Marlene Tukur
Black Velvet Diamonds
Fragments of a life wandering.
I am nothing.
I can never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Yet, I have inside me all the dreams of the world.
- Fernando Pessoa
When I went into what was going to be a six year long retreat I wanted to erase my life somehow. Social media seemed to be a good starting point. (Although, my instagram account seems to still be alive, taunting me with my forgotten password.) I wanted to start over. I was tired of being me, tired of trying so hard to be whatever I thought I should or needed to be.
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Now out of retreat, I wish I could go back into those accounts. But alas, I have erased or forgotten the possibility to do so. I wanted to get back pieces of my past, but my previous intention had already worked its way through and really there was no going back, in a lot of ways. Social media being a poor example. But I also realized I can't just erase my life either. I do still have my hard drive full of the photos, so many photos, I've taken over the years. Photos I love, that I'm proud of. But why do I want to cling to them now, as if I can pick up where I left off? If I did pick up my camera again, what would the photos I take now look like? Would they be different?
I haven't shot a camera for awhile. I did keep shooting during retreat for a few years, but at a certain point I just dropped it. My twin lens reflex left abandoned in a compartment above my bed in my little caravan in France. I wonder if it still works, or perhaps it is now growing mold due to the damp and rain common in that area. And all the undeveloped rolls of film… when will I ever see those images? Will I ever?
I wanted things to crumble and fall apart, disappear or dissolve. I wanted myself to fall apart, and what would I find in the broken pieces? Right now I want to write. I feel like writing. I don't know if I'm any good at it. Maybe I will only write garbage and embarrass myself. Or, it'll just be really boring, boring and uninteresting. Maybe no one will read it. Maybe I should just do it anyways, even if it's pointless. And maybe I can pick up a camera again too. Give a visual friend to my words. It all feels incredibly daunting...
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Osterville, MA // Aug 2024
Stresseman Str. 92
My first house was in an area called St. Pauli, known for Hamburg's anarchy culture. It was haunted and old, and we had these high-quality Japanese mattresses on the ground in the upstairs bedrooms, which ironically made it look like we were squatting. The house had a lot of personality - a bit run down and charming. It was a small house, nestled back and between buildings in the city called a hinterhof (backhouse). I remember there was a single brick stencil painted into the living room wall that a friend of my father's had done when they had too much to drink one night. The living room held the green velvet couches, dark wooden tables, a fake palm tree with Christmas lights wrapped around the trunk and a big painting my great-grandfather had made in Sardegna (he had disappeared to there when my grandfather was just a child until about a couple weeks before his death, arriving back to Germany as quickly as he left) with bold brush strokes of farmers or peasants. My father carried all this through to every house he's lived in after, like a traveling living room replicated through time and place. And it included the incredible amount of books, CDs, records and his record player. The cellar was full of ghosts and my mother used to say she could feel them pressing into her as she walked down the stairs (but that's where they kept their wine), so she got a dog, Benny. Benny used to walk himself to the park my mother took him to which meant he had to use the train system and even switch trains (he could never manage to get himself home though). I remember the glass on the front door was smashed or cracked. There was the bathroom with blue tiles and a white bathtub. I remember coming in to my mother puking in the toilet and my father holding her hair saying, “your mother is pooping out of her mouth,” and she laughed. It all held our soon to be broken family together. It's not there anymore, torn down for new apartment buildings.
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Osterville, MA // July 2024
A poem
I'm yearning
It's like my heart spreads open
And I retract even though
All I want is to pour it out into sky
Into the air
Into you
I'm walking
And I imagine my feet have roots
that climb downwards
To the center of the world
I'm romantic
And I wonder if it's died in everyone else
I wonder
Does anyone feel their heart
The way I do
Will anyone write me a poem
The way you do
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Osterville, MA // July 2024
Enrico
One of the very first times I fell in love was with Enrico. He was a local boy from Montepiano (meaning 'slow mountains'), a village in Tuscany's Apennine Mountains, where my father had a house. My father had bought an abandoned old farm house named Malferra, a fifteen minute drive up the mountain filled with potholes. It took him almost 10 years to restore, and now that it is finished he has sold it just this summer - much to everyone's sadness I'm sure, and probably as well to my father's relief (the house was a lot of work to keep up). We had become somewhat part of the collective family there in that small village, it's sad to think I may never see them again. But, he did find another house in the south of Italy with a view of the Mediterranean, so I won't complain too much.
Montepiano is a close net of families who had all grown up together - romantically traditional and stereotypically Italian: the old men sitting at the tables at the local bar, gambling or playing games and drinking beer; the homemade Gelato; the old church and little park where the boys used to ask to kiss me when I was thirteen; the butcher shop and bakery and winding roads; the summer festivals with all its wine and food; and the unwavering hospitality and unannounced visits.
There was another little bar run by two elderly sisters in their 90s. It had long been out of business due to their age and probably regulations not coming up to code, but the town kept on pretending that that wasn't the case, unbeknownst or forgotten by the owners - they still opened it daily, and locals would come in and sit, sometimes reading a newspaper without ordering anything. I went in with my father and his band, and saw the two women behind the bar. He ordered a beer that had probably expired in the 1970s and smelt like ammonia when he opened it. It was late afternoon with my father's four piece jazz band and they played their music (they had decided to do a spontaneous music tour around Montepiano's very small restaurant and bar scene). The bar owners were elated.
Enrico was the second person I had sex with in my life. Although, I could hardly call the first time sex, but more like a quick mechanical procedure just to be able check off the lost virginity box. I think I even remember him doing some weird little dance with his hands and singing “no more virginity!”. It was anything but romantic or even meaningful. So I like to think of Enrico as the person I lost my virginity to. I was sixteen, and he was twenty-six.
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I don't remember how it all started. He was older then the other boys I was spending time with, more of a friend of my father's. He must have driven me home one night and pulled over on the side of the road up along the mountain towards Malferra. This was always the ordeal when my sister or I took a ride home with a boy - inevitably they would pull over and try to get a kiss, or more. But Enrico was very kind, gentle and cared for me. I could feel that. I could still feel it when I saw him years later at my father's birthday party (he always celebrated it at Malferra).
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We would sneak off at night after being with friends at the bar and go to a small apartment his family owned in the village but no one lived in. Or we would go up the mountain, into the grass and stars and make love outside or in his car. I can imagine I must not have been very good at it as I really had no experience.
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One evening he took me to Florence, which was about a 45 minute drive away. Enrico didn't speak a word of English - I don't think I even heard him make one attempt - and I didn't speak any Italian. So it amazes me that we were able to spend an entire evening together walking around a city. At one point he wanted to get me a gelato from somewhere specific, but the metal gate was halfway closed over it. He leaned down and asked if they wouldn't mind taking one more order as there was an American here who wanted to try. They obliged.
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Enrico is now married with children, and he seems incredibly happy. And that makes me happy too. I thought of him a lot over the years, and that feeling of his gentle heart has left a mark on me. At the end of the summer of our short lived romance, I was supposed to see him one evening but he wasn't showing up. I was worried I wouldn't get to say goodbye so I left him a note with a friend. He found me later, trying to explain to me that if he said he would be there, he would be. I can't remember what we did that night.
I picked up a bag I had left at his parents place on my last day and we drove out and away to the airport. When I opened a small mirror in my bag, it popped open suddenly and a letter came out. It was from Enrico, written in Italian. At the end it wrote, "ti voglio bene". I wish I still had that letter.
Osterville, Ma // August 2024
Disappointment
We must surrender our hopes and expectations, as well as our fears, and march directly into disappointment, work with disappointment, go into it, and make it our way of life, which is a very hard thing to do.
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Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence. It cannot be compared to anything else: it is so sharp, precise, obvious, and direct. If we can open, then we suddenly begin to see that our expectations are irrelevant compared with the reality of the situations we are facing.
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Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
Opportunities, many times, are so small that we glimpse them not and yet they are often the seeds of great enterprises. Opportunities are also everywhere and so you must always let your hook be hanging. When you least expect it, a great fish will swim by.
OG Mandino
Back in 2015, when I was finishing my photography degree in NYC, I used to go to a bar called Bizarre in Bushwick (Brooklyn), just around the corner from my apartment. They had strange sideshow circus performances, which I loved. I loved that eccentric world of the circus. I managed to squeeze myself into a group of performers who ran ordinary day jobs, and totally bizarre sideshows at night. I had one friend, and I can't for the life of me remember his name - he was a small Russian boy and just as weird as I was. We became close friends. He was asked to be in a play, directed by someone called Etienne, which would be shown in the French Embassy library after a reading and Q&A of a new philosophical book being published. The audience for the most part were older, above 50.
My friend asked me if I wanted to be in it. I of course accepted it, having really no idea what it was about, even as Etienne was explaining it to me. It was all very surreal and hell-realmish. He asked me to play Lucifer, and I was given a hand-made long golden gown to wear. Etienne had a giant paper-mache hand also hand-made, which represented the hand of god, filled with plastic bags of fake blood that, after screaming "fuck you god!", I had to tear through with my own hands on the night of the play. This I couldn't rehearse beforehand.
We rehearsed on Etienne's rooftop in Brooklyn night after night. It was a very eccentric group of actors. And there was one evening that we were having a lot of conflict, so the producer, Harry, asked us all to sit down and passed around a prayer - I don't remember what it was - for all of us to recite together. Years later I realized it was a Buddhist prayer, probably Tibetan.
On the night of the play, in the beautiful French Embassy library, with all its marble and columns, I decided to get very drunk off of shots of vodka in the "dressing room", which was just a very tiny room off to the side. I was nervous, obviously. The reading finished and we started almost immediately, and I didn't realize beforehand that it would be pretty dark with strobe lights - not ideal when you're drunk. After screaming "FUCK YOU GOD!" I managed to rip apart the hand of god successfully, spilling the fake blood all over the marble floor. After that, I would have to somewhat halfway carry my friend off the stage as he moaned and drooled on himself while hunched over. Well, because the fake blood was everywhere and all over marble we managed to do a pretty hard sideswipe fall into the pool, covering my gold dress in the stuff, and only adding to the dramatics of whatever was going on, which I have never been entirely sure what was. Apparently a friend of mine who had come to watch overheard someone from the audience leaving say to themselves, "Jesus Christ..." - I would say that accurately describes the play.
Years later, after I had just "met the dharma" and taken refuge, I was on a small plane to Oaxaca, Mexico with my boyfriend to go see one of his (eventually our) teachers. Most everyone on the flight was traveling for that. As I was sitting down I looked over at the person behind me, I recognized him. "Did you do a play with Etienne?" I asked. He looked at me confused for a moment and then shouted, "LUCIFER!" It was Harry, the produced who had us recite the prayer together during our night of tension. He had been my first tangible link to Buddhism, my very beginning.
​Osterville, MA // August 2024
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how to light gets in
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Leonard Cohen
Currently I am living on Cape Cod at my grandmother's house in Osterville, Massachusetts. I left Australia and said goodbye to my boyfriend and came back home. It was a clear decision for me. A true 'follow your heart and gut' kind of decision. I was initially staying with my mother at her boyfriend's house closer to western Massachusetts when my sister and I decided to drive down the Cape to visit my grandmother, or Grammie, as we call her. As soon as we arrived she was having vertigo spells and could hardly stand up. She has always been independent and lived alone since my grandfather had passed, always able to do almost everything herself, even at her age of 94 (even still driving!). We sat her down in the living room where she told us about her neighbor who had had a stroke and was now living life like a vegetable, unable to do anything for himself anymore. "I don't want to live like that, that is not a life," she said to us, more times than one. She told us about the gun she had in her bedside table that she was willing to use if it came down to it. My grandfather, her husband, and my great-grandfather had gone in that way - used an old handgun and shot themselves when they knew it was going to be a fast road into illness and decay. My grandfather wanted my grandmother to keep the money for herself, not to waste it on hospital bills that would only lead to his imminent death anyways. Her and my mother were there at their lake house when he did it. I still remember the dress my mother was wearing when she came home afterwards and laid in bed to cry.
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We sat down for dinner and when we finished, Grammie was acting somewhat strange and wasn't able to answer some of our questions. More alarmed than I was, Lilly had me call our mum, who is an emergency room nurse, while she was working. "I'll call you back," she said, and I just said, "ok," and hung up. "Call her back!" Lilly said. So I had to make several attempts to finally get her on the phone long enough to get the message across. I think if I had been alone I would have been far less active about it than my sister. We called 911 and the EMTs came in, with my grandmother in her pajamas and red bathrobe, and told her they needed to take her to the hospital. We followed the blinking red lights through the streets to Hyannis, watching the cars pull over, like Moses going through the Red Sea. At first the doctors thought it had just been a series of very small seizures, and it wasn't until the day after spending the night in the hospital that it was realized she had had a series of strokes, leaving her completely paralyzed on her right side and unable to speak or do anything for herself. Needless to say, it was quite a shock for everyone. Somehow though, it all felt to me like exactly what was supposed to happen. I had no feeling of surprise, in some sense. She had, after all, somewhat predicted this on her living room couch.
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Our time going through this big change has been incredibly interesting and continues to evolve and change. We are all learning a lot through it, specifically about ourselves. My mother went through a period of grief and of course cried a lot. But then, I've been watching her become so incredibly relaxed through it, as she deals with everything and all the responsibility and change she has been forced to face. Its amazing to watch, especially to witness her sense of humor morphing through it all. She has been making me laugh more so now than ever. And the support and understanding friends and family have given us, the peaks into their own lives with similar situations. I start to see what it means to give care to someone who is totally disabled, understanding what that means through every facet and angle. What it means, specifically to me, in my own perception and role in it. And all the details you don't consider when you aren't actually faced with it. And how, they are still just as human as you are, albeit with lesser working faculties. The fear, the neediness, the letting go, the laughter, the sorrow.
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Grammie can speak a little more now, sometimes even whole sentences. But of course, she struggles to get it out. So much so that she'll go into a stutter for so long that makes her laugh, every time, which makes us all laugh too. One afternoon we were all sitting in the living room with her in her hospital bed and she was trying to say something. All of us leaned forward, straining to hear as if it would help her to squeeze the words out somehow. Eventually she managed to shout, "ICE CREAM SUNDAE!" and we all broke out into laughter. She lives almost literally right next to an ice cream shop, so that request was easy. I think she ate almost the whole thing.
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When the EMTs had arrived that first night, they commented on my grandmother's teddy bear sitting in the entrance with Donald Trump's hair. She was a very vocal supporter of Trump, much to my mother's frustration. I think we all learned to tune out that part of her, and seeing her laying on her hospital bed, unable to do anything for herself, you realize we are all totally beyond all these political opinions. We are so much more. But my mum was not going to stay in a house with Trump signs out the front, so she took those down. "I just can't," she said to me, and I laughed. She brought the teddy bear into the living room while Grammie was resting, assumedly asleep. She just kept looking at it and discovered a zippered pouch in it's back, which she opened, and pulled out an American flag, one side sewn in so it acted like a cape. My mum just kept repeating, "oh my god, oh my god, oh my god..." while unfolding the flag and wrapping it around the bear, and then turned it around and proceeded to punch it in the face, like an act of therapeutic release of anger and frustration. At this point, my grandmother, who we all thought was asleep, lifts her head and shouts, "you democrats!" We all lost it. I couldn't stop laughing. She fumbled her way through a few sentences about Trump saving our country, and Biden ruining it. "Maybe we should talk about politics more Mum, to get you stimulated," my mum said to her. After we calmed down, we changed the subject and a friend was telling us about some blue mold she found in her garden. My grandmother lifted her head, again, and shouted, "blue mold is democratic!" That was a good day.
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Through it all, I'm so grateful to be here. It feels, finally, that I am where I am supposed to be. For so long that was always a disabling and heavy question weighing on my mind, never sure if I was where I needed to be. I get to see and swim in the ocean every day. I get to walk and be outside and help care for my grandmother when I can, and I am able to find space to be alone. You learn quickly, that while giving care for someone who needs it constantly, that one cannot do it constantly, but find a way to work as a team with those around you willing to help and support. And finding the strength inside you to be there for another human, as much as for yourself. For my grandmother, the process and transformation in her must be largely unaware to all of us, even though it would be the most powerful of all. She is forced into a position where she has to let go of all control, as now she has none. All her rigid, controlling and anal tendencies now need to be worked through. And we watch her gradually decay and dissolve into the next journey, sometimes finding her reaching out towards someone we can't see, someone waiting for her.
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Osterville, MA // August 2024​
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Sarah
Sarah was… wild. She didn't care too much about what other people thought of her. And that was infectious. Some people couldn't stand to be around us both because we would feed off each other’s energy. She had wild, red curly red hair and everything about her was alive.
When I was 24 one of my closest friends at the time died - hit by a car walking across the street in Brooklyn. Straight impact to the head, no pain - immediately she left her body. A coma for about a week. I remember her head blew up almost twice it's size. That was very sad, and I was in Germany at the time, so I flew back to say goodbye to her on life support - they kept her on it long enough for me to be able to say goodbye. At the time of her death, I knew her better than most anyone else. We had been living in NYC together. For two months she crashed on my couch, much to my boyfriend's disapproval, until she found an apartment of her own.
Her favorite word was fearless. She used to say (or scream) it a lot. It was her word. Her boyfriend, who I've known since we were little and who I met Sarah through, gave her a thin gold necklace with the Sanskrit word abhaya written on a small gold plate, which translates as fearless. She was wearing it when she was buried. Probably when she was hit too. I got that word tattooed on my arm.
About ten years after her death my mum and sister saw a median. I don't think for any specific reason, just my mums friend highly recommended this one. I listened to the recording of it.
Of course, they contacted my grandfather and great-grandmother who had passed. My mum even contacted a long since passed friend, Dr. Abawagi, who was from Africa and a king of a tribe there, as well as a doctor in Boston, and who was also very rich and very much in love with my mum and wanted to get married and adopt us kids. It didn't work out, of course, and I have to say I'm a bit sad about that. But he did say his death would have been too hard on us, so it was better so.
Anyways. They met a few passed loved ones until someone came up to the front of the line. I can see her pushing her way through the invisible crowd. The first thing I heard come from the median was, “well aren't you sassy.” I think that one sentence sums up a lot about Sarah. And then, “this girl is funny!” and then mentioning of a tattoo. My sister responds, “ I don't think this one is for me, this is for my sister.” And they spent the rest of the time talking with her. I couldn't believe, especially because she wasn't particularly close with my family.
“Tell her to stop playing the story in her head,” she told them for me, referring to her accident. Like I said, she had no pain when she was hit. And she was fine, great even. She went on to say she was having a lot of fun, wherever she was, whatever realm she was in. She was even going to concerts. “I didn't get jipped,” she said. I can imagine she's having way more fun than all of us on earth.
While this was happening, I was starting a vision quest in Australia, which is a Native American practice of spending four days and three nights alone, in nature, without food or water. Needless to say it was quite intense, and there were drums, singing, a fire and a sweat lodge that felt like my skin would burn off through. When my mum mentioned it Sarah immediately responds, "she's doing that?!" and proceeds to make drum noises, "BOOM BOOM BOOM", because that's how she was! She was always poking and making fun , especially if you took yourself too seriously.
She wanted to tell me thank you for continuing to talk about her, as her family was too sad to do so. She wanted me to know that she's been traveling with me, and likes to mess around with my things as I like everything to be neat. She moves pictures off-kilter or things like that. (Honestly, I hadn't noticed). She wanted me to know that I needed to stop running around and wasting money, that I needed to stop chasing after enlightenment, and that I have everything I need already inside me. She showed an image of what looked like Ireland or Scotland, something to note. Somehow I feel I need to go there someday to find something, see something, meet someone, experience something. She wanted to tell me to stop hiding, but to be in the world. I had been cocooning myself a lot then, too scared to even be caught in conversations. I wasn't doing too well. She told them that I need to write, free write, that she could connect with me through it.
My sister wanted advice on her relationship which was gradually falling apart, and eventually it did. Sarah goes, "I got this," and told her to stop adopting “pound puppies”, which is a beautifully accurate way of describing my sister's last boyfriends and the general type of guys she's been attracted to. And that she “mind-fucks” everything - which my sister agreed with completely. There were other direct and incredibly accurate advice. It was every bit of her that I can remember.
She told them that we were more than friends, we were sisters. And we were, Sarah and I had a very similar energy and look on life and we both wanted to explode into the world. But ironically, I always wondered if Sarah actually liked me outside of the heightened energy we created together. She told my family we still have work to do together. I'm sure I'll see her when I leave this world.
I tried looking for her in off-kiltered frames and misarranged objects, but I didn't find her yet. I think she's still waiting for me to write more. Waiting for me to be fearless.
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I did ask one of my teachers about this, because in Buddhism we are taught that the bardo - or in-between state, the state after death and before your next rebirth - is quite disturbing, terrifying and confusing. Our whole practice is in preparation for this period in our lives, the dying process, or the state thereafter, because it will take a very open and clear mind to be able to free oneself, and not fall into cyclical existence again. The opportunity is so great to cut the ties of existence, yet equally are the obstacles preventing you from recognizing it. So we are given terrifying descriptions, and no doubt, they do happen - but what about the other experiences? The blissful ones, the insight one gains after death that is then communicated through medians or people who have had near-death experiences. How do we view those? With my limited understanding or interpretation - as I was also very nervous at the time asking this question in front of hundreds of people - was that its true, there are both these experiences happening, but that the more pleasant ones also need to be cut through and gone beyond. Terrifying or blissful, we must recognize its nature and go beyond, and return to the inconceivable vastness of the universe (in my own words).
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Osterville, MA // August 2024
May our story be rich to unfold,
at the edge of our seats.
Love is incandescent
and moves through
like water.
Calm, steady, wild
and infinitely alive.
Osterville, MA // August 2024
Antipoetry
I noticed that there are more people ignoring the do not trespass signs for private beaches. They are spreading out over the empty parts of sand, which none of the big houses are using. And it made me happy to see people disobeying ridiculous rules.
We are all back home on the Cape again - my mum, sister and I - and I listen to them talk from upstairs. I join them in the kitchen, where they are sitting at the table. Laughing. Lilly pours herself a full glass of wine while I serve myself dinner, and she calls us the little women. And even though they've already finished eating, it feels like, in these days, for the first time, we are a family. The kind you look forward to coming home to. That feeling is ineffable and complete.
There's so much light in the living room, with the high ceiling and big yellow rug. And the porcelain owls - two of which are lamps. It's fresh and alive, and my grandmother is laughing at the things we talk about, the little women. I can't remember what. It finally stopped raining, and the light pours through.
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Today the local barber approached me, he must be in his 70s. He told me, if I sat long enough with you, I think I could learn to do that. I smiled, you mean writing? He said, I'm not very good at it. I told him, anyone can do it.
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Osterville, MA // August 2024