Another cloudy day. The sun peeked through earlier, again, but this morning it was gone by 8. I woke up during the night trying to figure out why so much light was coming through my back window. Was there an outdoor light on at the inn next door? Nope, it was the waning moon, shining brightly. It was still almost full the first night I was here. I watched it rise and waited for it to move across the sky to where it would be shining on the water. By the time it got that far, it was lost in cloud cover. My mother and grandfather had taken pictures of the full moon shining across the water when we spent the summer down the beach a ways in 1952. I scanned these slides into my computer during the past year, and I wanted to take my own picture... but it won't be happening on this trip.
Later. This afternoon I walked down to the end of the street, where I'd seen a sign for a Day Spa that said they took walk-ins. I thought that was its name - Day Spa - but it's really the Girls Just Want To Have Fun day spa. As I walked over to the spa, a couple of women came out, and one of them looked at my feet, which were in sandals, and asked if I wanted a pedicure. Since that was one of the reasons I'd come down there, I was happy to agree. I asked about having my eyebrows done, and the young woman who does eyebrows said she'd be glad to. So I had my first eyebrow waxing, something I'd been eager to try for a long time. I'm all for it. I've never been good at tweezing and shaping my eyebrows. It didn't hurt all that much, either. I'm pleased with the results.
Then I had my pedicure. There was a foot spa, kind of a hot tub just for feet, and I soaked in it first. The pedicurist (a different young woman from the one who'd done my eyebrows) clipped, filed and shaped my nails, trimmed and buffed off some of the calluses, and put on four coats of nail polish - a clear one underneath, probably one of those nail hardeners (I didn't ask), two coats of a lovely bronze polish, and another clear coat. I'm pleased with them, too. The shop was having a special - 20% off everything - so I got all this done for less than $50. This is the kind of thing I can do at the Cape that I just can't seem to make myself do in the city. I'm just so much more comfortable with myself when I'm down on the Cape.
This morning I drove up to Orleans. My original goal was to find an internet connection at a coffee shop. I saw a place called the Hot Chocolate Sparrow in the Yellow Pages and decided to go look for it. I also wanted to find a bookstore I remembered and to see if Earth House was still there. We used to go every summer. It's an old hippie shop. Anyway, I went into the Hot Chocolate Sparrow, ordered coffee (so-so) and a berry blast muffin (spongy and bland), and sat down to read a Boston Globe that had been left behind by somebody else. A little while later, two young girls with laptops came in and sat down next to me. They appeared to be reading email, so I guess there was WiFi there even though I couldn't see a sign saying so. There was a data port right in front of me, too. But by then I was almost done eating, and it seemed a little odd for me to go out to the car for my laptop then. So I let it go. It wasn't all that important anyway.
The bookstore I was remembering was no longer there. Not really a problem; I just like to hang out in bookstores.
I couldn't remember where Earth House had been, and the more I drove around looking for it, the more I was convinced it had disappeared. I found it at last on Route 6A. It didn't seem to be open, but it was definitely still there. They may just open on weekends at this time of year. There used to be a car parked in back of it that was just plastered with those New-Agey bumper stickers - "Love your Mother" with a picture of the earth, things like that. It wasn't there; in fact, the parking lot was empty. [Note: They don't indicate that they close for the non-tourist season on their website, so they might have actually been open...]
I came back here after that and took a beach walk. It was high tide. I don't know why the tide was so high; it's past the full moon. But it seemed to be in as far as the most recent tide line, and it was still coming in. There's a point down after the seawall starts that there's really no beach at all; the water comes clear up to the seawall at high tide. So that was as far as I could go. If it hadn't have been high tide, that's when I would have done my Allen Harbor walk. It was as bright out as it was likely to get today, and I thought I might get good pictures. Here's one I took of the waves washing around the staircases.
I thought I might do my Allen's Harbor walk later this afternoon, but when the time came, I didn't want to wreck my pedicure, so I decided not to. I feel guilty about it; tomorrow's my last day, and I'm meeting the boys at around noon, so unless I do it in the morning I won't do it at all. At least I got to our old beach yesterday, even if I didn't have my camera... All in all, though, I did a lot of what I'd hoped to do on this vacation. I didn't start to outline my NaNoWriMo ideas, which I'd hoped to.
Which brings me to why I originally came over here at the “Later” header above: I just finished the first section (the Eat section) in Eat, Pray, Love, and I wanted to comment on it.
Basic premise: woman in her 30s undergoing journey of self-discovery. She'd just gone through a miserable divorce, probably even more miserable than mine. (heh.) She, however, is a successful writer already, and gets her publisher to give her an advance on this book so that she can write it. Oh, well; she has books, I have kids. Sigh.
It's a very enjoyable book. She's not especially religious – hesitates to call herself Christian, even. I think she's a Unitarian-Universalist and doesn't know it.
I know there were several sentences that made me say “Yep, I've been through that,” but of course I can't locate them now. I can, however, find the Italian words I wanted to remember. Her friend Luca Spaghetti (apparently his real name) brought her to a soccer game, and she points out that the word for “fan” is “tifoso”, derived from “typhus” - “one who is mightily fevered,” she points out. And right after that, she quotes the tifoso standing behind her, who is yelling obscenities. [In the original blog, I quoted them at this point, but for the online version, I'm leaving them out!] So if I get nothing else out of the book, my knowledge of world language has grown!
Some of the “me too” moments I had while reading this came from what she writes about her depression. She tried to wean herself off her Wellbutrin while in Italy, and I guess she succeeded. But it wasn't easy at first. She relates an incident from her life where she sees herself in a mirror and thinks she's seeing somebody she knows, a friend of hers. In this period of post-Wellbutrin depression, she writes: “Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a friend.” I really like that.
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