Tuesday I dropped CLH off at her new job downtown, before sunrise even, and was on my way. At 8:30 in Old Lyme, I looked for breakfast but it didn't happen. Hallmark's offers it only on weekends, and a couple of other places weren't open yet. I miss the Lymelight. But I got to the beach before 9.
I walked out to Griswold Point, or what's left of it. There are curves of sea grass where land used to be. What land remains was covered in cormorants and sea gulls and plovers and terns and there no dogs can get at them, but there's less habitat overall. It was stunning and gorgeous and perfect in every way, breezy and sunny and warm in the sun and cool in the breeze and when I got back to the town beach I dove in. Lordy. I have not been at the beach in September for some years. The day after BJWL's wedding, I invited folks to the beach and TJZ came and ABW came with baby NKW, but it was cloudy and chilly. This was perfect.
People swim in artificial water for exercise and to cool off. Does anyone go into fake water to enjoy being in the water? I don't see how, the dosed water feels so wrong against skin. This was something else. This was perfect. I swam with no fear of jellyfish or jetskis, I floated in salt, I bounced in the strange formations called "waves" that Old Lyme only gets in September (and presumably over the winter, but even I swim only May through September).
When I started shivering I got out and lay in the sun until I decided dehydration and hunger weren't helping me to warm up. By this time the new café across from Phoebe was open, so I had a tomato and cheese bagel and a liter of water and shivered at a patio table in the sun as I read the paper. When I ordered, hugging my arms to myself and turtling my head into my shoulders, the proprietor asked, I think incredulously, if I was cold. It was a gorgeous day in the 70s by now--how could anyone be cold? "I just got out of the water," I told her. The wet hair might have been a give-away, but maybe not: there are showers. I went into Phoebe, listening to the grandfather clock strike the hour, looking through the children's collection, glancing at the new adult fiction, before heading to my main goal, the old reading room. I nodded to Phoebe, still smiling her Mona Lisa smile over the fireplace, and breathed. Eh: it's air-conditioned now, so no real air even in the summer. The geneaology room smells right, at least: no air conditioning can combat books that old.
Then I hied me to Uncas. The road is passable! One of Connecticut's means to balance its budget is to "return certain parks to a natural state," i.e., a reduction in services. There were never any services in Nehantic State Forest anyway, praise be, except to pave, in the most slapdash way, the road. It's now dirt and the smoothest drive I have ever had there. I spent four hours there, sunning and swimming and reading and looking at the sky through the leaves* and being almost entirely alone. Once two men arrived, which made me a little skeevey, but the older just told the younger about fishing here and then they left; another time when I was in the water a man showed up with a baby in a front-pack and a dog on a leash and soon left. Later a family came paddling by in a canoe. No smokers, no screaming kids, no one else in the long term. Peace. Water and sun and utter quiet. Not silence, because of the wind in the trees and the birds, but quiet, with just the wind in the trees and the birds: perfect.
My mother got out of work at 3 so I headed for the house. I remember this as an unstressful half hour, anyway. ABW showed up with her two boys, my mother went off to an optometrist appointment, and ABW and I gave the boys a choice: the beach, with waves and better castle-building sand, or a lake with warmer water and a playground and not very good sand. They opted for lake, so we went to Haynes Park at Roger's Lake, and thank goodness it was after Labor Day or my willy-nilly parking in town lots at beach and lake couldn't've happened. My mother and I would occasionally swim in Roger's Lake, but up in Town Woods, when she didn't want to drive all the way to Uncas, but I haven't been in the shallow, tepid water at Haynes Park since Hurricane Gloria, when after three days of yard clean-up and no electricity I biked over with a bar of Ivory. We attempted to build castles (too coarse a grain), to volley a ball in lacrosse-y baskets, and to seesaw. A 150-pound woman can teeter but not totter when at the opposite end are a 7- and a 4-year old. They scrunched waaaay back and I sat waaaay forward, ahead of the handle and nearly at the fulcrum, and that worked somewhat better. But not much. And then someone dumped a bucket of water on me, so then it was war! After a staggeringly healthy dinner at Hallmark's (fries and a mocha shake for me), they dropped me off at the house and ABW set off with a cargo of exuberantly yelling boys.
I spent the evening with my mother and BDL and that seems to have been fine too. Tedious as usual, but no tenser than usual. It was only after I reminded my mother of my plans for the rest of the week that the stress level ratcheted up, or that's how I remember it now. I had told her that I was traveling to see other people, Charenton and RPR and TJZ, who had guests or a trip to Vermont or baptisms that precluded their coming to UncasCon, but she didn't pay attention or believe or whatever. Now, this makes sense: hurt that I chose to spend so little of my time with her, she acted hurtly, and I got mad for feeling however guilty I felt, and maybe guilty for not feeling guiltier, and the vicious cycle continues.