Month: September 2024

Here you get to know just what an awful person I really am. This is my favorite month. After a summer of loads of people on the beach, last weekend marked the end of summer, and I am thrilled. Clearly I’m turning into an antisocial hermit, but I’ll just have to lean into that and quit apologizing for my love of places that are mostly devoid of humans. I get to hear the waves, the gulls, my own thoughts, the crows, the wind, the crickets, all the natural sounds of this Lake Michigan shoreline. The summer-only folks close up their cottages, the renters disappear, the beach gets scrubbed clean by the wind. Ahhhhh.

Okay, I won’t lie—in the off-season when I’m here alone for more than a few days, it does get a bit lonely. Still, I love it best when it feels like almost no one else is here along this stretch of beach, the biting wind kissing my face alone.

Lonely and alone, though. Two words most associate with melancholy, sadness, maybe defiance, possibly abnormality. I am regenerated by being alone, and I never used to feel lonely until the last several years. Oddly, I rarely feel lonely when I am alone, though… for me, loneliness creeps in when I’m with other people but am not feeling any connection. Is this my age, or something collective in our human experience? I’m not sure.

In any case, the week here was warm and full of all the things you want a stretch of beach to be, with warm, swimmable water, a broad beach to walk on, gorgeous sunsets. Until the rain came and the temperature dropped yesterday, a reminder of fall to come.

Today dawned cool and windy with clouds that lingered into the early afternoon and cleared to a stellar blue sky as I write this in the early evening, with soup on the cooktop using all the local veggies I could find at the farm stands. I have settled into no longer being a student, and I’m happy to report I feel much more comfortable about that than I did in my last posts. And since that writing, I’ve devoured over a dozen books, mainly novels, some poetry, too. I mostly abandoned novels over the past few decades, favoring nonfiction instead, but there’s a shift in me and somehow dystopian—or more dark, or somewhat askew—novels are really drawing me in. Books that are a little unsettling but still melodious, hopeful, cheerful still in some way. The book I finished this morning after reading late into the last three nights was just that. Hours later, I’m still feeling part of the storyline, the characters and their habitats still within reach.

All of this to say I still have more time on my hands than I’m used to. Reading is helping, but I have art supplies I have yet to bring out, and poor excuses for not bringing them out. So that’s on my list this weekend, but first I had a burst of using up some film in July and didn’t get around to posting much other than a few images in my last two posts, so adding a few here. More film, more art. That’s what I’m hopeful for in the coming months and years. Finding myself again, or maybe rediscovering.