“Love is the great good use one person makes of another”

~ Lorine Neidecker

Without melancholy, and with gratitude, I walked, slowly, through the Menemsha Hills down to the beach for my last walk of this trip. We went early. There was sunshine. There were many gifts from the walk, including the sparkling spider web on the trail and the moon shell in the rocks on the beach. Finding the moon shell reminded me of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s “A Gift From the Sea,” and I looked up the quote about solitude and the moon shell. Also, I listened again to a recording of Lorine Neidecker reading her poems and heard, again, the wonderful quote about love. I listened to Adrienne Rich read three poems, including a favorite, “Dreamwood.” I walked along the rocks and had an idea for the poetry reading I’m going to give on August 24 with my friend Jenny Grassl, showing our art and reading our poems. So, now I’m eager to prepare for this. I packed without melancholy while Frank worked and my daughter and her boyfriend woke an helped and we went, for the last time of this trip, to Lucy Vincent Beach in the early afternoon, and it was a yellow flag and low clouds and peace and sunshine. The afternoon grew more cloudy than sunny and so we went home and packed and packed and put the house in order and the dogs in the car and went to the ferry and then, driving toward our house well after dark, in three different cars, we all saw it: the orange shooting star that fell out of the sky right over our house. We are home.

“Î find there is a quality to being alone that is incredibly precious. Life rushes back into the void, richer, more vivid, fuller than before. . . “

~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh, excerpt from the “Moon Shell” chapter from “Gifts From the Sea.”