Solstice spaces: Achnahaird Beach

This could start as one of Ruth’s odes to turquoise, the way the sun churns up liquid jewels from the dark northern waters. Because this is summer, the time when our latitude becomes an uncoiled spring. For now the days are so long, there is room to hang up all the pieces of our lives, to let our memories breathe and gather the sweetness that seems to come from spaces between the air. We long for it the same way our mothers would haul down the sheets from the line and press the clean cotton into their smiling faces, recalling their own maternal ghosts.

We know these are the things that we will pull in close to us when the winter comes. And it will come. But when it does we will be holding a vast collection of molecules, the rapid-fire procession of all our days, stretched out through the summer of our youth.