Feel them ebb and flowing like a sky
My niece had carefully kept the secret of my birthday plans which ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch had arranged with my mother and my mother with her friend who lives by the sea: an outing to Point of Pines in Revere. My mother drove, my brother called shotgun, Rob and I jammed ourselves into the back seat with my niece who purred most enthusiastically to wish me a happy birthday. We ate our assortment of fried shrimp and clams and roast beef sandwiches from Kelly's at the picnic bench in the back yard of my mother's friend who has known me and my brother since we were part of the same play group as her children. It was her house where I received my idiosyncratic exposure to children's cartoons of the '80's on the days when she picked me up after school because both of my parents worked too late to. Now she has a house with a beach at the end of the street, decorative lobster buoys hanging on the gate and an antique Singer treadle machine for a mail table and a stained-glass window full of sun and waves at the turn of the stairs. My brother took her silky-eared, caramel-colored dog to run on the beach with my niece, my mother and her friend stayed behind to catch up in the late chasing sunlight, and Rob and I made straight for the sea. All photos taken by him unless specified otherwise.
At Revere Beach. We believe I was leaning on part of an old water fountain, although it caught our attention primarily for its fantastic seahorses. The figures coming across the beach are my brother and niece.
At Point of Pines. My phone has the most rudimentary camera imaginable these days, but I needed to send some ocean toselkie stat. The sun came and went through the clouds, the tide pulled out and showed shingle farther down the sand, we walked northeast to the turn of the beach and found clusters of gulls and sandpipers, walked the other way and found moon jellies and mermaids' purses and everywhere heaps of seaweed from the storms, tumbled wet and rust-green, dried to blackened wire. The waves were bands of bottle-green in one light, a spill of pewter surf in the other. Everywhere sleeve-snatching wind and salt.
Your guess is as good as mine. I could have been hitting genteelly on a seagull for all I can tell. I like this picture a lot.
My brother captured this sequence of what I am informed is teeth-aching cuteness. No regrets.
Taken by my mother's friend: three generations of sea-visitors. I am glad to have the memory of this picture. My brother said we look like an album cover, but I think we look somewhat older.
It is always important to bring home something of the sea: a skipping stone of red granite, a backpacking slipper shell. Wind-knots. The lingering smell of the sea.
I do not often get to observe my birthday as a family affair on the day. My niece had effectively appointed herself master of ceremonies; we got home and she kept me out of the kitchen until it was time for her to lead me to the table with my eyes closed, cautioning me not to look even when an unseen vase of flowers brushed my face as I sat down. She had helped decorate the cake—almond flour with marzipan, marmalade, and slices of mandarin orange—with a rather abstract cat's face in green icing and with the small polymer clay animals that were a treasured staple of birthdays in my childhood. They hold the candles; they were presents from my god-aunt who is no longer alive; I was given one every year until I was twelve. The little pink-nosed mouse with a wedge of yellow cheese is the oldest. The green-eyed Siamese cat in a tangle of blue and pink yarn was perhaps my favorite, closely competing with the sable-black seal with a red-tailed fish in its mouth. The white and silver dragon was to grow on. I hadn't seen any of them in decades. I am now in possession of far more presents than I was expecting from this straitened year, including Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (2015), Desperate Journalist's Maximum Sorrow! (2021) which my brother turned out to have ordered from the UK, and an IOU from my father for the Gorey-illustrated The War of the Worlds (1898). I must also give a special shout-out to Katherine Kincaid's Beloved Bondage (1993), which I read in a friend's dorm room at grad school because he had been given it as a gag gift: I recall it as basically original character m/f for I, Claudius, which, you know, I stocked far worse ideas in the romance section of Waldenbooks. My mother regretted not being able to send me home with a balloon this year for the cats. I told her it was all right. I had a wonderful birthday. I really did. I did not always imagine I would make it this far. I hope I can hold on to wanting to keep going.
spatch had arranged with my mother and my mother with her friend who lives by the sea: an outing to Point of Pines in Revere. My mother drove, my brother called shotgun, Rob and I jammed ourselves into the back seat with my niece who purred most enthusiastically to wish me a happy birthday. We ate our assortment of fried shrimp and clams and roast beef sandwiches from Kelly's at the picnic bench in the back yard of my mother's friend who has known me and my brother since we were part of the same play group as her children. It was her house where I received my idiosyncratic exposure to children's cartoons of the '80's on the days when she picked me up after school because both of my parents worked too late to. Now she has a house with a beach at the end of the street, decorative lobster buoys hanging on the gate and an antique Singer treadle machine for a mail table and a stained-glass window full of sun and waves at the turn of the stairs. My brother took her silky-eared, caramel-colored dog to run on the beach with my niece, my mother and her friend stayed behind to catch up in the late chasing sunlight, and Rob and I made straight for the sea. All photos taken by him unless specified otherwise.
At Revere Beach. We believe I was leaning on part of an old water fountain, although it caught our attention primarily for its fantastic seahorses. The figures coming across the beach are my brother and niece.
At Point of Pines. My phone has the most rudimentary camera imaginable these days, but I needed to send some ocean to
selkie stat. The sun came and went through the clouds, the tide pulled out and showed shingle farther down the sand, we walked northeast to the turn of the beach and found clusters of gulls and sandpipers, walked the other way and found moon jellies and mermaids' purses and everywhere heaps of seaweed from the storms, tumbled wet and rust-green, dried to blackened wire. The waves were bands of bottle-green in one light, a spill of pewter surf in the other. Everywhere sleeve-snatching wind and salt.
Your guess is as good as mine. I could have been hitting genteelly on a seagull for all I can tell. I like this picture a lot.
My brother captured this sequence of what I am informed is teeth-aching cuteness. No regrets.
Taken by my mother's friend: three generations of sea-visitors. I am glad to have the memory of this picture. My brother said we look like an album cover, but I think we look somewhat older.
It is always important to bring home something of the sea: a skipping stone of red granite, a backpacking slipper shell. Wind-knots. The lingering smell of the sea.
I do not often get to observe my birthday as a family affair on the day. My niece had effectively appointed herself master of ceremonies; we got home and she kept me out of the kitchen until it was time for her to lead me to the table with my eyes closed, cautioning me not to look even when an unseen vase of flowers brushed my face as I sat down. She had helped decorate the cake—almond flour with marzipan, marmalade, and slices of mandarin orange—with a rather abstract cat's face in green icing and with the small polymer clay animals that were a treasured staple of birthdays in my childhood. They hold the candles; they were presents from my god-aunt who is no longer alive; I was given one every year until I was twelve. The little pink-nosed mouse with a wedge of yellow cheese is the oldest. The green-eyed Siamese cat in a tangle of blue and pink yarn was perhaps my favorite, closely competing with the sable-black seal with a red-tailed fish in its mouth. The white and silver dragon was to grow on. I hadn't seen any of them in decades. I am now in possession of far more presents than I was expecting from this straitened year, including Frank Ormsby's Goat's Milk: New & Selected Poems (2015), Desperate Journalist's Maximum Sorrow! (2021) which my brother turned out to have ordered from the UK, and an IOU from my father for the Gorey-illustrated The War of the Worlds (1898). I must also give a special shout-out to Katherine Kincaid's Beloved Bondage (1993), which I read in a friend's dorm room at grad school because he had been given it as a gag gift: I recall it as basically original character m/f for I, Claudius, which, you know, I stocked far worse ideas in the romance section of Waldenbooks. My mother regretted not being able to send me home with a balloon this year for the cats. I told her it was all right. I had a wonderful birthday. I really did. I did not always imagine I would make it this far. I hope I can hold on to wanting to keep going.
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Thank you! I had missed the sea so much.
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*hugs*
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There would have been few to no pictures of me because it's declasse to take a picture of a person with her clothes completely wet. Maybe one of my fat little sandfootprints before I leapt. Soon, I hope.
*hugs* Enjoy the gifts, and the well-wishes, all deserved.
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Offerings may be left at the top of the dunes.
There would have been few to no pictures of me because it's declasse to take a picture of a person with her clothes completely wet.
But it's nature photography to capture a seal in her natural habitat!
Enjoy the gifts, and the well-wishes, all deserved.
*hugs*
Thank you.
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Nine
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*hugs*
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Thank you. It was a very important kind of day to have.
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You can even say hello to James Joyce there as there's a life size statue on one of the bridges.
Complete with a spare Scot:
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I would love to find out. I miss traveling.
Thank you for Joyce and the Scot!
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Thank you!
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Love that third picture of you and Spatch; v. good smile.
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Thank you!
Love that third picture of you and Spatch; v. good smile.
*hugs*
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I like seeing your mom barefoot on the wet sand--that's a beautiful generational picture. (You look lovely in all the photos, and even better, you look happy, and I hope there is more of that in the days and years ahead.)
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I didn't grow up at Revere Beach because I was growing up on the beaches of Maine, but I can see that I will need to make its proper acquaintance.
I also really, really love the description of the figurines that hold the candles. What a sweet, creative continuing present. How great that now your niece knows them, too.
I think she had helped pick which ones to put on the cake. She loved them.
I like seeing your mom barefoot on the wet sand--that's a beautiful generational picture.
It really makes me happy. It reminds me of photographs of my grandmother, too.
(You look lovely in all the photos, and even better, you look happy, and I hope there is more of that in the days and years ahead.)
*hugs*
Thank you.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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Thank you. I really appreciate like three-quarters of my family pitching in to make sure it happened!
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Between your hat, your mother's stick and your niece working industriously away at the sand, you could very easily be tweaked to become a painting of 19th-century fisher-folk.
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Thank you!
Between your hat, your mother's stick and your niece working industriously away at the sand, you could very easily be tweaked to become a painting of 19th-century fisher-folk.
Constable, here we come!
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Thank you!
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It really was! Thank you.
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And that was some excellent birthday planning on the part of all involved.
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Thank you!
And that was some excellent birthday planning on the part of all involved.
I am impressed as well as deeply appreciative.
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Thank you! The sea matters so much.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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Thank you! I like having wonderful days! And they are so much harder to come by, and people made this one happen.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!