Simple Things

   There is a heaviness in this morning heat as I sit and sip my morning coffee. From my back porch the half moon hangs in a hot dull blue above the soft green of the trees lining my yard. On the street, the trash truck is beeping incessantly in reverse. (Why, I don't know.) The muffled traffic on 117 seems more distant than ever before. The yard is as the kids left it: the mower parked in front of the soccer net, trucks scattered in the sandbox, towels hanging on the porch rail; and the balls—footballs, baseballs, soccer-balls, basketballs, and whiffleballs—grow like fungus scattered on a feral lawn. The kids will return next week. I can already hear them screaming as they jump out of the bus. They will disperse like a flock of startled grackles into every corner of the yard; they will try to catch up on everything at once. Every ball will be chucked to a new home; the swings and the slide will be tested; the blackberries will be gorged; the cats will be chased under the shed; the sprinkler will go on—and so will life as we know it as the beautiful panoply of seven kids returns to their other Eden.

It is strange to be here alone. Denise and the kids are up in their other paradise at Windsor Mountain. I came home yesterday to do a couple of shows and pad the bank account before I head back up later today. From there, we'll load everyone on the bus and keep going north for a weekend in Vermont with cousins and friends on Pete's mountain tree farm. We'll climb the mossy waterfall and fish for bass in the pond, and roast and sing around a massive campfire. We'll flip pancakes and make challenges and boasts for 'capture the flag', and we'll climb the small peak and look south and lie about how about far we see: “There, past the far mountain, I see Maynard, and I see Gramma Mary knitting on the porch—and there's Soren knocking on our door. He's yelling, “Where are you? Are you ever coming home?'” In the mid century of my life, every memory becomes a blessing—a host offered to a loving and waiting deity. In every moment there is nothing more that can be done. We simply are what we need to be.

Summer for us is a time to live and relive every moment. It becomes a tapestry that we hold like a child's blanket throughout the rest of the year. It is the promise that we repeat to ourselves when dragged back into the rituals of our other life. We wait in expectation of the returning dawn. We gather our scrapbooks and laugh at the memories. We go back to the pond. Tommy paddling around on a surfboard singing, “Merry Christmas, I can swim.” EJ caught in mid air trying to back flip off the rope swing, his body a tattoo of bug bites, scrapes, sunburn and muscle; Margaret celebrating her first headfirst dive, the wet jangles of bracelets she wove during some craft’s class glistening on her ankles, wrists and neck; Emma squatting at the edge of the dive tower peering in her solipsistic intensity into the waiting abyss of joy; Pipo neck deep in the pond counting out the seconds he can tread water: “One- two-threefourfive six!” Kaleigh, bedraggled and smiling after two weeks of paddling and climbing and becoming a young woman, is surrounded by friends who think she's the coolest kid on the planet—and Charlie—everything to Charlie is joy: seven years old, his long blond hair in dreadlocks, soaring higher and spinning wildly off the rope swing as if gravity only applies to the timid. Always near, always one clutch away, Denise leads them everywhere: cheering, brokering, warning, and loving—and loving, too, every second of every summer day.

Nothing we do is grand. No place we go is uncommon, but in the steady flow of simple actions we flow into the greater sea of common, ordinary joy—and that is all we need. It is all anyone needs. As you write, don’t forget to celebrate the common and the ordinary. Don't wait for inspiration. Don't wait for something extraordinary to write about. Simply look around you and within you. Weave your own tapestry out of the life you live. If what you see gives you joy, it will give others joy to read about it. If what you do is hard and moiling, let your writing capture that toil, and we will live more fully and think more deeply through your efforts. We often travel too far to see too little. Let your own backyard—the life that you know best—be the place where you begin.

In the end, we can only write well what we truly know. Start there.