life, tennis, dogs

Oh I do want to live beside the sea.

In a big, old house with a garden and a dog or two. I would be kept very busy with writing, yoga, family, friends, gardening, walking the dogs. Maybe I could open a book shop with an old espresso machine to make people coffee as they pore over the dog-eared pages.

Just finished reading The Great Gatsby; devoured in an entire weekend. The protagonists whose lives Scott Fitzgerald chronicles seem so glamourous and exciting. The bejewelled upperclass, and all their demons and eccentricities. Summer nights spent lazing in glowing garden parties, drinking mint juleps (they sound divine, even though I don’t know what exactly they are), taking drives as collectives to ‘town’ aka New York, and sitting around while listening to someone play the piano. I ran along a street yesterday and saw a house, set back off the road, with a tennis court out the front and two white-clad couples sitting at a table nearby drinking lemonade, assumedly after a few balmy sets. *Note appendum to my seaside abode dream: tennis court. No matter how old and run-down, it’ll add to the romance of it all.

Note Kent Nerburn in Road Angels: “I've watched the light go out of too many of my friends' eyes as their lives turned from a crazy garden of weeds and wildflowers to a well-manicured lawn. I'm not ready for that yet. I need 'bears behind trees' – surprises in life that are bigger than a plugged sewer line or an unexpected finance charge on my credit card ... If I don't have them, my life becomes just a long-term maintenance project.”