Apricot Submarine

We had a day in Port Townsend, on the Olympic Peninsula, earlier this summer. The Olympic Peninsula–for those of you approximately as advanced at U.S. geography as I am–is the sticky-outy bit at the upper left of the continental United States. It’s where Forks is, as in Twilight, and also Port Townsend, a delightful preserved Victorian seaside town where we can have hamburgers & malts, play on a sandy beach, and spend too much money at preposterous boutiques while our crab pots soak.

To get to it, if you’re a northerly type and don’t want to approach from the mainland to the south of it, you cross the Hood Canal Bridge. This is a floating bridge and also a movable bridge, to allow watercraft to pass. If you plan to take the Hood Canal Bridge there is always a danger that it will be opened when you get there, which stops traffic for about 30 minutes.

Anyway, on the way home that day we stopped at Chimacum to buy a 25-pound box of apricots, and that delayed us just enough that as we pulled up to the bridge, we were stopped for an opening. Now, when traffic is stopped for 30 minutes at a time it backs up quite a bit, so usually you’re stopped a mile or so back and have no idea what kind of craft the bridge has opened for.

That day, though? We were within the first dozen cars,so we were actually on the bridge… and the craft was a nuclear submarine.

I mean, wow. Even living in this area, with the Bangor Trident Missile Base eating up a huge swathe of the coast, you don’t see a submarine every day. People got out of their cars to take pictures. Everyone was excited, and we certainly were, too.

Anyway. We got home and I had 25 pounds of apricots to process. I made a lot of jam,

which was a boneheaded move considering that we don’t really eat jam in our household, but also several quarts of stewed apricots, which I have very happily been eating with my morning oatmeal and also my evening yogurt. I also made a pie,

which ran over prodigiously and which, in my usual way, I didn’t sweeten enough. Anyway it all made a pretty picture on the 4th of July tablescape I had out at the time, with calendula from the cutting garden.

This summer has been soul-crushing. Sparks is finalizing his magnum opus, and has gone full Nutty Professor to do so. He’s been in his shop 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, and prying him away for a day out like the one in Port Townsend makes me feel guilty, but has also felt necessary (we also went to the Tacoma zoo once, and I think that’s it.) The child is a strong, smart, and good child, but she’s also a lonely-only with emotional scars from pandemic isolation, so when friends and group activities haven’t filled in the space, I have worked hard to.

I had jury duty, the kid has an oral surgery upcoming, I’m having to do a lot of Very Important Bureaucratic Stuff, both cars need oil changes, and above all–the very worst thing–our well is going dry. We have Public Health’s approval to drill a new one, and a driller who supposedly has us on the roster for late winter, and meanwhile we’re living with half a gallon a minute, and about 30 gallons max in storage.

You may remember that I am a gardener and that PNW summers are terribly, terribly dry. This year the spring was also terribly dry. And watering plants is… hard, under our current conditions. So amid all the obligations and worries, the one thing that I really do for myself and feel proud of in the summers has been more or less taken from me.

Sparks, bless his heart, hasn’t let me give up completely. He waters things in the early morning, before I’m up. The garden is still growing. Things aren’t dying. But it all makes me so tired.

I stopped blogging again, after that short start. I think I got spooked. People who *know* me were reading the entries and commenting, and I am not accustomed to being known. Certainly not over spans of many years. I’ve always moved house periodically, often to new states where I get to start fresh as a new person. This blog, at this point, has readers who have “known” me for 20 years, and I don’t know exactly how to deal with that. I was a very different, unhappy, and slightly awful person when I began to write here. But so confident. So sure I could do everything best. And as a result, I sort of did do a lot of great things.

Now I am middle aged, closer to the peak of my powers, but much of the confidence is gone. I know there are better cooks. I know for damn sure there are prettier houses. Sewing and knitting make me tired. I can’t water my damn garden. So… gee.

Then there are the awful revelations about social media in recent years. Back in the 2000s lots of people I knew saw it coming: they didn’t want me to post pictures of them, they didn’t want to join Facebook. I just wanted to enjoy it all; privacy really didn’t occur to me.

Now it does, of course. After the last few years I think it has occurred to all of us. And where does that leave blogging? Where does that leave pictures and stories?

Oh well.