midsummer

staying awake

“Are you sure / That we are awake?” — William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

I played Titania in High School. I danced down the auditorium aisle in fairy wings. I recited a speech about the moon while holding a little boy’s hand. Did that really happen?

I collected seashells as a child in the Outer Banks. I went to Rwanda and hiked with gorillas. I debated God in Christ Church meadows. I got lost on the Ulster Way.

Memories can feel like dreams, or the echoes of them. Dreams are usually more sinister, or at least the ones I recall. Dark forests, abductions, strangers with no faces. But some memories have the same quality - did that happen? What feeling does this encourage inside me? Regret or nostalgia or something else, something hard to recall?

“Remember what it is to be me.”

That’s what Joan Didion said about keeping a notebook, about why you should. What she understood is that you will forget yourself - that certain selves will become dream-like and distant. If you don’t write it down, you will forget. That self will be gone.

We experienced an emergency recently that had my daughter in the ICU for three days. As we experience more and more normal days in the aftermath, I wonder - did that happen? Was it a bad dream?

It’s a dream that can happen again. I just don’t know when, or how. So I can’t cast the vigilance or the feeling of unreality. How can things be so normal, and then so… not normal? How can everything happen and then disappear?

I stood on the shore in Cape May and the waves crashed on my feet, sinking them further and further into the sand. My four-year old is too afraid to stand and hold my hand for long. I’m losing my balance. “Me too,” I say. And what else I want to say is, this is how it always is.

I try to explain to her how the moon’s gravitational pull effects the tides, and I describe it like a string, or an indrawn breath. What was it Titania said about the moon?

“Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter”

I remember after all.

My daughter tells my husband a story about a sheet of ice that a girl skates on so long it becomes a mirror. What a beautiful thought - or was it a dream, or a memory?

“Once I spoke the language of the flowers / How did it go? / How did it go?”

— Shel Silverstein

There are few things more evocative than sea air. It makes me think of being a child - how wobbly my legs would feel after a day running in the surf… a big beach towel wrapped around me… a soft bed. I think of kites at sunset and my mother four layers deep, sensitive pale skin and a hat to boot.

And she did always look lovely, just like my grandmother, her mother, the ultimate connoisseur of hats and elegant skin.

You don’t think they could guess my age, do you? she’d wink, eying some young man. No, I would smile, They’d never guess. It was the hats, always the hats. And the Chardonnay. Keeps you young. Wink, wink.

There are some memories that aren’t memories at all, but fully present. People too. They never left at all. My grandmother is like that. She’s still here, grinning under a polka dot brim, photo propped up next to her piano.

My husband and I quote that over-quoted Isak Denison quote —

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

“She’s right,” I say. My husband laughs, surprised to hear I’d acknowledge tears as healing. I don’t like complicated emotions, or sad ones. What’s the fix? What’s the solution? Who wants to sit around and be sad?

We got a puppy. I don’t know why. One day we’re talking about my husband’s grandfather’s sweet, old blind dachshund and remembering that one dachshund we saw leaping through grass walking a cross country course, and a few weeks later I’m driving four hours there, four hours back, a little brindle 8 week old miniature dachshund in the seat beside me.

We don’t really need more chaos, or more neediness, or less sleep, or more things to worry about our two year old harming. I’ve never had a little dog. I’ve always had the big, rough and tumble types. Our big lab sniffs him and looks at us questioningly - Is this a dog, too? I don’t really know how to care for a two year old and an 8 week old puppy at the same time. But right now I do have a warm three-pound creature lying next to me in a state of utter trust and abandon. That has to be important in some way.

My younger daughter will join my older daughter at Nature School three mornings a week starting tomorrow. My first free mornings in four years!.. and, enter, small very needy puppy. So the tumble of needs continues. as it should. (puppies do sleep around 20 hours a day, but at least at this age, they are newborn-like in their need for that sleep to be with you).

importantly: snuggles for Britbox marathons

What does it mean to live through the longest day of the year? Winter Solstice makes more sense to me. I understand wintertime and dark days — I like books and fires and stews. But all this light! What do we do with it?

I love the Baltimore Basilica, (America’s First Basilica and more important to me *MY First Basilica* [where i became Catholic]), but it is very light.

I’m a traditional gal and I like my churches dim and secret - some nice saint bones in the corner, a small votive candle here and there, curtained off confessionals with some muttering priests. Throw some incense in too. But the Basilica is stark white with open windows and Grecian-style pale statues. There’s nowhere to hide.

So perhaps that is Midsummer after all - when the night is so short you can’t remember when you started falling asleep, or if you slept at all. You can’t hide from anything. Not the nightmares, or the memories, or the sun. Are we awake? Are we dreaming? What Really happened? Narratives blur and merge.

Puck restores it all. Sorry if we upset you. It was just a dream, after all.

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended.”

I loved going to the beach this year.

Having a 2 year old and 4 year old feels on the cusp of doable life, where the kids can occupy themselves digging in the sand and I can gaze out at the sea for the moment, or even sneak a peak at my Agatha Christie. Not that I don’t preclude chaos in the future, babies or more chaotic puppies, or who knows what else, but this is a moment in time. “Remember what it is to be me” - (to be us.)

Where we can get crashed on in the surf. Where we can have conversations over lunch. Where my daughters can talk and talk before bed about the adventures we had.

As we told knock-knock jokes at the table I looked around at the four of us. We were a family —

our own floating island, and sea air or mountain air or midsummer or midwinter, night or day, good or bad,

that was real.

looking at my kids

If you’re new around here, my name is Katie and I’m an erstwhile podcaster, current audio consultant, writer, mother, and hopeful farmer. I have my paid subscriptions paused for the time being (if you are a paid subscriber, this means you are not being charged currently).

I am leaving things on pause until I feel I have the ability to give my paid subscribers what they are paying for — namely one physical monthly mailing in their mailbox. As a paid subscriber you also have the ability to access the archives (almost all posts are paywalled after 2 weeks). Thank you to those who have supported me in the past and for those considering it when I open things back up.

In the meantime, if you’d like to buy me a coffee, I’d be very grateful!

And a like/comment/share go a long way! Thanks for reading!