Five Pieces From This Sunday

1.

The sun today is laughing at me, I am sure of it: this is the first fully-sunny day in six weeks, and at the height of it the temperature stands at just 11 degrees. All that sunlight, meanwhile, is reflected in a thousand different mirrors, as it bounces back in every direction from the white snow. It is painful to see. I stand beside the radiator as I watch the ice blooming on the inside of my windows, and consider the wind in the landscape: it is like the desert outside, only instead of the great storm of stinging sand being blown up it is a whirl of stinging snow. There are times you cannot see the houses across the road, although even then, you can look up and see the blue brilliance of the sky. Which remains unavailable to you. My son comes down the stairs and I remark on how like a desert of sand the landscape looks today. Only cold, I say, colder than you'd think a desert could ever be. My son says the truth is, deserts get very cold: especially in the night, even the warm ones quickly freeze. He tells me, that is because there is nothing there for the heat to hold on to. And nothing in the sky to hold it in.

2.

I own a toy, a kaleidoscope I found in my mother's house after she died. I'm not sure whether it's old or whether it was only manufactured to look old; the legend inscribed around the lens says Corning Glass Works so in truth, it could be very old. Or very new. I keep it by a northern window in the kitchen and from time to time, usually when I'm watering the plants over there, I see it and remember to pick it up and have a look. This morning the tumbling glass pieces first formed what made me think of an embroidered robe, like maybe something I'd have been dressed in had I been born a princess and not your average Anne. I spun it around once more and was looking at a green-and-amber forest screen, and the symmetry and the colors made me think that I'd like to replicate the pattern, maybe make it into a tile backdrop for some piece of wall in my own home. While I stood trying to memorize the scheme, I shifted a little, and the colors tumbled again, and I was back in my grandmother's garden, with the purple faces of the pansies she grew forty years ago come back to life, nodding at me from among their green leaves. Asking me--as I imagine my grandmother would ask, if only the kaleidoscope could summon her too--asking me, how have you been?

3.

Every morning starts out the same: I feed the dog, I pour my coffee, I draw a series of tarot cards for the day. For that I've invented a system which uses three decks and eight different cards, and it's a system that is intuitive and inexplicable and which makes perfect internal sense to me. This morning I am surrounded by swords: the three, the six, the nine, the nine again, and the eight. The Queen of Swords is a widow like me, but this morning she has not come around. Still, I frown at these cards for a long time: heartbreak, something going away, nightmare, nightmare, being bound. I try to reassure myself that swords are only secondly struggles, that their primary nature is to be thoughts. But thoughts of course are things.

4.

Last night's dream was a minor nightmare of the sort that I have not had in years. In it, I was taking a final exam in English, and I knew that my answers were going to be achingly on the verge of genius and also knew that I was going to fail. I was allowed to sit outside while I took the test, and was handed a piece of black felt and some markers to take it with. First I had to invent the question, and then answer it. I decided to begin by illustrating my essay, and drew some lines; but immediately something went wrong, and in the middle of the ebony cloth there appeared a large white patch, and that apparition stumped me more than any question could have done. Since I didn't know how it had gotten there I was vexed as to how to remove it again, and so began to walk up the road looking for someone who could help me, for the antidote, for anything. As I walked I began to suspect that I was forgetting something even more important, that maybe I was supposed to be at work or was supposed to be picking one of the kids up somewhere. I climbed back into the van that I'd been sitting in when I began to take my exam. It was still a sunny afternoon, and I couldn't find the keys, and on the seat beside me where I'd tossed it, the black felt test paper with its glaring white error looked back at me.

5.

Everything today keeps circling around to the wind. For awhile in the afternoon I wanted to go to sleep, curling up in a recliner in the living room and pulling a blanket over me. I walked down that long tunnel that runs between the world to which I wake and the one I enter as I fall asleep. Do you know this place, does it exist for you, too? Early on my way through, I hit a patch of ice and my feet flew out from underneath me. In the chair my legs jerked; the motion woke me up, but next I realized it was really the sound of the wind intruding on my consciousness that made me skid this way. Presently I began to sleep again, and the image of an old lover's face came into view: it is the man I was involved with when I met the man who became my husband. I had not thought about him in many years, and as I watched him look at me, I thought that if I was seeing him now it must be because he had recently died. He opened his mouth and started to speak, but instead of words I heard the wind blow a hard gust, and so was pulled awake again. The third time I attempted to sleep, I suddenly came to understand the connection between the way the stories in the Decameron are organized and the cards that came up for me that morning in my tarot reading. Why had this not occurred to me before? Excited, I woke for the third time in twenty minutes, and this time, the wind blew steadily, holding its own in conversation with itself. Gradually the tarot-Decameron connection began to be less clear to me, but rising in its place was the conviction that I was meant to be awake then, that had I slept, I would have slept straight through an idea that was trying to come. Then I remembered that this had happened one other time recently, that one morning I was sleepless at 4:30 and grumpy about it, but I wandered downstairs and looked out a window and saw Venus shining low over the Eastern hill, and in that moment an essay presented itself to me, wholly formed, and I had thought then that had I been asleep, this idea would have entered my house and slipped right out through my walls again, without me being there to catch it. I think about that other essay until I'm sure I've memorized it again. Outside the wind continues on and on, and I think that it is beginning to sound like voices singing a children's round, and if I listen long enough pretty soon I'll know it well enough to be writing down those words, that tune.