maine island days

July 7th sunrise, Sutton Island, Maine.

4:55am, or so

[I wrote this post yesterday morning, after a week on our favorite island with all the kids plus S.O.'s - the first ever gathering of all 9 of us]

Back on Sutton Island in Maine, where time hovers in suspension.  We leave today.  I say goodbye to a large number of those whom I hold most dear, so I am restless.  I always get unsettled when they leave me, when they go off into their cars and planes and lives – all those things fraught with unknown perils.  At least, that’s what it sometimes feels like when they are out of my hands, out of my sight.

The sunrise is always there, more often ignored than not these days.  The month of June slipped away without a sunrise excursion.  But today I allowed it to call me out.

I’ve been in a kind of holding pattern, waiting not for a landing but a launching.   I suppose I’m waiting to be called out in a bigger way.  Less than a week remains before I start my first residency for an MFA program in writing, and I’ve been writing virtually not at all.  I wish I didn’t feel the need to be shoved forward by some external force, but that seems to be my lot.  

Maybe with that impetus I can write about this island, the thoughts that flit by, the personalities inhabiting my life’s space, cookouts on the rocks interrupted by a drenching rain, hummingbirds at the feeder, barnacle scrapes, wading to a tidal island, catching up with a slew of 20-somethings over breakfast on a hot summer morning, many dogs draped over stones and decks in a state of island bliss, lots of coffee from a French press, margaritas shaken up in a washed out spaghetti sauce jar…stuff like that.

 dawn glow through a screen door...