Whan That Aprill With His Shoures Soote

One night last week I had a bad dream: I was with my sister and we had just discovered her old gray cat Moonshine, dead on the barn floor, and she wept and keened and managed to pick him up despite my urging her not to. In her arms the cat was rigid and thin, and in the dream I felt his deadness the same as if I'd been holding him myself. When I woke, I remembered right away that Moonshine had in fact been gone for more than twenty-five years; still, the dream had an air of urgency, of immediacy, that made it hard for me to convince myself it hadn't just happened. For two days afterwards I walked around thinking that it must be the start of an essay, somehow, but all these days later, nothing more has come of it.

It's been a string of nights full of dreams just like that, which is one of the things that my brand of insomnia does for you: I don't sleep well, but I sleep enough to dream, anxious dreams (no doubt because they're the products of a tired mind) that I generally remember since I'm always right on the verge of waking up, or have just woken up, or am lying in the dark thinking about the dream I just had while I wait to fall back asleep. At least it's been some time since I've been troubled by this. A year ago, I can see right in the entries here, I was plagued by sleeplessness, although then, it was rooted in my being stirred back into life after a long dormancy while I got accustomed to my widowhood. This year, who knows. I wonder if it's not a seasonal thing now. You'd think that the increased light would have a beneficial effect on me, helping me to emerge from the damp ground the way it's bringing my daffodils out. Instead, more light translates into more illumination of the things that trouble me, back in the deep recesses of the mind.

All day yesterday I tried to get here to write, mostly because it was the last day of the month and I didn't want to entire thing to have gone by with just one entry from me. But the truth is that lately, this is the last place I come to write: I'm still slogging along with the poem a day (#61 today, as a matter of fact) and most mornings I manage at least a short entry on the blog I keep on myspace, so if you don't find me here, chances are you'll find me there. And, having determined a course--finally, I think, the right course--of action to pursue as regards my essay-writing, the rest of the time I have to give over to this, pretty much goes to that.

And so I didn't manage to get here yesterday and honestly, because I didn't write it down anywhere else, I no longer remember what it is I intended to write about here. I hate to think that I have arrived on those shores of no longer being able to trust things to memory, but it may be that I have. I wonder how much of this is avoidable. Yesterday I taught in a middle school math program, one designed for the lowest of the low-end kids. As they worked over their sheets on simplifying expressions, they were encouraged--in fact, they were ordered--to use their calculators for the basic arithmetic functions of add and subtract. I thought to myself that surely, that reliance would weaken their minds. I thought about the old bardic orders, and their disdain for the printing press; surely, their argument went, that mind would weaken which was no longer required to memorize. But I can see the wisdom in keeping a small notebook and a pen always at hand. I always wonder what else I may have forgotten.

The past several days, when I haven't been tossing in bed, or having bad dreams, or trying to make myself useful in the classroom, I've been spending a lot of my time moodling around Jon Katz's wonderful Bedlam Farm although not, unfortunately, in person--the farm lies some four hours to the East of me. But his site is wonderful, the farm journal now a daily must-read, and it's got me thinking once more about the question of home, particularly as I look at it from a spiritual angle. I've concluded that what I really need is to create the outer set of circumstances that will more accurately reflect my interior world--when I read about Bedlam Farm I think to myself that that's what he's built for himself there, even though the journals mostly address that obliquely, with their focus on his hospice work, his photography, his sheep and, of course, his dogs. When I lived in New Hampshire I was fond of saying that I liked it there, but I didn't love it there, and mostly that was true. But the one thing I really did love was how I lived in a place where I could take a 6-mile walk--and often did--and barely encounter a car going by, let alone another soul. I miss that solitude. Where I live now, on a main street in a village that, for all it is small, is still a village, I feel hemmed-in, claustrophobic some days. To tell the truth, I don' t like it here at all, with the notable exception of one thing: I moved here with the thought that doing so would enable me to write, and write I have: when I look over the output from the last, say, thirteen months or so, I've written more in that time than I did in the previous thirteen years all put together. So now I need to find a way to synthesize the two.

I was just saying that to a friend last night, and remembering that made me remember what I was going to write about here yesterday. It rained; and first thing in the morning the rain made me remember other rainy mornings. That got me to remembering springs when I was in college, and how on some of those rainy days I wouldn't be able to help myself, I'd skip class and push my desk up by the window that overlooked the Commons in the town where I lived, and I'd sit there and write. I can remember the girl I was in those days, the writer I was at that young age, can still feel her the way I could feel the dead cat in the dream the other night--there, but not there. In those days I was hopelessly smitten with all things hopeless, which showed itself no where more clearly than in my love life, which was largely a series of disastrous entanglements with the sort of guy I'd always assumed I'd marry--someone artistic, controlled by creativity and instinct, someone a little moody, a little--or a lot--dark. Someone, in other words, just like me. Even when I'd been married for a couple of years and got to grad school, I'd still look around at the big shaggy men who lumbered in and out of my writing workshops, dragging around poems about their father-and-son angst or how they wanted to bang the papergirl and I'd think, why didn't I end up with someone like that? Luckily my own instincts outsmarted me there, and the man I eventually married was sort of the opposite of all that, and turned out to be just what I needed. When I met Dave I was involved with a guitar player, a man in whom musical talent was only outstripped by his capacity for substance abuse. Early on in our courtship, my soon-to-be husband tried competing with the other man on that man's terms, and so one night I had an hours-long serenade on Dave's old guitar while he strummed his way through--many, many times--the only song he knew how to play: House of the Rising Sun. Luckily, the musical talent portion of the pageant wasn't really part of the larger audition, and we ended up together anyway. Late in our marriage, after Dave had developed a real love for Americana music, I bought him a banjo one Christmas. This would have been the year before he had his recurrence, and so he got about eleven months in which he was able to pull the banjo out and practice--slowly, and more than a little painfully. It's actually a difficult instrument to play--those strings hurt, much more than any guitar strings do--and Dave never did learn to read music, so had to content himself with trying to teach himself through tablature. When his recurrence came, of course, the cancer rebloomed in his spine and robbed him of much of the use of his arms, and that was the end of his banjo days.

I sold the banjo the summer we left New Hampshire. I posted an ad on craigslist and a nice young couple, sort of throwback peaceful hippie types, came up from where they lived near Boston. The man picked the banjo up and took it in his arms and immediately it began to sing; he strummed, and picked, and cocked his ear and listened, and then he told me how he had a big family and they all got together frequently and played music together on the wide front porch of his parent's house. He paid me for the banjo what I'd asked for it, and they drove away again, and I was glad to think that it was going to go someplace where it would be played, and probably played a lot. I still have Dave's old guitar, which is warped beyond the point of being playable by now. But it sits in the corner of my bedroom and I think from time to time of covering it over with a beautiful glass mosaic, something green and gold and vaguely Arabian, although I have no idea why I think that, but I think that it would look nice, and that the guitar would enjoy its next life decked out in that garb.

And that is the story of two more of the musical instruments I've had in my life, and it was the rain falling down yesterday morning that made me remember it all. And the poems I've written in the last three days have all been about the rain.