Roaming in the Glorious

Last summer I learned how to live forever, not an experience I sought or thought I was remotely interested in knowing more about. But the answer was in Maine’s summer blue sky, yet I wasn’t looking at the sky at first.

I was sitting on a bench on Monument Square on Congress street sipping coffee at 7:00 a.m. while delivery trucks with Maine eggs, raw honey, and beer made stops at local shops. Tourists took pictures of Our Lady of Liberties with her flowing bronze skirt, shield, sword and, under her skirt, men from each branch of the military service and year of the war they fought. But the blue sky was the main attraction. It muscled its way into everything – sidewalks, roofs of brick buildings, and as reflections of turquoise seas on glass windows of offices above. Only soaring sea gulls, flying low enough to cut a silhouette of their shadows on the façade of buildings and summer camp children, who walked on the square playing “I spy” and screaming out “the sky” when the instructor said she saw something blue, sensed the cloudless sky was glorious. “Not that blue,” the instructor corrected them, but who was she kidding, no other blue was worth noting.

It was a beautiful summer with 78 degree days and dazzling warm rays of sunlight. Day after day, I refused to return home to work on my online classes, write, or shower after my early morning workouts. Instead, I sat on the bench dazed by the days until I my skin turned the brown of a worn leather couch.

Being mindful of the daily sky, I recalled a Caribbean honeymoon long ago, the joy of suspended happiness on an island with pretty hills, sandy beaches, sunny days, and a cruise ship in port. But this blue wasn’t that blue; this sky flexed its vibrant color muscle into my face and pumped its vigor into my veins. Like me, it was alive. After four years of living in Maine, why hadn’t I ever noticed its summer sky?

Suddenly, I understood my memory from a trip to France and seeing a young, beautiful Parisienne woman, in a red silk party dress and black motorcycle boots, sitting on a park bench at nine in the morning and staring lovingly at the Seine as if she had slept in the river's depth and emerged grateful for another day to roam dry land. 

My memories stretched back further to the attic of my childhood home in Queens, New York, where I rolled around the red acrylic carpet in the attic and wondered about its prickliness. I recalled the opaque wallpaper stamped with green leaves on porch windows that didn’t allow a view of the running trains outside no matter how much I stared beyond it. Such sudden and never before recollected memories raced back as an epiphany of presence and timelessness being one and the same: an experience of pure life that cancelled the stress of passing time and weaved intense curiosity for the moment into an eternity of aliveness.

I refused to go home and walked instead the small city's brick sidewalks to Munjoy Hill and Casco Bay with sailboats like dozens of white barrettes pinned loosely to the water, and the Maine islands stretched to the horizon like petri dishes of mini-green forests. The sweat collected on my skin until I smelled of the buttered popcorn I ate at the movie theatre on Temple Street.

When I returned to my apartment late in the afternoons, I ran the water in my tub, grateful for the hot water tank my landlady boasted of keeping fully operational. Scrubbed my skin with a green glove made sudsy with a lavender goat milk soap made in Vermont. Ducked my head to listen to the vigorous gurgling of my manmade stream. Made suds while shampooing my hair.  Soaked my body in steaming hot water while conditioning my hair.  Splashed with freezing water from my shower-head above. Toweled-dried my hair and body.  And walked barefoot and naked around my apartment to feel the warmth of the day and coolness of the mahogany wood floor, with dark brown stains like age spots, on the soles of my feet.

When fall arrived I was surprised and shocked. The blue of the sky was vacuumed into a more subdued hue, the rains came, the temperature dropped, and my restlessness increased as I mourned the end of a summer I had lived forever. 
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