Summer, unedited

What sustained work are you longing to do?

Penny and Lance © Hannah Clarkin

Hello my friends,

One of my goals for Sea Diary is write regularly and not overthink my entries. Another is to write more directly and openly. There is always this wall that I can’t seem to punch through, in all the writing I do. I arrange things to appear more idyllic than they are, realize this, and then leave it that way. Everything I’ve sent out thus far is the result of several weeks of work, many drafts, and soliciting feedback from tolerant readers.¹

So here is a letter, that I will try not to edit, from my actual summer.

We are midway through July, and humidity has settled over Cape Cod like a physical manifestation of brain fog. Each day dawns overcast, as if it will eventually rain, and then it mostly doesn’t. The temperatures are low, rarely breaking 80, but the air is thick. Our hydrangeas are happy piles of fat blossoms—pink, purple, blue, white—they can gather water out of the air. One loop around our half-mile block and the dogs are breathing hard, tongues hanging, beards dripping. I don’t want to tell you about their beards because that sounds unpleasant. I want you to imagine our schnauzers with dry, silken beards, at all times. But they cannot move through this humidity without panting. When we return I try to give them long drinks at the hose, with the ulterior motive of washing their beards. Lance accepts this, and laps the water gamely. Penny shies away, and hovers beside the door, waiting to go inside and drink from her own bucket.

The pace of life, now that it is summer, feels disjointed and insistent. All the routines of spring have dropped away, and in their place is a feeling of too much. Too many people driving on the roads, too many plans, too much ice cream (I know, things are getting desperate). I show up at my desk on Friday mornings and cannot decide what to write about. My mind buzzes as I consider the past week, trouble about the upcoming election, and then start arranging my study so it will be a calm refuge for our next overnight guest. I don’t know the topic of my next essay. I just want to escape.

For the last two summers I spent this part of July at sea on research vessels for work. This year, I miss it. Those voyages drew a firm line across the summer. All my other projects in the office had to be completed. All my responsibilites at home paused. I agonized about packing, how my dietary restrictions would be handled by the steward, and the writing and photography deadlines I’d have while aboard—and then I set sail.

Working overtime at sea cannot be construed as a vacation, but I am swooning with nostalgia for it. I idealize being out on the Caribbean, how blinding and hot it was outside, the roar of a working vessel, the humming of generators and singing of hydraulic cranes moving equipment into the water. The air was so salty that flakes formed on all the rails. I imagine being in the bow, leaning against it, looking out at the distant horizon or down into the passing water, surrendering my body to the roll of a ship underway.

But mostly, the longing is for the order of those days: the liturgy of watches, launches, common meals. The simplicity of my work: just writing.

I finished reading Writers & Lovers by Lily King this week, and found the end unexpectedly moving² I read most of it for the setting—Cambridge, Massachusetts in the 1990s—a sub-genre I never knew I’d love.³ I laughed that the main character actually lived in a potting shed, because in our years of living in a basement apartment only a few miles from where she is supposed to be, I openly fantasized about renting someone’s potting shed, which would at least be above ground.

I won’t say much about the plot, but I will share this quote, which is delivered after the character confesses her enormous student-loan debts, family estrangement, string of terrible jobs, and recent heartbreak:

“What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful. Maybe some of you … have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.”

I came for a summer read and was left with the longing to embark on the sustained work of writing.

I want the kind of project that I will continue across years, if necessary, to see what I can build. I’ve felt this before, but only as an occasional flicker that I instantly dismiss as impossible. It seems significant that the possibility sounds good to me, for the first time in a decade.

I want to write more—maybe about a recent lake swim and how differently the light penetrates freshwater, or my plan to pick blueberries this weekend, or how I am turning 40 in just a few weeks and that knowledge feels almost as freighted as this humid air—but I am out of time for today.

Outside my study window the sun is coming and going, the great oak boughs are swaying in the wind, and the inside of the glass all across the house is starting to fog as we run the air conditioning to drain the air of moisture. Behind me, Lance is snoring loudly on the floor and across the hall Penny is flat on her side in her crate, her breath softly huffing. It’s the afternoon. I need to rouse these dogs for a walk, take a shower, and go meet some friends for a backyard party. I will come back to my desk, but not to work on this, because I’m going to schedule this to send before I change my mind.

What sustained work are you longing to do?

With love,
Hannah

1. First reader is always Christopher and my grad school friend Kaitlin has read every entry (except this one) for me.

2. This, and most of my summer reading, came from going to the library and checking out nearly all books “about depressed people” in Emma Straub’s Summer Reading Assignment.

3. Two other books that I loved set in Cambridge in the 1990s: Either/Or by Elif Batuman and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Levin.