I wandered in and out of rooms like a moth

Fish stew, purple sand, a wrecked firetruck, and geologic time

Fish Stew

I have this memory of bouillabaisse served on a huge white tray at the beach house.

Why were they calling it bouillabaisse? This family of Italians? Why not cioppino or zuppa di pesce? But they did. I can hear it still, bouillabaisse in an Italian accent.

We caught everything fresh. I was an expert crabber by age three.

Beach house makes us sound fancy, but it wasn’t that. On weekends, my grandparents and I would hop into my grandfather’s Kermit-the-frog green Datsun pickup—I sat in the truck’s bed, under the homemade bed cap, with the food and the suitcases. There was a little window I could open to talk to my grandparents.

The beach house was a sweet, small, wood paneled, low-slung house nestled into the back corner of larger plot a street away from the Sound. Eventually there were two beach houses when my parents bought the wreck next door and fixed it up.

I just found our beach access point. Forty years ago, I learned to pluck a piece of grass, tuck it between my thumbs, and make the sound of a dying goose right here.

There was a badminton net and a hammock between the houses.

I was the only child in rotating cast of adults: grandparents and great aunts and uncles and second cousins, my parents’ gang of college friends, my uncle’s girlfriends, who were always pretty, always sneaking quietly away.

I wandered in and out of rooms like a moth. My little kingdom. I hid Barbies in dresser drawers.

I can see it on the table. The bouillabaisse. I can see my Nonna and her sisters bickering in the kitchen. Always a competition about who was the best cook.

I remember the huge pot for boiling lobsters.

The steam rising from every pot, every surface.

Bouillabaisse.

Justin Dolske, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Purple Sand

Purple sand beaches occur when there are large amounts of purple minerals—manganese, garnet, rose quartz— that have eroded from some hills somewhere over millennia.

Forty years ago, when I was a kid playing there, the entire top half of our beach was a deep purple. Hotter to the feet than white sand. You had to wear shoes until you got to the shoreline.

The precarious rock jetties where I fished for crabs with clothespins.

Concrete jetties covered in snails.

Purple sand meatballs and “stuffed shells.” [I am the child of Italians.]

Long Island Sound was murky, cold, full of seaweed. Its rocky bottom frightened my little feet.

Elemental. Geologic time was somehow closer, somehow in that purple sand.

The Caverns in Tennessee for a Murder By Death show this past weekend.

Geologic Time

On a walk this week, I tell a friend that the only way I’m able to function in these infuriating times is to think of now in relation to geologic time. How many billions of years for the sand to become sand? The boulders to grind into rocks. The rocks to wear and smooth into stones.

The cliffside to become a rolling hill, then a valley, then a trench.

The mountain to bow down to the sea.

The sea to yawn its wide mouth.

Humans are a drop in the ocean of time. Our political machinations mean nothing to the stars. The middle-school-mean-girl tiffs between grown billionaire men—geologic time will not remember them, nor the horrible things they did to other humans in the name of the almighty god-dollar.

They will die and we will die and in a thousand years no one will care—if there’s anyone left.

The zoom out is like those thirty seconds I take between sets at the pool. Just a little breather. Nothing we are doing here is all that important on that timeline.

Fragility

Driving home from Tennessee this weekend, we had a scary experience. I describe it in this video post:

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• Jar of Light is a collection of audio and video poems with just a little chit chat. I will always link to it here, but you can also subscribe specifically to this section in settings > subscriptions > Crow + the Poet > notifications.

• You can pre-order Agatha here.

• Would any of you join an online write-in/accountability group? Maybe with a prompt to start should anyone want one?

• This whole newsletter reminded me of E. Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses,” a poem I quote incessantly and unapologetically.