Work at Hand

Work at Hand

High summer here in my little Cape village. The grass is a crisp brown, hydrangeas are masses of feisty blooms, the air is redolent with grill smoke and salt, heavy with humidity, festooned with spider webs, specked with fireflies. The harbors are jammed with boats, and baseball games are the excitement for the night. People are dining on front porches, beaches, in side yards, clam shacks, and boisterous restaurants with windows open to the blue air.

Usually, about this time, I begin to fret in earnest about a big August craft fair held in my town. For at least ten years, this event has indelibly stamped each mid-summer with apprehension and disquiet. For most of late June, July, and early August, I feel haunted, as if something is shadowing me, a nudging reminder that a deadline is looming.

Like most other vendors, I make everything I sell, which means a great deal of summer is lived in my little factory, seated at the old door and sawhorses I call my work table. The good thing is that the fair forces creative endeavor. I have artist friends who show in galleries every summer, and say this helps them, that without the pressure they would turn into indolent sloths, spending these golden, halcyon days in a hammock, reading faded paperbacks with sandy spines…and never rouse themselves to work.

The bad thing is that creative endeavor forced by a deadline exacts its pound of flesh.

This year, I have decided that the price in time and spirit is too high and will forgo the fair, and all it entails: the creation and production; the big tent and the anxious, sleepless nights; the display and the schlepping; the nice people and their stories; the camaraderie of the vendors; the swiping of the credit cards; the exhausted smiles; the uncertainty; the packing up and the taking down; the money count at the end.

Like all traditions, the fair has seemed immutable, as if it will always define my summer. Without it, I feel rudderless, adrift on a wide, glassy sea. I am reading those novels, riding my bike, swimming on occasion, talking with friends, making a few cards but nothing of any substance. I sit outside at nine o’clock and watch the fireflies, savor bouquets of peppery arugula from my brother-in-law’s garden, dream restless dreams on these hot, still nights.

For me, few things are relinquished without a sense of loss. There is nothing on the creative horizon but sky. I feel no inner calling. I feel no compulsion. I am bewildered and unsettled by this space, this quiet, this emptiness. And yet, I am adjusting to it, happy to hear the hydrangeas breathe in the dusk, happy to bite into a sizzling hot dog, happy to follow the peaceful meanderings of the day, happy, for now, to say nothing.