summertime and the living is easy

First there was a vegetable garden: tomatoes, zucchini, squash, rosemary, thyme and sage. We patched it together with four wooden slabs and a chunk of rocky earth. It rained hard in the evenings, but the sun was heavy and hot. The herbs were moved indoors and a tomato plant perished.

My daughter refused to swim. She thought sharks lived in swimming pools. In the night, she would awake, terrified, swimming through her sheets and fighting off her pillows. She kicked a girl in the face at a birthday party who was swimming and neighing like a horse. I guess she was afraid of horses too.

Fourth of July was barbequed in Chicago. We sat in lawn chairs in front of dad’s house drinking boxed red wine and singing Fleetwood Mac against the bands playing in the park. Debbie danced barefoot in the street. Fireworks exploded. The grass was wet. It had rained all day. Two young boys lost in the festivities had me drive them home. When I dropped them off their father began to beat them at the door. I tried to explain how good and polite they had been and how it had not been a problem to bring them home. But their father would not listen. He told them to get the fuck in the house and then he slammed the door in my face. Sweet boys. Ugly man.

We ate chocolate chip cookies in the sand in Ocean City. It was foggy for days. I got sunburned. Pictures show women and children squinting, grinning, and surrounded by toys and junk food. I guess it was fun. I don’t really remember.

August was spent out West, picking sage off the side of the road and living in tents. We road tripped. Four women and a child crammed into a hatchback. We ate tuna and vegetables out of cans for days. We slept under a tarp, our cotton sleeping bags soaked by morning from the nightly desert monsoons.

In Arizona we stayed a night on a reservation. The Navajo gathered around midnight somewhere near where we slept, yelling into the dark and beating drums until we had fallen asleep. It was lovely. The sky was so large, filled with skipping stars. The earth hard and toned by dust and dogs, wild, wandering starved through the canyons.

We backpacked into the Grand Canyon, rotating between the four of us a twenty-five pound child in a twenty-pound backpack. We dripped and panted and struggled for four days: in and out and in and out. Hardcore.

In another part of Arizona we hiked into a lush canyon, shimmying through rust colored rock and jumping gaps between the trails. We ate tuna next to a herd of mangy sheep. They were herded by an archaic Native American woman, her skin leathered, brown, her hands, thick, held a carved walking stick.

In Utah we passed children playing basketball in the middle of an empty abyss as a dark storm gathered in the distance. A group of shacks cluttered together appeared vulnerable, naïve to the impending clouds. Beyond, lay nothing but gray mountains and a cliff with a stone portrait of Jerry Garcia.

For weeks we ran the coyote fences of Sante Fe, drinking Tequate and philosophizing, solidifying and romanticizing. I fell in love with Jackson. We painted, sewed, and slept. Jalapenos and black beans with everything.

Maryland humidity was suffocating. I couldn’t sleep. East coast was harsh, brittle. Hard to be back, in the grind, in the bitterness of it all. Summer halted.

Now all the leaves are brown and the skies are gray …