Summer Interlude

Tags

beach, driftwood, Georgia, out of this world, St Simons Island, summer, Weekly Photo Challenge, youth

A seasonal time warp dropped me into a brief summer idyll last week. In the day and a half it took me to drive nearly halfway across the lower U.S., I transitioned from late winter rain and fog to luminous blue skies, cottony clouds, and soft, warm air.

In the early hours, the atmosphere was thick with fog and the greasy refinery stench of East Texas, Lake Charles, and Baton Rouge. As I pushed on, the petrochemical panorama eventually gave way to tangly brown swamps crouching below the causeways of Louisiana.

For me, it’s always an eerie part of the drive – a divided road propped up on pylons above the brackish water, followed by bridges over the Atchafalaya Basin’s Henderson Swamp, an enormous and ghostly pool of water in which half-buried trees appear to be drowning. Billboards hawk boudin and cracklins for miles, neither of which tempted me to stray from my path hard east.

The mist slowly lifted, and so did my spirits, as I spied skeins of birds unspooling over the low-country wetlands of Mississippi and Alabama and, later, a shimmering expanse of water dancing with hard white points of light near Pensacola.

The second morning, fields of bristly marsh grasses appeared, my sign that coastal Georgia was near. I-10 straight east, Houston to Jacksonville, and then a short northern jog. That’s all it took to land me in a hot summer milieu that smelled just like childhood.

It lasted all week, a gift of lightness and the very best kind of nostalgia. “School’s out!” the fresh air cried, and we flung the windows open and popped in the screens at my parents’ sunny house. It was summer break in mid-February, and I hungrily inhaled the sweet and earthy scent of grass and warm soil. I marveled as flowers and ferns began to sprout from one day to the next. A chorus of birdsong was my morning wake-up call, and cheeping insects serenaded the dog and me on her last trip outside each night.

I pedaled an old bike into the wind, savoring the delectable mix of hot sun and cool air on bare arms. In the company of my parents and younger sister, we revisited old pastimes, ducking into the DQ for long-eschewed treats and lolling on the couch with the NY Times crossword in the evening. The aroma of fresh shrimp and veggies rose from the grill, and a hint of chlorine, fertilizer, and light mildew – all smells I strangely love – put the finishing touches on my olden-days reverie. The years and cares that had been piling up rolled away, and if my birthday hadn’t been at the end of that exquisite week, I might have been convinced I was several decades younger.

Which leads me to graceful aging …

A highlight of the week was a walk on Jekyll Island’s Driftwood Beach, a popular, well-loved shoreline that had somehow eluded my acquaintance in many years of being so close by. It was immediately obvious this had been a terrible oversight!

Jekyll’s northern beaches are slowly eroding; each year, more and more sand is pushed by the sea and dumped on the south end of the island. In that process, centuries-old live oaks and pines are uprooted and scattered across the hard sand that is constantly pounded by ocean currents and then baked by the sun.

A few trees remain rooted but most are sun-bleached carcasses strewn about like sculptures in an outdoor art exhibit. While the otherworldly scene has become popular for wedding shoots, my sister and I used it like the children we had regressed to, climbing barefoot on trunks, branches, and toppled root systems as our father amusedly looked on.

The driftwood has an admirable, simple beauty, a spare look that’s enhanced by the blue of the ocean beyond and the pinkish tinge of early sunset. We roamed aimlessly for a while, climbed some more, took our photos, then slipped back through the ferns and palms to the road. Like the buffed and whitened old trees, my own troubled edges were scrubbed clean by my week in the sun, and I came home rejuvenated, eager to reclaim the simple pleasures of summer and youth, every day.

Home again