Summertime Diaries

Start of May: consuming, mothering, pondering

What is it about our human inclination to fall from things that bring us near to contentment, to the versions of ourselves we feel most at home in? I’m always asking myself this, as I check out a library book and read before bed, as I sit down at my desk and write, as I journal my prayers, reading Scripture out loud while the babies swarm my lap. These are things that make me feel whole, make me feel creative, make me feel prepared for the day, content from the day. Yet, here I am, worried I’ll stop and have to rediscover it all again in a few months.

Our parents might say it’s those damn phones, and honestly, it is.

But they aren’t going anywhere, so here I am, determined to write and read and sit and sew and walk and do things that feel like home.

It’s summertime here in my tiny, unassuming town. The universities are celebrating graduation today and tomorrow morning, and then our population will drop a few thousand until the heat of August when they all return, backpacks and texting in the driver’s seat. It’s one of my favorite times of year, when the campus we live behind is an empty park, when the streets are quiet and the sun is pink. I’ve never spent a summer down here by the river, where the breeze is tangible, a few degrees cooler than just one street over, where we lived last summer and the summer before that. I’m welcoming summer, heat and all.

For nearly half a year now, I had this idea to finish writing my novel, a story that revolved around the summer of 1995 and has taken me ten years to write, and share it in installments here on Substack. When we moved into our home in March, I started writing, letting the story consume any time I had while the babies were tucked into their beds. I sent voice notes to myself on our morning walks, ideas I didn’t want to forget by the time I packed the stroller up and pulled back down our driveway. The story evolved and expanded and became something bigger than I had intended, a behemoth piece of my mind on paper, and I found myself searching for debut authors on TikTok, watching their stories of querying and submission and reading their Publisher’s Marketplace blurbs with tears in my eyes. And I stopped thinking about this summer and started thinking about another summer when maybe, just maybe, someone might hold my book in their hands, published by a publishing house with my picture on the back, This is Adeline Murphree’s first novel.

And so there won’t be any installments of my novel this summer, which you won’t be disappointed by, as you only just found out about the pivot in plans. And I had contemplated whether or not I wanted to share any part of the writing journey, because what if nothing comes of it? but what if something does? And then I thought, these people have signed up to read my work, and so if I share it with anyone, why wouldn’t it be you?

I finished the last unwritten chapter last Thursday at 4:15, and I just kept thinking of how I’d exhausted my mind of anything beautiful left to say. I kept asking myself how anyone could write two books? Three? How in the world is Nicholas Sparks doing what he’s doing?

But this week, I started my second draft, first revisiting the 20,000 or so words I wrote while pregnant with Kit, 20,000 or so words that now read like child’s work, and the editing, the rewriting, the imagination is all there again, reloaded after four days away, pouring from my fingertips like warm honey. I’ve made friends with a retired English professor and his wife on my walks, and they have so graciously agreed to edit the book once it’s finished, and so I’m working towards handing them it all printed in the next week or so, and then I’ll begin quilting to distract myself from the waiting.

But that leaves me with nothing to write, and a summertime now with an empty docket of stories to share, my Substack revival gone and all. And so I’ve decided I’m determined to share journals of thought weekly again, a summer camp of book reviews or thoughts in need of somewhere to go, updates on my decision to pursue traditional publishing, this and that, you know. I haven’t decided on a day I’ll post yet, or if it will always be on a certain day, but I have a summer plan, and that’s enough.

Before I start my lists, though, I do want to say how powerful your readership has been to me these past two months, sitting in my amber office, writing to the soundtrack of Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey. Even if my writing doesn’t catch the eye of a single literary agent, and this book, in the end, sits dormant on the shelf, I still wrote it, and I know I wouldn’t have if it weren’t for the knowledge you existed, people who enjoy reading what I wrote. You have been an incredible gift of grit and confidence and perseverance, and I am thankful with everything I am.

CONSUMING

Two things of note this week: the smallest of which being the bubble gum pink bags of Swedish candy Bon Bon NYC sent over for Mother’s Day. I’m not sure how I stumbled upon this company three years ago, but I did, and I ordered a large sweet & sour mix for Price on Valentine’s Day, and lo and behold, he’d discovered them for me, too. Both then and now, my favorite is the little Cola flavored candies. And the bag itself. It alone feels special, this pink paper bag sitting in my pantry.

But mostly, I consumed Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake like air. The word I keep thinking to describe the story, the storytelling, Lara’s motherhood, the ending, every single detail, is divine. This genre of fiction is my favorite, literary, slow, methodical, thoughtful. Books that have beautiful plots, but aren’t driven by them. Books that are, instead, driven by brilliant prose, the author’s skill at using words and sentences to evoke deep, intimate feelings within the reader. While I read Tom Lake, I felt immersed in the cherry trees, in the summer stock theater, in the relationship of sisters listening to their mother. This is my favorite thing: to read a book of an author who wrote plenty more, unlocking a world for me to spend time in for a while longer.

I borrowed it from the library, where I have an inclination to turn them back in rather late (two weeks is not long enough if we’re being honest), and so I dropped it off in the little mailbox on the porch yesterday, while Kit sat in the car yelling, “Book! Book! Book!” and I pretended I didn’t hear, for we had errands to run and I looked too terrible to mosey around public places.

I’ll purchase this in hardcover for my own personal library, I loved it so much.

MOTHERING

Kit has slept in her big girl bed for a little over a week now, a full-size memory foam mattress on clearance at the front of the store, now tucked up in the very corner of her room (resulting in a very difficult making of the bed when the sheets need to be changed). She sleeps with five pillows, her covers, blankie, and Baby, and yet, somehow, she is still sleeping as if she were in a crib: perpendicular to the pillows, her head nearly on her nightstand, blankie tangled around her and the covers as if I hadn’t even pulled them back. When I’m putting her to sleep, I wish I was bathed and in my pajamas, so I could just stay tucked away with her, so I could wake up with the warm sun in our eyes together, for lack of curtains. She hasn’t discovered the ability to get out of bed, or even to read the Little Golden books I leave on her nightstand. So I watch her toss and turn and listen to her count and sing and recite all of her family members in the sweetest, tiniest voice I’ve ever heard, the voice that has started calling me mommy and I hope never stops.

PONDERING

Buying an ice cream machine (my mother made homemade vanilla ice cream and served it with espresso on top, and one bite alone convinced me I needed one for the summer). If I should wallpaper my bedroom (yes). If the mosquitoes will be worse this summer, given how near we are to the river, and then in the same thought…will there be snakes in all my hosta beds? Ben and Erin Napier’s furniture line, the chairs with the colored piping specifically. My college graduation, as we walk past the white chairs in rows on our nightly walks, preparing for Saturday morning, and I’m hit all over again with the everlasting bitterness in my heart from the dreadful year of 2020. Why must making dinner be so hard, so very daunting? And on that note, why do groceries cost what they do? If I should buy Kit a limited-edition Kit Kittredge doll, while they’re available (although given my last question, the answer is an adamant no). What to do with the family of kittens living underneath my house. Who made up the concept of grammar rules, and, really, does a run-on sentence harm anyone? (No.) Summers in Rhode Island. The fact I’ve been married nearly five years now. And then, I disappear into the memories of our honeymoon, waking up in a cottage on the sea, hot coffee on the way, and I ache to experience seven days of that once more.

But alas, I wake in the house I’ll spend all my days in, with a warm baby whining in my ear, desperate for milk and his mother, for morningtime, for play. And so I pull on my Bartlett for America sweatshirt and heat up his bottle and open the blinds in the sunroom and watch the Today show and then read on the floor while he tears up Kit’s dollhouse meticulously set up the night before. And one day, I’ll ache for this, too.