Edges Like Sea Glass

By Leah LaRocco

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Pardon Our Appearance

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Please pardon the disheveled appearance of Edges Like Sea Glass while I attempt to recover lost photos, text, and links that did not transfer over from Blogger.

At this point in time, I think that I’ve finally recovered all the photos and re-inserted into the posts, thanks to this link.  If you notice any pictures that are still missing or not working, please leave a comment and let me know! In the meantime, your patience is appreciated as I try to figure out this new situation and keep my sanity intact!

Here’s a lovely sunset from Georgica Beach in East Hampton …

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A Walk In Winter: Not To Be Missed

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices.  Today I woke up, puttered around the kitchen for a while, read a book, started to take a nap, and finally forced myself to get out of bed and leave the house.  We’ve had snow here in Nashville which has been a bit of a phenomenon because it’s actually hung around.  Most of the time when it snows here, the totals barely reach an inch and within a few hours become a distant memory as we slog through mud for a few days.  I haven’t been able to get into the woods over the past few weekends because of bad weather and things we had going on, but today I was determined to see the trees covered in snow.

As I left the house and crunched along the ice on our road, I kept thinking about turning around, but the main roads were clear.  When I pulled into the park, I couldn’t contain my excitement.  I didn’t fix or filter any of these pictures, this is just how it was.  And the whole time I was walking and trudging up the trail I kept thinking, “I could have missed this.  I could have stayed inside and missed this.”

Edwin Warner Park

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“I would have missed this…”  It got me thinking.  How much do I miss as a result of certain choices?  It’s always easier to stay home, snuggle up with a cat and a book, drink some tea, and bliss out on a good story.  It’s easier than making the effort to pick up the phone or make time in the calendar to connect with friends.  Easier than getting bundled up and walking to town for exercise when it’s cold out.  Easier than planning a trip and going to the airport and flying somewhere.  It’s always easier to stay home.  But is it always worth it?

I’m married to a man who is slowly introducing balance into my life because we are opposites in just about every way.  Where I feel the need to GO GO GO in order to feel productive and be inspired, he feels the need to rest and relax as a result of the physically exhausting nature of his job.  So on days where I’m dying to get out, he is often aching to put his feet up and chill.  We are learning to respect our individual needs and compromise whenever we can.  So sometimes the choice to stay home is a necessary one.

But if there’s one thing I would encourage everyone in my life to do, it would be to get outside more and experience this beautiful world that we live in.

Radnor Lake

 

 

 

 

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or
philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to
point B.  It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With
what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness
the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams
and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was
powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like
this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would
always feel this way.”  
Cheryl Strayed “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail”

We Didn’t Win The Powerball: Hello, 2016!

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David Bowie has died.  Another creator’s voice silenced when the world felt there was still so much to give.  A reminder to all of us that life change change on a dime, that it’s never long enough to fully accomplish all we intend.  And then there is Alan Rickman…I don’t even know where to begin with this one.  He will forever be Colonel Brandon and Severus Snape to me, in that order.  He was as dashing a figure as ever there was and such a brilliant actor.  He will be missed. Always…

The end of 2015 slipped past quietly.  Any time I spend New Year’s Eve at home on Long Island there is nothing to do.  Everyone I know up there is praying in the New Year, faithfully on their knees as midnight comes and goes, ushering in the unknown future by acknowledging God first.  As a kid this used to drive me crazy.  The clock would get closer and closer to midnight and they’d all still be praying…what about the ball drop?  What about screaming Happy New Year and singing Auld Ang Syne? What about bear hugs all around and champagne and cheers?  Instead, fervent requests for the fate of our country, peace in the Middle East, the homeless in our community…on they prayed through the strike of an old grandfather clock in some distant corner of the house.  As an adult, I hold dear their reverence.

It’s a notion that I would love to grab hold of, to say that my faith is strong enough to want to eschew things like frivolous celebration, but is celebration not a prayer of thankfulness itself?  I no longer care about a ball dropping in Times Square, but every year when midnight rolls around, the slate is wiped clean, a new day dawns, and I start thinking about new adventures…not what I want to change and inevitably miserably fail at, but where to go, what new things to see this year that will broaden my understanding of beauty and this great, vast world that we live in?  I worry that time will elapse and there will be places my heart longs to stand in that will go unseen.  Trappings of career, money, house, and family all contribute to the inability to drop everything and go.  I want to leave it all behind and hike the Appalachian Trail, to recover bits of myself that have been lost along the way, to look into new faces and experience God on a mountaintop, a
literal mountaintop.  But I remain responsible, tied to a life carefully built, tenuously held together, and most of the time, happily walked in.  Sigh…

Winter has settled in.  Finally!  I thought I was a woman tied to spring and could live happily in a world where the temperature is always 72 degrees, but this year I understand that I am a woman of the seasons and each one has its purpose.  The frost and cold brings a refreshing comfort in knowing the plants will at last lose the old foliage they’ve been hanging onto, the dangerous bugs will finally die of exposure, and
the bulbs will bloom in spring.  The garden that is a blank canvas of tired soil will once again be renewed and ready to receive the new year’s crop.  The seeds have been ordered, the grow light is set up, and gardening books are being read.  Winter’s bite means that the warmth of spring is on the way.

I have embarked on what I fear will be my total failure as a gardener.  I planted seeds.  I faithfully ordered the usual stock, with a few new ones thrown in, from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds, but this year instead of purchasing heirloom tomato plants, I’m attempting to grow my own.  I tried this a few years ago, but it was
such a disastrous failure that I gave up entirely and have since direct-sown seeds into the ground and purchased tomato plants.  But this year, I decided to have another go at it with the knowledge that my
self esteem may be damaged forever.  The varieties you can buy in seed form are so much more interesting!  It’s like shopping in the shoe department at Walmart versus going to Bergdorf‘s.
When you start from seed, the world opens and the Pradas and Valentinos of tomatoes are suddenly at your fingertips!  I’m sticking with mostly heirloom cherry varieties this year since I’ve found that the large
tomato plants have a very small yield and the likelihood that a squirrel will taste my prize tomatoes before I do is infuriatingly high.

 

Every year in the garden has been a calendar period of sheer experimentation.  What will the bugs destroy this year?  Which organic spray mixture will actually kill them?  Answer: just forget it, you have to kill yourself in order to kill the bugs.  How many tomatoes will the squirrels steal and will I get enough sauce to freeze through the winter?  Which cucumber variety produces the nicest, straightest fruits without tasting bitter if left on the vine? Why are carrots so stupid?  Does the asparagus prefer being uncovered after frost or left to grow through its mulch cover?  Why don’t apple trees bloom?????  Which basil variety do we prefer?  There are so many!  How much thinning do beets actually need?  Answer: a lot.  How many tons of mulch, compost, humus, and manure will it take before my soil consistency is loamy like the community garden at the Warner Nature Center, of which my envy knows no bounds???

I haven’t figured it out yet, any of it.  And this year promises to be just as experimental with just as many foot stomping failures that will inevitably make me want to throw garden rakes at our neighbor’s awful,
noisy ducks.  The work involved in a garden of our size (19’x35′) is greater than I ever could have realized and the weeds are a particular challenge, a force of evil which cannot be thwarted.  I already feel torn between the desire to hike every weekend and the backbreaking work it will take to maintain the garden through the prettiest outdoor seasons of the year.  All of it goes hand in hand, really.  A friend once said to me that he couldn’t figure out if gardeners were either psychotic or just a bunch of people who love the outdoors.  Precisely!

The Best Views In GSMNP: Charlies Bunion

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Coming back to real life after vacation is such a drag, like a shoot me, I wish I had some moonshine right now kind of drag.  But muddle through we must…until the next vacation…which is on Thursday, thank God, or I would have to find something high to jump off of.  We’re heading to Long Island for some soul medicine known as salty air, prescribed by the Almighty as an antidote to the occasional drudgery of daily life.  Also, December is depressingly busy.  Happy busy (maybe?), but just too much happening.  I didn’t even realize it until we got home last night and I opened up my circa 1992 Hallmark, fit-in-your-purse calendar to look at the month and nearly had a heart attack.  All those tiny squares fill up so quickly and then people get mad because you have too much going on and have to draw the line at some things.

For the two more days that we’re in town prior to salty air inhalation, I’m thinking about the mountains and trying to remember all the emotions felt while standing on top of the world, looking out at an endless sea of peaks on Charlies Bunion.  This outcropping of rock has a weird name because it looks like a bunion on the side of a hill, but the views…THE VIEWS!!

A friend recommended this hike to me because it’s her favorite hike in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  Then, I watched two park volunteers get dewy eyed when talking about the trail and the sights from Charlies Bunion.  “You should really do that hike, you have to see the views from there, it’s incredible.”  The trail to get to Charlies Bunion starts out at the Newfound Gap parking lot and goes directly along the Appalachian Trail.  We’d hiked on the AT the day before and I was convinced it couldn’t get any better, but it does.  I’ll add myself to the list of people utterly enchanted by everything having to do with this trail.

We came upon another shelter, the Icewater Spring shelter, which had a lovely view of the mountains.  Still sparse, but quite a nice place to spend the night.

Thankfully the pricey trekking poles saved our knees.  We got one pair and each had a pole, but I noticed a difference in how my knees felt, as in I could still walk to the bathroom to take some Advil at the end of the day.  If I had pulled 18 tendons in my legs, it would have been worth it to see what we saw on Charlies Bunion.  We had it to ourselves for a few minutes to just silently take in the breadth of what we were seeing and to climb carefully up onto the rock for a picture without falling to our deaths.

When we finally tore ourselves from the bunion, we headed back along the trail to an offshoot called the jumpoff which included a steep uphill .3 mile climb to a whole different perspective of the mountain sea.  In fact, we could see Charlie’s Bunion from where we were and we traversed a mountain like the Von Trapp family, people.  Rob couldn’t see the bunion because he’s going blind at 40, but the neon shirts of the people standing on the rock to get pictures where we’d been standing an hour before showed up against the backdrop of leafless trees. 

In short, a magical respite from the usual pace of life to an altogether different daily challenge of tackling nature.  I hope we can get back there soon to experience even more places in the park, but what a lucky blessing to be able to see what we saw and feel so teeny in the middle of it all.