Firewood
J and I sort through the cord of firewood that arrived yesterday. It is “soft wood,” pine and hemlock. Some of it is so dry that even the large pieces feel unnaturally light. J has cut a measure of wood for me to use as a ruler; our fireplace insert will only fit pieces of wood up to 16 inches and many pieces are too long. I toss these to J who saws them in two and tosses them back to me. This is the specific element of danger: the screeching power saw, the tossing of the wood, which bounces unpredictably. J doesn’t feel the danger, but I do. It’s familiar: a mostly unfocused feeling of danger is always buzzing in the background of my waking life.
I stack the wood. This involves an exercise in reverse entropy that is actually very satisfying. I take two or more pieces of wood from the random pile and place them onto the wood rack in such a way that they’ll stay put and will also create a space for another piece to nestle on top or against them. It’s both imprecise and deliberate. It’s curiously satisfying to devote my body and mind to this. The sun is out and even though the day is relatively cool, I’m sweating. J and I don’t talk much, but there’s a sense of creating this together.
We make a pile of the heavier, oddly-shaped pieces of wood next to the chimenea. After dinner, J makes a fire. I lie in the hammock and use my star app to locate constellations. The order we’ve made of the wood chaos is only temporary, only resting energy, always changing. Now it is fire and warmth. Now it a sense of danger for Halle so that she refuses to stay outside with us. Now the sparks of it shoot through the constellations.
Ball field
Halle and I walk here most mornings. Instead of staying outside the ball field fence, Halle likes to go through the opening onto the playing field. She doesn’t go straight across the outfield though. She’s always been an edge walker. She sniffs along the fence, stopping to pee at select spots. This is how she maps the world, through scents both given and received.
The ball field is its own kind of map, but not one that corresponds to any physical place. It’s one of countless maps we lay on the earth that correspond to places in our mind. The game’s physical enough: the bats, the balls, the exertion of the players. But what’s being mapped out doesn’t have a physical location so much as a psychic one, a social and emotional one. Not that those locations are any less real. And Halle can probably sniff them out, too, come to think of it.
In which I confuse risotto with pilaf
Returning to Trader Joe’s in Portland this week was a bit of a rush. A little over a year ago we turned into the parking lot to see a line of masked-up, socially distanced people outside, extending the length of the store, eyes fixed on their phones, waiting to get in. We circled back out of the parking lot and went home to Bath. Since then, our food shopping has consisted of rushed, claustrophobic, anxiety-driven experiences divided between Shaws and Hannifords, with the occasional pop into the Bath Natural Food Market. All of these places are shrouded in my mind with pandemic pallor.
No line outside TJ’s today. And inside, the familiar, quirky, upbeat displays. I must admit, my heart leapt at the sight. There were the bins of daffodils from Ireland, $1.79 a bunch, that I’ve purchased every spring (in Maryland, in Seattle, in Maine) for at least the last 8 years. There were the Valrhona chocolate bars, the bags of roasted sunflower seeds and walnuts, the cheap but tasty Chardonnay, and my favorite “European-style” yogurt, not found anywhere else on the planet, including (I’m guessing) in Europe. We headed for the frozen food aisle, but alas, could not find the bags of rice and veggies we used to buy weekly in Seattle and mix with anything from fish to chicken to tofu. Pilafs, I thought they were. An employee asked if she could help, and again we cruised up and down the aisle, until the memory clarified and I realized the mixtures were risottos, not pilafs. We found them at last with a delight disproportionate to frozen food and grabbed up half a dozen. The employee cheerfully described the process as a treasure hunt. And that’s the magic of TJ’s, the children’s bookstore quality of it, at least for now.
Boat Launch Ritual
Several times a week J and I take our dogs to the South End Boat Launch in Bath, on the Kennebec River. Our old lab is arthritic and walks with difficulty, but he sheds the years once he’s in the water, swimming out enthusiastically after a tossed frisbee. While this is going on our other dog, a Standard Schnauzer, noses around to her heart’s content. She’ll occasionally deign to chase a frisbee, if there’s a treat in the offing.
Even in the dead of winter, when the dock is disassembled and no boats are going into the water, people seem drawn to the boat launch. Often, when we arrive there will be a car or two parked at the base of the launch, facing the river, engines idling if the weather’s especially cold. No one gets out. They are there, seemingly, just for the privilege and pleasure of staring at the Kennebec. And then there are the cars that turn off of Washington Street into the parking lot, circle around to the launch and without stopping head back out the other side of the parking lot and go on their way again. I can’t figure these people out. I frequently complain to my husband about them, because when I see a car pulling in I need to grab the wayward Schnauzer and wait with her until the car leaves. If they want to see the river, then stop and see the river. But why just circle through? My husband claims to find nothing strange in this behavior. He says he’d be tempted to do the same thing if he was driving by, just swing through to acknowledge the Kennebec. An almost spiritual sort of ritual, it seems to me. A brief connection with this huge natural power. Something to take back out on to the road with you.
Skiing - Inland Woods and Trails/Gould Trails, Bethel, Maine
We’ve spent four day on the snow, writing in our muscles what it takes to move our bodies, touching the bottom of our lungs and swimming back up.
The ski trails are white palettes where the least bit of color - from an isolated pine cone, a bit of green lichen, a fallen leaf - is illuminated, presented to the eye in singular splendor.
Waking in Maine
The trick to dodging the dawn through your bedroom window is never effective: you arch the sheet over your eyes, retreat into sleep, wake again to the rasp of light across your face. There’s no contest here: the day will be. You go outside, where the yew hedge squats on a bleached lawn, inhabiting its own darkness. Purple cone flowers in their temporary pots ask you to feel the pull of soil beneath your sandaled feet and have pity. A tree drops its net of shade over the street. It’s a vigorous day, sliding heat along your hair; a contentious day, setting the electric buzz of cicadas against the barking of a fretful dog, the D minor wail of a mower against the low C of a motorbike out on Route 1. What are you in this? A flower but walking, longing turned into a leaf. Everything in this place is this place. Something still asleep mutters from the room of dreaming, but the day has no patience for ghosts, and soon you are beyond the reach of haunting.
Vesper Flights
A splendid piece by Helen Macdonald about swifts and about the realms in which we make our homes. Below is an excerpt from the end. The full article is here.
“Thinking about swifts has made me think more carefully about the ways in which I’ve dealt with difficulty. When I was small, I comforted myself with thoughts of layers of rising air; later I hid myself among the whispers of recorded works of fiction, helping myself fall asleep by playing audiobooks on my phone. We all have our defenses. Some of them are self-defeating, but others are occasions for joy: the absorption of a hobby, the writing of a poem, speeding on a Harley, the slow assembly of a collection of records or shells. “The best thing for being sad,” said T.H. White’s Merlyn, “is to learn something.” As my friend Christina says, all of us have to live our lives most of the time inside the protective structures that we have built; none of us can bear too much reality. And with the coronavirus pandemic’s terrifying grip on the globe, as so many of us cling desperately to the remnants of what we assumed would always be normality — sometimes in ways that put us, our loved ones and others in danger — my usual defenses against difficulty have begun to feel uncomfortably provisional and precarious.
Swifts have, of late, become my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather. They aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm.
Not all of us need to make that climb, just as many swifts eschew their vesper flights because they are occupied with eggs and young — but surely some of us are required, by dint of flourishing life and the well-being of us all, to look clearly at the things that are so easily obscured by the everyday. To take time to see the things we need to set our courses toward or against; the things we need to think about to know what we should do next. To trust in careful observation and expertise, in its sharing for the common good. When I read the news and grieve, my mind has more than once turned to vesper flights, to the strength and purpose that can arise from the collaboration of numberless frail and multitudinous souls. If only we could have seen the clouds that sat like dark rubble on our own horizon for what they were; if only we could have worked together to communicate the urgency of what they would become.”
Moving from column A to column B
On this day 54 years ago, Frank O’Hara was buried in Green River Cemetery in Springs, Long Island. (More about that here )
A 2008 Article in The New Yorker ( Fast Company ) calls O’Hara a “self elegist,” moving his own fleeting life by means of poetry into the timeless:
“His poems, so full of names and places and events, are exquisite ledgers for the tallying of reality. They all attempt to move the vital but fleeting items in Column A—sandwiches and torsos, lunch hours and late nights—into Column B, where works of art stand, “strong as rocks,” against the ravages of mortality. The attempt to move people from Column A to Column B is called “elegy,” and, while every poet tries it, few have done so with the illusion of real-time improvisation that makes O’Hara’s poems so risky and so satisfying. Although he wrote his elegies for both the famous (James Dean, Billie Holiday, Jackson Pollock) and the obscure (many of whom, like O’Hara’s Boston friend Bunny Lang, have become almost famous for their part in his poems), O’Hara was essentially a self-elegist: poem after poem explores that darker sense of his “own ceaseless going”—his presence, a moment ago so real and vital, now going, now gone. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” Robert Frost wrote, “the poem must ride on its own melting.” This is the story of every O’Hara poem, which simultaneously moves forward and disappears, delighting in its speed and despairing of its brevity.”
Fiddleheads
Can you see them a split second before the metaphor takes hold, before your mind furls into a shape to meet the shape it sees? Metaphor is a trap they always slip. They’re caught for just an instant, before unfurling into something more alien, for which we find no cognate. Or is metaphor an aspect of what they are, that allows us to be in brief relationship? As if the heads of fiddles and the heads of young ferns are infinite lines in a cosmic geometry, intersecting only at this point.