It was another slow reading week, really through until the weekend. A couple of nights working late (meetings on Pacific time – it happens!) coupled with continued doomscrolling just took it out of me, and I had a hard time settling in to read, putting my phone down, and focusing. The result being that it took me almost an entire week to read The Book Lover’s Bucket List, which is S-L-O-W for me. (Only 215 pages, and pictures – including some full-pagers – on just about every page; that should have been a recipe for flying through, but I kept getting sucked into my Washington Post app.) I do need to be a little more intentional about the way I consume the news. During 2017-21, I got pretty good at stopping the doomscrolling spiral and protecting my own peace. I need to revisit those strategies; over the weekend I did do a decent job of putting my phone in another room and just reading. So things are looking up, maybe?
Anyway, the weekend did go better on the reading front. After I finished up The Book Lover’s Bucket List I finally caught up on A Poem for Every Spring Day; just like with A Poem for Every Winter Day I’d let myself get woefully behind. So I read the selections from mid-April through to the end of May in basically one big gulp. It’s not the ideal way to read poetry, I know, but there were a couple that I really loved in there (and I marked them with book darts) so I got something out of it. On Saturday night, after wrapping up my poetry binge, I picked up Mariana, by Monica Dickens, which I’ve had on my TBR for years. I’m about a third of the way through at press time and loving it.
Peanut had a service project with her Girl Scout troop – picking up trash at one of our favorite local parks, so I stuck around and treated myself to a lovely solo hike. I’ve been waiting for this level of independence for years and it feels SO good.
By the time we had settled in at our Osa Peninsula hotel, it was mid-afternoon and we started looking around for something to do. It was hot, and we didn’t have enough time before dinner for a full-scale expedition somewhere (even if that had been an option, which it wasn’t – excursions all took place in the mornings, to avoid the hottest part of the day). But we were itchy to start adventuring, after two days of mostly sitting around on planes. Kayaking was the obvious choice.
We dumped our bags in our room at the inn (reached by a flight of about eighty – no joke – outdoor stairs), changed into swimsuits and sprayed ourselves liberally with reef-friendly sunscreen, and we were ready to go. Grabbing kayaks from the dock couldn’t have been easier; we just sauntered up to the hotel employee working the area, and we were paddling off into Drake Bay in moments.
It does. not. get. more. gorgeous.
Longtime readers may remember that I am a summer person. I love the sun and am almost never uncomfortably hot. Steve isn’t a sun-worshipper, but hey – in February, mid-eighties feels like pure luxury even if you usually prefer cool temps. Or at least, it does for him.
As we were paddling around, exploring the nooks and crannies of Drake Bay, it occurred to me that even though we are avid paddlers, I don’t think either of us had ever kayaked in another country before. (I may have, one time, in Mexico when I was twenty – but I’m pretty sure I snorkeled instead that afternoon.) So – our first international kayaking! Exciting stuff.
(Don’t mind the big water droplet on my hat. I was experimenting with my new waterproof camera.)
Drake Bay was gorgeous and the sunshine felt incredible, but eventually we had poked around as much as we wanted to – and there were a few bigger swells as some of the larger boats passed us by, which made Steve a bit nervous, since we weren’t wearing life jackets. I’m a little more relaxed about that sort of thing; I figure if I fall off a sit-on-top kayak into deep water what’s the big deal, really, I can swim and I’m not going to hit my head on anything… but his point was fair and I wanted to honor his comfort levels, so we turned back toward the hotel. I hadn’t seen anyone else out kayaking, so I mused aloud that I’d noticed what looked like a little river spurring off from the smaller bay where our hotel was located, and what about exploring that?
Ahhhhh. Deep green waters, hanging bridge – now this is classic Costa Rica, right here.
We paddled upriver, mindful of the receding tides and on the lookout for crocodiles (didn’t see any – this time). As we slowly meandered along the shoreline, Steve stopped paddling abruptly and pointed excitedly at a tree on the bank.
OH YES, MY FRIENDS, THAT IS A TOUCAN.
I am a gigantic bird nerd, as everyone knows (because I literally talk about birds all the time, ALL THE TIME) but I’d never seen a truly exotic bird in the wild. This was a huge treat! The only thing that kept me from falling out of my kayak was the knowledge that we were paddling in croc-inhabited waters.
Seriously, does kayaking get better than this? Between Drake Bay and the river off our hotel grounds, we had a treasure trove to explore. We reluctantly turned our kayaks downstream and headed back to the hotel once the river narrowed and became impassible.
As sad as we were to hang up the kayaks, we had a week of exciting adventures ahead of us – so the first afternoon’s adventuring boded very well indeed. And the day got even better from there: after we’d washed off the sunscreen and gotten into presentable outfits for dinner, we wandered back down to the previously deserted dining pavilion and found it hopping with our fellow hotel guests, who were all chatting in a group. Steve and I got ourselves drinks and started to dissect our afternoon’s adventure between ourselves, but were quickly roped into conversation by a gregarious hotel guest who explained that the dining was communal and everyone bonded over dinner, and she was adopting us. She asked what we had planned for the next day, and we told her we were going scuba diving. At that, our fellow hotel guest perked up and told us she had to introduce us to the couple we’d be diving with, because they had been wondering who the other divers on the boat would be. She gestured to a man who seemed to be about our age, and told him she’d found his dive buddies. He immediately broke into a huge grin, and introduced himself as “Garry – and my other half is Donna.” Garry and Donna (who quickly joined her husband) had eighty dives under their belts, which blew our minds. We confessed that we were newbie divers, planning to do our certification dives for our open water course on this trip, and we hoped we wouldn’t hold them back too much. They laughed and assured us, kindly but obviously sincerely, that they hadn’t been diving for almost three years between life and COVID, and that a nice shallow, easy dive sounded like exactly what they were looking for, and we’d be very well-matched indeed. The dinner gong sounded and we followed our new dive buddies to the group table, where we sat until everyone else had gone to bed, chatting furiously and discovering that we were exactly aligned on everything from cocktail preferences to salty senses of humor. The next day’s dive suddenly felt much less scary, and much more approachable with our new best diving friends.
Did they survive their first day of scuba diving? Check back next Friday!
Reading is my oldest and favorite hobby. I literally can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t love to curl up with a good book. Here are my reads for May, 2022.
The Blessing, by Nancy Mitford – When a young Englishwoman finds herself swept off her feet by a dashing, aristocratic Frenchman, culture shock ensues. Grace Allingham marries Charles-Edouard de Vallhubert and follows him to Paris with their “blessing,” Sigismund, in tow. But the cultural differences take their toll and when Grace decides she can no longer abide Charles-Edouard’s extracurricular activities, she decamps for London. Sigi, now a precocious little boy of eight years old, discovers that he can get spoiled much more easily with his parents apart, so he embarks on a campaign to keep them separated – a campaign characterized, as one review I read put it, by “Napoleonic cunning and Saxon thoroughness” – just perfect. This was absolutely hilarious.
The Song of the Lark, by Willa Cather – Considered Cather’s most autobiographical novel, The Song of the Lark follows young singer Thea Kronborg through her childhood on the Colorado plains and her awakening as an artist. Full review – for The Classics Club Challenge – coming soon.
Light Rains Sometimes Fall: A British Year Through Japan’s 72 Seasons, by Lev Parikian – So, the subtitle is a bit of a misnomer. Parikian (an orchestral conductor and nature writer, there’s a perfect combination for you!) does view the British year through the Japanese framework of 72 seasons, but he gives each microseason its own, very English, name. I read slowly through this, savoring every descriptive paragraph – it was lovely.
The Darling Buds of May (Larkin Family Chronicles #1), by H.E. Bates – The Larkins are a free-spirited family, living for good food, good company, and the good life generally. But their freewheeling ways seem to have caught up with them in the form of Mr. Cedric Charlston, a young tax inspector who arrives unexpectedly one day to find out why they haven’t submitted their tax returns. The Larkins promptly absorb Mr. Charlston into the family, rechristen him “Charley,” and go right on about their merry business. This was a fun, light read.
Delight, by J.B. Priestley – I had never heard of J.B. Priestley before, but apparently he is known as a master of the short form essay. This collection – compiled as a beautiful 70th anniversary edition, with a really eye-catching cover – explores 114 little things that bring Priestley delight – everything from fountains, to “cosy planning” (I felt that one deeply), to walking holidays and women discussing clothes. I loved it; it was one of those conflicting books that you want to both swallow in one gulp and also savor slowly.
Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce – Tom Long is disappointed and angry. He had been looking forward to a carefree summer climbing trees with his brother, Peter. But when Peter is quarantined with measles, Tom is sent to stay with his aunt and uncle in their gloomy flat in a converted Victorian mansion. It doesn’t take long for Tom to discover that not everything is what it seems in the rambling old house. The grandfather clock in the hallway strikes thirteen, and Tom is transported every night to a magical garden, sometime in the cloudy past, where he meets a young girl named Hatty. Together, Tom and Hatty spin tales and construct adventures – but as the summer winds to a close and Hatty begins to draw away and grow up, Tom plots how he can put one over on Time itself and stay in the garden, with Hatty, forever. I loved this.
Well – May is a long month but I didn’t get much reading done. Between being under the weather earlier in the month and doomscrolling toward the end of the month, I just couldn’t seem to focus on a book. I did really enjoy everything I read, especially “The Blessing” and “Delight” – highlights of the year, both. For June, I have a big stack I’d like to get to reading, so I’m going to really need to put the phone in the other room, get the news-induced spiral of despair under control, and rekindle my reading evenings.
covered in flour 