Loose Leaf Notes

The summer in review, taken from first lines in past posts. Click on the last word in each line if you want to read more.

1. My mother and I have an ongoing conversation through the clipped newspaper articles we send each other. It’s the only comfortable way we can “talk” about politics because our views are so vastly different.
2. It had all the earmarking of a mythical wound, the inch long deep gash on my leg that had reduced me to crawling on all fours.
3. All the signs of summer have arrived, the first one being that I’m in a sundress.
4. I don’t know what it means to be a grandmother. It’s probably a role you grow into.
5. Sheltered from the neighbors by a row of jasmine bushes and a fence lined with dwarf conifers and roses, a bird serenades, water streams from a dolphin fountain, and wind chimes remind me of home.
6. Mission accomplished.
7. Human voices muffle in the lullaby of tide. Overhead jets like flies to swat sting as they pass.
8. In 1969 I was wearing a black floppy hat while riding the subway from Boston when a little boy pointed at me and asked his mother, “Is that a hippie?
9. At the beach Joe said to me, “I’m so glad you introduced me to naps, baths, and beaches.” Yeah, that about sums me up.
10. You know when you forget someone’s name and no matter how hard you try, even if it’s on the tip of your tongue, you can’t remember. Then you go off and do something else and the name just pops in your head? Writing poetry is like that.
11. Environmental Organizers, Scientific Researchers, Ultimate Frisbee Champions, Flower Girls, and Flower Children all came together on Saturday to celebrate the marriage of Johanna and Nick at Floyd’s High Flowing Farm.
12. Folding little tea poems … Origami notes … Petals of the Orient … Light enough to float.
13. Hung-over with fun from the wedding on Saturday, I dragged myself to a Woman’s Clothing Exchange the next day. Over a dozen women came and dumped piles of clothes all over my friend Penny’s house for a real Filenes’s Basement experience.
14. My new line as of late is: “I’ll bring the cucumbers!” They grow overnight.
15. The beach is my new religion. Baptized in the ocean’s holy water, I worship at sunset under a big sky. At the shoreline I’m humbled, in the name of the sand, sun, and sea.
16. One is a General in the Marines, another is a massage therapist. Two are hairdressers and about four are Vietnam Vets. There is a salesman, a store owner, and a professional dancer who came all the way from Spain. The thing I like most about the Hull High Class of ‘68 is that most of us like to dance.
17. In this day of theme parks with rides like the Tower of Terror and Disney mouse and duck characters posing for photo-ops, I’m relieved there are still parks where real ducks can be fed and where you can ride around a weeping willow lined lagoon on a peddle boat with a giant swan on it.
18. What can top a Boston Swan Boat Ride? How about an all you can eat Lobster dinner?
19. In a pinch, when I’m at the beach without a notebook, I can write in the margins of a clam box menu using my flip flop sandal for a desk.
20. Washing the salt out of my bathing suit … I won’t cry over a spilled summer … drained empty like the last gulp down the sink … I won’t squeeze another beach day out of August … mourn the blueberries of July … dripped dry …