BEACH NIGHT

"Under no circumstances are we cancelling tonight."
"Okay."
"If there's a tornado, maybe, but anything else, we're still on,
all right?"
"Right. (Tornado, maybe?)"

I'm on the phone with my friend, talking about our beach night
tonight. Once a month, on the night of the full moon, we drive to
Mickler's Landing, a public beach south of Jacksonville. We bring
folding chairs, blankets when it's cold, thermoses of herbal tea and
something we've written to read aloud. We've tossed around a few
names for our group, including the Full Moon Women's Writing Circle,
the Moon Maidens and the Loonies, but nothing has really stuck. It's
the getting together that counts.

Earlier this month we had to cancel our plans because a newcomer to
our group had a previous commitment. My friend and I have
decided we're going to meet up anyway, just the two of us. "I really
need this," she says, and I realize that I do as well.

When I moved to Jacksonville from Ludington I left more than a house
behind, but it took me a while to sort out what else was missing.
Some things were obvious, like dentists and produce markets and
trails through the woods. Some things took a little longer to
identify, like where to drink coffee while writing in the morning,
the best place to sit while talking on the phone and faces you know
and who know you back.

When we arrrive at the beach we walk to a flat spot, then arrange our
chairs and take turns reading what we've written. This month's topic
is "The path not taken." My friend decided in the middle of writing
her essay that it was actually about parts of herself that she'd
failed to nurture. My piece turned out to be about learning to love
the life you've got instead of the one you wish you had.

After reading we walk up and down along the water, carrying our
sandals, looking for shells. I recently borrowed a book from the
library about decorating with sea shells and so I'm gathering
materials for a project. I don't know what I'll make, only that
I'll need lots of shells to make it with. We pick up orange, brown, blue,
striped, smooth and ridged shells and put them, whole and fragmented,
into a bucket.

Back in Michigan the only shells I've ever found are zebra mussels
and snails. When I was a teenager I would collect lucky stones, small
fossilized plant segments with a hole through the middle. I got to be
pretty good at seeing them among all the other stones on the beach.
I'd like to develop that skill down here to spot shark teeth. I tell
my friend that I won't feel like I've really settled here until I
find one for myself. I've been studying them in the stores so I can
see the shape in my mind. She says she's been here twelve years and
hasn't found a single one.

In Ludington, past First Curve, the beach is lined with dunes. On
this beach in Jacksonville as far as we can see in either direction
there are lines of mansions staring out to sea. We talk about what it
would be like to live in one. "Maybe it would be like living in a
magazine photo shoot," she says. "Too clean and perfect, like nobody
lives there." I think about my own house, evidence of life scattered
over every surface -- dishes, clothes, books, receipts, loose change,
and lately, shells.

Most of these houses seem empty, with long rows of dark windows. My
friend says she and her husband decided a long time ago it wouldn't
be worth it to live in one of them. "You'd have to evacuate for every
hurricane," she says. "And you have to replace the light fixtures all
the time because they corrode in the salt air so quickly." She adds,
"I wouldn't mind walking through one, though, just to see what it was
like."

I think that if I had a house on the water I'd never leave it. But
I've never lived on an ocean. Maybe, when the sea rose up and crashed
against the shore I wouldn't want to stick around to see what
happened next. It's not something I'm likely to experience anyway.
Shoreline property is even more expensive down here in Florida than
it is back in Michigan and, by the looks of these places, once you
have the land, you're required to build a castle on it.

My friend and I return to our chairs and then talk until nearly
midnight. We speculate about whether the lights floating slowly by on
the horizon are a barge or a cruise ship. Occasionally a helicopter
flies past, hugging the shoreline, probably from Mayport, a naval
base just north of us. We wave but they don't wave back. I tell her
about my chopstick diet and she tells me about her daughter's dream
to fly an airplane. Eventually we stop talking and just lean back in
our chairs and look at the stars. I think about how the Big Dipper I
see here is the same one I see when I'm in Ludington. When the
mosquitos come out we pack up to go home.

As I drop my friend off at her house I ask her what next month's
writing topic is. "Moments of joy," she says. Piece of cake, I think.
I'll start with tonight and go from there.

Fair Game

Back in Michigan tourism season is just getting under way. There are more visitors crowding the beaches and walking the state park trails. You have to park your car a little farther away from the entrance at Wal-mart. The stores, restaurants and galleries are open seven days a week instead of "by chance" and there are fishing tournaments and fireworks and parades and art fairs to look forward to. I feel nostalgic thinking about all the cool stuff I'm missing up north.

So when an artist friend asked me if I'd be interested in selling my window paintings at the Lake Asbury Pottery and Art Fair just south of Jacksonville I told her, "Sure." It seemed like a pretty good deal. She said the organizer of the event was looking for more vendors, the entrance fee was cheap and she'd even loan me her tent. I thought about how I'd enjoyed strolling through the art fairs in Ludington in the past and how I'd always wanted to try to sell my stuff in an art show. It would be fun to hang out with other artists and watch people browse through the booths. I pictured a pretty green lawn crowded with tents and the spaces between filled with folks in brightly colored summer clothing. Maybe I'd get lucky and sell some stuff. How hard could it be?

Right away I threw myself into preparations for the show. I made lists of materials I'd need to make more window paintings, like more window sashes and window paint. I started thinking about things I'd need to sell the finished work, like a credit card imprinter and a receipt book. I thought about how to arrange my booth to create an inviting retail space. I'd have a guest book available for people to sign up to get regular updates on my latest art. I'd have a giveaway at the end of the show. I'd have three pricing tiers — a high end, a mid-range and a low end product — to tempt every customer no matter how much money they had to spend. I'd craft free-standing sculptures to hang my paintings on. I'd make eye contact with everyone who passed by my booth because as I'd once smugly told my then six-year-old daughter who was trying to sell Girl Scout cookies at K-mart, "If you don't ask for the sale, they don't have to buy."

I had plans. Unfortunately, they were more suited to a six month lead time instead of three weeks, which was all I had. Instead of 30 paintings I ended up with nine. I didn't have time to make 50 window clings, only 21. The mid-range set of products never happened. The clever sculptures to hold the paintings devolved into precarious bamboo tri-pods, held together at the top with twine. After three weeks of furious activity I was tired and discouraged and wondered how I'd ever thought this was going to be an easy project.

The day of the art fair was a beautiful one, pleasantly warm, with a light breeze. The sun shone brilliantly through the leaves of the tree under which I had set up my tent. I had hung my paintings and strung up the window clings between the tent supports. From the booth space to my right a pair of watercolorists came over to offer encouragement. "These will sell," said Edith, after introducing herself. "They're beautiful." I felt reassured about making the decision to come and was grateful for her comments.

I carefully aligned my credit card imprinter with the edge of the table. I had special business cards stacked in a neat pile, ready to give away, and my cell phone was close at hand, pre-programmed to dial the credit card authorization number if a customer wanted to buy a window painting with a credit card. I daydreamed about quitting my day job and making art 24-7 in a cute little art studio/gallery in my back yard.

Al, the vendor on my left, asked me to watch his booth while he made a final dash to the restrooms before the show opened. "Remember, $2,000 takes it all," he joked as he left.

It was beautiful all day, perfect art fair weather. But no one took advantage of it. Well, that's not precisely true. There were about sixty people who came to the show and that includes toddlers and dogs. I found out weeks afterwards that there were two other art events happening at the same time as the one where I was, each well-established, well-attended and well-publicized. Funny how you can completely not recognize a losing proposition when you're blinded by hopeless optimism.

Later that day, Al told me that Sundays were terrible sales days at any art fair he'd ever been to. He was trying to cheer me up. I didn't point out that it was Saturday. He left again to use the facilities, but this time dropped the price for everything in his booth to $500. I'm pretty sure he was still joking.

At the end of the day, when we were packing up to go I ended up buying a bird feeder from Al. I did it to thank him for helping me set up and tear down my tent, and also for his kindness in not mentioning that when I first got there I arranged my booth so that it faced away from the flow of foot traffic. "I figured you knew what you were doing," he said.

The day wasn't a total loss. I had one person sign up for my mailing list who asked if I did work on commission. I may have gotten drool on my shirt then. And toward the tail end of the day a gallery owner stopped to admire some of the paintings and ask if I'd be interested in selling them at her shop. I nearly asked her to adopt me. And I sold two clings for a total of $14.

I'm not sorry I did the art fair. I met some good people, gained experience giving impromptu workshops on window painting to other equally depressed vendors and learned that displaying artwork at leg cocking height is extremely dangerous when there are loose dogs around.

What's more I can now cross this off my list of things to do before I die. I've moved on to the next item which is, "Learn How to Fly." How hard can it be?

Trash talking

"What an amazing coincidence," I tell my husband. "Ludington is having their spring clean up the weekend that you'll be there hunting for morels."

"Let me guess. You want me travel 2,000 miles so I can trash pick windows?"

"Please?"

My husband is leaving to go to Ludington this weekend to spend a few days combing the woods for morel mushrooms. This is an annual outing for him and he's looking forward to the trip. Maybe he'll be lucky and find lots of fungi. He's bringing his GPS unit to be sure of hitting every one of his secret spots in the woods. Last year he forgot to take it and he's sure he missed finding the morel motherlode for that reason. I'm glad he's going, but not because of mushrooms. It's spring clean up time in Ludington and he's promised to bring me back some trash.

In Ludington in the spring people put out all the bulky items that aren't allowed during the rest of the year. This is the signal for flat beds and pick up trucks to crawl along the streets, looking for free stuff on the curb. When we lived in Ludington it was a bigger deal than Easter. We'd pack up the kids, the dog and Grandma in whichever vehicle had the most storage capacity and drive up and down the streets of Ludington, looking for treasure. Once we brought home a heavy old cash register, a big brass one with a segmented drawer on the bottom and numbers that popped up behind the glass along the top. The kids played store with it for a year and then we put it out on our own curb during the following spring clean up, tired of barking our shins on it in the living room. I like to think that it's entertained eight or nine other famlies with small, button-pushing children since then, endlessly rescued from and discarded on a different curb every spring.

We used to take the opportunity provided by spring clean up time to empty our own house of old computer parts, building materials and things that were one or two parts shy of being garage sale fodder.

I wasn't sure of the proper etiquette during those times when I'd be outside hauling things to the street and someone would pull up to look over my castaway items. Should I greet the lookers with a "Hi, how are you?" and an offer to help them load up or would that be embarrassing? Would acknowledging their presence drive them away like startled deer caught in mid-forage? Maybe they'd prefer it if I just pretended they weren't there at all.

I settled this the way I usually do, by not quite doing one thing or the other. I'd wave a little, smile a lot and fade back to the house to watch from behind the living room curtains, commenting under my breath. "Yes! They're taking the couch! Hey, hey, hey! What about that piece of countertop over there? C'mon, buddy. You know you want it. Yes! It's history! It's outta there!"

I'm a rubbish picker, a rag puller and a dumpster diver from way back. Along the window sill in my office lie trophies accumulated during neighborhood walks: a Fiona head, some wire, a chewed up scoop, a rubber heart that says "Barbie" on it, a green plastic lizard, and a purple bird-shaped cookie cutter. Once I found a heavy buck knife and I picked it up thinking my husband might like it. A few steps farther on I found the sheath for it. I decided it had probably belonged to a teenager. They tend to congregate along the ditches down here at night, drinking their parents' Natural Light and casually boinking in the bushes. I felt no guilty twinges for taking the knife home, figuring a slew of flyers saying "FOUND: BIG FAT KNIFE - CALL TO IDENTIFY" posted on telephone poles would net me a whole lot more trouble than I cared to endure.

There isn't a spring clean up in Jacksonville. People don't put out trash down here, they sell it. Recently I've been scanning the roadside for wood windows. I need them to paint pictures on to sell at an art fair that's coming up. They're amazingly difficult to find around here and it's particularly galling to know that I used to pick up old windows by the boatload every spring in Ludington for free. Unfortunately, down here they're considered vintage and priced accordingly.

I visited a salvage place called Burkhalter's last weekend looking for some single pane wood sashes, lured by the pictures of cement elephants, rows and rows of pink and blue toilets and demolition slide shows on their website. They're located right in the middle of old Jacksonville, about a half hour north of where I live. I found windows by the hundred there, years of dust on them, most of the glass broken, covered with dirt and grime, stacked upright in an old shed that my son, who was with me, declared too creepy to enter.

Starting price for these crumbling beauties was $20 each with additional numbers of panes adding to the total. I asked the guy minding the store to cut me a deal on four and he nearly choked. Obviously he was very attached to them.

I miss spring clean up in Ludington -- the air of anticipation, the annual appeal in the newspaper asking people not to put stuff out until the night before their scheduled pick up date, the cars full of avid treasure seekers, necks craning out the windows, pulling over to grab a lawn chair or two, only to exchange them on the next block for a better looking pair on another pile.

But most of all I miss getting enough raw material to keep me chin deep in art projects for the rest of the year in exchange for a few hours driving up and down the streets. Last week I caved and bought enough windows to see me through the art fair but it's not the same. There's something addictive about finding cool and funky junk and turning it into cooler and funkier art. It's the thrill of the hunt mixed in with my natural cheapskate tendencies that makes me do things like ask my husband to look for trash for me while he's on vacation. Any normal person would be happy with a postcard, although if he happens to find cool ones in a pile somewhere, I hope he'll bring them back. I need some for a decoupage project and free's a great price.