Year's Last

All day I've been skirting the edges of this space, wanting to sign on and begin writing but not signing on, wanting to write but not knowing what, wanting to say something with absolutely no clear idea how. Well. I finally realized I was ignoring my own advice, or at least what I always tell my students: it's a mistake, I say to them, to think you already know what you're going to say when you sit down to say it. You miss a whole lot that way, and I really mean it when I say it although usually, it's advice that's meant to quell their early-onset writer's block. I tell them it's okay--preferable--not to know, that you sit down and start anyway and see what happens.

So I've finally sat down here to see what there is to say, and whether or not anything major comes of it still, I feel better thinking I'm ending the calendar year on a writing note. And of course tomorrow I must write as well--superstitiously, then, since I like to do on the first day of the year what I hope to do on every day for the rest of the year. Even though New Year's Day is an arbitrary thing, a date that doesn't make sense on any internal feeling or external event that I might base it on. If the decision was left to me, which day would I pick for a New Year's Day? I'm not sure, but mine would probably fall sometime in the autumn, around the equinox, perhaps, or the first of November. I base that decision on--nothing, really. Maybe on the onset of the school year, which still, this many years later, feels like the real beginning of things to me, or maybe it's rooted in Celtica, or in the moody distribution of the year into light and dark, into summer and winter, with winter always having the slight edge of ascendancy, at least in our imaginations. If I was going to think about an agricultural year, I suppose I'd begin mine in early spring. February might not be too early for that; some farmers start their crops that early, and I even see vestiges of that in the feast cycles of the church year.

But, here I am in 21st-century America (at least in this lifetime) and January 1st it is, and I am left feeling rather at loose ends about the whole thing. Part of this comes no doubt from stuffing myself with folklore the way I was stuffing myself with Christmas cookies a week ago. Because I want to call down as much good fortune on this household as I can, I get frantic about not making any missteps now--what is the right thing to eat, to wear, to bring into the household, to wish, to say, to do to greet this year and make it look favorably on me? For years we ate black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, although we never ate them any other time; and at this very hour my Southern boyfriend is in fact stewing up a big pot of them for his lunch tomorrow. The trouble is, that doesn't feel quite right to me--I get how you eat things that are supposed to resemble money (in other places they eat lentils for the same reason) and that's why the traditions extend to include things like lettuce and cabbage (for the green) or a whole fish (head-to-tail, so that your year is blessed from beginning to end--but I think this tradition is Chinese). And my mother's admonition, that I've never heard anywhere else: on New Year's Day, only eat pork or beef, and never poultry. The reason is that pigs and cows both root forward, but chickens scratch backwards, and thus you don't want to hobble yourself with a backward-looking life. Black-eyed peas just don't feel like money food to me, and I don't eat meat very often; I almost think it would be preferable to eat bread that you've made by hand (staff of life stuff) or even chocolate cake (so that life is rich and sweet). The one tradition I've never wanted much part of is the drink-until-you're-ill tradition. The year I bartended on New Year's Eve--this would have been in 1986, I think--was enough to convince me I didn't want any part of those behaviors, yikes: I see now why they call it amateur night. I suppose there's nothing lucky at all about starting the year off with alcohol poisoning. I think this year, I'm just going to eat what I feel like cooking or what the kids feel like having for dinner, and we'll see what happens.

I did spend part of the afternoon making English muffins, and although the process is a little fussy and a little time-consuming still, this feels like wealth, to have those couple of dozen golden circles spread out on the cooling rack and to think about my children eating them sometimes for breakfast, in that quiet twenty minutes they spend at the table before the school day starts. Maybe by the time the breads are gone, spring will be in the neighborhood. Maybe I was inspired to bake them because they make me think of the sun, and at this time of the year, I am ready to be done with winter and wish that the sun would make a fast return. The days have been noticeably longer for the past couple of weeks--sunset started coming later long before the actual solstice--but it's still cold out there, the furnace still has to run in the evening, there was snow overnight last night and likely, there will be snow again tomorrow.

And, although I always swore I would not be one of those older people, the truth is I'm really done living in the frozen north, really done with winter seasons that consume a good five months of the year. I don't know if it's the unmanageable costs of the heating bills, or the incredible pain-in-the-ass that is the constant shoveling, or the fact that I don't like sweaters, only sweatshirts (but you can't wear a sweatshirt to teach in) or the way that I hate slip-sliding around on the roads out there...well, it's all of the above, no doubt, plus a few things more.

The positive aspect to winter is reading about it. For instance, Rima Staines in her lovely blog has been illustrating a different winter creature from the Northern myths for the past several days, and there is something to be said for being forced, by the weather, to sit indoors and invent things. Years ago I had in mind to write an anthology all by myself--and yes, I know that traditionally, that's not what an anthology is--of winter stories for children. At the time my own kids were very small and we read constantly, and so everything used to look to me like it was a pretty good idea for a children's book. I may still write it, one day. In my children's Winter Book, the first story began at the end of autumn--canning, if I recall it right, a story about working in the kitchen all night to get the harvest stored as the year's first hard frost advanced on the other side of the steamy windows. In those days, I was also working on a farm, and so my perceptions of things tended to come in shades of agricultural concerns.

Just start, and see what happens. A year ago I wasn't looking forward to much of anything, and if there were any one thing I ought to be writing about now, it would be about what a mass of changes this year brought with it. For starters, I wrote a lot: the records here show that I began this blog in February (see? Maybe that is the true New Year) and this will be the 34th essay I've put here--there is still one under construction, so it would have been 35; but it's a piece that's going to be difficult to write, and I want to get it just right, so it will appear when it appears. I also kept smaller blogs on two myspace sites, writing for a period of about 4 months as a plant (essay about that experience to come) and since the plant went to sleep, writing a short bit most days on the other account. Between the two of them, I posted 151 times; not a bad year's work, especially from a woman who spent fully six years in the grips of a writer's block. That time should warrant an essay of its own, though partly it was already written in the form of the story of Inanna.

So, I wrote a lot, I met Buck, and this was the year I began to breathe again after the long stretch of years in which my husband's cancer was the unimpeachable Lord of Dark Rule over both our lives. This will be the third New Year's I will have passed since David died and by now, the grief has gone from acute to almost soothing and better yet, now that I'm on the cusp of 50 years old, I think I'm finally beginning to grow up. Loren Eisley wrote about that in one of his essays, and said he was 50 the day he turned into an adult; when I first read that passage, nearly half my lifetime ago now, I couldn't imagine what he meant. Now I know exactly.

In the past couple of weeks a lot of ideas have been coming to me, some of them almost wholly-formed when they get here, some of them a little shyer than that, requiring more of me to draw them out. It reminds me of lovemaking, in an odd way: some days you initiate things, other times you get gotten. And this: I've gotten to where I anticipate my time at my writing desk the same way I anticipate seeing my lover, and I like that I have this relationship with my creativity now, like that it's a joy, and never a burden, to come here and write. I was thinking the other night about the fact that it took me this long to turn into this kind of a writer. Truth is, years ago, I just didn't have that much to say. And now that I have begun to find my voice, the better part of it is that the things I used to think were important--recognition, money, landing fat book contracts--all strike me as terribly beside the point now. I cannot tell you how freeing that is. In a very real sense this has been a year with bigger changes for me than any other year I can remember. This week, in fact, I think the first piece of housekeeping I need to do is to update the profile on this page--very little of that seems to be who I am anymore!

So, here's to good things continuing along into January--words that keep coming, relationships that stay blossoming, time to walk every day and the strength to do so. Maybe I'll go make that chocolate cake while I'm at it, too.

The House Ghost, Revisited

Wyatt came home from school a few days ago and wanted to know where he could go to find out information about the history of our house. I told him my best guess, but of course I wanted to know why he wanted to know. Well, he said, I think we have a ghost. He went on to describe the things he sees--I already knew how, some nights, he thinks he sees lights hovering in his room (I probably shouldn't belittle his experience by saying he thinks he sees, but I do remember what darkness in childhood is like, how it's often your own mind that's haunting you, that it's always your own mind filling in the blanks when your eyes see something they misinterpret or don't completely understand.)

Then he said this: the other day when I came out of the computer room, I looked at the picture that's hanging on the wall there, and reflected in the glass, I saw a little girl standing. When I looked over, she wasn't there. Now, that got my attention, and my first thought was, I knew it was a little girl I heard running down the stairs...and my second thought was, this is getting a little creepy. What I said out loud was, that's your mind, honey, putting together pieces and adding information that isn't really there. It's very human, it's what everyone does. I stopped short of telling him outright that he's seeing things because again, I remember what it feels like to be a child and nobody believes you...

Here is what I know about our house: it was built in 1875 by a wealthy family named Faulkner. It was in that family for many years, and has in fact changed hands relatively few times--I seem to remember someone telling me I was just the fifth owner in its nearly 135-year history. But my mind may have made that up, may have filled in information I forgot to find out on my own. I know that the land around me, now filled up with mostly modest houses, was once all farmland. I do know that sometimes I wake up at night and hear my children murmuring in their sleep, and when that happens I always feel a bit uneasy, and it's difficult for me to get back to sleep afterwards.

And, I also know that this doubt of mine over whether we are, in fact, possessed of a ghost in this household--never mind the doubts I still harbor over whether they exist at all!--is turning into my own preoccupation with what it is I'm actually seeing go on around here. This is what happened the past few days: our stockings are all hung with care just now, across the front of a long bookshelf in my living room, as it happens, and the other night, I noticed that Maeve's had been turned around on its hook, so that the backside faced out into the room, and its toe marched counter to the other four stockings that hang there (we still put Dave's up, and of course the dog has one, as well). Both kids were in the living room with me: who turned that around, I asked them, but of course, no one had. A day or two later as I sat at the dining room table, I noticed that the child's rocking chair that sits in the doorway between that room and the next was also turned around, facing into the dining room instead of away from it. Again, no one seems to know how it came to be that way, and although I imagine there are probably any number of so-called logical explanations for it, the one I keep coming back to is, we've got a ghost, and it's feeling mischievous.

Or, perhaps it's my own forgetfulness and my perpetual distractedness that together are the real ghost here, and I'm moving things around without being aware and forgetting where I set things down, which is why stuff disappears for awhile and then reappears in odd places later on. Perhaps Wyatt, sensitive and imaginative, takes too much to heart the paranormal shows he watches on The Discovery Channel, and perhaps the children whisper and sigh in their sleep because that's what teenagers do, what with all those hormones coursing around and keeping things on edge. Perhaps my own hormones are beginning to shift, and that accounts for my jittery sleep, my own restlessness in the face of what is more-or-less a good life.

Or, maybe if there is a house ghost, we can appeal to it to become a helpful member of the household. For instance, I'd like some help in finding the television remote, which has been missing now for nearly a week. For that matter, I need to remember where I put that one box of Christmas presents, which I think got delivered here sometime in the past week--although I can't decide if that's an invented memory. But even if it is, it's one so strong it had me searching every cupboard and cranny and hidey-spot in my house last night. To no avail. My son tells me that ghosts sometimes become active if they're upset over changes to their households. It's a fair deal, I think, and so if there is a house ghost here, I promise to leave your place the same as I found it, if only you'll promise to leave my things alone, as well.

My Solstice Fortune

I admit to still being in love with what I call the pagantides, those eight points of the wheel that come around in their regular pattern of long-balanced-short-balanced light and dark. I like midwinter, in spite of the things that drive me crazy about the season, the high heat bills, the back-breaking labor of clearing snow, the stupid-as-a-sack-of-hammers snowmobilers who, despite my requests that they not cross my property, continue to regard my land as their right-of-way. Up goes the fence!

But overnight (and uncharacteristically) last night, most of my chronic irritation melted away. I woke today with a delicious--and decidedly seasonal--craving for solitude. All morning the sky has been cloudy and low, although now a wind has picked up and the green pines and the gray branches of the maples are blowing around in it. The movement reminds me: things are alive. I woke wishing that my house were situated in the midst of a vast tract of acreage, field upon field and wood upon wood, and that I could be free to walk out through it alone with my thoughts and in danger of meeting no one. I like the energy of this, the shortest day of the year, and think that it naturally lends itself to going within, to deep thought and focused reflection. When I'm lucky enough to uncover the treasure that's patiently waiting there, I realize that it's the real thing I want for Christmas, and every other day of the year as well: the only thing on my wish list is that I be given an idea I can develop, and the time to develop it. And that I then be given the next one. Usually those discoveries come to me through writing--contrary to what a lot of people think, most writers don't know what they're going to say when they first sit down to say it. Or at least I don't. And of course, sometimes that treasure comes along through writing's corollary, walking (which in my experience is a kind of letterless adaptation of writing). That's what I try to tell my students: I love to write because when I do, when things are really in flow and your self is truly engaged with your self, it feels exactly like flying.


Today of course the reality is somewhat removed from solitude's ideal: my house is just one of a number of houses clustered around this block in the village, my son was awake early and so came downstairs practically on my heels, even now, as I write upstairs at my computer, the dog has arranged himself beside my chair making me aware of the other heart beat in this room besides my own. And at that moment, as if my writing a sentence about him had been the same thing as calling his name, the dog got up and nudged my arm and forced my attention away from these words for a moment and we both enjoyed a good long scratch behind his ears.


But, the urge to make a story out of the day has not passed, and despite the inevitability of the million other things I'll have to do today, there's still that long silver road spinning out in front of me to think about, and that road is the impulse to write, to make an image of or otherwise translate some experience that captures my attention at just that moment, or this one. As long as I can see that road the potential to walk down in exists, and everything else, the distractions or difficulties that rise up ahead of my getting there, are pretty much secondary.


Yesterday I spent the day with a kindergarten class, and while they colored away in a book full of illustrated Christmas carols, I sang the words to them and sometimes they sang along, as they could, and sometimes they stood up and did interpretive dance to the words. I never enjoy singing more than I do when it's for an audience who doesn't even notice that I don't sing well. I even amused them by making up my own words to some of the songs: "We wish you a merry CHRIST-mas/Get down off that chair!" (Prior to their class, I'd been reading a chapter in Stephen Fry's marvelous The Ode Less Travelled and reading about meter and rhyme always makes me start thinking in meter and rhyme.) This in turn made me remember, as I always do this time of the year, that there's a large body of work out there done rewriting the old Christmas songs to turn them back toward their pagan roots. I don't think there's anything wrong with this--at my core I'm a spiritual anarchist and anyway, I think that song-making is a fine occupation for this time of the year. I've already decided that this year, my solstice present to myself is going to be picking one or two favorite tunes (here I'm thinking Greensleeves and Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child) and making them my own, creating the lyrics that will fit the music and that will also reflect my own experience of this deep dark time of the year. That will be one part of the walk along that silver writing road today, just as writing in this blog space is also a part of that walk.

This morning I threw the I Ching and got the hexagram that translates, roughly, into "staying still," which is perfect advice, I think, for the day. Kind of a gifting message, I think: just sit still and see what your stillness attracts. let creativity come a-courtin' you. It's a happy state of anticipation. What do people do, I sometimes wonder, what do they think about, who do not seek out this state of inspiration? In my personal pantheon, at least, I arrange on the uppermost tier those divinites who grant that inspiration, placing them ahead of all the other spirits of weather, fortune, luck, and light.

His & Hers

I've had a few recurring dreams in my lifetime, and I've been fond of them all: I have written elsewhere how all of these involve houses, and how house dreams are really about your own inner world, and so the nicest thing is to fall asleep and find myself there. Whenever I reemerge into one of those rooms, I always check to see what's new since I was there last, what is the same, what I had failed to notice before.

A new one of these, and a new type, has appeared on night's landscape, however, and although I've only had it twice, still, that makes it recurring, and I am uneasy now lest it come back again. This one is not about a house. The problem, in the dream, is simple: I need to call Buck, and someone hands me a phone. I start to punch in the numbers and find that on the phone I have been given, there is no number "3." (In the morning, when I will phone him for his usual wake-up call and tell him about this, Buck's real phone number will contain the numeral three three different times. You begin to understand the difficulty in the dreamscape.)

I fret all day: is it an unlucky omen? The dream seems poisonous. Buck tells me that the next time I'm near a pay phone, I should pry the little metal cap off the numeral 3 and put it in my pocket. That way, he says, you'll always have a spare. The night he tells me this, Buck has this dream: he has been given a box full of strips of cloth; they are an inch or so wide and about a foot long. They are all sorts of colors, but one color--by morning he can no longer remember which--is missing, and in the dream he looks and looks through the strips for the color that is not there...

...which he does not find, and that sets me into a tizzy: these dreams are bad omens, I am sure of it. Not at all, he replies, it just means that something's missing, and what's missing is you being with me and me being with you. It seems so obvious when he says it. Why is it, I wonder next, that I live in the grasp of an imagination that itself seems to have no such grasp of the obvious?

The House Ghost

I noticed a little bit after the fact that when you buy a house, there are no disclosure requirements about ghosts; I didn't think to ask about it until it was too late, all the papers signed and my big check written and cashed. I think we had been living here about two weeks when I first heard it: it was in the middle of the evening; the kids had just gone to bed and I was sitting alone in the downstairs living room, which is a newer addition to my house (which is itself what you'd call an older home, built ca. 1875, and so of course you wouldn't be surprised to discover a ghost living here, would you? I've wondered that sometimes as I've been out walking around where the McMansions are cropping up and I think to myself, how does any soul ever manage to dwell in such an unsoulful place? Luckily for us we live in a home that's one of a number of other older homes on the block, else I think I'd likely be overrun by spirits looking for an appropriate place to hang.)

I have already decided that when I'm able to (by which I mean, at the point where my kids are grown and educated and my financial involvement with their lives is largely over [which, at the rate things are going, is probably going to be tomorrow: my niece was here with her new baby last week, and she said, well, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be walking all over the place. No, I told her, by next Thanksgiving Maya will be applying to college..] ) but when I'm able to, I'm going to return to college one last time and get that Ph.D. and I'm going to study folklore and my concentration is going to be ghosts. And then maybe I'll have finally figured out what I'm most curious about, when I think about ghosts: what exactly is it they want?

Mine seems to want to run down the stairs. The first time I heard it, as I said, both kids had just gone to bed and I assumed the thudding down the front staircase that came right after was one of them--I thought my daughter--heading back down to say something they'd just remembered, you know how kids are when it's bedtime but there's that one last thing on their minds. I waited, and I admit I waited a little annoyed, since I didn't want to deal with one single more interruption (you know how mothers are when it's the end of the day and the only thing that's on their minds is some silence and solitude). So I waited, and no one appeared--thankfully, I now think to myself--and I forgot about it until the next night, and the next night after that, when the same footsteps ran down the same length of staircase and by that time I was pretty sure I wasn't dealing with any figment of my imagination, and the thought of it and the sound of it kept me in a state of low-grade uneasiness for awhile, enhanced by how we were all three already uneasy much of the time, living as we were in a new house, in an unfamiliar town, and all the rest of it.

It doesn't confine itself to the late evening hours, this ghost of mine. One night my daughter heard it too, as we sat in the living room together and that familiar thump thump thump came on the stairs and she looked up and said oh, Wyatt must be coming down for something. I waited, watching her out of the corner of my eye, because I knew that Wyatt wasn't going to appear and I wanted to see her face as she began to figure it out. Either she never did, and forgot about it, or else she's keeping it to herself, because she didn't mention it again, and after a few minutes our conversation picked back up on another thread altogether and so far, house ghost is not a story we have told each other.

I have told a few other people about it, though, but just a few. One night I mentioned it, on the phone, to my boyfriend; he came to visit me some time after that and on a Saturday night, I fell asleep on the couch while the rest of them watched television. He woke me when it was time to go to bed, and sounded a little shaky when he told me, I heard your ghost. Same thing as me: the kids had gone to bed, a few moments later he heard someone thudding back down the steps, and waited to see Wyatt enter the room. When Wyatt did not, he realized what it was he'd heard--I don't think it scared him, necessarily, but I don't think he'd quite expected it, either.

I'd grown used to thinking my ghost was a little girl, my boyfriend thought it was a boy, judging by the way it clomps on the carpeted stairs. I'm not sure, but now I'm thinking we were both wrong, and this is why: last week the steam boiler that runs the radiators in the old part of the house quit working. The first thing I tried--the only thing I could try--was replacing the batteries in the thermostat that operates it. That wasn't the problem, and of course, when I took the batteries out everything reset, so I had to run through the program redoing the time, the date, that sort of thing. I could not get the temperature gauge to reset properly, though, and so I left that for the repairman I called to deal with. When he came in the next day he asked me, why did you set this to military time?

Well, I had not, but I think I know who might have. When I bought this house I bought it from a woman who was selling because she'd become widowed. Her husband had died here about a year earlier; all I knew about him was that he had died from kidney cancer, and that he had been career military, retired from the Air Force. I told my boyfriend when he called that night, I think I know who the ghost is, I think it's probably the Colonel. Who else would reset the only clock I have that can be set that way, to military time? And since I said that out loud, the footsteps at night have fallen silent, the evening hours are quiet again, and now I think, maybe that's the only thing a ghost ever wants, is for someone to know its real name.

The Cave Birthday

I was born in early November; and it may be that the atmosphere at this time of the year shaped my personality or it may be that my personality predisposes me toward Novembrishness, but however it happened, we're a perfect fit, this landscape and I, the lowering skies, the 40% chance of mournfulness. When November holds its mirror up to me, I reflect its own face back. And it suits me. This year, for instance, I am living several hundred miles away from my lover and spend much of my time lonely, but it's oddly welcome, a little ache I rarely mind, to feel that melancholy drifting in, right at home in the drift of the season's last leaves and in the abbreviated daylight as it sifts slowly down.

Still, it has been lonely for both of us, and so when I write, for instance, that we got together for the weekend the phrase is impotent even in my own mind, failing, as it does, to convey how that feels, the heightened anticipation, the brief conjunction of our orbiting paths, then separating again, which I invariably start to fret about long before I ought to. But, we manage it, and I wonder sometimes if eventually, I might think back on this time and decide it wasn't so bad, after all, think it's even possible I might grow lonely for my own loneliness. I miss everything, once it's over. I have known for a long time that nostalgia is the real landlord in my life, it's where all my rent goes, and my tithes, and everything else right along with it. My nostalgia is in season now, these Novembers, and I notice myself thinking that things had better hurry up and turn painful somewhere, else what will there be to think about when I want to sit and stare out the window? Back in the spring when I was first falling in love I realized it had been years since I had understood the season at all, if I ever had. I took a picture one morning, that late April, of the ornamental cherry tree outside my kitchen window. Its branches were wild with flowers that day, flagrantly so, obscenely so, and when I sent this new man the picture I wrote: I have the most vivid flowers in my neighborhood because this year, I'm the happiest person in my neighborhood. The tree has gone bare again by now, of course, and a few days ago some of the outer limbs snapped off in a wind storm. I watch it scratching at the sky these afternoons as the sun goes down, and we nod at each other and I think, I know just how you feel.

But this year, on the weekend before my birthday, we met in central Virginia, my lover and I, landing in a sort-of midway point between upstate New York and North Carolina. Since we both like being outdoors, and since the area is famous for its caves, we drove on the day before my birthday to a well-publicized one in the town of Grottoes, VA. I thought I'd certainly live in a town called Grottoes, although when we were driving through, we noticed that mostly it was agricultural, that mostly the houses there were for sale. There's an Alcoa plant there in the town, and we wondered whether it might be closing down, thus precipitating the rush to move on out of there. It's always a little sad when you see that, lots of people moving away, and you imagine them sorry to go even though the reality may be much different, perhaps everyone has found a better job somewhere else and in an even nicer climate, or perhaps they've all finally met True Love At Last and are off for the next great adventure. Even the weather that day seemed to be hinting at something better about to happen: the trees were muted but still full of leaves, much more than they were in the New York landscape I'd left behind, and the sun was out that day, pale though it is in November. There's a poem Rod McKuen wrote about lovemaking that works that image in, something about our bodies like clouds and the pale November sunshine and even though he was a terrible poet and you don't like to think about the fact that you're remembering him, never mind quoting him, now, thirty years after the last time you picked up one of his books, still, he got that right: the pale November sunshine.

But I was thinking that I might like living in a town called Grottoes, until we first stepped into the cave and at that moment I mentally moved myself out of any of the Houses For Sale that we'd seen and set up housekeeping in my head right there in that cave, forever, I loved it that much, right away. It was my first time in one, and besides being in love I was startled on two counts, beginning with how you enter it. When we were driving down I was thinking about Merlin in his crystal cave, about the magicians of Lascaux, about the Tuatha dé Danaan; about oracles and hermits and the assorted holy folk who wander through all the stories you've spent your life absorbing. I was thinking about cave-as-tomb, cave-as-womb, and so I guess I expected to have a bit more of a preamble to the initiation. Instead, this is what happens: one minute you're standing in a sort of science museum, studying exhibits of bats and examining broken bits of stalagmites, and the next you've opened a door and walked through, and there you are, standing in the first chamber of the place. And so you arrive at your initiation without your ritual dress and purifying bath, with no hallucinogenic smoke to help you to see things and very little in the way of instruction, and you think about that and stare around for a moment and wonder, how did Merlin ever manage it?

After the shock of unexpected initiation came the shock of how little the cave looked like what I thought a cave looked like. However I got the idea, I've always guessed that caves resemble stony birth canals, cramped, smooth-walled little places you pass through for the express purpose of getting yourself back out again, pronto. The reality was so much better than my imagination, however, and I couldn't have been happier to have been wrong. The initial room was high, as most of this cave was high, with a ceiling that rose some forty feet above us. It, and the walls, and most of the floor, as well as the various hulking formations that gathered themselves up and out of the walls, the floor, and the ceiling, all of these surfaces appeared to have been made by a mad mosaicist with infinite materials, a pocketful of genius, and no brakes on her time. There was little smooth about the place (my expectations about that shattering nicely on the million spiky edges that poked up everywhere) and nothing I could quite line up with my previous, non-initiated experience. Without the usual reference points of sky and horizon, once you stepped in, most of what went on in the non-subterranean world stopped registering and so you forgot about the waning sunlight you had just walked away from, forgot about all the bad poetry being written there and the people abandoning those rooms they'd been writing it in. The first thing I noticed was my lack of any sense of direction, in particular any sense of the direction down. Our path led us, in total, three quarters of a mile into the Earth and some 200 feet below it, but the journey through there felt upright and level, and I barely thought about how far down we were or how much weight slumbered above us, except for when we passed under enormous cracks in the overhead rock, deep fault lines running there, and then you couldn't help but think about it plenty. But everything stayed put that day, and when I asked I was assured that no, Virginia isn't prone to earthquakes.

Most of the cave, we learned, was made up of a calcium compound, which was why so many of the walls sparkled white in the light. There were bands of other colors, too, mostly muted green which turned out to be algae, and red, where the calcium had aged out, and black, which was either manganese or torch marks left over from visitors who had come there before the age of the electric light. The algae grew on account of those lights; people had been wandering through this particular cave for some 200 years that we know about, and I was glad to have been in a group that wandered through in these days of electricity and wiring. At one point our guide put all the lights out, holding up just a candle in his hand, and then he blew that out, too. I probably don't have to tell you just how dark dark can be, and I thought it went on just a little too long, the guide talking quietly in the cave-night as he told us a story about a party who had been trapped there for a couple of days, once, when all their lanterns blew out together. Imagine it, he said, imagine all those hours in this dark. He talked on, and I thought about reaching out my hand and trying to find my lover's hand, but knew I would start to panic if it turned out he wasn't standing where I thought he was. Mostly I could orient myself two ways: by the direction of the guide's voice, and by the whiskey breath coming off the man from the other family in our group. It was just noon then and we had watched him drive up with his nine-year-old son perched in the truck next to him, and the sharp, sour smell of the alcohol made the me turn my face whenever he happened to look my way. The mother was there, too, but distracted: her daughter-in-law was in labor, her water had broken just before we all entered the cave together. It would be the first grandchild. I thought about telling her: I was born now, too, this is a good time to be born. But who knows, with a baby about to come into a family that didn't smile or look one bit impressed by a single thing in that cave and the grandfather drinking mornings and driving around anyway, and so I said nothing. That may turn out to be a story his grandmother tells him, though: on the day you were born, I went for a walk in a cave...I think of the child a few years from now, bored with having heard this story too many times and none too impressed by a cave himself, looking away and out a window, thinking about the grayness of the month, thinking about the hidden sun and all the bad poetry being written out there in the world, thinking about whiskey breath in the morning. He may think to himself, when he is a little older still, all of this suits me...



There are two hundred years of records about people exploring it, and in that time, the cave has acquired a lot of names, different ones for the different chambers you come through as you walk the length of it. There is a place where someone carved risers out of the side of the wall, and once upon a time the traveling preachers used to come there and sermonize, everyone protected inside from the rain and snow. They would have gathered by candlelight or torchlight, too, and I imagine all that darkness coupled with all that shouting about Satan must have been a sure way to scare the bejesus out of a person, or into him. There is a ball room, where they held real dress-up dances a hundred years ago, complete with a flat rock stage where the orchestra sat. There were little chambers off to one side where the ladies could go to change into their ball gowns, making it unnecessary for them to wear them, dragging, in through the mud. There is a room called Dante's Inferno. (Sadly, there is no Oracle of Delphi, although there is a rock creature who guards the path about half-way through the cavern: we were told it's called George Washington's Ghost but my guess is, it's a case of mistaken identity.) My daughter and I read The Inferno a couple of years ago, and I wanted to go see, but it was hard to get to, and not well lit, and so I did not. That time, at least. I may go back and get myself in there; I keep reminding myself to memorize some cantos before then, to have something to chant as protection against the walls falling in, against my slipping into a hidden hole. Someone described to us how these caves got discovered, and we all squinted up our eyes, imagining it: the slow belly crawl through the dark and the unknown, and toward more darkness and more mystery, all the while knowing that if the little space we squeezed through turned out to be a false start, we'd have an even more difficult belly crawl retreat, this time scraping along backwards. I feel myself clouding over at the idea, having been born devoid of the discovery gene. One of the men from the hapless party whose lamps all blew out volunteered to try crawling out and so save the group; he fell into a hole somewhere along the way and although he didn't die, he was there for ten hours after the rest of his companions had been located, rescued. Imagine yourself, ten hours longer in that total dark, convinced you were feeling what eternity felt like while around you, the old old cave huffed and dripped and spoke its one invisible thought, if you think this feels like an eternity, just you wait.




The caves in this part of Virginia are known as solution caves, formed when the acidic ground water percolates through the fractures in the limestone and wears it away: creation by subtraction. It leaves behind the slate skin of the place, the minerals that seep in from the Earth. All of that takes one eternity to create. The limestone getting there in the first place takes another eternity, of course, the bodies of small marine organisms dying off and piling up and eroding down and settling in, hardening for millions of years. Pretty soon time as it's passed on the Earth begins to assume the proportions of distance as it unfolds in space, a scale that is always just outside your ability to comprehend it. In centuries past, tourists were avid--and reckless--collectors of the stuff of caves, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, we say it is because they didn't know just how long these things take to form. The solution cave has found its true calling as a sculptor, and everywhere we looked there were formations with names like shields and draperies. There were the structures I already knew, stalactites for example, no less fabulous for being more familiar. All of these form when the water drops evaporate and leave behind a little calcium trail, a microscopic footprint of the minerals that water drop collected as it seeped down through the earth. You can imagine that this takes a long time. I liked the draperies, which reminded me of organ pipes, and the shields that looked like oversized pendants a bold woman might wear on a chain around her neck. I wished I could figure out a way to play the draperies; I wished I was that woman who was comfortable wearing bold jewelry. For the entire mile and a half we walked, I felt like we were being watched, because everywhere there were smaller formations rising up that looked like statues of people, sometimes couples holding children, sometimes rows and tiers like choruses, and at one point, a white round figure that I knew was the Buddha of the cave. He stood on the other side of a pool and none of us could reach him to rub his good-luck belly. Our guide told us that it takes about 150 years for a cubic inch of these formations to grow. We came to a natural tower growing up in the middle of the path: the Tower of Babel, the guide said was its name: 30 feet high and 80 feet around. When I got home I asked my daughter for the formula to figure out the volume of the piece. At a cubic inch of growth every century and a half or so, my rough estimate for the age of that Tower of Babel puts it at around 122 million years old. I thought of myself confronted by that colossus on that Sunday afternoon, and realized that of the two of us, I was the elderly one, standing there with the absurdity of my soft tissue, this ridiculous little life span already so much used up.

We stood in a small room that had been carved out of the rock, off to one side of the main chambers we'd just come through. The entrance to this room was an arch in the wall, with rows of pointy small stalactites hanging down like teeth, and it reminded me of being inside the whale's mouth and looking out, perhaps a little mournfully, at the life you were just about to say goodbye to. As I watched, a drop of water grew with elegant precision at the end of one of these teeth, and I thought to myself, I'm going to stand right here, and when it starts to fall I'll open my mouth and let the cave water drop right in. But the drop never fell; it gathered itself there and then hung quite contentedly, and then we had to move along. Immediately as we came around the corner there stood on the side of the path a tall ceramic jug. Our guide told us, once upon a time they used to keep these jugs set up at strategic places along the trails, and they'd catch water, and you could drink it. This jug, he said, is a relic--we've found two of them, and the other is back in the museum, in a display case, in shards. He said, the legend is that if you drink this water, you'll get eternal youth. He said, probably what will mostly happen to you is you'll get kidney stones, what with all the calcium in it. As soon as he had turned away to walk on and everyone else had turned to follow him, my hand went into the jug and I dipped some water out and had a little drink. Of course I did. It was underworld cold, and tasted like stone. When I caught back up to the group I looked back and saw my lover emerging from the shadows behind me, although a moment before, I was sure he had been in front of me. He was smiling, and as he got closer whispered to me, I just had a drink of that water. Me, too, I whispered back, and we leaned our heads in, laughing at ourselves, eternally youthful together, eternally conspiratorial. I like to think the cave was laughing, at that moment, right along with us.

You see things in caves, because it's human nature to do so, you notice faces in the walls, see people in the shapes growing up from the floor, same as I saw fat Buddha sitting there with his smile, same as I saw all those choristers standing around to sing us on through. We walked into a room they call the Bridal Chamber: a huge white shield formation hangs down in front of you, with white draperies flowing off of it. There are two white lovebirds perched on one wall, and the outline of two hearts near them. None of these things, as far as the cave is concerned, are there (although despite this, the occasional small wedding is held in that chamber, even now. People just can't help themselves.) The word for this kind of recognition is pareidolia, and it means the tendency we all have to see meaningful images in otherwise meaningless patterns. It's how constellations came into being, it's why all children pick shapes out of the clouds, and it's why, the whole time I walked through that cave, I walked in the company of vast populations of people I recognized, faery-sized to ogre-sized, and every one of them right at home in their cave landscape the way I was right at home up top, then, in my November world. I thought for a minute that I wanted to learn to be like them. You don't want to die, of course, or at least not any time soon, but it came to me that once upon a time I might have died near a cave like this one, and someone would have painted my body red, and someone else would have set me inside the cave, and entombed thus in the center of the slow procession of cave time, my soul would have begun the long dream toward reincarnation and however long it took, it still would have been nothing to the cave that held me, with its cubic inch of progress every century and a half, its statuary built up over a hundred thousand millennia, that long and patient mystery with the recognizable face.

Maybe it was the water we drank that made us dream that night, and it may be that by eternal youth they really meant vivid dreams, and if so, that's still a deal I'm happy to take. That night we slept neither deeply nor long; when we woke, it would Monday, still the middle of the night, and time for us to get in our cars and drive off in opposite directions. It was the morning of my 49th birthday, and this was his dream: he had a trained cat, and when he cued it, the cat would leap from its position atop a counter far across the room, and land perfectly in his lap. The cat performed this trick over and over. This was my dream: I had gone back to the cave with my lover, where an invisible woman waited for me at the entrance. She handed me a long and hooded dark red cloak that I was supposed to carry, not wear, and she gave me a riddle. I understood that I would find the answer to the riddle as I walked back through the cave carrying my cloak. We then entered together, my lover and I, and at that point he became invisible, too, and the woman remained at the opening to wait for me. In my dream, I retraced all the steps we had taken that day, through every chamber, around every corner, and then all the way back out again, but I did not find the answer to the riddle. As I came back to the entrance I explained that to the woman, and she said it was fine, that I'd find the answer the next time I walked back through. I then told her that I was going to forget the riddle as soon as I crossed back over the threshold and left the cave, and she said that was fine, too, that was exactly what I was supposed to do. Just don't forget, she cautioned me, that you have the red cloak, that's the thing you're supposed to bring back with you. And I woke then, and felt the weight of the red cloak draped across my outstretched arms just beginning to lighten.

When I was in elementary school I had a twenty minute walk home at the end of the school day, and I was always a little tired then, and usually hungry. A few blocks from my house there was a commercial bread bakery, and most afternoons the smells of sour yeast and wholesale quantities of baking bread floated around on the afternoon air, fueling my hunger even though they were making white bread there, and I didn't care for it. I disliked school in those days, disliked most things. The world felt heavy to me then: the monotony of studies, the incomprehensibility of my life, even my own body as it dragged me along through my bewilderment. I have a strong memory of a certain walk home on one such day, probably in the late autumn or early winter because the air was chilly, making the bakery smells particularly sharp, and the sidewalk I plodded over was full of wet leaves, and slippery. In that town, in those days, most of the sidewalks were still made of slate. As I trudged along I thought to myself that I couldn't wait until I was 48--I remember picking that age exactly, although I have no idea why--I couldn't wait until I was 48 because by then, I knew, life would be staid and I would feel settled at last and all the current wrongs in my world would have evaporated, leaving behind a small perfect residue of contentment. When I was ten that's what I envisioned my 48th year to look like; and instead, I arrived like this at the door of my 49th and stepped through, with a red cloak, a riddle, and a second chance. After I woke I thought about that for awhile in the dark, and told myself the story of the dream a few times so as to be sure to remember it all. And then in the last moments before the alarm began to ring, I turned to the man who was stirring beside me and began to tell him the story, too.

Night Sky

My son and I have gotten in the habit of walking together for an hour or so early in the evening; these days when we go the sun has already set, and this week the moon has been rising in time to accompany us, or was, until last night. The reason for going is, ostensibly, to take the dog. Because he's nearly nine, he needs the exercise now more than ever, needs to keep moving so that he will be able to keep moving. But the truth is that I need to go, too, and physical health isn't the half of it. Someone told me that every hour you walk adds another hour to your life. I pass this information along to my son, and in turn we consider whether that might translate as well to the dog's life, and in that case, is it dog hours and dog years they'd be talking about? We don't know. We do know that everyone has more energy as a result of these walks, we're all losing a little weight, we all sleep more soundly at night. It's good for us, good for our bodies and good for our heads, too. And it's good for the two of us to have some time by ourselves: in our household, my older child, a girl, tends to dominate the conversation. I was an eldest child too and never really thought about what it was like for my sister to occupy the seat of youngest child, or didn't think about it until I saw how the dynamic winds itself out between my own two children. These nights are also giving me a more intimate understanding of how the young male mind winds its own self out, me, who grew up in an entirely female universe, no father, no brothers, just one bad-tempered grandfather who did us all the favor of dying on the young side (mercifully so, as his dementia was beginning to get dangerous, or so I thought later, when I was older and could understand what had been going on during those years). Once I watched during a long sweaty August afternoon as he walked slowly back and forth, back and forth, past the two windows of the living room where I sat. Finally he came into the house, wiping his bald head and complaining bitterly about how damned hot it was, trying to mow the lawn just now. But of course, he hadn't been pushing a lawn mower at all, had just been walking back and forth and back again in the blazing summer sun. Later that month, he laid down on the couch in the morning and my grandmother, pausing at the top of the stairs, turned her head for a moment in time to hear the death rattle in his throat.

So, these nights I walk around the back streets of our town for an hour or so with my son, and he talks, and the dog rambles, and while I never hear much about how the day went for him, my son does like to talk about the things that are most heavily on his mind--those things gain their heft, I believe, precisely because he is afraid to talk about them. So he monologues about his belief in ghosts, wants to know whether he's descended from people with unusual psychic abilities, talks about how he's torn between becoming a brain researcher, or becoming a cryptozoologist. I think to myself that he must get that from the distaff side, as they used to say--his father was a pragmatist, a logical guy, really my intellectual opposite-but-equal. I wonder what my son's ideal partner will look like. I do know that right now, the girl who has become his first real crush is also the only student in his accelerated classes who is consistently able to edge him out, grade-wise. So we know he likes smart women. When he talks to me about her at all, which is admittedly very little, what he seems to like about her most is that she's nice to him. I like that too, kids who are nice to my kids.

While we walk and he rambles in his conversation and the dog rambles around with his nose pressed to the ground--the dog so single-minded that last night I watched him walk smack into a tree while he chased, nose down, the trail of some irresistible scent or another--my own thoughts like to escape a little bit as they can, when there's a lull in the conversation, or when my son seems more like he needs to get the words out than that he requires any response from me. The painter Paul Klee said that drawing is like--or that it's only, I can never remember which--taking a line out for a walk. Which is exactly what I think writing is, it's simply taking a thought out for a walk, and the best way to walk it around is to get out there walking yourself. It's what's always worked best for me, anyway, and it's something I discover all over again every time I pick the habit back up. I've walked a lot over the years, and I always wish that I walked even more, even when I'm walking an hour every day the way I have been lately. It really is a peculiar form of worship, I suppose, meditation and magic and conjuring and inner work and outer work, all in one basic and repetitive motion. Last night I noticed that my legs felt so strong, I thought I could probably start to run and not tire out. I wonder if eventually, I might feel so strong beyond that, that I'll think I could probably fly?

In the years before I went to college, my mother, sister and I lived in a house in a quiet neighborhood in a small town a block over from the river, and I walked constantly then. Constantly, and often at night, or very early in the morning. Anyway I spent a good many hours traveling through the dark, and never felt unsafe nor, I'm sure, was I. I do remember my mother telling me that, if I grew up and moved to a city, that was going to be the one thing for sure I'd miss, being able to walk around freely at night. The irony was that in the place I lived for the past decade, I never could walk at night, precisely because it was too rural. There were fisher cats there, and the occasional bear, but most of all there were no streetlights on any of the roads around me, so if the wildlife didn't get you, the careening cars with their night-blind drivers most likely would. I walked a lot in that town, but always in daylight.

And for many years prior to that I worked nights, so wasn't walking then, either, and now that I've started taking night walks again my first thought is always, why did I ever stop doing this, until the second thought comes along and reminds me, that's just the way life has been. But I'm back to it now, and the same night sky is there to walk beneath, the same night air is there to breath. One difference is having a child along for the journey. Once both of my kids were too afraid of the dark to ever want to go outside at night even, for instance, the year we lived in New Hampshire and the comet came. Sometimes they'd look at it through a bedroom window. My daughter is still nervous about the dark; my son is learning to be a little more at ease there. Lately in his Earth Science class they've been studying their astronomy unit, and that helps with his curiosity. At night we go out, and if the moon isn't up yet and the big stadium lights at the sports complex aren't blazing away, we get a good look at the starry field of the autumn sky. He can find Polaris; he can pick out the subtle shape of Cepheus and the winding path that is the constellation Draco. He is always curious about the planets. And last night, because it was just setting, I was able to show him the constellation Sagittarius. He had just been explaining to me the reason we can't see the mad explosion of stars that lies at galactic core. I pointed to Sagittarius and told him there, if you look off in that direction, that's where the center of the galaxy, the one you can't see, lies...

It is no small feat, I think, to be able to orient yourself even in that small way, in the midst of such vast distances.

When we were a few blocks from home last night, on the way back, I looked up to the north and the east and there in the sky hung a star I'd missed before. It shone vividly like Venus shines, although I know right now, Venus is coming at us in the morning; it glittered there so impossibly bright I wondered for a moment how I'd managed to miss it just a few minutes before, when we'd been standing along the corn field on the side of an unlit road. In fact I opened my mouth to say just that, how did I miss pointing this one out to you?--but Wyatt was talking, I wanted to figure out just what it was I was looking at, and in the seconds that elapsed then the bright star suddenly began to fade, as though thin clouds were passing between me and it. But the sky was cloudless last night, the star simply faded back into quiet star commonness, and afterwards, I was left wondering what exactly it was I'd just seen--a variable star? An aircraft of some sort? A trick of the night and my 48-year-old eyes? I want it to have been something rare and lucky, something that is so unusual to see that science can't predict it and you're only likely to have seen it if your gaze just happened to have been wandering across that particular place at just that particular time. I want this to have been something that earned me a new celestial star setinto my earthly crown.

These morning it's still dark when I begin my day, and this is the time of year when the old Celtic method of reckoning a day as the period that occurs between sunset and sunset makes a lot more intuitive sense. Today I put the dog outside early, as I always do, and looked for the moon which is directly overhead in the predawn sky right now. I used to look at the moon a lot, same as I used to walk at night a lot, and I miss having those particular roads unwind ahead of me, as well. Let me describe to you what the moon was doing this morning: directly around her waning gibbous form there was a reflected halo of light, this one tinged, improbably, with purple, with green. Farther out in a big sweep that took up a good third of the visible sky, was a vast and perfectly-formed white circle of light, looking for all the world like an enormous ring of snow was bounding the moon at its center. In fact someone told me that the appearance of such a ring means it's going to snow; I have also heard that if you count the number of stars inside the ring, it is the number of friends who are soon to die. I hope that's not the case, since this morning's count was five or six. I think that the bad omens that come along with these phenomena are more a reflection of the fear we feel when confronted with the moon- and starlit parts of our interior lives. I don't know anyone who isn't at least a little afraid of that, but I do think that once you go there, you start to fear it less. It helps to have someone to travel along with you, too, I think. A companion, and the chance to be by turns chattering, silent, rambling, snuffling, imagining, thinking, learning to locate the center of the galaxy, learning to be at home in your dark corner of it.

She Inspires Me

I am very happy today to be able to take myself out of my own head long enough to tell you about one of my favorite artists in recent memory, and most specifically to mention that she's begun a blog of her own--do check her out. I first learned of Rima and her wonderful world when she posted on a message board on the Sur La Lune fairy tale site (another enchanting place to get lost in when you have some time). When you visit Rima's blog you can find links to her web site, other places you can see her amazing work, and more.

I adore Rima's art, and am fascinated by her inner world. I first encountered her during a difficult period in my own life: widowhood was still new then, and still stung; I'd just moved my family to another state where I knew no one, had no prospects, and had managed, I was convinced at the time, to make a real mess of things. Rima's images reminded me of how magic can still persist, even in the unlikeliest of places; if I had to analyze my response I'd say it has something to do with the way she interprets the mythic, manifests something concrete out of the imagination. But this is an instance when I prefer the pleasures of enjoyment to the work of analysis. This morning, looking at her new work, and at her old work again, I am reminded once more of how it feels to live in the world when you're open to possibility. I bought a few of her prints last year and enjoy them as much today as when they first came into my home. What can I say? I'm a big fan. I hope you'll all become fans, too. Because I know for sure that now, there's nothing I'd rather do on this gloomy and atmospheric autumn day than hole up in my study and let my words make some magic of their own. And I can't think of any higher praise for an artist, than that her work sets you happily off in pursuit of your own.

October

In my Summerland, it is always October. Night is always about to come on; here, a glittering crescent of moon hovers just over the hilltop and beside it, the evening star throws its light down, too. I walk across the plain below, always on the cusp of nightfall. If we get to have an afterlife at all, then this is where I want to spend mine, walking forever through this landscape, a solitary figure on the unpaved road that cuts through the illuminated darkness of near-night. Here, it is the end of a good day--what would constitute a good day in the afterlife?--perhaps I have spent the day walking out and also spent it composing essays, poems, because the passage of time will be of no more consequence to me, and so there has been time to do both, walk endlessly and write endlessly. Perhaps there has been some physical work as well, planting or more likely harvesting of the crops, for there are piles of grain and stacks of corn lining the roadway beside me. Even if there is no more need for nourishment in the Otherworld, still, there will be the need for the cycles I am familiar with from this world, else it would make no sense for October to exist, the waning of the year, the treasure box of things ending that I am so delighted to find myself confronted with opening.

So: it is the end of a good day and I am walking home through the early part of the autumn evening, with the moonlight and the starlight for company, the grain piles proof of the day's labor and I hope maybe a sheaf of writing in my pocket as tangible proof too. In this place, a poem is every bit as useful as food. Perhaps a dog runs out a little ahead of me as I find my way home. It is possible that during some part of my day here I've been in the company of others who might inhabit this place. I think that I am not completely alone here; but the truth is that solitude is the necessary condition for my pursuits, now as I imagine it will be then, and so at the end of every day, at the onset of each night, at these balanced moments of perfection , if I am alone then I know it is indeed a good afterlife I've landed in. I think alone, I write alone, I navigate the landscape alone, or alone save for the quiet company of the dog who pads along with me. In my Summerland, I know that at the far end of the road there is a stone house waiting, and inside it a wooden table. There will be hot soup to eat, and a window to look out of, and all throughout the night the moon will stay suspended, and the evening star along with it, and dreams will form themselves and stay with me as wake and cross back over the threshold and the cycle continues, the sun rising in the Otherworld, generously, if for no other reason than to give the day the opportunity to turn back into the night, and me the opportunity to walk back through it...

25

When I woke up this morning the rain was falling heavily, and I stayed in bed with my eyes closed for a little while, imagining how all that rain was silvering the road outside. I wrote a scene in a children's book about that once, about silver appearing suddenly in the middle of flaming October, appearing on the sheets of rain that always seem to fall mid-month. Twenty-five years ago when I woke up on this day it was the morning of my wedding, and the sky was overcast through the early part of the day, I think maybe a little rain fell, and by early afternoon the sky had cleared again and the rest of the short day was sunny. If my husband had lived we would have been celebrating our 25th anniversary--the silver one--today. Instead he died a few days after we had our 23rd. I tried for awhile this morning to remember scenes from those anniversaries: on our first we sat at the table in our little rented lakeside home and dutifully ate the leftover wedding cake (I don't advise trying to save cake in the freezer for a whole year, I just don't think it was meant for it). On our fifth anniversary we'd been living in Massachusetts for just a few weeks; I spent our sixth by myself because David had checked himself in, two days earlier, to a residential detox hospital in northern Vermont. Cancer killed him anyway but alcohol would have killed him a lot sooner, if he hadn't gotten sober when he did. On our ninth anniversary I was a new mother, and we celebrated our tenth with a one-year-old in tow; on the eleventh I was newly-pregnant again and happier than I'd ever been, because it was autumn, I was in love with my life, and pregnancy, as it turned out, agreed with me. Our seventeenth anniversary, the last good one, we spent apart: it was a Friday, and each of us worked all day and then he went to his usual AA meeting that night, because he was about to receive his 12-years-sober chip. I went out for awhile, that night, with friends. The following year my mother had died; that grimness still was hanging around me, and anyway, by then David was already feeling a little sick: in another two months the tumor on his pancreas would finally show up on the scan. On the morning of our twentieth anniversary we woke up to snow on the ground, and that year, the ground was snow-covered all the way until the following spring. At the time, I chose to interpret it as a sign that we were going to grow into the winter of our lives together. That was a Wednesday morning, and the kids went to school and we went back to bed, made love and afterwards, he slept for awhile and I got up and answered emails. Later, I could never remember for certain if that was the last time we had sex. On the following anniversary he was sick again, although at first, even his oncologist was interpreting the pain as not being cancer-related. When his recurrence was diagnosed, the thinking was that he had another two months. He died two years to the day after that diagnosis. Someone took a photograph of us on the afternoon of our last anniversary together. I think that was the last day he was able to sit upright, after that, he didn't bother to get up again. I saw the picture again about a year later. I looked so bad I didn't even recognize myself, face bloated, hair matted, the stress wiring itself to every neuron so that the whole edifice was about to implode, and you knew it. David looked like he was already dead. He had lost a hundred pounds by then and when you looked at his face, mostly what you saw was skull. I think I destroyed the photograph, thinking that no one needed to know what it looked like, being wed to a corpse husband. The shell-shocked bride, I remember thinking, and the skeleton man, both in free fall after a five-year cancer bender. David would have just shrugged at the photograph, and if he'd lived and I'd died, he might well have gone ahead and kept it.

Today would have been the twenty-fifth anniversary, the silver one, and that was probably the third or fourth thought I had after I woke up this morning. Which means, I think, that I've gotten better, since a year ago it was still all I could do to keep from howling into the empty night about it. I dreamed about Dave last night, too, which was unusual, because I had a dream about him earlier this summer which I thought was really going to be good-bye, because he said it to me: I have to go now. Good-bye. And I nodded and said good-bye, too. Last night I dreamed that David and I were packing for a trip south, because I was going to go visit my new boyfriend and he was coming with me. Which would have been strange in either case, since if David was still alive I most likely wouldn't have a boyfriend and if I did, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be taking my husband along for the rendezvous. But in the dream, Dave was still dead, he was going to travel with me, and it all made perfect sense. I was packing and unpacking a cooler, remembering to bring along some bottles of beer, putting in more ice, frowning at it, taking it out, thinking I ought to pack some cartons of yogurt for the trip, as well. Throughout the dream my old love stood there beside me, watching while I made ready to go meet up with my new love. There is a passage in one of the journal entries I kept during the last weeks of Dave's life, when I was recording the thoughts I was hating myself for having: those nights while Dave drifted in and out, waiting to die on the couch, I was there beside him drowsing on the cot, and wondering what might be coming next for me: thinking about new love, I admit it, as my old love lay dying beside me.

I knew couples who, every year, made an occasion out of their anniversaries: babysitters, dinners out, sometimes booting the kids right out of the house so as to have an entire night of privacy. I know this because on some of those nights, my house was where those kids slept. My husband and I never did any of that, and I'm not sure why, just like I'm not sure why, these couple of years later, I still find myself unable to write about him, about our marriage, the way I want to write about it. A year ago I wrote this in my journal: I've been trying all morning to sit down here and write about Dave, about how last year on our 23rd anniversary, ON the 23rd...we knew it was our last. Don and the kids went out and bought us flowers and cards, and while it was a lovely gesture, it was the wrong gesture. I didn't want any of that, what I wanted--other than for my husband not to be dying--was some time alone with him. But from the night I got the news that he was terminal (straight from the horse's mouth: "We're at the end of the road," is exactly what David said to me) we were never alone again for more than half an hour, tops... I had forgotten about that part of it, about how public the whole end of his life turned out to be. And we weren't exactly public people, having preferred each other's company, and the setting of our own household, to most other company and most other places for most of our married lives. I don't know what we would have done today, had he lived, had we been celebrating our 25th together, instead of me just sitting here thinking about it. Bought something silver? That seems doubtful: neither of us ever paid much attention to those conventions (although the winter after Dave died, I did buy myself two different sets of new dishes, suddenly--and irrationally--furious that I hadn't gotten them on our 20th anniversary, The China Year). Most likely it would have been another day not exactly like the others, but not all that much set apart from it, either: he would have just gotten his 19-year chip, the kids would have spent the day at school and we'd likely have both taken off work again, just like on the 20th, and in the evening, everyone would sit at the dinner table and talk about the day, just like every other night, while outside the trees, a few days past peak now, would be letting their leaves sift to the ground and we'd see the evening coming on a little early, the rain having stopped just before nightfall but the clouds not quite pulling away in time for the late sun to come through.

When I Grow Up I Want To Be Dead

For my first teaching assignment of the year, I am dropped into classes of high school juniors and seniors and their first assignment of the year is to learn about writing their personal essays. I think to myself how lucky I am that this is the task today, and how lucky they are too, if only they knew it. We begin by talking about the essays they've read over the past few days. Those writers deal with the usual: cancer, alcoholism, the horrid ordinaries that make up all of our lives. I ask my classes: how many of you know someone who's had cancer? All morning 70% of the hands go up. Did you like this essay, I ask no one in particular. One boy answers: no. I ask him why not. It was retarded, he replies. That's not a word they get to use in my classroom, and I tell him so: try again. It's gay, he sneers, knowing I'm going to tell him that's the wrong word, too, although he seems surprised to hear me say it. It's dumb, he finally says, trailing off. The teacher keeps a thesaurus on her desk, and for a moment I consider picking it up and slamming him in the side of the head with it, just to see if we might be able to put some new words into him that way. I think to myself: this would be the most surprising thing that would happen to them all day. I wonder how many other teachers have ever felt that impulse. We move on, and talk about what they might use for a subject when they get down to their writing. No one has a clue what they could find to talk about. I try to remember if there was ever a time when I didn't have something to say. I want to ask my students, how many of you cower under your sheets at night because your alcoholic parent is in a drunken rage downstairs. How many of you have already been drunk yourselves and worry about the things you did, who's had their heart broken by that early abortion, how many of you have tacked up a Confederate flag on your bedroom walls. How many of you know what that means? What I saw to them instead: what's interesting about your lives, what story do you have to tell that no one else can tell? They don't know; they don't like it. No one can imagine what there could possibly be to say, never mind how they could possibly write about it. It's all dumb.

And then at the end of third period Ryan materialized beside me just after the dismissal bell rang. He is almost exactly a third my age, several inches taller but several pounds lighter, and I noticed the way his clothes hang off his skinny frame. I didn't notice right away that those clothes were fatigues, in his drab camouflage he nearly disappears into the bland background of the classroom. I think I might know, he begins, what it is I want to write about. His voice pitches up here in the beginnings of enthusiasm. Last summer, he tells me, I went through basic training. He falls silent for long enough that I begin to wonder if that's what he stepped forward to tell me. But he continues in a much lower voice: I'm going to graduate in the spring, and right after that, I'm shipping out for Iraq.

And then he began to shake.

I thought at first he was going to cry, and then I thought that maybe I was going to cry, and all I wanted to tell him was, get your parents, get a lawyer, it's not too late to get out of this. What I manage to say is, oh, and by that time he's recovered a little bit, has regained some of the swagger that I imagine is part of what they taught him over the previous summer. But by the time I get there, he continues, it'll all be fine: I'll be an engineer, and I'll be building roads, so all I'll have to worry about is reconstruction. I couldn't help myself, what I said next, because one thing I've learned about writing over the years is that you have to tell the truth, and sometimes when you're speaking you're really writing out loud, and so I said to him: well, that's all you have to worry about as long as you don't, you know, run into any IED's while you're building those roads...

There he puffed up, confident again and having regained his bearings. They taught us all about that, he tells me, and this is why that happens: those guys who are getting blown up have been there a long time, and they get careless. That isn't going to happen to me.

I don't know what I do think is going to happen to him, but I do know, as I watch him walk off to his next class, that he's been lied to plenty already, and I am suddenly pretty sure that eventually, all that being lied to is what's going to form the central chapter of his life, that he's on the verge of becoming someone who's about to find out he has plenty to say. If only he already knew it. If only he survives long enough to figure out how to say it. If only, all these days of thinking about him later, I could think of a way to tell it to him.

On the way home that afternoon I was daydreaming in the car about the textbook I'd like to write for these kids. The first chapter would be about how everyone has an inner life--I suspect no one has ever said the phrase inner life to a single one of the students I saw that day--and how it's okay to use it. More than okay: it's what you need to survive. Then I'd have a chapter about how the pen is mightier than the sword. It's an idea that goes back to Euripides, that may well go back to the invention of writing. I haven't seen Ryan again since that day, but a few weeks later I was talking with the school librarian. He and I were discussing problem children, as the class I had that day was full of them. The librarian tells me: there's one boy who was a huge problem all last year, then he spent last summer in basic training. I know him, I say suddenly, although of course I don't really know him, I only spoke to him once, briefly and unimportantly. I can't get over the change in the kid, the librarian continues, and his tone is glowing: he's a whole different person now. It grew him up. I couldn't get over how scared he sounded, I reply, and the librarian and I look at each other across the counter, each of us wondering what on Earth the other could possibly be thinking, how dead wrong in their perceptions the other person really is. If only they knew it.

Autumn

By now the fields are sprawling with goldenrod, punctuated by stands of tall tipped asters that I recently decided are my favorite flower. We have a long history, the aster and I. When I was very young I thought that my birthday, November the fifth, fell in September and that the aster was my birth flower. When I later realized that November fell in November and that the chrysanthemum was in fact my real birth flower, still, neither of those things seemed that far off from my original suppositions.

Here is another story about asters, one that came back to me a few days ago. That morning I was driving, off on my way to teach English at the high school. We'd be talking about starting the personal essay--their personal essays--and my main point that morning was this: start big. Which is what kept me from starting this essay myself because later, I had no idea how to begin it. So I find myself now beginning by explaining that I don't know how to begin, and also that this is another memory that had kept itself hidden from me until I saw those tall wild asters nodding in the morning light.

The year I was in fifth grade I began to learn the clarinet. In the early weeks of that school year I used to go to my grandmother's house afternoons. I'd take my clarinet and walk down to the field behind her house, and from there into the woods that bordered it. I knew two notes on the clarinet, and I would sit down among those trees and play them for a long time: at first mournfully, each one in turn for as long as my breath would hold out. Then I would trill them together, flying my fingers back and forth between them as quickly as I could. Because I'd already been a pianist I wasn't half-bad at that; but because my teacher was stingy with his knowledge those two notes were all I had for some time (and because I wasn't much of a musician it never occurred to me to go off looking for more notes on my own).

Still, there was the novelty of the instrument's portability. My only other musical experience was with the piano, and you always went to it--which meant that when you were making music, you were generally in the vicinity of someone's living room corner. The idea of being able to wander about and play music wherever you landed was, therefore, a real novelty. And so I was drawn down into the woods, and sat on the damp mouldering leaves of the forest floor and mushrooms grew there, and a particularly short, vivid kind of aster which nodded at me the way they had been nodding every year, and I played my two notes all afternoon while the light shifted in the sky and my grandmother finally clanged her old school teacher's bell from the back porch and that was my signal to come back to the house, supper was near ready. Later I inherited that bell, inherited it from my mother who had used it to summon me those last nights when she was dying from cancer and couldn't call out loudly enough for me to hear.

Down there in the woods I loved the asters, loved how they shook off the first light frosts and were always there, underfoot and companionable. I hated how the clarinet reed felt against my lip, hated the clarinet I played because it was old, silver, and unfashionable. We were poor, and so I had been given my aunt's old instrument to play, while everyone else in my group lesson rented a new instrument, shiny and black. Most of them regarded my silver one with a bit of uncertainty--what was it? Was it even a clarinet, looking like that? I suppose it was a bit of serendipity that I had been assigned the clarinet at all. This is how you auditioned for the school band, when I was in fifth grade: you went into the musty auditorium of that pre-World War elementary school, and one teacher played a few notes on the piano, which you were to sing, and then another teacher--the instrumental teacher--examined your teeth and through the calculation of some mysterious formula known only to them, you were told flute, or trumpet, or trombone. Personally, I considered it a lucky thing indeed that no one had looked at me and said tuba.

As far as I know, no one in my family owned a tuba to hand down to me, so chances are I was never in any danger from that quarter, anyway. The clarinet I acquired was also different from the new ones in that it wasn't made to come apart like those were, and so even the case I carried it around in looked different from all the other cases in the clarinet section. In those days, to me, things like that mattered. But my perception of my family's relative poverty may also be why everything the land offered up on those two little acres my grandmother owned, seemed like real wealth. Summers I couldn't get enough of the blackberries that grew wild all over the property, and we picked and picked and the berries bled all over our hands; we ate bowls of them for breakfast and they were the first pie I ever learned to bake. The asters were wealth, too, for all you couldn't eat them.

That year, by the time I had learned enough clarinet notes to play a whole song the asters were gone; I never did learn to tolerate the feel of the reed against my lower lip, nor did I ever learn to like the sound the clarinet itself made, and after that school year was over I gave it up entirely. The antique school bell sits on a book shelf, and every spring I study the pictures of asters in my seed catalogues, and every autumn it is a little piece of a miracle, a bit of proof that maybe the universe loves me after all, the way they appear all through the fields all on their own, despite the fact it has been forty years since I poured my music all over them, or maybe because of it. Forty years, and when they appear I am still celebrating my birthday at the wrong time, still sitting on the damp forest floor half-listening for some bell, somewhere in the distance, to call me in.

In Praise of Terminal Curiosity

My brother-in-law is driving, and he says, let's get off the highway. Don is nearly always the one driving, and always the one to say: back road! The rest of us say ho-hum. This time it turns out he's right. On that particular afternoon we drove only a few blocks out of our way, and in that stretch we saw: an old building whose brickwork was so beautiful I decided on the spot to become a mason. We saw a house where the porch had been draped, post-to-post, in long curtains, and it looked inviting and mysterious as a harem. And we saw backyard where a bright yellow caboose had taken up residence, complete with its own short set of railroad tracks. I saw the prettiest Arts and Crafts-style bungalow I have ever seen, in a town that's full of them. I saw a tractor-trailer hauling two long propellers that were headed to find a home on a turbine on a wind farm. They were nestled together like yin and yang on the bed of the truck, and I can tell you, without knowing exactly where this wind farm is, someone was raising hell about it appearing there at all.

Years ago Don told me that an elderly friend had said this: as you get older, you care less and less about more and more of the world around you, so that, by the time you die, you really don't mind so much. If this is the standard, I have to guess that Don is going to live well into his hundreds. When I met him nearly thirty years ago he was a one-trick pony, focusing on his business mostly and beyond that, I don't know. To see curiosity emerge as his primary trait now is fun for us both. His days are interesting, his curiosity is a window that opens onto his inner life and lets me have a look in. On our way home that night, we turn onto a back road in time to see a single hot air balloon drifting over the hill, toward sunset.

My kids are often unsuspecting captives on these trips, as their uncle is fond of hauling them around and never considers that they, as teenagers, might not share his enthusiasm for looking at things. Right now I have little hope that they find any of this one bit exciting, but I do have hopes that this trait of their uncle's gets into them now, and that it will find its way back out when they're old enough to appreciate it. I know it's not genetic; I hope it's genetic.

Don told me this story: the best thing I ever did, he said, was when I drove off the highway and into and through the town of Olney, Illinois. He said, I did nothing but go up and down the streets and look at houses and talk to anyone who would talk to me, and I told them all how their town's name was my name, too. By the time I drove back out of there at the end of the day, everyone was waving to me.

There's the back of the salt mine, there's an old movie theater, there's some beautiful brickwork, right there. When Don came to stay with my kids last spring while I was out of town, he brought his bicycle with him so that he could ride around and have a different sort of look at things. Every day is a back road sort of day, when you're him. He is examining an old train depot, he is photographing graffiti. He has discovered a web site where people are uploading two million images a day. There is not enough time, we tell each other. Probably there are not enough lifetimes to look at all these things, even if you calculate the probability of that on the high end of your rebirth odds. I wonder, given that, how do you decide which road to turn down, which thing you're going to look at, at the expense of every other thing you won't then have a chance to look at. Serendipity I guess. Serendipity, and you have to learn to not mind missing what you miss. Maybe that's what Don's elderly friend really meant by what he said: you make your peace with things. You look, and you learn to let that be enough.

Since I've Been Gone

To be honest about it I hadn't even noticed the widening gap there, how the space was growing between the time I wrote last and the time I wrote next. I was surprised when I finally thought, on the first day of this month, to pick up my morning pages journal and saw that its last scrawled entry was dated 3 July; surprised again when I looked around a little more and found, for instance, that was the same last date that I'd written anything here. Two months is a bad long time to go without writing, when you're a writer, and I wonder whether I shouldn't be punished for it -- although the commission of this particular crime really is a punishment all its own. When you neglect something you love, it comes out in your life in odd and insidious little ways; with me it manifests as a sideways sort of unease, the sense that I've forgotten something terribly important but am about to remember what, and that I'm going to be devastated when I finally get it back. Lots of things can wake me up too early in the morning, but since I've been gone, being on the verge of that memory is what has haunted me most during those long and patient hours.

Well, nothing stopped because I wasn't writing, other than my writing, but otherwise the Earth pretty much has kept to its course, dragging the rest of life right along with it. In fact life is the one thing that didn't stop at all, and since I've been gone it's changed enough that big parts of it aren't anything I recognize from even just a season ago. For instance I think to myself how the profile I wrote for this blog hardly fits me anymore, although it's anybody's guess how to change the thing to better reflect what the reality is now. At some point along the way I started to breathe again, just to give you an idea of how basic the changes are. Well, if you know me, you know all about that already, about the man I met, about the trials of our long-distance love affair, maybe you've already figured out that I'm thinking by now about how to transplant myself to yet another new environment, yet again. All of this has transpired across a span of fewer than six months, and the two months that I've been gone most of my energy has been given over to that. But don't think I'd forgotten about everything else. Times like these are part of the great mystery cycle of birth, death, and the transformation that comes in between. My deal with myself has always been to live with the silence that times of change bring, with the understanding that once they're assimilated, writing will come back through. All the while that I've been gone, I've been taking careful notes.

Since I've been gone, the Earth has curved around a bit somehow, so that now the nights are cool again and by mid-morning, I have to open all the windows and doors to warm the house, which has somehow retained the nighttime chill. Across the street Mrs. Gordon's cancer has come back, and by my side porch the goldenrod has grown up, and when I wander downstairs from my writing desk I like to look out and see those yellow heads as they unfurl in the noonday sun.

I Had Forgotten

I recently came across my friend Lunaea's blog and read about a story I'd told her way back in the once-upon-a-time of our friendship. The story concerned doughnuts, and in truth, much about my life can be legitimately examined through the lens of food. I'm not sure why that is, whether it's a reflection of my genuine enjoyment of the acts of preparing food and eating it, or whether it's an echo of the insecurity that came from growing up with a mother born at the height of the Depression, and the odd way no one from her parent's generation was ever able to let go of the memory of being hungry. Odder still is the way I inherited that memory, who really never went without something to eat.

But, the doughnuts: for a period of about ten years I worked in a café in northern Massachusetts, a place that was unusual on at least two counts: first, it was owned, run and mostly staffed by women (the occasional male dishwasher did appear over the years but otherwise, it was a female sort of universe). And nearly everyone I worked with then was there as long as me, and that kind of longevity, in a business that is largely known for its high turnover in help, was also unusual. You get to know people when you work with them that long, and much of the time we all read from the script of dysfunctional family. Like any good band of crazy relatives, we fought amongst ourselves viciously, but would turn equally quickly and as one upon any outsider who dared attack one of our own. We went through holidays together, and a number of births; a slightly lower number of divorces and other betrayals, pregnancy scares, break-ups, new love. Everyone had her thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth birthday there, and the ones who went through menopause spent those years pampering each other with water bottle fans and learning to duck when the hot flashes came on in the middle of stressful hours. There were two things we took care of every first week of January: a new calendar had to be hung up in the waitress area, and someone copied over from the old calendar the entire year's worth of birthdays: ours, and also those of our regular customers. And the owner would go over to the drugstore across the way and buy an entire year's worth of birthday cards, both for the help and again, some generic ones to have on hand for the regulars. If you worked there, you also got cake. If you ate there a lot and we liked you, you'd get a muffin with a candle in it, and all of us coming out to sing "Happy Birthday" to you.

Restaurants are different than other businesses with repeat clientele, and I think that has to do with the intimacy involved in the act of preparing food for someone else to eat. On one end, when you do it for people you love, it's an act of love, when you do it for strangers, for money, it begins as a business transaction, but then when you start cooking every day for someone you know because they're showing up every day, the business end of things softens. Customers understood the difference, too, although it always surprised me how a person who ordered the same breakfast every morning, six days a week, was himself surprised that you knew what to cook for him before he'd asked for it. Sometimes we would see Eric, for instance, pulling into the parking lot, and his 6-egg-white-spinach-and-feta-omelet with dry wheat toast would be already at his place at the counter as he walked into the building. For my part, I liked to bring in food from outside. I used to open on Sunday mornings--typically, one of the busiest days of the week--and most weeks I brought in sweet potatoes for the other cook and the two opening waitresses, and I'd throw them in to bake first thing, and by the time we'd opened and gotten the first dozen customers taken care of, we'd stand in the kitchen together and eat that roasted orange flesh and it was enough to keep you happy all morning long. It was our favorite part of the day.

Our customers liked to bring us food, too, which always struck me as a little bit coals-to-Newcastle, but, there it was. Aaron was one of the boy dishwashers who was with us for several years, working weekends when he was in high school and some years all summer long, if the regular dishwasher had quit. His mother sometimes sent him to work with baskets of cookies she'd made for us, same as if we were all her teen-aged boys. Our favorite were her peanut butter blossoms that she topped with mint chocolate kisses--such an odd combination that you had to wonder if it had started out a mistake, but for whatever reason, it worked. At Christmastime we got showered with candy, so much that most of us spent the holiday weeks with sugar hangovers, and people brought more candy at Mother's Day, a holiday we all worked, mothers or no. Sometimes a customer would come in with a 5-gallon bucket full of clams he had dug, and everyone would go home and make chowder. Every Sunday mornings for many years, my friend Woody treated me to a large cup of coffee from a local stand. It was twice as good as the coffee we served, and he brought it to me full of sugar and cream, which is not how I normally take mine but it was delicious, like having dessert at 6:00 a.m. I drank hundreds of them over the years, until the point where my husband's cancer came back and I had to quit my job because he was too sick to stay home alone anymore, or to manage the kids by himself.

There were two foods in particular we could count on seeing, and they are what make me remember how food is really a seasonal thing, an idea that's too easy to forget in a time when you can get strawberries in December, mangoes in climates where they've never grown. First in the year came the ice cream. The customer who brought it to us appeared otherwise infrequently, but he never missed coming on two particular dates. There was an ice cream stand in our town owned by a family who lived the rest of the year in Florida, but for the summer season they always returned to northern Massachusetts and opened up shop, turning out the most delicious hand-made ice cream I've encountered anywhere. Our customer always brought us in two quarts on their opening day, and then two quarts again on their last day of the season. These days always happened to fall on Fridays, and once he appeared everything else we were doing would come to a sudden stop, despite the throngs of people waiting at the door for their haddock chowder and their fish fry lunches, despite the phone ringing incessantly with people frantic for take-out orders. Who cared?--the ice cream was here! Everything paused for that moment while we all dug into the cartons with their slightly-melting contents, clutching our long iced tea spoons, and ate, and then someone would run the ice cream out back to the big freezers, where it would have to wait until the restaurant had closed down again. Thus our summer season was bracketed not by Memorial Day and Labor Day, but by Chocolate Walnut and Vanilla Supreme.


The other big food event--and this is the one that Lunaea reminded me of--was the arrival of the season's first cider doughnuts. We had friends who own a large apple farm there in town and while it's possible to get their cider doughnuts all year long, the best time is when they've done the year's first pressing of cider. It's late summer when that happens, and while it's not my favorite cider of the year still, it's hard to ignore the lure of the doughnuts that get made from it. The year I'm speaking of one of our regulars was the baker for the farm, and he came in one morning carrying a sack of doughnuts he'd just made from the new cider. In fact he had made this batch, pulled them from their oil bath, bagged them up and run...when they got to us the bag was still blisteringly hot from its contents. I can still see us as we were then, two cooks, three waitresses, the dishwasher, all standing in our sweatshirts and our shorts, while we tore open the waxy sack with those little spots of grease starting to bloom from its contents. We inhaled the spice of the rising steam, we inhaled the doughnuts like we'd never seen food before, and luckily it was mid-morning and a little slow in the restaurant, and so our customers sat unattended and drank their coffee while we stood and ate, and ate until every last crumb was gone. That year, that was the day autumn arrived. Ever since, whenever I remember the scene, the women I stood with, how hungrily we all ate, it is autumn's first day again.