• Paddleboarding on Lake Michigan.
    • How looking into any body of water — even a Great Lake — is freaky, evokes Jaws-style fears, because every shadow of every wave seems like the silhouette of a just-about-to-breach creature.
    • From far away on the water, watching a kid run down a large dune, like an ant on a sand pile.
    • The clouds moving slowly behind the dunes, at their same level, giving the impression they were a great white glacier moving along.
    • How I’ve always wanted a small boat, but after this great inflatable paddleboard excursion, maybe a paddleboard would be enough?
    • How being at the beach, more than any other physical activity, makes me feel grateful for my health. It’s the sunny, lake-soaked, totally active feeling of being on the beach that I remember when I’m sick or freezing…
  • E. B. White in his essay “My Day”: “A man sometimes gets homesick for the loneliness that he has at one time or another experienced in his life and that is a part of all life in some degree, and sometimes a secluded and half-mournful yet beautiful place will suddenly revive the sensation of pain and melancholy and unfulfillment that are associated with that loneliness, and will make him want to seize it and recapture it; but I know with me it is a passing want and not to be compared with my taste for domesticity, which is most of the time so strong as to be overpowering.”
  • In another essay, E. B. White accounting for the true cost of an egg produced on his farm, just as Noah Kalina did for his own chickens in his newsletter a few months ago.