Dig

Yesterday the excavator was here all day, and all day I was trying to get some work done but could not--my lawn pulled wide open, the workman calling me back again and again to look at this, to look at that, telling me what he was going to do next, what he guessed would be the right fix. It was mesmerizing, this whole underground system of dry wells and pipe pathways and those mysterious subterranean workings of my house laid bare for me to examine. The rocks and the roots. A little while ago I looked out and saw a grackle locked in a frantic tug-of-war with one of those roots that had surfaced and not been buried again at the end of the day. Whatever was pulling from within the Earth won; the grackle flew off, I would almost say flew off looking dismayed.

There is under my lawn a stacked stone holding tank that someone had constructed decades ago. The excavator pulled away a couple of feet of dirt to show it to me, how it rested there like the unguessed-at doorway to a temple or a tomb. How did he find it? Maybe he's a dowser, and that's what led him to this line of work in the first place.

I had most of the day to contemplate this concealed world--the utility men had also been out earlier in the week, and so other parts of my yard were marked with little flags like ley lines, yellow ones tracing where the gas pipes traveled, blue ones marking the water. So much that is right there, and so perfectly hidden from us. Because we see imperfectly? It occurs to me that this is not so different from the shamanic world its practitioners have described to me, a parallel and invisible place that runs right alongside ours, like a harmony being sung at a slightly higher remove along the treble clef. This gives me the basis for my own theory of the music of the spheres: the whole subterranean system of the world is the bass clef, those higher concerns of the spiritual world are the grace notes and dog-pitch octave trills way at the top of the page and me, well, I'm sort of tootling along in the neighborhood of middle C, a few steps up, a few steps down, trying to make any sort of music with my limited range and these plodding, quarter-note feet.

Leaving March

This morning I woke from a dream in which I was teaching a writing class. I had just finished telling my students the story about the magic box. Next, I told them, I need to tell you a story about something else. I began by trying to create an anagram: Learning Is Fundamentally--fundamentally what, I ask them, and remember you're trying to spell the word "life." Someone raises her hand: evil? she says, perfectly serious. The whole class considers that for a moment before we all conclude that no, "evil" isn't the correct word for this lesson. Try this, I tell them: responsibility. That makes us all "lifers." And that, I tell them, brings me to another story. I relate the conversation I had with a friend a few nights before, a friend who seemed angry with me over her perception that I might use her problems as a basis for writing of my own. She was...prophylactically angry, I suppose, as she was on the offensive long before I would have had time to hang up the phone and pick up my pen. This was not the first time she and I had had that conversation. So, I tell my students, that is another thing you have to think about when you think about your writing, what you're going to be responsible to...

That is the point in the dream at which I woke up, and I thought about it most of the morning, rather sorry to have ended class at all. Even though I don't teach very often I know its big secret: you always learn more from your students than you can ever hope to impart to them. So to that room full of my ghost students from last night: thank you. Please come back to class again soon; there is so much more I have to learn from you all.

But this--and I am very lucky here, I know--is how March walks out beside me like a lion, only this one has nothing at all to do with the weather. There is a lion pictured on the Strength card of every tarot deck I own. Its meaning is not, Beware A Late Snowstorm, but Lust For Your Own Creativity. That weather blowing through my own world this morning is welcome like, well, welcome like the rain.

This Early Spring

There is nothing either lion-like or lamb-like about the way the month of March is leaving us this year. Instead, it's going out like a nasty poltergeist with a decided mean streak: wind storms, thunder storms, tornadoes, floods. March is saying to us: screw you for complaining about the persistent cold, the lingering snow pack. In my part of the world, the water table is unusually high, and troublesome like that. (The neighbors' sump pumps have not stopped running for weeks.) Troublesome, and also oracular: it is how I discovered a few days ago that I have a collapsed septic pipe in the side yard.

There's water everywhere, and the river that goes through our valley seems especially ambitious these days, branching itself out in all sorts of new directions. If I walk south about a mile from my house, there's a spot where the river veers right up toward the road, with an old asphalt bridge crossing it along a side path. This morning as I walked I saw that it had crested over its banks there, yards were flooded, someone's swing set submerged up to its cross bars. I had walked to that spot because I wanted to take a picture of it for a friend. I hoped that in the early morning light the river would look inviting and artistic, fresh. This time of year the light is hard, though, and flat, and when I got home I didn't like the photographs I'd taken. They all look as though they were shot through a brown filter, brown water, bare brown trees, brown spit of land struggling to stay aloft in the middle of the river bed. The water itself looks bloated and not at all like something you'd want to jump into. It was not a great day for a picture outing, nor for imagining a swim, but it was still a good morning for a walk.

I've been a walker all of my life, though for different reasons at different stages of it: when I was younger I walked because I could not drive, later I walked because for many years I drove but did not own a car, I walked because I had a dog who needed to walk, too, I walked for the exercise. When my first child was born I walked because there was little else to do in those early isolated months of her infancy. It was on those walks that I discovered what I think is supposed to be its real purpose in my life, and now I walk because that is when I do much of my work. Ideas come then, or pretty soon after. I'm hardly the first writer to have noticed this. What I have noticed most is how reliable a technique it is because something always emerges. It is like having a little treasure box that you can open time and time again, and each time, there's something new in there, no matter how much you take out all you have to do is close the lid and open it again and boom, there's the next thing. If I could wish for one magical ability it would be shapeshifting but if I could wish for one magical tool it would be that box. I am fully aware of how remarkable it is to be already in possession of that very instrument. This should be a fairy tale or a children's book; maybe I will write it. Maybe that was the thing the box offered up for today. Or maybe this is, these few paragraphs I'm writing now. Is it enough? It is.

Most days I like to walk alone because it's easier to let my thoughts have their way with me when I don't have the responsibility of being a human being because I am in the company of another human being. Today, though, I would have liked to have had a companion, someone to walk beside me down the wide road and talk about--I don't know what we would talk about, it has been a long time since I've taken a walk with anyone other than myself and the dog. I have been thinking about it a lot over the past few days, though, thinking about how much time I spend alone now and how finally, I am beginning to think I wish that would change. I imagine I must be remarkably close to becoming Crazy Cat Lady and decide, all other things being equal, that CCL ought to be Plan B or even Plan C but definitely, not the default.

Rather, a Plan A like this one: someone to walk down to the river with, and sit beside on the rocks in the hot spring sun, and maybe if we could find enough to talk about for long enough the sun would shift in the sky, and the flat light and the brown landscape together might turn out to be not half bad, considered over a little time, in company. It would be better to lead someone down there and say to them, I want you to see this the way you see it rather than the way I see it or the camera tells it, and you can let me better know what you think. That little image of mine is, after all, only a sorry sentence or two out of the whole, much bigger and much more interesting when it's not just mine, story.

Glamour

Oh, how enjoyable. My sister tells me her stepdaughter met a staff writer for a Famous National Magazine recently, and has thus decided she also wishes to join the ranks of such a glamorous profession. This news comes to me in the middle of my own morning of working glamour, for this is how the writerly day goes in my world: I am puzzling over the manuscript of the Main Book I'm trying to work on, let's call it Book #1. This morning I tossed the entire first chapter of Book #1, then reconsidered and hauled it back, turning Chapter One into an introduction. This left a hole where Chapter One used to be and nothing to move into its place, which in turn left me with the horrid realization that now I would have to compose an entirely new Chapter One to put there. I reconsider again: is it worth turning my attention to the Lesser Book, Book #2? Well, yes, but I am determined to see it out, so a new Chapter One, Book #1, it is. This in turn was going to require some serious mental work, so I went outdoors and cleaned up a month's worth of dog poo out of the yard, came in and washed up and made some tea, remembered I had to go to the post office, came back upstairs and checked my email. I moved some other chapters around in the book then, and added notes for a new chapter twelve which at this point is still so far away that it may as well be a theoretical point on Einstein's event horizon. I decide I have managed to do a lot of work, cleverly giving Book #1 an introduction, moving the line-up around a bit, inventing a whole new chapter. I sit still long enough to write 250 words of my new Chapter One, which is as far as I get before I can't stand it anymore and have to use the word count function of my program to see just how far it is I've gotten. I decide my quota for the day will be 2500 words, so I'm a tenth of the way there. There are still no email messages and it must be nearly time for lunch. I stop to write this blog entry. I don't know how the glamorous staff writer for the Famous National Magazine conducts her day; you can see how mine has gone. I should put on red lipstick and high heels. And let me add that truthfully, and without the slightest bit of irony, I consider this a good day's work.

The Chair

This is a story that starts in the middle, because by the time I see the picture of the chair it's too late, I'm already smitten and there wasn't going to be any undoing this one, I knew even then. This story starts in the dullest of places, with dull old me sitting on the couch one night, looking at a catalogue. This is typical of my nights and the energy I bring to them: by that point, I have nothing left. This has been true since my children were born. Once I read that if you have nothing left by the end of the day, perhaps it's really because there's nothing more you need.

Turning those pages in the middle of this story, I came across a photograph of a chair for sale. Not just any chair for sale, but a masterpiece of a deeply tufted, leather-and-rivet swallow-you-whole kind of chair with so much soul they couldn't fit it all within its upholstery, and it ended up spilling over into the matching ottoman. You couldn't buy one without the other. No matter: the moment I saw it I felt my heart roll in my chest the way water comes in against the sea wall. I saw that chair and thought I wouldn't be able to wait until it was time to buy it--not because I wanted to sit in it, you see, but because I understood immediately that this would be the perfect chair for the Current Object Of My Affections to sit himself down in. I even said it out loud: I cannot wait to buy this chair for you...

I stay put, but the story moves out from there: I have secured the chair, I have secured the affections of this man I want there, and this is what happens: he comes home every night and sits down. We have a library, most likely, where our chairs are drawn up near the fireplace (my chair is more modest in scale but still, it fits me and I like it) and there is a table between them for us to pile our books on. We have a bit of supper there, and we read or talk about what we're reading and naturally, most nights, once we've gone to bed, there is sex involved. The sex between two people who read a lot is usually pretty good: see how nimble we both are, moving from mind to body the way we do! In this world, everything moves from chair to bed to sleep, and does not include whatever happens beyond the walls of the house. Here, by the time the curtain comes up, the play is already underway. The origin of consciousness is the threshold of that room as we step in.

So now this story has an early middle and a later middle, and because the longer I sit on the couch the more insistent my imagination becomes, my story develops a backstory and that gets its own backstory, too. Where the story began was the only thing real: a fast, dizzying infatuation that slapped me and gave me what felt like the first lungful of air I'd had since my husband died. This is not the first time I've come back from the dead, but it never stops being a surprise when it happens. In my backstory, I am something of a tragic figure. In that story's backstory, that was never meant to be the case but still, things happen, plots change, the mischievous or malevolent or sometimes goofy plans of the gods emerge and here we all are now, or at least I am, come around to this place where I'm buying imaginary furniture for rooms that don't exist. Choreographing hours of sex with people who will never touch me.

I have a friend who has been my friend since we were in the fourth grade together and all this time later, we are still in touch several times a week. Some days it's a race with us, who gets to be the more pathetic of the two; most days I think I'm probably winning. Both of us live in our heads a lot. The difference is partly a difference of degree, and partly who is the more comfortable with things the way they are. He likes his imagination; I am more wary of mine. Once, the year we both turned 40, we spent a whole summer imagining what it would be like if we were married to different people. For both of us, it turned out that our fantasies had less to do with the bedroom and more to do with Thanksgiving dinner. We both spent less time thinking about how we'd feel with a new sexual conquest and more time thinking about what color we'd paint the living room walls. We thus escaped from the mundane, directly into the familiar. He and his wife have been married a long time, just like I was. I know he loves her, same as I loved my husband. I don't know if he still thinks about having dinner with a different wife sometimes. I do know that those little daydreams never left me completely, and now take up even more space in my day, being no longer subject to the hourly interruptions of a current spouse.

And what of those other interruptions, the fact of the real lives we're really leading? The house that contains that chair has great magical powers, and dispatches the difficulties of wives, children, paths not meant to be, with impossible ease. The house of my imagination requires a well-stocked larder: I put all the responsibilities we have to other people, to those other circumstances and places into what resemble the antique canning jars I inherited from my grandmother and set them on a shelf. I think they are pretty there, lodged safely behind the thick blue glass like that, and happily, I am quite unable to hear their complaints.