Summer Salt Quotes

Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.

I could taste the salt on her lips, each kiss like a summer wave breaking on an empty beach.

People said the towers looked like giant salt and pepper shakers, but I’d always thought they looked like Daleks from Doctor Who.

Because there was nothing in a girl’s history that might negate her right to choose what happens to her body.

i am such a sensitive summer thing.

Are you happy at all?" she asked tentatively. "Of course I'm happy. Why wouldn't I be happy?" "Oh, I don't know. Sometimes you just find reasons not to be.

On the island of By-the-Sea you could always smell two things: salt and magic.

I knew that he would use that gun, because that is what small, scared men did: they used things more powerful than themselves to make up the difference. They hid behind weapons of mass destruction: big guns and bigger bombs.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

She seems like she only exists in summer. Only made to swim in the waters of the ocean, the smell of sunshine and salt clinging to her clothes.

I'm having a cheeseburger," Anna said. "With fries smothered in vinegar and salt." "I told you I wouldn't kiss you again. You don't have to poison your mouth." "Very funny. What are you having?" "Something with onions and garlic.

Except there weren’t any princes on By-the-Sea. We didn’t need princes; we saved ourselves.

I vaguely remember a story about a woman who looked back while fleeing a broken city. She turned into a pillar of salt. A harsh fate, but I got the point. You can’t look back when you’re escaping disaster. You can’t hope that someone will come after you, either.

Concerning trees and leaves... there's a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn't make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.

The real magic - the magic we'd lived with all our lives, my mother's magic of charms and cantrips, of salt by the door and a red silk sachet to placate the little gods - had turned sour on us that summer, somehow, like a spider that turns from good luck to bad at the stroke of midnight, spinning its web to catch our dreams. And for every little spell of charm, for every card dealt and every rune cast and every sign scratched against a doorway to divert the path of malchance, the wind just blew a little harder, tugging at our clothes, sniffing at us like a hungry dog, moving us here and moving us there.

You learn to forgive (the South) for its narrow mind and growing pains because it has a huge heart. You forgive the stifling summers because the spring is lush and pastel sprinkled, because winter is merciful and brief, because corn bread and sweet tea and fried chicken are every bit as vital to a Sunday as getting dressed up for church, and because any southerner worth their salt says please and thank you. It's soft air and summer vines, pine woods and fat homegrown tomatoes. It's pulling the fruit right off a peach tree and letting the juice run down your chin. It's a closeted and profound appreciation for our neighbors in Alabama who bear the brunt of the Bubba jokes. The South gets in your blood and nose and skin bone-deep. I am less a part of the South than it is part of me. It's a romantic notion, being overcome by geography. But we are all a little starry-eyed down here. We're Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and Rosa Parks all at once.

She was tied to the water, my sister. Moods like tides, temper like a hungry shark.

Oh, By-the-Sea, island of Fernwehs and everything I had ever known and loved. How I would miss you—every part of you—but especially the smell, always the smell: of salt, of brine, of water, of spells, of potions, of feathers, and of what it would mean to leave it all in just two months.

I was tempted to tell her that babies born on By-the-Sea tended to always smell like salt, always crave the ocean on their skin, always look for the full moon or North Star to guide them home.

Addie," he breathes, and the sound sends sparks across her skin, and when he kisses her, he tastes like salt, and summer. But it feels too much like a punctuation mark, and she isn't ready for the night to end, so she kisses him back, deeper, turns the period into a question, into an answer.

He sang the brightness of mornings and green rivers, He sang of smoking water in the rose-colored daybreaks, Of colors: cinnabar, carmine, burnt sienna, blue, Of the delight of swimming in the sea under marble cliffs, Of feasting on a terrace above the tumult of a fishing port, Of tastes of wine, olive oil, almonds, mustard, salt. Of the flight of the swallow, the falcon, Of a dignified flock of pelicans above the bay, Of the scent of an armful of lilacs in summer rain, Of his having composed his words always against death And of having made no rhyme in praise of nothingness.

What more could I want?” I said. But I think we both knew the answer to that question was: Lots lots lots lots lots.

What time is it, Georgie?” “I’m not saying.” “Georgieeeee.” “I’m not saying it.” “Georgie, what time is it?” “Cute o’clock,” I relented. “It’s cute o’clock, okay, you psychopath.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

the smell of salt water and unapologetic maleness

Where did you get them? Are they Stuart Weitzman? Prada Summer Collection?' 'Um, New Look, I think,' Lara told him.

It was then I thought of Corsica, the place we had discovered together. I craved the wind, the sun and salt, the simplicity of the island.

What’s on your mind, Willard?” she asked, because she wasn’t the sort of woman who just handed things to people. She liked to make them work for it.

The lady set off, in search of summers long past, always just around the next corner. On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same; perhaps we were all looking for something. Looking back, looking forward or just looking for something that was missing. Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and the sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way. Stuck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death. At the edge of existence.

And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and it is spring again and yet again and the small streams that run over the rough sides of Gormenghast Mountain are big with rain while the days lengthen and summer sprawls across the countryside, sprawls in all the swathes of its green, with its gold and sticky head, with its slumber and the drone of doves and with its butterflies and its lizards and its sunflowers, over and over again, its doves, its butterflies, its lizards, its sunflowers, each one an echo-child while the fruit ripens and the grotesque boles of the ancient apple trees are dappled in the low rays of the sun and the air smells of such rotten sweetness as brings a hunger to the breast, and makes of the heart a sea-bed, and a tear, the fruit of salt and water, ripens, fed by a summer sorrow, ripens and falls … falls gradually along the cheekbones, wanders over the wastelands listlessly, the loveliest emblem of the heart’s condition. And the days move on and the names of the months change and the four seasons bury one another and the field-mice draw upon their granaries. The air is murky, and the sun is like a raw wound in the grimy flesh of a beggar, and the rags of the clouds are clotted. The sky has been stabbed and has been left to die above the world, filthy, vast and bloody. And then the great winds come and the sky is blown naked, and a wild bird screams across the glittering land. And the Countess stands at the window of her room with the white cats at her feet and stares at the frozen landscape spread below her, and a year later she is standing there again but the cats are abroad in the valleys and a raven sits upon her heavy shoulder. And every day the myriad happenings. A loosened stone falls from a high tower. A fly drops lifeless from a broken pane. A sparrow twitters in a cave of ivy. The days wear out the months and the months wear out the years, and a flux of moments, like an unquiet tide, eats at the black coast of futurity. And Titus Groan is wading through his boyhood.

A Faint Music by Robert Hass Maybe you need to write a poem about grace. When everything broken is broken, and everything dead is dead, and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt, and the heroine has studied her face and its defects remorselessly, and the pain they thought might, as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves has lost its novelty and not released them, and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly, watching the others go about their days— likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears— that self-love is the one weedy stalk of every human blossoming, and understood, therefore, why they had been, all their lives, in such a fury to defend it, and that no one— except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light, faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears. As in the story a friend told once about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash. He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge, the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon. And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,” that there was something faintly ridiculous about it. No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. It’s not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,” which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing

Last to dry was the hair. When we were already far from the sea, when words and salt, which had merged on us, separated from one another with a sigh, and your body no longer showed signs of a terrible ancientness. And in vain we had forgotten a few things on the beach, so that we would have an excuse to return. We didn’t return. And these days I remember the days that have your name on them, like a name on a ship, and how we saw through two open doors one man who was thinking, and how we looked at the clouds with the ancient gaze we inherited from our fathers, who waited for rain, and how at night, when the world cooled off, your body kept its warmth for a long time, like the sea

Funny how perfection can mean a million things. Tonight, it’s a boy and supermarket salads, the air tasting of salt and second chances, and a butterfly feeling in my chest.

I loved how the sun and salt spray perfused my skin, filling me with the memory of light. God surely meant for humans to live like that. He hadn't intended for us to wither into desiccated husks in front of brightly lit screens that leeched away our summer days one meme at a time.

A few lantern bugs were coming out, their little lights blinking on and off. The green water was warm as tears, but there was no salt in it. It tasted of summer and mud and growing things.

I’ll have to build a widow’s walk,” she said, and then she looked at Aggie and smiled so Aggie knew that she could smile, too, that the rest of their lives wouldn’t be all sadness and loss.

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar. The mystery of mayonnaise-and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this_is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, a at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs)or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the French could have wrought this gastronomic miracle? Mayonnaise is France's gift to the New World's muddled palate, a boon that combines humanity's ancient instinctive craving for the cellular warmth of pure fat with the modern, romantic fondness for complex flavors: mayo (as the lazy call it) may appear mild and prosaic, but behind its creamy veil it fairly seethes with tangy disposition. Cholesterol aside, it projects the luster that we astro-orphans have identified with well-being ever since we fell from the stars.

For a person accustomed to the multi ethnic commotion of Los Angeles, Vancouver, New York, or even Denver, walking across the BYU campus can be a jarring experience. One sees no graffiti, not a speck of litter. More than 99 percent of the thirty thousand students are white. Each of the young Mormons one encounters is astonishingly well groomed and neatly dressed. Beards, tattoos, and pierced ears (or other body parts) are strictly forbidden for men. Immodest attire and more than a single piercing per ear are forbidden among women. Smoking, using profane language, and drinking alcohol or even coffee are likewise banned. Heeding the dictum "Cougars don't cut corners," students keep to the sidewalks as they hurry to make it to class on time; nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass. Everyone is cheerful, friendly, and unfailingly polite. Most non-Mormons think of Salt Lake City as the geographic heart of Mormonism, but in fact half the population of Salt Lake is Gentile, and many Mormons regard the city as a sinful, iniquitous place that's been corrupted by outsiders. To the Saints themselves, the true Mormon heartland is here in Provo and surrounding Utah County--the site of chaste little towns like Highland, American Fork, Orem, Payson and Salem--where the population is nearly 90 percent LDS. The Sabbath is taken seriously in these parts. Almost all businesses close on Sundays, as do public swimming pools, even on the hottest days of the summer months. This part of the state is demographically notable in other aspects, as well. The LDS Church forbids abortions, frowns on contraception, and teaches that Mormon couples have a sacred duty to give birth to as many children as they can support--which goes a long way toward explaining why Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh. This also happens to be the most Republican county in the most Republican state in the nation. Not coincidentally, Utah County is a stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.

It seems to me that the greatest adventure is to find a home in the world, particularly in the natural world, to earn a sense of belonging deeply to a place and to feel the deep response well up within you and become a part of you. When it is done, it can't be lost; the knowledge is as acute and sure as falling in love.

Pick the tomato warm from the garden. Sit right there in a sunny patch if you've got one. Brush off any dirt and bugs, but don't make yourself crazy. Sprinkle with a little salt. And don't you add one other thing, because there's just something about a tomato being a tomato. Eat it like an apple. Let the juices run down your chin, and then wipe 'em away with your shirtsleeve. You heard me. The perfect summer tomato is worth half a shirt. And that's the truth.

We surf-fished in the breakers catching spottail bass and flounder for dinner. I discovered that summer that I loved to cook and feed my friends, and I enjoyed the sound of their praise as they purred with pleasure at the meals I fixed over glowing iron and fire. I had the run of my grandparents’ garden and I would put ears of sweet corn in aluminum foil after washing them in seawater and slathering them with butter and salt and pepper. Beneath the stars we would eat the beefsteak tomatoes okra and the field peas flavored with salt pork and jalapeno peppers. I would walk through the disciplined rows that brimmed with purple eggplants and watermelons and cucumbers, gathering vegetables. My grandfather, Silas, told us that summer that low country earth was so fertile you could drop a dime into it and grow a money tree.

Becky walked to the sea late in the day, trod barefoot among the tumbled blocks of stone that lined the foreshore, smelling the old harsh smell of salt, hearing the water slap and chuckle while from high above came the endless sinister trickling of the cliffs. Into her consciousness stole, maybe for the first time, the sense of loneliness; an oppression born of the gentle miles of summer water, the tall blackness of the headlands, the fingers of the stone ledges pushing out into the sea.

For the city, his city, stood unchanging on the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.

What was my sister wearing the night she was raped? How much had my sister had to drink the night she was raped? How many guys had my sister previously had sex with? Because—again, out of a fairy tale—they realized that none of those things mattered.

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir...)

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drunk wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white.

There were times—especially in summer, while swallowing my afternoon salt-pill—when it occurred to me that I was simply repeating my mother’s life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I’d think This isn’t the way our lives are supposed to be going. Then I’d think Half the world has the same idea.

Mystic The air is a mill of hooks - Questions without answer, Glittering and drunk as flies Whose kiss stings unbearably In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer. I remember The dead smell of sun on wood cabins, The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets. Once one has seen God, what is the remedy? Once one has been seized up Without a part left over, Not a toe, not a finger, and used, Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains That lengthen from ancient cathedrals What is the remedy? The pill of the Communion tablet, The walking beside still water? Memory? Or picking up the bright pieces of Christ in the faces of rodents, The tame flower- nibblers, the ones Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable - The humpback in his small, washed cottage Under the spokes of the clematis. Is there no great love, only tenderness? Does the sea Remember the walker upon it? Meaning leaks from the molecules. The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats, The children leap in their cots. The sun blooms, it is a geranium. The heart has not stopped.

Before I opened my computer in the parking lot today, I relived one of my favorite memories. It's the one with Woody and me sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum after it's closed. We're watching people parade out of the museum in summer shorts and sandals. The trees to the south are planted in parallel lines. The water in the fountain shoots up with a mist that almost reaches the steps we sit on. We look at silver-haired ladies in red-and-white-print dresses. We separate the mice from the men, the tourists from the New Yorkers, the Upper East Siders from the West Siders. The hot-pretzel vendor sells us a wad of dough in knots with clumps of salt stuck on top. We make our usual remarks about the crazies and wonder what it would be like to live in a penthouse apartment on Fifth Avenue overlooking the Met. We laugh and say the same things we always say. We hold hands and keep sitting, just sitting, as the sun beings to set. It's a perfect afternoon.

t smells in. Let the smell of hot tarmac in the summer remind you of a meal you ate the first time you landed in a hot place, when the ground smelled like it was melting. Let the smell of salt remind you of a paper basket of fried clams you ate once, squeezing them with lemon as you walked on a boardwalk. Let it reach your deeper interest. When you smell the sea, and remember the basket of hot fried clams, and the sound of skee-balls knocking against each other, let it help you love what food can do, which is to tie this moment to that one. Then something about the wind off the sea will have settled in your mind, and carried the fried clams and squeeze of a lemon with it.

I love letting my soul soar on a summer breeze, or getting entranced by the rhythm of the sea. It carries you off on its currents until you’re completely lost and then drops you back on the shores of reality with salt on your cheeks and grains of dreams running through your fingers like sand. It’s almost an occasional necessity – I guess because when you get completely, fantastically, dizzyingly lost you’re temporarily suspended between what has been and what could be. In those first moments when you come back up for air, or when you float back down to the ground, you’re living in the land of possibility, where you understand that reality can stretch just as far as you’re willing to dream.

You thought blackberries had passed, didn’t you? Or you’ve eaten them and thought you didn’t like them. No, you need to wait until the last moment, that moment between perfect and spoiled. The blackbirds know that moment. And if the mist comes right then, laying the salt air gently on the fruit, you have something that money can’t buy and chefs can’t create. A perfect, lightly salted blackberry. You can’t make them; it has to come with time and nature. They’re a gift, when you think summer’s over, and the good stuff has all

Det var dagen efter självständighetsdagen den 4 juli och lukten av svavel från fyrverkerierna blandade sig med lukten av salt från havet - det var sommar.

The day after Independence Day, the sulfur from the fireworks mingling with the ocean salt - summer.

Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

Slowly, Delphine began to understand that each dish was created, not merely cooked as one would cook a slice of toast. Each had its own beauty and depth: its own poetry. Course after course, the finished plates were passed among the chefs and sampled with care: small briny oysters from Corsica were nestled into a bed of pink rock salt; white asparagus were trimmed and served alongside a smoked duck salad; cream-fed pork was braised with pears and apples, and new potatoes were browned in duck fat and dusted with late summer truffles. Each dish was more amazing than the last.

She took out avocados, tomatoes, a Bermuda onion, and a container of cottage cheese. She searched the pantry for cumin, cilantro, garlic. She had two secret ingredients: cottage cheese that gave the guacamole a creamy taste and Hawaiian sea salt. Becky had introduced her to pink Hawaiian sea salt. The grains were like delicate crystals, and Becky used to eat them from the palm of her hand.

You're like a summer storm that came crashing into my life, soaking the ground and bringing me to life..." he said, stopping his ministrations. "I was a seed planted too far into the ground, waiting for my life to start. I had all these ideas of what I would do and be like when I grew up... But you...you made me realize I could be that man now. I don't have to wait. I don't have to wonder. You made me grow into the person I want to be.

Refreshed, delighted, invigorated, I walked along, forgetting all my cares, feeling as if I had wings to my feet, and could go at least forty miles without fatigue, and experiencing a sense of exhilaration to which I had been an entire stranger since the days of early youth. About half–past six, however, the grooms began to come down to air their masters’ horses—first one, and then another, till there were some dozen horses and five or six riders: but that need not trouble me, for they would not come as far as the low rocks which I was now approaching. When I had reached these, and walked over the moist, slippery sea–weed (at the risk of floundering into one of the numerous pools of clear, salt water that lay between them), to a little mossy promontory with the sea splashing round it, I looked back again to see who next was stirring. Still, there were only the early grooms with their horses, and one gentleman with a little dark speck of a dog running before him, and one water–cart coming out of the town to get water for the baths. In another minute or two, the distant bathing machines would begin to move, and then the elderly gentlemen of regular habits and sober quaker ladies would be coming to take their salutary morning walks. But however interesting such a scene might be, I could not wait to witness it, for the sun and the sea so dazzled my eyes in that direction, that I could but afford one glance; and then I turned again to delight myself with the sight and the sound of the sea, dashing against my promontory—with no prodigious force, for the swell was broken by the tangled sea–weed and the unseen rocks beneath; otherwise I should soon have been deluged with spray. But the tide was coming in; the water was rising; the gulfs and lakes were filling; the straits were widening: it was time to seek some safer footing; so I walked, skipped, and stumbled back to the smooth, wide sands, and resolved to proceed to a certain bold projection in the cliffs, and then return.

Wild Peaches" When the world turns completely upside down You say we’ll emigrate to the Eastern Shore Aboard a river-boat from Baltimore; We’ll live among wild peach trees, miles from town, You’ll wear a coonskin cap, and I a gown Homespun, dyed butternut’s dark gold color. Lost, like your lotus-eating ancestor, We’ll swim in milk and honey till we drown. The winter will be short, the summer long, The autumn amber-hued, sunny and hot, Tasting of cider and of scuppernong; All seasons sweet, but autumn best of all. The squirrels in their silver fur will fall Like falling leaves, like fruit, before your shot. 2 The autumn frosts will lie upon the grass Like bloom on grapes of purple-brown and gold. The misted early mornings will be cold; The little puddles will be roofed with glass. The sun, which burns from copper into brass, Melts these at noon, and makes the boys unfold Their knitted mufflers; full as they can hold Fat pockets dribble chestnuts as they pass. Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover; A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year; The spring begins before the winter’s over. By February you may find the skins Of garter snakes and water moccasins Dwindled and harsh, dead-white and cloudy-clear. 3 When April pours the colors of a shell Upon the hills, when every little creek Is shot with silver from the Chesapeake In shoals new-minted by the ocean swell, When strawberries go begging, and the sleek Blue plums lie open to the blackbird’s beak, We shall live well — we shall live very well. The months between the cherries and the peaches Are brimming cornucopias which spill Fruits red and purple, sombre-bloomed and black; Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback. 4 Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones There’s something in this richness that I hate. I love the look, austere, immaculate, Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones. There’s something in my very blood that owns Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate, A thread of water, churned to milky spate Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones. I love those skies, thin blue or snowy gray, Those fields sparse-planted, rendering meagre sheaves; That spring, briefer than apple-blossom’s breath, Summer, so much too beautiful to stay, Swift autumn, like a bonfire of leaves, And sleepy winter, like the sleep of death.

Summer of the Grandmothers" They come back in their white shifts, their ruffled shawls of salt white, the way the dead always return when you need them the most-- when it's too hot to do anything but picture the worst—the Bomb finally fallen, the world burned-up, the entire planet radioactive-- when you are too weak to do anything but lie in a stupor and call them back to drift at your side, in eyelit dresses of old starlight, fresh-faced and cold.

As for the crab, honey, listen up. One egg slightly beaten, one-half teaspoon dry mustard, a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce, four unsalted soda crackers, crushed. Chop up an onion, a Vidalia if you’re still hoarding any from summer. One green pepper, chop that. A teaspoon or two of parsley, salt and pepper to taste.” “Sounds fabulous,” I gratefully said. “Bev, what would I do without you?” “Now you gently mix all that together and shape it into patties.

Meditteranean Summer Salad Serves:  5 Ingredients: 2 tablespoons lime juice 1 teaspoon oregano Pepper to taste ½ teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons olive oil ¼ cup crumbled cheese ½ cup chopped red bell peppers ½ cup sliced kalamata olives ½ cup diced cucumbers 1 cup halved cherry tomatoes 2 cups cooked quinoa Method: Mix all ingredients together Serve cold: Cooking Tips: Mix oil and juice before adding to salad Variation: Use lemon juice or vinegar in place of lime juice

— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

Song for the Last Act Now that I have your face by heart, I look Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook. Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show Of yet another summer loath to go Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. Now that I have your face by heart, I look. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read In the black chords upon a dulling page Music that is not meant for music's cage, Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed. The staves are shuttled over with a stark Unprinted silence. In a double dream I must spell out the storm, the running stream. The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves; The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

Taking both of my hands, he pulls me into the tide. Salt water deepens the lavender satin of my gown to almost black. The waves push into it, making it heavier and heavier. “Tell me when,” he says. I nod. When Galen is neck deep and I’m clinging to him to keep my head above water. When my saturated prom dress feels like an anchor grasping at my limbs. When the moon is directly overhead and makes the silver flecks in his eyes shimmer like gems. That’s when I’m ready. “Now,” I breathe. He brushes his lips against mine. Once Twice. So soft it barely feels like anything. But it also feels like everything. He pulls me under. One day, when Galen and I are mated, I’ll be a princess. But I’ll never feel more like a princess than right now, in his arms, dancing on the ocean floor. He pulls my from my trance with his lips against me ear. “Emma.” It’s silly how my own name can send tingles shooting everywhere. “Hmm?” “I’ve been thinking. About us.” He pulls away from me. “I think…I think I need a distraction.” “Um. A distraction? From me?” The words taste vinegary in my mouth. They turn sweet again when Galen throws his head back and laughs. “Emma,” he says, brushing his thumb across my bottom lip. “You are the one thing I’m sure of. Completely. Without thinking twice. But I want to get away from here for a little while. And I want you to come with me. I know you’re set on going to college in the fall. I’m only asking for the summer. Let’s go somewhere. Do something.” I float up until I’m eye level with him. “Let’s. Where will we go?” He shrugs. “I don’t care, as long as it’s away from any ocean.” “So…the desert?” He grimaces. “The mountains?” I laugh. “Deal. We’ll go to the mountains.” “You’re sure?” I pull him by the neck until our noses touch. “Completely. Without thinking twice.

Sometimes it’s the place where you grew up that says, You belong to me. No matter how long I’ve been away, when I come back to New York City in a taxi over the Triborough Bridge and the afternoon sun shifts off the steel skyline and blinds me, I feel it. In the heavy July of privet tinged with sea salt on the East End of Long Island, where I spent nearly every summer until I was twenty and many since, I know it. And in an empty theater, with the ghost light on and the darkness, warm and velvet like a dinner jacket my father once wore, it’s mine.

We spent afternoons kicking around in the sand, picking through the seaweed for shells, making headdresses of washed-up fishing ropes and hats from Styrofoam cups. Beach rats, we were called. We stopped brushing our hair, and it hung in tangles spun by the salt air. We sprayed Sun-In across our heads and let it turn our hair orange in patches. Our skin peeled, and we didn't much care. We woke up to the feel of sand in our sheets. We covered ourselves in baby oil and iodine and let the sun bake our skin. We smelled like Love's Baby Soft perfume, like summer all year long. We were tanned, with freckles across our noses.

In hidden orchards the stone fruit ripened so fast that what we didn't eat was given to the animals, and so like chimps like finches like gilas we glutted on plums so ripe they split if looked at, cherries and blackberries staining our sheets. We distilled summer meads heady with anise and yogurt, and watered fields with the barrels' dregs. To the tidal boom of an underground aquarium, I cut a sturgeon nose to slit and ransacked its body for that other fruit, pure caviar. I looked to Aida for the salt. Sweaty, unshowered, her pubis its own rough ocean. Saline, the meat of her as she bucked against my tongue, split open, gleaming.

Thought I saw you on the beach this morning...Thought I saw you standing on the white strand, your back to the wind. The rain had stopped and there was a brisk clarity in the air. You watched me over your left shoulder, head tucked in coyly. Seabirds flying low in the sky, and the grey-green waves at your foot. A whole panorama thrown up behind you. I was on the coast road coming back from the shops. I stopped walking once I caught sight of you. You were wearing a reefer jacket with the collar turned up against the weather. It might have been navy, but it looked black in the distance. As did your trousers. As did your shoes. All of you was black except your face and hair. You wore no hat...Never once saw you in Winter clothes, yet there you were as clear as day for a whole moment. Only your eyes were visible above the upturned collar. Your hair was in your eyes. You watched me through those pale strands. And I watched you. Intently. The man from down the road drove by in his faded red car. He was going the other way, so he didn't offer a lift. He just waved. I waved back. And then I turned to you again, and we looked at each other a little longer. Very calm. Heart barely shifted. Too far away to see your features. No matter. There was salt on your face. Sea salt. It was in your hair. It was on your mouth. It was all over you, as though you gazed at me through ice. And it was all over me. It tingled on my skin. After a time I moved off, and you broke into two. You realigned yourself into driftwood and stone. I came inside and lit a fire. Sat in front of it and watched it burn. The window fogged up as my clothes and hair dried out. That was hours ago. The fire is nearly gone. But I can still taste the salt on my lips. It is a dry and stinging substance and it is everywhere now. It has touched everything that is left. Coated every surface with its sparkling silt. I will always be thirsty.

My name is Lev," said Lev. "My name is Lydia," said the woman. And they shook hands, Lev's hand holding the scrunched-up kerchief and Lydia's hand rough with salt and smelling of egg, and then Lev asked, "What are you planning to do in En gland?" and Lydia said, "I have some interviews in London for jobs as a translator." "That sounds promising." "I hope so. I was a teacher of English at School 237 in Yarbl, so my language is very colloquial." Lev looked at Lydia. It wasn't difficult to imagine her standing in front of a class and writing words on a blackboard. He said, "I wonder why you're leaving our country when you had a good job at School 237 in Yarbl?" "Well," said Lydia, "I became very tired of the view from my window. Every day, summer and winter, I looked out at the schoolyard and the high fence and the apartment block beyond, and I began to imagine I would die seeing these things, and I didn't want this. I expect you understand what I mean?

She might have been afraid except the thick summer air smelled so sweet and earthy that she couldn't breathe it in fast enough. It was like a warm and balmy laughing gas, and she let go into the intoxicating fragrance of salt air and withering corn husks and tomatoes so ripe she imagined them dropping off the vines around her.

Life is amazingly simplified,” she wrote in her journal, “now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff of sun-worship and salt air, and all looks promising.” She already adored New York.

The Chablis runs smooth throughout. Then the vol-au-vents, light as a puff of summer air, then elderflower sorbet followed by plateau de fruits de mer with grilled langoustines, gray shrimps, prawns, oysters, berniques, spider crabs and the bigger torteaux- which can nip off a man's fingers as easily as I could nip a stem of rosemary- winkles, palourdes, and atop it all a giant black lobster, regal on its bed of seaweed. The huge platter gleams with reds and pinks and sea greens and pearly whites and purples, a mermaid's cache of delicacies that gives off a nostalgic salt smell, like childhood days at the seaside. We distribute crackers for the crab claws, tiny forks for the shellfish, dishes of lemon wedges and mayonnaise.

My life began by flickering out. It may sound strange but it is so. From the very first moment I became conscious of myself, I felt that I was already flickering out. I began to flicker out over the writing of official papers at the office; I went on flickering out when I read truths in books which I did not know how to apply in life, when I sat with friends listening to rumours, gossip, jeering, spiteful, cold, and empty chatter, and watching friendships kept up by meetings that were without aim or affection; I was flickering out and wasting my energies with Minna on whom I spent more than half of my income, imagining that I loved her; I was flickering out when I walked idly and dejectedly along Nevsky Avenue among people in raccoon coats and beaver collars – at parties, on reception days, where I was welcomed with open arms as a fairly eligible young man; I was flickering out and wasting my life and mind on trifles moving from town to some country house, and from the country house to Gorokhovaya, fixing the arrival of spring by the fact that lobsters and oysters had appeared in the shops, of autumn and winter by the special visiting days, of summer by the fêtes, and life in general by lazy and comfortable somnolence like the rest. ... Even ambition – what was it wasted on? To order clothes at a famous tailor's? To get an invitation to a famous house? To shake hands with Prince P.? And ambition is the salt of life! Where has it gone to? Either I have not understood this sort of life or it is utterly worthless; but I did not know of a better one. No one showed it to me.

Grandma, he had often wanted to say, Is this where the world began? For surely it had begun in no other than a place like this. The kitchen, without doubt, was the center of creation, all things revolved about it; it was the pediment that sustained the temple. Eyes shut to let his nose wander, he snuffed deeply. He moved in the hell-fire steams and sudden baking-powder flurries of snow in this miraculous climate where Grandma, with the look of the Indies in her eyes and the flesh of two warm hens in her bodice, Grandma of the thousand arms, shook, basted, whipped, beat, minced, diced, peeled, wrapped, salted, stirred. Blind, he touched his way to the pantry door. A squeal of laughter rang from the parlor, teacups tinkled. But he moved on into the cool underwater green and wild-persimmon country where the slung and hanging odor of creamy bananas ripened silently and bumped his head. Gnats fizzed angrily about vinegar cruets and his ears. He opened his eyes. He saw bread waiting to be cut into slices of warm summer cloud, doughnuts strewn like clown hoops from some edible game. The faucets turned on and off in his cheeks. Here on the plum-shadowed side of the house with maple leaves making a creek-water running in the hot wind at the window he read spice-cabinet names.

I stand. People move around me, they try to touch, but they can’t stick. Two, three, four steps and I’m less than a meter away. “June?” Enki says. I kneel. A subject to her king. I take his hand. His grip is firm and warm and dry; he smells of hibiscus and sea salt. I never really believed you would pick the Queen’s Award, he said. And he was right, in the end. “The person —” Enki puts his hand over my mouth. He looks scared. Has something else happened to the city? “Quiet.” His lips barely move.

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin.” “As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed, long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

One Autumn night, in Sudbury town, Across the meadows bare and brown, The windows of the wayside inn Gleamed red with fire-light through the leaves Of woodbine, hanging from the eaves Their crimson curtains rent and thin. As ancient is this hostelry As any in the land may be, Built in the old Colonial day, When men lived in a grander way, With ampler hospitality; A kind of old Hobgoblin Hall, Now somewhat fallen to decay, With weather-stains upon the wall, And stairways worn, and crazy doors, And creaking and uneven floors, And chimneys huge, and tiled and tall. A region of repose it seems, A place of slumber and of dreams, Remote among the wooded hills! For there no noisy railway speeds, Its torch-race scattering smoke and gleeds; But noon and night, the panting teams Stop under the great oaks, that throw Tangles of light and shade below, On roofs and doors and window-sills. Across the road the barns display Their lines of stalls, their mows of hay, Through the wide doors the breezes blow, The wattled cocks strut to and fro, And, half effaced by rain and shine, The Red Horse prances on the sign. Round this old-fashioned, quaint abode Deep silence reigned, save when a gust Went rushing down the county road, And skeletons of leaves, and dust, A moment quickened by its breath, Shuddered and danced their dance of death, And through the ancient oaks o'erhead Mysterious voices moaned and fled. These are the tales those merry guests Told to each other, well or ill; Like summer birds that lift their crests Above the borders of their nests And twitter, and again are still. These are the tales, or new or old, In idle moments idly told; Flowers of the field with petals thin, Lilies that neither toil nor spin, And tufts of wayside weeds and gorse Hung in the parlor of the inn Beneath the sign of the Red Horse. Uprose the sun; and every guest, Uprisen, was soon equipped and dressed For journeying home and city-ward; The old stage-coach was at the door, With horses harnessed,long before The sunshine reached the withered sward Beneath the oaks, whose branches hoar Murmured: "Farewell forevermore. Where are they now? What lands and skies Paint pictures in their friendly eyes? What hope deludes, what promise cheers, What pleasant voices fill their ears? Two are beyond the salt sea waves, And three already in their graves. Perchance the living still may look Into the pages of this book, And see the days of long ago Floating and fleeting to and fro, As in the well-remembered brook They saw the inverted landscape gleam, And their own faces like a dream Look up upon them from below.

He lifted one bottle into the light. " 'GREEN DUSK FOR DREAMING BRAND PUREE NORTHERN AIR,' " he read. " 'Derived from the atmosphere of the white Arctic in the spring of 1900, and mixed with the wind from the upper Hudson Valley in the month of April, 1910, and containing particles of dust seen shining in the sunset of one day in the meadows around Grinnell, Iowa, when a cool air rose to be captured from a lake and a little creek and a natural spring.' "Now the small print," he said. He squinted. " 'Also containing molecules of vapor from menthol, lime, papaya, and watermelon and all other water-smelling, cool-savored fruits and trees like camphor and herbs like wintergreen and the breath of a rising wind from the Des Plaines River itself. Guaranteed most refreshing and cool. To be taken on summer nights when the heat passes ninety.' " He picked up the other bottle. "This one the same, save I've collected a wind from the Aran Isles and one from off Dublin Bay with salt on it and a strip of flannel fog from the coast of Iceland." He put the two bottles on the bed. "One last direction." He stood by the cot and leaned over and spoke quietly. "When you're drinking these, remember: It was bottled by a friend. The S.J. Jonas Bottling Company, Green Town, Illinois- August, 1928. A vintage year, boy... a vintage year.

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He’d almost read his father’s full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It’s been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there’s that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you’ll see.

I travel your body, like the world, your belly is a plaza full of sun, your breasts two churches where blood performs its own, parallel rites, my glances cover you like ivy, you are a city the sea assaults, a stretch of ramparts split by the light in two halves the color of peaches, a domain of salt, rocks and birds, under the rule of oblivious noon, dressed in the color of my desires, you go your way naked as my thoughts, I travel your eyes, like the sea, tigers drink their dreams in those eyes, the hummingbird burns in those flames, I travel your forehead, like the moon, like the cloud that passes through your thoughts, I travel your belly, like your dreams, your skirt of corn ripples and sings, your skirt of crystal, your skirt of water, your lips, your hair, your glances rain all through the night, and all day long you open my chest with your fingers of water, you close my eyes with your mouth of water, you rain on my bones, a tree of liquid sending roots of water into my chest, I travel your length, like a river, I travel your body, like a forest, like a mountain path that ends at a cliff I travel along the edge of your thoughts, and my shadow falls from your white forehead, my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces and go with no body, groping my way, the endless corridors of memory, the doors that open into an empty room where all the summers have come to rot, jewels of thirst burn at its depths, the face that vanishes upon recall, the hand that crumbles at my touch, the hair spun by a mob of spiders over the smiles of years ago,

Bleecker Street, Summer" Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

One pioneer remembered seeing “an open bleak prairie, the cold wind howling overhead…a new-made grave, a woman and three children sitting near by, a girl of 14 summers walking round and round in a circle, wringing her hands and calling upon her dead parent.” Janette Riker was only a young girl when she headed for Oregon with her father and two brothers in 1849. Late in September they camped in a valley in Montana, and the men went out to hunt. They never returned. While she waited, Janette built a small shelter, moved the wagon stove in with all the provisions and blankets, and hunkered down. She killed the fattest ox from her family’s herd, salted down the meat, and lived alone through the winter, amid howling wolves and mountain lions. She was discovered in April by Indians who were so impressed by her story that they took her to a fort in Washington. She never found out what happened to her family.

There are Californians who waiver in their allegiance to the climate of California. Sometimes the climate of San Francisco has made me cross. Sometimes I have thought that the winds in summer were too cold, that the fogs in summer were too thick. But whenever I have crossed the continent—when I have emerged from New York at ninety-five degrees, and entered Chicago at one hundred degrees—when I have been breathing the dust of alkali deserts and the fiery air of sagebrush plains—these are the times when I have always been buoyed up by the anticipation of inhaling the salt air of San Francisco Bay. If ever a summer wanderer is glad to get back to his native land, it is I, returning to my native fog. Like the prodigal youth who returned to his home and filled himself with husks, so I always yearn in summer to return to mine, and fill myself up with fog. Not a thin, insignificant mist, but a fog—a thick fog—one of those rich pea-soup August fogs that blow in from the Pacific Ocean over San Francisco. When I leave the heated capitals of other lands and get back to California uncooked, I always offer up a thank-offering to Santa Niebla, Our Lady of the Fogs. Out near the Presidio, where Don Joaquin de Arillaga, the old comandante, revisits the glimpses of the moon, clad in rusty armor, with his Spanish spindle-shanks thrust into tall leathern boots—there some day I shall erect a chapel to Santa Niebla. And I have vowed to her as an ex-voto a silver fog-horn, which horn will be wound by the winds of the broad Pacific, and will ceaselessly sound through the centuries the litany of Our Lady of the Fogs. Every Californian has good reason to be loyal to his native land. If even the Swiss villagers, born in the high Alps, long to return to their birthplace, how much more does the exiled Californian yearn to return to the land which bore him. There are other, richer, and more populous lands, but to the Californian born, California is the only place in which to live. And to the returning Californian, particularly if he be native-born, the love of his birthplace is only intensified by visits to other lands. Why do men so love their native soil? It is perhaps a phase of human love for the mother. For we are compact of the soil. Out of the crumbling granite eroded from the ribs of California’s Sierras by California’s mountain streams—out of earth washed into California’s great valleys by her mighty rivers—out of this the sons of California are made, brain, and muscle, and bone. Why then should they not love their mother, even as the mountaineers of Montenegro, of Switzerland, of Savoy, lover their mountain birth-place? Why should not exiled Californians yearn to return? And we sons of California always do return; we are always brought back by the potent charm of our native land—back to the soil which gave us birth—and at the last back to Earth, the great mother, from whom we sprung, and on whose bosom we repose our tired bodies when our work is done.

He spent the morning at the beach. He had no idea which one, just some open stretch of coastline reaching out to the sea. An unbroken mantle of soft grey clouds was sitting low over the water. Only on the horizon was there a glimmer of light, a faint blue band of promise. The beach was deserted, not another soul on the vast, wide expanse of sand that stretched out in front of him. Having come from the city, it never ceased to amaze Jejeune that you could be that alone in the world. He walked along the beach, feeling the satisfying softness as the sand gave way beneath his slow deliberate strides. He ventured as close to the tide line as he dared, the white noise of the waves breaking on the shingles. A set of paw prints ran along the sand, with an unbroken line in between. A small dog, dragging a stick in its mouth. Always the detective, even if, these days, he wasn’t a very good one. Jejeune’s path became blocked by a narrow tidal creek carrying its silty cargo out to the sea. On each side of it were shallow lagoons and rock pools. When the tide washed in they would teem with new life, but at the moment they looked barren and empty. Jejeune looked inland, back to where the dark smudge of Corsican pines marked the edge of the coast road. He traced the creek’s sinuous course back to where it emerged from a tidal salt flat, and watched the water for a long time as it eddied and churned, meeting the incoming tide in an erotic swirl of water, the fresh intermingling with the salty in a turbulent, roiling dance, until it was no longer possible to tell one from the other. He looked out at the sea, at the motion, the color, the light. A Black-headed Gull swooped in and settled on a piece of driftwood a few feet away. Picture complete, thought Jejeune. For him, a landscape by itself, no matter how beautiful, seemed an empty thing. It needed a flicker of life, a tiny quiver of existence, to validate it, to confirm that other living things found a home here, too. Side by side, they looked out over the sea, the man and the bird, two beating hearts in this otherwise empty landscape, with no connection beyond their desire to be here, at this time. Was it the birds that attracted him to places like this, he wondered, or the solitude, the absence of demands, of expectations? But if Jejeune was unsure of his own motives, he knew this bird would have a purpose in being here. Nature always had her reasons. He chanced a sidelong glance at the bird, now settled to his presence. It had already completed its summer molt, crisp clean feathers having replaced the ones abraded by the harsh demands of eking out a living on this wild, windswept coastline. The gull stayed for a long moment, allowing Jejeune to rest his eyes softly, unthreateningly, upon it. And then, as if deciding it had allowed him enough time to appreciate its beauty, the bird spread its wings and effortlessly lifted off, wheeling on the invisible air currents, drifting away over the sea toward the horizon. p. 282-3

Stop it,” came Eustace’s voice, squeaky with fright and bad temper. “It’s some silly trick you two are playing. Stop it. I’ll tell Alberta--Ow!” The other two were much more accustomed to adventures, but, just exactly as Eustace Clarence said “Ow,” they both said “Ow” too. The reason was that a great cold, salt splash had broken right out of the frame and they were breathless from the smack of it, besides being wet through. “I’ll smash the rotten thing,” cried Eustace; and then several things happened at the same time. Eustace rushed toward the picture. Edmund, who knew something about magic, sprang after him, warning him to look out and not to be a fool. Lucy grabbed at him from the other side and was dragged forward. And by this time either they had grown much smaller or the picture had grown bigger. Eustace jumped to try to pull it off the wall and found himself standing on the frame; in front of him was not glass but real sea, and wind and waves rushing up to the frame as they might to a rock. He lost his head and clutched at the other two who had jumped up beside him. There was a second of struggling and shouting, and just as they thought they had got their balance a great blue roller surged up round them, swept them off their feet, and drew them down into the sea. Eustace’s despairing cry suddenly ended as the water got into his mouth. Lucy thanked her stars that she had worked hard at her swimming last summer term. It is true that she would have got on much better if she had used a slower stroke, and also that the water felt a great deal colder than it had looked while it was only a picture. Still, she kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everyone ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes. She even kept her mouth shut and her eyes open. They were still quite near the ship; she saw its green side towering high above them, and people looking at her from the deck. Then, as one might have expected, Eustace clutched at her in a panic and down they both went.

But I would point out that there is another and still more important function of great mountains - the culture not of athletic faculty alone, but of that intellectual sympathy with untamed and primitive Nature which our civilization threatens to destroy. A mountain is something more than a thing to climb. To the many who, on a fine summer day, swarm up Skiddaw or Snowdon by the well-worn pony-paths, it is pure holiday-making; to the few who (in another sense) swarm up Scafell Pinnacel or the Napes needle, it is pure gymnastics; but between or beyond these two classes there are those - pilgrims I call them - who find mountain climbing what only mountains can give, the contact with unsophisticated Nature, the opportunity to be alone, to be out of and above the world of ordinary life, to pass from the familiar sights and surroundings into a cloudland of new shapes and sounds, where one feels the fascination of that undiscoverable secret (I do not know how else to name it) by which every true nature-lover is allured.

The smooth, flat rocks were exactly the same, the sea pounded down on them in the same way, and also the landscape under the water, with its small valleys and bays and steep chasms and slopes, strewn with starfish and sea urchins, crabs and fish, was the same. You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

somewhere there is a women in China holding a black umbrella so she won’t taste the salt of the rain when the sky begins to weep, there is a 17 year old girl who smells like pomegranates and has summer air tight on her naked skin, wrapping around her scars like veins in a bloody garden, who won’t make it past tomorrow, there is a young man, who buys yellow flowers for the woman in apartment 84B, who learned braille when he realized she couldn’t read his poetry about her white neck and mint eyes there are people watching films, making love for the first time, opening mail with the heading of ‘i miss you’, cooking noodles with organic spices and red sauces, buying lemon detergent, ignoring ‘do not smoke’ signs, painting murals of his lips in abandoned warehouses, chewing the words ‘i love you’ over and over again, swallowing phone numbers and forgotten birthdays, eating strawberry pies, drinking white wine off of each others open mouths, ignoring the telephone, reading this poem somewhere someone is thinking i’m alone somewhere someone finally understands they never really were

Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats. Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug, over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar, the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only for a brief whiff. I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Baseball may be called the national pastime, but it survives on the sentimentality of middle-age men who wistfully dream of playing catch with their fathers and sons. Football, with its dull stoppages, lost its military-industrial relevance with the end of the Cold War, and has become as tired and predictable in performance as it is in political metaphor. The professional game floats on an ocean of gambling, the players' steroid-laced bodies having outgrown their muscular and skeletal carriages. Biceps rip from their moorings, ankles break on simple pivots. Achilles' tendons shrivel like slugs doused with salt. Soccer and basketball are the only mainstream sports that truly plug into the modem-pulse of a dot-com society. Soccer is perfectly suited for a country of the hamster-treadmill pace, the remote-control zap and the national attention deficit—two 45-minute halves, the clock never stops, no commercial interruptions, the final whistle blows in less than two hours. It is a fluid game of systemized chaos that, no matter how tightly scripted by coaches, cannot be regulated any more than information can be truly controlled on the Internet.

Song for the Last Act Now that I have your face by heart, I look Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook. Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show Of yet another summer loath to go Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. Now that I have your face by heart, I look. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read In the black chords upon a dulling page Music that is not meant for music's cage, Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed. The staves are shuttled over with a stark Unprinted silence. In a double dream I must spell out the storm, the running stream. The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves; The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish. I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think. "Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry." "May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns.

I know you're a chocolate lover. I can always tell. I'm about to temper the chocolate. I have my own method; want to watch?" "Could I?" Inside my head, a little voice was reminding me that I had to get back to the office, but it was drowned out by the scent of chocolate, which flooded all my senses with a heady froth of cocoa and coffee, passion fruit, cinnamon and clove. I closed my eyes, and for one moment I was back in Aunt Melba's kitchen with Genie. I opened them to find Kim dancing with a molten river of chocolate. I stood hypnotized by the scent and the grace of her motions, which were more beautiful than any ballet. Moving constantly, she caressed the chocolate like a lover, folding it over and over on a slab of white marble, working it to get the texture right. She stopped to feed me a chocolate sprinkled with salt, which had the fierce flavor of the ocean, and another with the resonant intensity of toasted saffron. One chocolate tasted like rain, another of the desert. I tried tracking the flavors, pulling them apart to see how she had done it, but, like a magician, she had hidden her tricks. Each time I followed the trail, it vanished, and after a while I just gave up and allowed the flavors to seduce me. Now the scent changed as Kim began to dip fruit into the chocolate: raspberries, blackberries, tiny strawberries that smelled like violets. She put a chocolate-and-caramel-covered slice of peach into my mouth, and the taste of summer was so intense that I felt the room grow warmer. I lost all sense of time.

The Seer's Map by Stewart Stafford Howling dog, thou cursèd hound, Plaguest thy master with baleful sound, The cur's yelps taint the air around; A dirge for all that hear thy wound. The rooftop magpie foretells: Herald of guests to visit soon, A noisy speech announceth, Companions of the afternoon. Lucky horseshoe and iron key, Bringeth good fortune to the finder, But spilling salt provokes fate, And draws the evil eye's reminder. A shoe upon the table laid, Tempts the dead to live anon, For this ungracious gesture waketh, Flesh and blood from skeleton. Who crosses the path of hare or priest, A perilous milestone on thy road, Their very presence signifies That gathering trouble doth forebode. A toad on thy merry travels, Brings sweet smiles and kindest charms, Keep one about thy person warm, To shelter safe from danger's harms. Red sky at night delights the eye, Of shepherd that beholds thy light, Thy colour doth betoken dawn Of weather fair and clear and bright. Red sky at morn troubles the heart, Of shepherd that surveys thy shade, Thy hue doth presage day Of stormy blast and tempest made. December's thunder balm, Speaks of harvest's tranquil mind, January's thunder, fierce! Warns of war and gales unkind. An itchy palm hints at gold To come into thy hand ere long, But if thou scratch it, thou dost lose The fair wind that blows so strong. A Sunday Christmas forewarns: Three signs of what the year shall hold; A winter mild, a Lenten wind, And summer dry, to then unfold. Good luck charm on New Year's Day Maketh fortune bloom all year, But to lose it or give it away, Thou dost invite ill-omened fear. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Chicken Francese, or lamb chops, or plump spinach gnocchi that she'd roll out by hand and drop into boiling salt water. When her brothers came home for the holidays, she'd spend days in the kitchen, preparing airy latkes and sweet and sour brisket; roast turkey with chestnut stuffing; elaborately iced layer cakes. She'd stay in the kitchen for hours, cooking dish after dish, hoping that all the food would somehow conceal their father's absence; hoping that the meals would take the taste of grief out of their mouths. "After my father died, I think cooking saved me. It was the only thing that made me happy. Everything else felt so out of control. But if I followed a recipe, if I used the right amounts of the right ingredients and did everything I was supposed to do..." She tried to explain it- how repetitive motions of peeling and chopping felt like a meditation, the comfort of knowing that flour and yeast, oil and salt, combined in the correct proportions, would always yield a loaf of bread; the way that making a shopping list could refocus her mind, and how much she enjoyed the smells of fresh rosemary, of roasting chicken or baking cookies, the velvety feel of a ball of dough at the precise moment when it reached its proper elasticity and could be put into an oiled bowl, under a clean cloth, to rise in a warm spot in the kitchen, the same step that her mother's mother's mother would have followed to make the same kind of bread. She liked to watch popovers rising to lofty heights in the oven's heat, blooming out of their tins. She liked the sound of a hearty soup or grain-thickened stew, simmering gently on a low flame, the look of a beautifully set table, with place cards and candles and fine china. All of it pleased her.

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can't see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn't you just stay put? Why couldn't you feel I was coming for you? You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn't I dead? He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen's main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him. As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can't take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He's had enough of himself. He's sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life. Does it hurt when I touch them? He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lied. No, he says.

Wherever you go, Provincetown will always take you back, at whatever age and in whatever condition. Because time moves somewhat differently there, it is possible to return after ten years or more and run into an acquaintance, on Commercial or at the A&P, who will ask mildly, as if he’d seen you the day before yesterday, what you’ve been doing with yourself. The streets of Provincetown are not in any way threatening, at least not to those with an appetite for the full range of human passions. If you grow deaf and blind and lame in Provincetown, some younger person with a civic conscience will wheel you wherever you need to go; if you die there, the marshes and dunes are ready to receive your ashes. While you’re alive and healthy, for as long as it lasts, the golden hands of the clock tower at Town Hall will note each hour with an electric bell as we below, on our purchase of land, buy or sell, paint or write or fish for bass, or trade gossip on the post office steps. The old bayfront houses will go on dreaming, at least until the emptiness between their boards proves more durable than the boards themselves. The sands will continue their slow devouring of the forests that were the Pilgrims’ first sight of North America, where man, as Fitzgerald put it, “must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” The ghost of Dorothy Bradford will walk the ocean floor off Herring Cove, draped in seaweed, surrounded by the fleeting silver lights of fish, and the ghost of Guglielmo Marconi will tap out his messages to those even longer dead than he. The whales will breach and loll in their offshore world, dive deep into black canyons, and swim south when the time comes. Herons will browse the tidal pools; crabs with blue claws tipped in scarlet will scramble sideways over their own shadows. At sunset the dunes will take on their pink-orange light, and just after sunset the boats will go luminous in the harbor. Ashes of the dead, bits of their bones, will mingle with the sand in the salt marsh, and wind and water will further disperse the scraps of wood, shell, and rope I’ve used for Billy’s various memorials. After dark the raccoons and opossums will start on their rounds; the skunks will rouse from their burrows and head into town. In summer music will rise up. The old man with the portable organ will play for passing change in front of the public library. People in finery will sing the anthems of vanished goddesses; people who are still trying to live by fishing will pump quarters into jukeboxes that play the songs of their high school days. As night progresses, people in diminishing numbers will wander the streets (where whaling captains and their wives once promenaded, where O’Neill strode in drunken furies, where Radio Girl—who knows where she is now?—announced the news), hoping for surprises or just hoping for what the night can be counted on to provide, always, in any weather: the smell of water and its sound; the little houses standing square against immensities of ocean and sky; and the shapes of gulls gliding overhead, white as bone china, searching from their high silence for whatever they might be able to eat down there among the dunes and marshes, the black rooftops, the little lights tossing on the water as the tides move out or in.

I put my hand on his forearm, I don't know why I do this, and it's not exactly natural, although it's not unnatural, except that I really want to touch his skin. It's smooth and tan just a little bit and feels like summer, like something familiar and warm and good, like my skin did on the first days aboard 'Fishful Thinking' before it salted and burned and peeled. 'We broke up three years after that.' I sit back in my chair and give a sly smile. Relationships are complex and sometimes you can't really explain them to an outside party. 'I can't believe I just told you that' 'YES! YOU! ARE! LIVING! YOUR! FULL! LIFE!' A third time. I am not imagining it. 'There you are.' This time my heart does skip a beat. I look down at his arm, and we are still touching, and he has made no attempt to retract his arm or retreat. All my surroundings, the red formica table top, the pink yogurt, the blue sky, the green vegetables in the market, they all come alive in vibrant technicolor as the sun peers from behind a cloud. I am living my full life. 'Honesty in all things,' Byron adds, lifting his cup of yogurt for a toast of sorts. I pull my hand away from him and the instant my hand is back by his side, I miss the warmth of his arm, the warmth of him. Honesty in all things. I should put my hand back, that's where it wants to be, that's Lily's lesson to me. Be present in the moment, give spontaneous affection. I'm suddenly aware I haven't spoken in a bit. 'Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?' As soon as it comes out of my mouth, I realize I sound like that kid from 'Jerry McGuire.' 'Did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?' I hope my question comes off almost a fraction as endearing. 'No,' Byron says with a glint in his eye that reads as curiosity, at least I hope that it does, but even if it doesn't I'm too into the inertia of the trivia to stop it. 'It's true, one heart called the systemic heart that functions much like the left side of the human heart, distributing blood throughout the heart, then two smaller branchial heart with gills that act like the right side of our hearts to pump the blood back.' 'What made you think of that?' I smile. It may be entirely inappropriate first date conversation, but at least it doesn't bore me in the telling. I look up at the winsome August sky, marred only by the contrails of a passing jet, and a vaguely dachshund shaped cloud above the horizon. I don't believe in fate. I don't believe in love at first site. I don't believe in angels. I don't believe in heaven and that our loved ones are looking down on us, but the sun is so warm and the breeze is so cool and the company is so perfect and the whole afternoon so intoxicating, ti's hard not to hear Lily's voice dancing in the gentle wind, 'one! month! is Long! Enough TO! BE! SAD!' ... 'I recently lost someone close to me....I don't know, I feel her here today with us, you, me, her, three hearts, like an octopus,' I shrug. If I were him, I would run. What a ridiculously creepy thing to say. I would run and I would not stop until I was home in my bed with a gallon of ice cream deleting my profile from every dating site I belonged to. Maybe it's because it's not rehearsed, maybe it's because it's as weird a thing to say as it is genuine, maybe it's because this is finally the man for me. Byron stands and offers me his hand, 'Let's take a walk and you can tell me about her.' The gentle untying of a shoe lace. It takes me a minute to decide if I can do this, and I decide that I can, and I throw our yogurt dishes away, and I put my hand in his, and it's soft and warm, and instead of awkward fumbling, our hands clasp together like magnets and metal, like we've been hand-in-hand all along, and we are touching again. ...