Wow, let’s give DK an attaboy for showing up on his own blog? An unscheduled sabbatical, like forever. MIA without notice.
Let’s give Anneli credit for my return, this being a far less ambitious adaption of her February effort, but hey, it’s Something.
The mood has been shifting anxiously between Renkl: “often it feels like the only thing left to do is rage against the dying of the light” and Murakami: “All that remained now was a sort of quiet resignation” and my recent fan boy affection for Charlotte Wood: “The beauty of being here is largely the silence, after all. Not having to explain, or endlessly converse.”
The Cove Island morning walks continue, despite the bitter cold. If I was counting, it would be 1,746 consecutive (almost) mornings. Like in a row. But who’s counting?!
It’s early morning Feb 10th, I’m heading to the cliff at The Cove. I’m standing in the spot taking the shot above, fingers numb from the cold, winds gusting up to 30 mph.
…I have spent 63 years trying to cultivate hope, but my thoughts wander in this direction too often these days. Why protect the wildflowers that grow in our yard when all the emerald yards nearby are drenched in herbicides and when their purely ornamental shrubs are drenched in insecticides? Why trouble myself to keep the stock-tank ponds filled with water when every spring there are fewer and fewer tree frogs who might need a nursery for their eggs? Why turn off the lights to protect nocturnal creatures when all around me the houses are lit up like airport runways? Why bother to plant saplings when a builder will only cut them down later, after my husband and I are gone, to make room for yet another foolishly large house that glows in the dark? …
More and more I find it hard not to ask the question I have spent my adult life avoiding: What is the point of even trying? …
At my lowest, I have never entirely given up my faith that good people working together can change the world for the better. When I have been downhearted in the past, I have always explained to myself that I am not alone in my efforts to cultivate change — by writing, by planting, by loving the living world in every way I can find to love it. Individual efforts gather momentum through the individual efforts of others…
In saving the leaves for the moths and the fireflies and the dark-eyed juncos, I am still trying. And in the trying perhaps I can save my own soul.
People have been arguing that print is dead, or about to be dead… It is not dead in this house. We write in books. We dogear pages and underline passages and draw little stars in the margins. To read a book after my husband has read it is to have a window into his curious and wide-ranging mind.
I’m aware that a novel is not a thing. A poem is not a thing. Whether a story or a poem or an essay or an argument comes in through your ears or your eyes or your fingertips doesn’t change the alchemy that happens in reading: the melding of writer and reader, one human heart in communion with another, and with all the others, past, present, and future, who have read the same book. That magic is unrelated to the delivery system of a text. It happens whenever and however a person reads.
Nevertheless.
I will always prefer a book I can hold in my hand, the kind that smells of paper and glue, the kind whose unfolding I control, no button or touchscreen involved, by flipping backward and forward with pages ruffling between my fingers. The physicality of it pleases me. I listen to audiobooks on solo road trips, but I always switch back to the physical book as soon as I unpack. Reading a book on paper feels slower — calmer, stiller — than encountering any digital text.
For me, a book made of paper will always be a beautiful object that warms a room even as it expands (or entertains, or challenges, or informs, or comforts) a mind, and a bookcase will always represent time itself. I walk past one of our bookcases, and I can tell you exactly why a particular book is still there, never culled as space grew limited, even if there is no chance I’ll ever read it again.
When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.
When I was a little girl, I loved to stand at my grandmother’s elbow while she wrote notes. Her desk was a small secretary, the furniture equivalent of an arranged marriage between a chest of drawers and a glass-fronted bookcase. Carved into the corners of the backboard were a pair of screaming gargoyle-like creatures in bas-relief, their surly beards made from deep black hatch marks. […]
Maybe I never noticed them screaming so far above my head. I wasn’t interested in anything about Mimi’s secretary except for the desk hidden behind a panel that dropped down from a shelf above the drawers. I loved the cubbies in back where Mimi kept stamps, paper clips, a stapler and tape, a ledger of some kind. I loved the stationery, and I loved the ink pens. A hiding place, just for writing!
Written language was a magic trick. My grandmother’s handwriting looked nothing like my mother’s, or my great-grandmother’s, and yet whatever any of them wrote could be understood by anybody who knew how to read. Was there anything more mysterious or more profound? To a child in love with language, the secretary was an altar, its hidden compartment a tabernacle.
One day when I was 12 or 13, Mimi looked up from her writing. “Someday this will be your desk,” she said to me. “You’re the writer in the family, and someday this will be yours.”
My grandmother lived to be deep into her 90s, so “someday” was a long time coming, and by then I had all but ceased to write anything by hand. Right up until she lost her eyesight, Mimi wrote faithfully to many friends and family members, a habit she had surely developed by living for much of her life during a time and in a place without telephone service. […]
Rebellion against the email leash chaining me to my computer may explain my 2021 New Year’s resolution to write a note, by hand, every day of this year. […]
Between those reminders and the writing itself, I can feel myself slowing down. This is not the kind of writing I can blast through at a messy speed, correcting later. This kind of writing requires a deliberation that little else in my life requires: one thought, one word, one sentence at a time.
In that sense, the letters are as much for me as for their recipients: a thin, scrawled thread connecting us across the miles, linking their grief with my grief, their joy with my joy, their generosity with my thanks. Sometimes this practice reminds me to act on my own generosity, a way to tell people I love or admire that I’m thinking of them. I like to imagine how surprised they will be to find a handwritten letter tucked among the bills and the ads they never glance at for products they will never need. […]
Finding time for anything that matters will always be a challenge, but the notes themselves aren’t hard. All that dread, for years, always putting off and putting off the obligation of a thank-you note or the duty of a condolence letter — why did I waste so much time on dread?
With every renewed effort, I marvel again at how easy it is. How it takes almost nothing to write just a few lines, nothing to fix a stamp in the corner, to walk the letter out to the mailbox and lift the little metal flag to tell the mail carrier to stop at this house. I wish I had known long ago how much pleasure I would take in lifting that little red flag. I wish I’d remembered how much I love the smell of paper and ink and the memory of my grandmother, sitting at this very secretary, the way she said, “You’re the writer in the family” and made it real…
Driving through rural Mississippi, I felt my shoulders drop. Suddenly I was smiling. On a dappled road between weedy hedgerows and piney woods and cotton fields and country graveyards and shabby crossroads towns without so much as a blinking yellow light, I was singing along with Tyler Childers and smiling like a fool.
I was home.
I don’t mean literally. I come from Lower Alabama peanut-farming stock, not Mississippi cotton farmers. The first time I ever set foot in Mississippi, I was 22 and on my way to New Mexico, eager to shake the red dirt of home from my sandals as fast as I could manage.
But those small clapboard churches where cars park right on the grass, and those rough farm roads yielding to blacktop, and those blooming, insect-bedazzled margins between fields, and that splintered light pouring down from the pines — they were all telling me I was home. And I was so happy to be home.
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”
I believe she’s right — “Joy is not made to be a crumb”— but for a certain kind of Southerner, it’s impossible not to question this particular happiness. This place has caused so much suffering. How could loving it fail to provoke questions? And yet the sight of cotton growing in fields made me happy. For those few hours, even knowing the terrible, blood-soaked history of cotton, I couldn’t help it. Happiness rose in me like an anthem. […]
Drive down a highway in your own homeland, the golden autumn light pouring around you and the golden leaves tumbling in the passing rush of air, and tell me your heart doesn’t fill up with love and longing. Tell me you could keep your heart from filling up with love to the throbbing point of longing. Even a heart entirely broken comes back for more breaking when the source of heartbreak is home. […]
I will keep on loving the place that made me, for I seem to have no choice about that. Because when the muted gold of the pine needles and the extravagant yellow leaves of the elms and the mottled orange leaves of the sugar maples and the shining red leaves of the black gum trees are all falling out of the sky in the passing wind, it always feels exactly like a benediction.
