Seal, popovers and fireworks over Cadillac

I've packed my woolens and water-tights, a month's-worth of heavy hardcovers, party favors for 4th July (including stick-on bindi that spell out U S A in red white and blue sparkle dots), Lady Gray tea, printer, battery chargers, diary and glue stick.

Nice thing about Maine packing - nothing remotely strapless needed. No peasant skirts, no faux-indian tunics, no massive sunglasses. Same relief I felt packing for India/Nepal - if you can wear it every day, or every item at once, all the better.

Was thinking about those aspirational packing features in the glossy magazines and lifestyle catalogs like VIVRE. Following their lead, I would have turned to the classic preppy section of my closet (as distinguished from the boho st. barths or the glam ibiza sections) and piled my canvas duffels high with white linen pants, french sailor tops, espadrills, Fred Perrys.

There's a reason LL Bean is in Maine.

God I can't wait to be there.

C

Resenting return, reality

True-to-form, I'm back and grumpy. I'm annoying myself.

I'm sullen about re-immersion in modern culture, resentful that people call this city life living.

My beach, my silence and tide pools? Where's my mossed path and library of botany, geology, Lewis Carol and Chesterton's verse? Where's my damn view??

R has to deal with my trucculence - me flopping about, sniffing my balsam sachet like a smelling salt that will spirit me from this world back to that Maine one.

I emerge to civility, but not without wishing my apartment had view of rocky shores, that my move upstate was in a few days not months, and that Starbucks on 76th and Columbus would get socked in with fog.


C - feet on pavement, mind on the rocks