Letter

We had to yell, and the only way I could know how I felt was by yelling, blindly groping for words in the speed of anger. In that speed, that intensity of wanting so badly to describe what it was like,I found a splinter growing in my side, and gave it a name. Sometimes just describing the symptoms makes them shrink. Like looking one of your monsters in the face: they diminish.

But I don't want to be vague to you. I don't want to use a language that passes by everything in a blur, like highway driving with all the windows up. There's a call for openings, for letting things seep out and in, for unwrapping something, for narrowing things down into something visible. Don't narrow it down so that it's smaller, but clearer. A huge storm can be clear. A shell on a windowsill can be clear. And remember the opposite call for guarding, for keeping certain things in hidden rooms, in a secret garden...but there's that vagueness again, and I start to see it as a hurdle.

Is it a letter I want to write to you or to myself? Or is it simply the kind of letter I'd like to hide in a wall, for the people who hope to find something in walls? (the way I always hope to find things in walls, in cubby holes, in hollow trees...)

And if it's a letter it's easier, I can breathe out and say, to an old friend, to myself, to the finder-of-the-letter-in-the-wall: I hate the word hurdle. Yesterday talking to an old friend we agreed that Bernice Drive was an ugly name. There are the good things, and in the midst of fighting it out, again and again, reinventing and setting up new tries, let's remember them. Morning sunshine on skin. Waking up while paddling out to the waves and that clean forgiving scent of salt that says, kindly and gently, Start Over. Find new ways of building. Mend crossed communication lines and Start Over, and build it better.

Raccoon

Now feels like a tangled twine, a first woodwork project, nails crooked and holding things in place vaguely, questionably. But it’s a beautiful day! And I want to learn to trust myself, to trust the day, to trust the tangles.

The trip to Maine is distilling itself, boiling itself down. Its images are wispier, and certain ones become more solid, growing roots. Why does only some of it grow roots?
Here are Anne, Peter, and Per, playing croquet in the darkening evening. There’s the barbecue, with smoke and coals and warmth and I’m standing beside it talking to Dave and watching. The woods are standing all around us, except on the fourth side, where the lake meets the shore seamlessly. It gets darker, they can hardly see the croquet gates anymore, and finally not at all. I stand there liking that they’re playing croquet in the dark. The kind of thing that comes as a relief and a surprise, that things don’t have to work as usual, as expected, as is proper. The same feeling as when a big storm hits, and all the wind is a relief. You want to run out into it and yell.

Here is breakfast the next day. One clear snapshot of homemade doughnuts warming in a pan on the woodstove. Steam rising from our coffee cups. Quiet book pages turning, and glances up at the lake through the porch screen. Canoes gliding past, and that’s what canoes do, they glide.

Lying on the dock on my belly looking down into the water, which is clear. Looking at leaves on the bottom, red yellow and orange, not having lost their colour yet. I think about them being there all through the winter, freezing into the ice. Dry leaves float down and land on the surface. But now I’ve seen that there are spiders here along the edge of the dock, and I jump up. We’ll jump into the water after awhile, and the shocking cold of it will be so much different that gazing out at it or down into it.

Driving home through the forests full of October is a sleepy, monotonous blur of glorious colour. It’s colour so vivid it’s alive like light, like water. I took the last shift driving toward midnight, with headlights and trucks to pass. I hit a raccoon. I felt the selfishness of our cars and highways. I felt how fast a life can go out, with a non-descript bumping sound.

Pools

In the afternoon I planted bulbs. I’d never done that before. It was harder to dig into the ground than I thought. The wooden dibber, a tool for making holes for bulbs, wasn’t much help. I looked in the shed and in the tool cupboards for a trowel or a shovel. Finding none, I brought out a crowbar and an old screwdriver. It was hard work but the crowbar worked okay. I discovered moist, loose soil under the deck, and carried loads of it on a piece of wood to where I was planting. Tulips and crocus: tulips along the steps to the deck, crocus under a tree. Pushing a bulb into a hole in the ground before winter struck me as being an act of hope. An act of faith. I like the simplicity of playing in the dirt. I like the complexity of how many plant species there are, and all their different ways of growing.

At dusk we went down to the beach. It was low tide and there were tidal pools among the rocks. We walked out among them. The sky was a pastel pink and purple, reflecting in the pools. The greens and yellows of the seaweed had a muted way of belonging together. There were lots of little starfish resting in the water. There were periwinkles with spiky “hair” growing upward from their tops. When I picked them up they made a sucking sound. I looked into these pools for a long time, crouching down and picking up the occasional empty crab shell or odd rock. I wasn’t doing much of anything but it felt worthwhile. As we were leaving I found a surfboard fin among the rocks.

After that, at the grocery store, we talked about which kinds of apples were which: Cortland, Gravenstein, Macintosh, sweet, sour, hard, soft. In aisle 4 we dropped a bottle of olive oil and it spread outwards on the floor into a yellow-green pool, slick and unreal under the florescent lights.