near the edge, holding his camera aloft (he was afraid they were beached, or hurt). By the time we got close enough to see they were rapidly returning to the water to become the regular loop of fin and body that we saw when they came up for air.

We saw them do it once more, but farther away. I hope to catch it again. Once you see dolphins do something like this, anything else they do seems impersonal and anticlimactic.

Lazy Days

It is a salty time. Mornings are full of the smell of bacon or sausage, which we eat on the porch over the salt marshes, with little salty crabs crawling in the pocked mud below.

Egrets come to stand on the dock. I got really close to one by creeping up when its head was turned, its long feathers blowing like strips of silk in the wind. It walked disdainfully away from me on black legs segmented into little stick sections.

It has been a time of contemplation and connection, as well.

Town in Carolina

My favorite place to bike is Seabrook island in South Carolina. You can ride these goofy rental bikes everywhere and not regret it, even after an hour or more of riding (though this "hour or more" language will not impress Amy).

You can also tuck kites into your belt:


It had been a long time since any of us had flown a kite. It takes some figuring out.

I've never flown kites on the beach, just in mountain fields on summer days with not enough wind so you have to run with the kite to make it seem like it's going anywhere. That is actually half the fun of flying a kite, but it's unnecessary on the beach.

What is fun on the beach is attaching a 600-yard roll of fishing line and reeling out about half of it. We kept one kite on its regular role of string. You can see the higher kite, a little speck just above the lower kite's string.






Reeling it back in took forever. We took it in shifts, so it was kind of a group exercise.

Birthday Jamboree

I've gotten behind on reportable events in my life, so am going to time-travel for a bit here. This was my birthday. Thanks to everyone for coming and making it a memorable night.

Quantum Leaps

Writing has been elusive as ever. Sometimes in the midst of creating poems or short story-ish things I just want to indulge in scenes I've just experienced with my family. But I'm not David Sedaris, or anything close, so this gets me nowhere in any career venue.

Still I think it's best to trust the source and not fight against it. Let it come and then move on to something else, rejuvenated.

On TV while I was sitting with my family in the hotel in Ohio, there was a study being reported in the news. The study showed that women are less happy than they were 30 years ago. They supposedly measured across a wide range of women and men of different backgrounds, careers, age, etc. Everything came out to women being less happy than they were 30 years ago, and less happy than men period. Men's happiness, according to the study, had stayed the same over the same time period.

I always wonder who participates in these studies. No one polled me. No one asked anyone I know. How was "happiness" measured? Couldn't it have been that men were more likely to report being happy on these questionnaires? Or that women are always more prone to questioning their happiness (could I get more out of life?) than men.


MJ found a ring while we were out shopping. The ring made her very happy, as she rarely finds a ring that thrills her, and even more rarely spends this kind of money on herself. She named the ring Quantum.

My uncle didn't find what he was looking for in Ohio.

Though he is one of the most accomplished people I know, a person who delights in many different intellectual pursuits, I almost never look at him and think he is a person who is happy, except fleetingly.

In my experience happiness is a temporary state, yet it's held as an ideal that everyone should desire to achieve on a consistent basis. Satisfaction and happiness are not necessarily the same (I would bet that this study delineates between the two).

It's true that writing makes me happy sometimes, but that I spend most of my life unhappy because I am not writing enough, or well. I spend more time being unhappy that I am not writing more, than I do being happy in what I write. I take less time to write than I take to do anything else, yet place upon it the most importance. This all seems like some kind of rat-in-a-maze game I play with myself, with no results whatsoever except to make me an grumpy, distracted person to be around.

MJ said on this trip that we need to use the Ohio gathering as a springboard from which to make a quantum leap. So when I got back last night, I had a small inspiration for what to do on the nights when I only have an hour or hour-point-five to spend on something creative.

In my house are several hearths: the writing table, the sewing machine, the bass, and whatever other projects I've got going on (currently Jake's photo book). When I've only got a little bit of time and I've spent the day sitting so much at work, I often don't want to spend my only extra hour before bed at a table, sitting and hunching over some other work. But last night I had the idea to set the timer and do a little bit of everything for 15 minutes.

So, as i sit here bundled up in the Caroline quilt trying to save oil, I am warmed by this idea of small fires. A small one is better than a big one, and will be there the next time you get more than an hour to spend on something.

I think I am on my way to making a leap.

Connection (when least expected)

One of the nurses at the facility where I work passed away a few days ago.

She was only 62. Her decline was one of those situations where you take someone to the hospital who seems sick but not seriously, and then, a few days later, they are doing so poorly that you know they will die. Then they are dead.

I didn't really know her. When word got out I asked who she was, and the description brought to mind a specific woman I had seen several times. I liked that woman a lot, and hoped it wasn't her.

Today there was a visitation and I attended to pay respects and also, weirdly, to see if it was the same person I kept imagining. The vague sadness needed a face to fall on, and there she was, in pictures by the casket and in the back room on displays of photos from her life. It was definitely the woman I was afraid it would be, Pat with the curly hair and bright eyes, always so sharp about what was happening on the Men's dorm, helpful and alert and spunky.

What a tragic loss. I felt so bad for her family and friends. It's strange to lose a co-worker because I am not that close to any of the people I work with, yet we are obviously connected on some level.




In the pictures she still looks very young and strong spirited, the kind of person you wouldn't think would die.

But everyone dies. It was a strange day. The visitation shook me up, made me acutely aware that each life around me was precious (an odd way to view your co-workers, normally such a detached relationship). It was the last workday before my vacation next week and I almost wanted to skip the visitation because I had so much to do.

Afterwards, the work took on a different perspective. I stayed late trying to get everything done, and walked into the parking lot at 7 p.m., the mountains cast in misty shadows cut by one black bird flying between trees.



Earlier in the day I'd stood, marooned in a conversation between two frequent dieters. I have a great deal of respect for both of them, but me and people who diet are like snakes trapped on different islands, looking at each other across the sea and hissing. My day is filled with these discrepancies.

Secretaries are tools meant to be used by others. No amount of being told "you are indispensable" ever sums up to actually feeling like a human being who controls her destiny. Most days I leave work listening to the ugliest rock I can find on the radio because it feels more like living than the static in my head, or the numbness in my heart.

But today was different. I just felt tired, but completely (and gratefully) alive. It's not that I had really changed, nor anyone I worked with; we're the same folks up to the same hijinks. But now they were surrounded by a fragile halo, the halo that I realized was around me too, and it was impossible to not see how those halos brushed against each other.

Here we were, for whatever reason, and none of us, for ever.