Honea Express

Archive for the ‘summer’ Category

People often ask me what it is I like to do in my free time. To which I say, mind your own freaking business. If I wanted you to know about it I would put it on the blog. Or Twitter. Or Facebook. But probably not Google Plus.

But then it dawned on me that I do not have a moment of free time, hence my inability to answer. Sure, some might say that writing a blog post is “free time” and I get that, but I’m just taking a break from writing something for money. That’s a job, people. Some smoke on their breaks, I blog. Also, pornography.

Basically, I wanted to touch base with you, the reader(s), and let each and every single one one of you know that I truly appreciate your kindness in what was (and continues to be) a very tough time for us. But we’re making due and getting by, and the good (deity of your choice) willing, maybe we’ll win a few games.

I’ve been keeping busy. Limey Yank Productions is a full-time job without all the hassle of benefits or paychecks, and I’ve been posting random bits of parenting woes and whoas all over the designated play area of the Internet. I’m also trying something new: humor. It’s like funny.

My wife is enjoying her new job, the boys like their new school (the youngest started kindergarten last week!) and the dogs seem happy to be happy. I don’t know what the hell the cats are up to.

And in the meantime life is bits of love and leisure wrapped tightly between inboxes and deadlines. We spend our days working and our nights trying to catch up. The boys bounce barefoot from beach to branch, leaving a trail of sand-covered Magnolias in their wake.  The days fly by us like we’re standing still, but we are moving fast in all directions.

The wind is a chorus of whispers and promise. Free time is but a kite in the distance.

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Thank you for reading.

And here are the links I couldn’t fit into the paragraphs above. You’re welcome:

Atticus and the Lion King 3D Premiere (video)

Public schools outlawing peanuts

Disney’s D23 Expo recaps, Day 1 and Day 2

The sound was children laughing. The distance was measured in steps. There was skipping and screaming, and toys thrown asunder — the usual suspects of happiness that have lovingly littered our small street for the past two years.

“But there is something missing,” said the neighbor.

I said nothing and watched the children run by us. They took the hill with confidence, a blur of open mouths and hair blown by the wind. Between them flickered empty spaces of sunlight where my boys used to be.

I said nothing and watched the birds fly overhead. The clouds were low and pulled further down by greedy trees with nothing better to do.  The mist fell across my face, cool and sticky. It saved me the trouble of crying. The house just stood there with a blank look across its face, its door wide open. Inside it was nothing but boxes, echoes, and the ghost of a home slowly dying.

The children ran back up the hill, a pack chasing after laughter. Our eyes met as they passed me by, and for a moment the world fell silent.  I could read the writing on their wall, the smiles upon their faces. They were happy, but they knew it too, for they had left the spaces.

______________________

Reading this post again, I can see how those that don’t know our story may find it cause for concern. My children are fine. They have just moved to California ahead of me to spend time with their grandparents while my wife starts her new job.  Unfortunately, they left some great friends behind in the process.

It’s Father’s Day and I spent it at a beer festival, forgive me for waxing melancholy.

I was fairly stationary as a child. I lived in the same house until college. Then I lived in the same area for another ten years. I was never more than 40 minutes away from anyone, friend, family or foe. Not that I had any foes, but I did have a love for alliteration.

I met my wife, and on a whim we hit the road. Once the moving started we couldn’t stop — kind of like dancing, except with less alcohol. My wife and I dropped pins all over the left side of the map. We were up, down and then up again. We had U-Haul on speed dial. Our last stop found us just outside of Seattle.

There are things here that we love. There are friendly people, incredible neighbors, wonderful summers, scenic beauty in every direction, fantastic schools and a sense of community that I haven’t known since my childhood. We live in a quaint town where roots are deep and well-watered. It is a perfect setting in which to raise a family.

But there are things that are dark and press against us, and the silver lining has become harder and harder to find within them. The clouds stretch from the sea to the summer, and their constant soaking leaves a layer of cold tucked tight between skin and bone. There will never be enough logs upon the fire.

Seasonal affective disorder comes and goes, literally with the seasons, but with each ebb it grows slower, and every flow seems more fond of shadows than sunlight.  Sadness grows like mold in the corners of our happy household.

The children do not go through bouts of depression, but rather sit beside them and grow restless and frustrated. They do not want to go outside into the cold and the rain, but they would enjoy it if we took them there.  The trips are few and far between. The children suffer secondhand, which is full of shame and lacking in justice.

We have tried to compensate with manufactured light, an overextended calendar and daily supplements, but all it has done is make us face the truth. It is time to pay heed to Harry Nilsson and go where the weather suits our clothes. It is time for sailing on a summer breeze.

Come June, when we are done with school and leases, we will follow our footsteps back to the sands of California. There is where opportunity awaits, and with it a warmth to bask in. Our running is equal parts to and from.

The leaving is bittersweet, and it packs a heavy heart, but the journey should find us nearly healed and the arrival somewhat lighter.

The ocean stretches from July to forever. We are the stones that skip across it.

Inland was warmth and sunshine and days of summer stretching wearily. The coast, however, was 20 degrees cooler and worked in so many shades of gray.  The sky fell into the sea and the waves rolled across my cold feet before running up the stairs to take their place at the end of the line.  Clouds waited patiently.

The rocks in the ocean were the size of ships, and ships were the size of small birds flying off in the distance.  There was a cave on the beach and in it sat a family around a campfire.  Their dog ran free and happy, a green ball held tightly in its mouth.

She stopped in mid-sentence, her words lost beneath the beat of a tide rolling in.  I hadn’t been listening.  I was writing poems in my head as I am prone to do, and then promptly forgetting them as that requires much less effort than actually writing them down.  Most of them were rubbish, but one may have been damn near perfect.  I watched her watch the ground.  She was brilliant against the sepia shore.

She bent down and picked a drop of red out of the surf-trodden sand. It was a ladybug, caked in grains and left for dead.  Suddenly, the beach was alive with polka-dots in reds and yellows and the polka-dots were, in turn, covered in dots of their own.  We sat on our knees in the sand and dug ladybug after ladybug from their collective coastline grave.  Our shoes, which had long ago left our feet and become something meaningless to hold on to, became the soles of rebirth. It was on the bottom of my left flip-flop that one ladybug found breath and another was once again able to crawl.  It was somewhere opposite where my big toe would be that a ladybug shook the sand from its wings and flew away home.

It seems that they live in the trees that tremble from the side of steep ocean cliffs, and when certain winds blow the way that certain winds do, the ladybugs are pulled from whatever life they have known and dropped without warning over deep waters and hungry fish. Assuming they don’t drown, are not eaten or lost at sea, they are marooned on beaches not 50 feet from the trees on which they started.  But they are pounded with ebbs and flows, and they are forgotten amongst shells and bits of seaweed.  All in all, it’s no way to treat a lady.

And so we gathered those that we could and we carried them on flip-flops covered with newfound meaning to a piece of driftwood just below the tree line. The ladybugs wandered aimlessly and probably thought things about mortality and what to make of second chances.

Every so often one of us would say how much the boys would like this while the other would nod, skip a stone or stare out at the sea. They were on a different beach in a different state looking over the same nothingness and the endless everything. Our day was a glass half hollow, half lined with romance. We played the percentages.

Then we walked back across the beach, our shoes once again empty, our feet still cold and bare.  We passed big rocks, small ships, a family around a fire and a dog with a ball and the constant need to wag.   Our car was waiting for us, and beyond it a green forest and blue skies and something pretty on the radio.

We got sand everywhere.

UPDATE: Troy’s EP is now available on iTunes (it’s featured on the Country Music page).
Working in the creative arts as I do I tend to have a lot of friends that are doing some really cool stuff.  Yes, I get jealous and poke pins in little dolls holding book deals and movie rights, but for the most part I’m really happy for them.  There are few things more frightening than putting yourself out there to be judged, loved and splattered with tomatoes — it can hurt like hell or it can feel like sex wrapped in sunshine and bacon.  These are called the ups and downs and they are what make or break artists.  The fact that I’m lucky enough to know people with such passion and talent is amazing, humbling and downright inspiring.

Which leads me to my friend Troy Olsen.  Long story short, Troy is the guy that introduced me to my wife.  That’s a great story in its own right, but this post isn’t about that.  This post is about the fact that 12 years of talent and hard work have turned Troy into an overnight success.  He has penned songs for Tim McGraw and Blake Shelton, which is pretty damn cool, but he now has his own album coming out after signing with Capitol Records, and just last week his first single debuted at number 57 on the country charts.  The record doesn’t come out until later in the year and at that time I’ll run a giveaway for an autographed copy or something sweet like that, but in the meantime you should check Troy out and remember that you heard him here first, strumming out a Summer Thing and looking surprisingly pin-free.