Last year I acquired a regal beast, Carl, Esq., because his family had rather rudely brought a human child into their lives. As this baby grew into a toddler, well—her enthusiasm for Carl, shall we say, was not welcome.
Carl spent the first week of his life at my house hiding from a different small terror, Henrietta the Hotspur, half his weight and twice his feisty-factor.
Surveying her kingdom, small but mighty.
After he decided it was safe to come out of hiding, my children visited to meet the new member of the household. Naturally it was a love fest.
At one point I was describing how the diminutive one had never cared much about her food, but now that the large Carl is vying for meals, she is suddenly more willing to eat what she had previously found UNACCEPTABLE.
Eli sighed and, shaking his head, said, “Ah. The Tragedy of the Commons.”
And there you have it, friends. The value of a liberal arts education: MORE JOKES.
I went for a run today. It was every bit as unpleasant as I remember, but the unpleasantness had a different quality than it used to, before the mortal peril.
When I fired up my running app, it asked me if I truly did want to start with Week One, Day One, or if I wanted to continue with Week Nine. No, thank you. Let’s not go back to 2018. Ever.
I’d run that same measly set of eight one-minute running intervals in April 2018, about three months after my unprovoked pulmonary embolism. “The clots are gone,” they said. “You should be back to normal,” they said.
That beautiful spring day I managed to shuffle along slowly, which, I thought, was better than a poke in the eye.
And when I got home, I puttered around the garden, casually lifting a weed here or there, enjoying the sunshine, imagining the summer color, writing projects I’d have time to finish after the end of the semester. I was still waking early to write, but I was frustrated that every time I’d get some momentum with my book I’d have to pack up to go to campus. That week in April, we were finishing up Into the Woods, and Sondheim is not my favorite—which made me all the more eager. I wanted to be done with that, done with the school year. Because I thought then I’d feel better, would not have to nap every day.
But that night, after those tiny running intervals and my hour or so lingering—I wouldn’t use the term “working,” for sure—in the garden, I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. Everything hurt, every joint. It hurt to lie in any position. It hurt to stand. It hurt to sit. And because I was on anticoagulants, I was not able to take Ibuprofen.
I would continue running through the summer, not realizing I’d been had. Duped. Mount Verstovia was when I realized, struggling up and then down that mountain, after running all summer.
Today it seemed like time to start again. Because of the suitors.
Eight years ago, I recorded two moments at work, and these glimpses into my life before, courtesy of Facebook, are so strange and lovely.
11: 37am · Our recordings archives guy went MIA, so I’m scrambling to edit and distribute CDs to our performers. Like, all of them, from every concert this fall. It is fidgety, time consuming work, but having Seth here with me in the booth, quietly reading the Odyssey, somehow makes everything better.
Especially now that both boys are gone, I feel a kind of fondness for the time spent not-talking, simply being together. At the same time, how quaint: CDs!
Two hours later, Seth evidently announced:
1:44pm · “The suitors are dead. Let’s have lunch.”
And that’s why I decided to get off my bum and find the running shoes. For months I’ve been overwhelmed by how many prongs I’ve had to use in my multi-pronged approach to feeling well again. So many. Yoga? Check. Physical Therapy? Check. Sensible diet? Check. Quit every activity except for work? Check.
But the long wait is over, and while my house is not littered with the bloody corpses of those pesky suitors, the weight has lifted. I am not distracted, disconnected, and it does feel time to attend to the more simple tasks. A wee run. And now some lunch.
When my older son was very small, he liked to “be” someone different each day. He had assigned costume status to various outfits: baseball player, cowboy, fire fighter, astronaut, pilot. Halloween was just another ordinary day, but with candy.
(His younger brother approached Halloween, and life in general, with more glee. When he was about seven, he famously approached the pumpkin-carving with a cheerful, “Okay, Jack! Time for your lobotomy!”)
My firstborn seemed to have been born tracking Lynn Dell Cohen’s vibe:
This deciding every night about who he was going to be the next day—well. It was sometimes a lot of pressure for someone who has only been on the planet a few years.
We have a legendary photograph of the E-man at four, sitting on his bed with all his different outfits laid out. Of course his distress was real, but he was wearing a caricature, over-the-top sad face. Like a mime. A big tear on his cheek. He couldn’t decide.
That may or may not have been the morning after he had panicked one night, going downtown with his worries. He was not only anxious about the next day, but he hurled himself wildly into the future. His lament began something like this, slowly escalating:
“I don’t know who I’m going to be tomorrow, I don’t know where I’m going to go to college, I don’t know where I’m going to live when I grow up, I don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up….”
And I’m probably missing a few here. But I distinctly remember the crescendo toward the grand finale:
“I don’t even know who I’m going to marry!”
Now that is some serious existential quandary right there.
I totally get that.
I was in divinity school when I learned, a week after my twenty-fourth birthday, that I was pregnant with that guy. I’d hardly had any time to be an adult in the world before my future became framed by “mother.” In two years, I’ll be the mother of a child learning to walk. In five years, the mother of a pre-schooler. Et cetera. And even while I forged my own identity, the presence of my son, and then sons, was the central feature of my adulthood.
So when my younger fella graduated from college last May, I began to wonder. Who do I want to be?
It’s… kind of a lot. To think about. When you’re paying a mortgage, and you’ve never given a rat’s ass about a “career,” which is how many of us are taught to identify ourselves. My honorary daughter works in a law firm in downtown Seattle and mused yesterday that “differences between men and women’s business attire is unfair in literally every way.” And “business attire” is 100% the reason I was never going to be able to “be” a business woman. Or work in any kind of cubicle. It is not the costume I prefer for the theatre of my everyday life.
And then there’s been the recovery from Mortal Peril, which involved a lot of wondering about the next world and do I even belong here with the living?
So in the last weeks, as we approached the Day of the Dead, I have been remembering my boys and their Halloween adventures, but also looking back to realize that although I was not hospitalized until January, it is clear from my journal entries and photographs that I was already ill at this time two years ago. Which is also a lot.
November 2017: my older son and I hiked up to this glorious view, a trail that begins just a few minutes from where he lived and worked in White Salmon, along the Columbia River. This is the day, struggling to climb the hill, that I began to wonder whether something was wrong.
Halloween was mostly stressful for me when the boys were small, but my favorite memory is my big boy, at four, in his ghoul costume, a white pillowcase with holes cut for the arms and a fabric mask. We bundled up with his newborn brother and walked through the Proctor District, where shopkeepers, bless them, handed out Tootsie Rolls, which, in my mind, should not be allowed.
As we approached each shop, my earnest boy would lift the mask to reassure the adult with the loot. “Don’t be scared! It’s just a little boy under here!”
The pressing in of the season of death with resonances of the enormity of the future, the enormity of our mortality—this is the right time to reassure each other. Don’t be scared.
Just before heading away last weekend to a remote village accessible only by boat, far away in the Cascade Mountains, I happened across photos of a vintage book called Trees Every Child Should Know. My favorite chapter title: “The Disappointing Hickories”—which, a friend suggested, could be the name of our bluegrass band. (Should we form one, we would definitely live up to the name.)
As a child my family lived in a small town on the mouth of the Connecticut River, on Long Island Sound. I spent a great deal of time outside exploring the marshy area and woods and beaches in our neighborhood. But I did not learn the names of trees, aside from the maple and the weeping willow—and I have fond memories of the willow across the street, in Lisa’s front yard, where, once, water collected in a hollow just before a severe freeze, forming a perfect ice skating pond. I snuck out of the house to skate alone early one morning in the thin winter light, resting in the “house” under the willow branches before going home to warm up.
Tidal wetlands in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, early April, 2015
Later, one summer when I was about fourteen, visiting in Ohio with my grandmother, we strolled over to Lake Erie. It was sticky-hot. Along the way, my stepmother pointed out the homes of her chums and various significant places from her childhood. These houses, her elementary school, and, curiously, several trees—all had been marker points, and stories of adventure were connected to each.
At one point, she and her mother mentioned a particular tree that was now gone, perhaps lost to Dutch Elm Disease—I can’t quite recall. But I do distinctly remember saying wistfully that I wished I knew the names of trees. “I guess they don’t teach that in school anymore.”
My stepmother was quick with her retort: “We didn’t learn that in school! Everyone just knew the names!” I felt somehow scolded and cheated at the same time. And I have since been haunted by a feeling of inadequacy concerning my knowledge of the natural world. Although, as an adult, of course, I have been curious, asked questions when I’ve met knowledgeable people, and I generally consult various guides, trees, birds, etc. And! I read aloud a few of Bernd Heinrich’s books to my younger son, Summer World and Winter World. Delightful.
Still. The feeling remains, this idea that “everyone” should know… this or that. The names of trees. Or flowers. Or animals.
Heading up the hill from Lucerne Landing to Holden Village. You can see a burned fir in the foreground, and fire damage in the distance.
And then last weekend at the village with my friend Tamara, I thought about this again, that I wanted to learn the names of trees. The Wolverine fire of 2015 had originated not far from the village, and it was only through heroic effort that the village itself was saved.
Walking away from the Village, you come very quickly to the boundary area where fire stopped.
We had a few walks, but the one day we were free to have a proper hike the visibility was so poor and the snow so thick, we had to abort the mission. Back at her chalet, Tamara showed me a guidebook—she had just read a quirky little blurb about the Douglas squirrel.
And that reminded me of a moment during my book purge last summer. For a hot minute I had thought about ditching my father’s old “history” books. I flipped through the pages, curious to see whether the musty old thing would spark joy, and, indeed, I admired the gorgeous and problematic color plate illustrations. Then I noticed an article about David Douglas, the botanist.
Not the best photo, but you can still see that it is both beautiful and deeply problematic.
The language is deliciously florid:
Romantic and interesting his life, tragic and melancholy his end: it is well that one of the most widely distributed trees on our coast should bear his name, and perpetuate the memory of his noble and self-sacrificing labors.
“An Early Hero of the Pacific: David Douglas, Botanist,” by T. Somerville in Frontier Days by Oliver G. Swan
I had made a mental note to look him up, put the book in the “keep” pile, then promptly forgot about Douglas altogether.
Reading about his squirrel last weekend, I made another mental note, and this time I remembered, partly thanks to Tom. (Poor Douglas. He did, indeed, meet a tragic and melancholy end—trampled to death by a bull after falling into a pit trap on the Big Island of Hawaii.)
The weather had been so grim that getting to the village was positively grueling. Of course, on the day I left, it was glorious—a windstorm had blown through the previous night. Tom, a forestry guy volunteering at the village, made the ten-mile trip down to the boat landing, bringing along his chainsaw. Which he needed. We stopped four times to clear a fallen tree from the road.
After we finally made it down the mountain, we piled out of the bus. Several of us were milling about on the beach waiting for the boat to deliver the next batch of visitors off the boat when Tom approached with a branch.
“Do you have something to show us?”
“I do!”
It was a fir branch.
You can see that the middle branch here is a bit chubbier that the rest.
“Do you see these?” he asked, pointing to the nodules along the branch. “They’re dwarf parasitic mistletoe.” And then he told us all about them, how they build up a sort of pus pod for the seed until there’s so much pressure it bursts out, shooting the seed as many as eighty-five feet in a second.
They also divert nutrients to the areas of the tree where they are latched on, and that area becomes lush. But that will cut off nutrients to the rest of the tree, and the topmost branches will eventually die. The bushy bits of the tree are called witches’ broom.
Later that afternoon, on the drive through Blewett Pass, I saw one! A fir with an enormous “broom” on one side, close to the ground, and the spire top entirely dead.
Naming and knowing stories help us to see. When we were in college, Tamara’s parents were visiting one spring, and walking across campus they pointed out that the flowering shrub was not, as I’d guessed, a rhododendron, but an azalea. After they pointed out the differences, they were obvious, but until then, the distinctions were entirely opaque to me.
I remembered this during the wait at Lucerne Landing—the boat dropped off the village’s next visitors and then left us to continue north, fetching us a few hours later on the trip “down lake.”
This long waiting, a liminal time in a liminal place, gave me the space to reflect deeply on all manner of things—a difficult semester, major life decisions looming, and, well, love and family, luminous and complicated.
The light was beautiful on the beach.
I do not know the names of the trees with the yellow leaves. Yet.
Pedaling over to campus early this morning, I noticed a pair of flip-flopped feet next to the sliding door of a van. I could only see the feet. It was a mom-type person getting kiddos and their accouterments packed in.
In that tiny moment as I rolled by, I saw a baby, face grim and serious, peering at a book, and, as if woefully considering the implication of the Senate hearings, the wee bairn was all slumped over to the side in its car seat.
And I thought, I feel you, little one.
A few blocks later, I slowed to let a dad-type person and his daughter cross to the elementary school. Turned out, it was DEATH, the guy who always plays DEATH in The Christmas Revels. I don’t really know him, but we’ve chatted once or twice.
His daughter was just a small herself the first year he was DEATH, and my son Eli was in that show. So around the dinner table, we heard a lotta stories about this guy, who may or may not be a smidge quirky in real life, but who was especially entertaining during those sleep-deprived first months of parenthood.
We exchanged hellos, realized we only live a few blocks from each other, and wished each other a fine day.
This is one of those marathon stuck-in-the-booth gigs for me, so that glimpse of the slumped baby and the tiny exchange with DEATH were the right way to start the day.
I distinctly remember that a year ago I felt well enough to be sure I was using the correct spelling, “plumb,” not “plum,” when I shared this photo of items that brought a little cheer during what was, in retrospect, the darkest time of my life. And the looking up, I suppose, is a sign I hadn’t lost it entirely.
But the previous week I had been weeping every day, preparing for a national conference that was a logistical nightmare. My colleague in the theatre department would call me in the morning to ask if I’d cried yet, and if not, could I wait until 2pm, because he’d be over then and we could cry together.
After we’d survived that flustercuck, I had an all-day Revels rehearsal. When I’d auditioned for the chorus the previous spring, I had thought that a summer of rest would put me in fine fettle to perform again. My fettle was anything but fine.
I don’t remember if they volunteered or if I asked, but my son Eli and his girlfriend Lindsey came to visit, fetching me at the church rehearsal space. And that, I suppose, is why, after we had packed into her little car and were setting off toward home that Lindsey announced, “I went to a mega-church once….”
“WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?”
I don’t remember her answer. But I do remember there was an actual camel at the church. Live. For the nativity, I guess. And people complained after we sheared a sheep onstage during a springtime Revels back in the day!
After recovering from the camel shock, I remembered the monstrosity out in Gig Harbor, the church where I heard the Symphony Tacoma Chorus sing The Messiah a week or so before the Mortal Peril. My friend Jinshil was performing, and she brought me along with her one evening.
I don’t remember much from that time, but I do remember reading a particularly steamy scene in Narcissus and Goldmund while the choir was warming up. And I remember the building. It was like an airport, or a carpeted shopping mall, with a coffee shop and bookstore.
I just kept thinking, they either hire an army of (likely brown) people to vacuum this place or they have some kind of space-age giant machine.
Of course I told the kids about that church, unlike anything I had ever seen. I suppose that’s what got us to thinking about IKEA. The enormity of the building, not the acres of carpet.
And then. Lindsey excitedly asked, “What if there was a church in IKEA?”
In response to which Eli intoned, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was hygge.”
It’s funny how crisis puts us exactly in a place where we cannot ask for help because we cannot see the extremity of our situation. All energy is focused on surviving each day. It was still a long struggle, the rest of that autumn a year ago. But the hygge moment was when I felt the suffering abate just a smidgen. For a moment I could see myself again and the everything was, well, not right, but a little less wrong in the world.
Last week my friend Barbara picked up passes for us at the library, and then we hit the Washington State History Museum—free-fer-nothin’, as my dad used to say—to check out the LBD exhibit.
I took a photo of this 1970 charmer because it had been owned by Jan Seferian, a local soprano.
Everything about the exhibit is top notch. We spent a pleasant hour exploring the exhibit, reading, talking, learning. And then we enjoyed some crepes for lunch across the street, and then we wandered through the farmers market. The perfect way to spend a rainy Thursday morning.
I had to hustle straight to work to set up for a dress rehearsal for our biggest concert of the year, a collage. Running up and down the stairs until almost midnight, schlepping equipment, taping infinity cables, all of it, meant that I had nary a moment to think about dresses, black or otherwise, let alone the social history of the LBD.
So it wasn’t until the next morning, putting on my own concert hall “uniform,” that I remembered the running joke I have with my friend Gwynne. Years ago I had told her that as soon as I had another job and was not required to wear black, I would wear only colors until my dying day and would immediately purge my wardrobe of every single item of black clothing….
“…and you’ll give them all to me!”
Of course I will.
I have been keenly aware that I am required to be invisible in my work, until something goes wrong, at which point I must be available to fix it immediately. Although, naturally, the preference would be that nothing ever goes wrong.
I had not connected the black clothing to the invisibility aspect quite so immediately before our museum visit, when I read about the mourning clothes of the Civil War period, which signaled that the wearer was outside the active, lively social structure. She was, in other words, made invisible.
A topic deserving of more time and thought than I have this morning as I rustle up the energy to get back on campus for another concert.
But the exhibit put me in mind of a piece I wrote a year ago toward the end of the spring semester that I can no longer even remember. So I offer here a flashback to Herr Wunderschlange and the Little Black Dress, which includes an excerpt from my forthcoming memoir.
11 May 2018
My friend Lissa came over yesterday to meet Carl, our new housemate, a demure and gentlemanly Maine Coon mix. But he was evidently too shy to greet visitors. So Lissa and I sat and quietly and caught up with all our news, hoping that Carl might make an appearance. He did not.
At one point in our conversation, Lissa glanced up to see my laundry hanging to dry, tipped her head to the side, and asked, “Why do you have all those black clothes hanging there?”
“What would you like to wear? Black, black, or black?”
Lissa remembered the movie, but not the scene.
Then I clarified, about the laundry. “There’s a blue dress there.”
“DARK NAVY,” she said, also laughing.
Black, black, or black?
Since the Mortal Peril, an unprovoked pulmonary embolism, I have gained a few pounds, just enough that I can’t comfortably wear many of my favorite things. But, in the last few weeks especially, I’ve had terrific good luck finding several excellent pieces to add to my work uniform collection of concert hall blacks.
But we’re coming to the end of the semester, lots of events, so by Saturday I was running out of clean clothes. That morning I had been rummaging through my closet and pulled out a dress I’d forgotten. And while I do tend to forget many things these days, (possibly because of the post-mortal-peril anti-coagulants?), my wardrobe is so small, I don’t typically lose track of items.
The last time I’d worn that dress was when I met a fella for coffee after a concert last winter.
The week prior, I had signed up with an online dating site. For two reasons.
First. My pals set me up on a blind date, and I was a disaster, in a fugue state of nerves. I realized I needed practice.
Also. With the boys out of the house, one day I would think to myself, “This must be what it feels like to be 20-something and single! Except solvent and happy!” And I would feel delighted, fulfilled, and I would glory in my future and freedom. The very next day I would think, “Fuck. All of my best work is done, and there’s nothing left but DEATH.”
Obviously, I needed to get out more.
So. My son had met his darling girlfriend on what I call some variation on MediocreCupid—which, I’m delighted to report, my spellcheck recognizes—and I thought I’d give it a whirl.
Right out of the starting gate, a polite German man messaged me. I asked what it was like growing up before the wall came down. We both shared a certain dismay at the idea that Angela Merkel was now the hope for democracy in the free world. We discussed Hermann Hesse.
And then we exchanged phone numbers and decided to meet.
Pretty standard.
(Except, perhaps, the Hesse part.)
The coffee was brief because I’d gotten lost on the way to the shop, in a nearby town where there seems to be no there there. He had his young daughters that weekend and needed to scurry home to help with homework. We took our coffee and had a stroll.
We had a polite and frank conversation about where we were in our lives and what we were looking for.
I’d had a long work week, six days, and then this whirlwind meeting. I was tired. But when I returned home from this middle-of-nowhere coffee shop, I sent a thank you text.
He replied, “I find you very sexy.”
Huh.
I turned this over in my mind a moment, and then opted to tell him the truth:
“Gosh. I haven’t heard that for a while. Thank you.”
There was only the briefest pause before my phone pinged again:
“I had an erection when we were talking.”
I was chopping an onion, making dinner, when the erection popped up on the screen. I felt a peculiar, particular ripple of fear and amusement and disbelief as I turned this over in my mind. We had crossed into new territory.
Before I had a chance to reply:
“In fact, I still do!”
After a good think, I washed my hands to type back, “Oh, I’m so sorry!”
He was helping his daughter with homework!
Boundaries, people.
Angela Merkel! Angela Merkel! How did we get to erections from Angela Merkel!
Confession: I let the conversation proceed a little farther than I would have if I’d had my wits about me. But I was surprised, and, frankly, a little curious.
I had been made aware, as it were, that there are people in the world who are able to have sex without intimacy, who are able to approach their bodies, other bodies, in a way that I do not fully understand. As a plaything. As things. Once, shortly after splitting with my husband, a married man volunteered to “get freaky” with me. I asked what his wife would think of that arrangement, and, evidently, they… have an arrangement. So I knew that people did this, disengaged their hearts.
Not my jam.
So when Herr Wunderschlange texted, “Please tell me you’re not into vanilla sex,” I was not entirely unprepared. I mean, I have a problem with the pejorative aspect of the term “vanilla.” And I had an idea what he meant. I asked him what he meant, anyway. It soon became clear that he was inviting me into his little sex dungeon for a spanking good time. Or, perhaps, a good, spanking time.
First thinking thoughts: I signed up for AdequateCupid to get out of the house. Why would I want to spend my weekends at his place out in the middle of nowhere?
More thinking-thoughts: The holidays! How would I schedule this sexy time? “Boys, I’ll be out for a few hours, then we’ll make peppermint bark when I get back.”
Generally, I try not to be uncharitable. It doesn’t feel good. But the whole scenario seemed hilarious. And that is likely not the reaction he’d hoped to elicit.
The next morning I woke with a screaming headache and knew I had to break the news. I was not going to be able to go downtown with this scenario. As it were.
I never heard from him again.
In the next several weeks, before the Mortal Peril put an end to this nutty experiment, I had a variety of confusing and curious exchanges with several men and a few more coffee dates. And I enjoyed reporting on these interactions to my little circle of pals on Facebook.
After the Herr Wunderschlange incident, one of my former students delighted me with: “Welcome to the glorious hellscape of online dating.”
GLORIOUS HELLSCAPE.
Indeed.
Later that winter, a friend and I were driving back from our annual pilgrimage to IKEA, and she said, “You need to write a book.”
I protested. It’s already been done. What could I add? I didn’t try that experiment long enough to have enough material.
And then I turned to look out the window. In a rare copse near a car dealership, I saw a bird of prey, still and beautiful on a bare branch.
Ploompf. The structure of a book plopped into my head. I turned back to Linda.
“I could do it.”
“I know you could.”
And I did.
For the last five or six months, constructing that narrative has been my focus, weaving these strands, the stories of love and longing and the construction of self—the stories of three generations of women, my grandmother’s, my mother’s, and my own.
Herr Wunderschlange was a blip.
So it’s curious that I never wore that dress again and that I feel sick at the thought. Without realizing it, I’d retired the costume from my repertoire, because that is not a role I want to play.
In The Secret Garden, after Martha laughingly asks what Miss Mary would wear, her dour, unsmiling reply is, “Are you blind? They’re all black. And I won’t be laughed at.”
Which is another way of saying, I won’t be made a thing.
Last night when I was awake in the wee hours, I finished Tracy Chevalier’s new novel, A Single Thread. It was recommended by an algorithm. I had Audible credits piling up, and all my library holds are still weeks from becoming available. And the cover is appealing. And I’d spent a good deal of time in 1932 last summer with my grandmother’s love letters.
So. I gave it a whirl.
I did not recognize the author’s name because in the early aughts I was busy with small children and read nothing. I knew Girl with a Pearl Earring had been made into a movie because, well, Colin Firth. But I did not associate the author’s name with her work. (Embarrassing.)
Which is to say: I went in cold. No expectations.
Historical fiction is tricky, something I learned when my children were young, and I read Marguerite de Angeli‘s The Door in the Wall with them. I had seen it at school and in the library when I was a child, but I had not read it. It won the Newbury in 1950 and is well-loved, “a classic.”
I hated it. Viscerally.
In college I had studied medieval literature with a brilliant young professor, and she had awakened me to the foreignness of places in time, to a world that was shaped and viewed so differently from ours, and not only in terms of electricity and modern conveniences. Or religion and reason.
Now, I haven’t re-read it recently, so I am willing to admit that I could be quite wrong, but my memory is that The Door in the Wall seemed like modern people with modern sensibilities wearing charming costumes.
When I was a child, my father read de Angeli’s earlier book, Henner’s Lydia, aloud to me. The rumble of his chest, the scent of his clothes, the illustrations—all real and immediate in my memory. So I felt betrayed by The Door.
At any rate. I learned then that one must approach historical fiction with caution.
Tracy Chevalier has done her research. The details are right. But I did not feel I was in 1932. And that is partly the fault of my grandmother’s letters, but also Barbara Pym. Although it takes place in 1950, Pym’s Excellent Women also features single women, post-war. Different war, similar challenges. Pym so masterfully portrays a sophisticated interior life that is shaped by forces that are alien to our sensibilities.
Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy A Single Thread. I did.
Like Violet, I had a grand walking adventure in England several summers ago. And, like Violet, my reasons for choosing that particular walk were privately complicated.
On that walk, I spent some time in Hexham, where I was especially struck by the embroidered kneelers in the Cathedral.
The patterns are not varied, as the ones in A Single Thread, but the colors are as vibrant.
I was struck by how much they light up the dark space, in just way that Chevalier describes the kneelers in Winchester Cathedral.
The dapper older gentleman in sassy peach-colored trousers was amused by my interest. He couldn’t give me any details when I asked, brushed me off, said something about the guild. It was a moment where you can’t say you don’t understand what someone means because they clearly cannot understand why you would be interested.
I love stories behind stories, and that was the appeal of A Single Thread, that Chevalier shone a light on an aspect of communal life that is at once taken for granted, assumed, and also so obvious that it is hidden, unspoken.
It was also pleasant for me to remember my trip to England, because shortly after I had a health crisis that has become a Great Divide. When I moved to the Pacific Northwest, people I met divided their lives into “before” and “after” the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s. Mortal Peril for me functions in that same way, and my life before seems remote, inaccessible.
And the peril naturally made me both more aware of my own mortality and the fact that I survived and escaped the devastation my siblings did not. Which is not the same as surviving a World War that has erased a generation of men, as is the case for the women in The Single Thread. But my own survival changed the way I see the world and read stories.
Today I was pedaling home from an appointment and spotted a tiny guy walking his vintage Fisher Price pull-toy dog, exactly the one I’d had and loved. He was excited to see me, kept saying “HI!” in his biggest voice.
When I said hello, and he bent over laughing, grasping his knees like an old man.
“You’re walking your dog!”
And he popped right up, looked behind him, astonished, and his eyes and mouth became perfect, round O’s.
Then I wondered, what if adults behaved the way children do, with so much enthusiasm and delight?
And then I remembered my staff meeting yesterday.
My favorite student walked in, spread his arms wide, and in his best movie announcer voice, said, “NICOLE! I had… a FEVER… last weekend! I HAVE MONO!”
I was making some jokes about “the kissing disease” when another favorite boy walked in, looking lost and confused. I said hello, and he looked around and muttered, “Where is my husband? When will he return from war?”
“Who is your husband?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” *sigh* “I guess I’ll find out when he gets back from war.”
My work re-entry this last month has been hard. Post Mortal Peril, my brain has dumped so much information that I’ve had to relearn almost every damn thing. I have to think hard to remember events last year, students’ names. I’m tired. I don’t have time to write. It’s just hard.
Thank heavens I have these loony kids on my staff.
I was not yet weeping every day I wrote this. That would come a week or so later, when I’d count it a good day if I could hold off on the crying until after the noon hour.
The previous August I had spent a glorious ten days in Sitka, Alaska, house-sitting for friends. My sole responsibilities were feeding the cats and myself and watering a few plants. I took walks, met many lovely people, practiced fiddle tunes in the evening, and whipped out a draft of my book proposal.
The view from Mount Verstovia in Sitka.
By October, I was so strung out with exhaustion that when friends would ask about the book, I would have entirely forgotten that I had written 40,000 words.
Today, another year of healing and a new doctor who listens and has an actual damn plan to get me “back to medically boring,” and the world is new. Or, you know. Better.
I have the energy now to go to my job AND do other things. Like this “platform” for my “marketing plan,” gods help me. I foolishly spent the summer working on content, not realizing that even with the help of kind James at WPBeginner it would take infinity weeks to get launched. But, this website, with my own domain, is finally here, hallelujah.
And in the last week I have written two article drafts, a long-form essay, Sunday School with Ted Bundy and a shorter essay about my trip last July to explore natural burial sites with my friend Barbara.
“Fecund” is the first word I voluntarily looked up in a dictionary; I’d read it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I don’t recall much about the book, except fecund. The word itself. I was fourteen, and my world was constricted, barren. I was hesitant to trust that fecundity was even a thing.
And so for the last quarter century, I’ve been haplessly dithering at making a garden, trying, at the very least, to make room for beauty and life.
We planted apple trees after I learned my second babe would be a boy, and I panicked at prospect of having to feed two human male teenagers. How could we possibly afford it! I decided to landscape with food.
I ordered bare root trees and together we planted them one dark January evening, that tiny baby in the front pack under my coat, before his name felt like his so we referred to him by various terms, usually The Stink. (“Just enough edge with that to give him something to talk about in therapy later,” my therapist friend said, “but not actually damaging or cruel.”)
Twenty years later, and just before the Mortal Peril, I had been ready to take out the apples. The boys were grown and the trees had served their purpose. The upkeep was hard.
But then I didn’t get around to it, what with the Mortal Peril and all. And because I was going to remove them, I didn’t have my pal Steve the Tree Killer come over to prune.
Evidently the trees did not get the memo that they were no longer required, and they’re producing like gangbusters. Two years of unchecked growth. Looks like I will be able to process enough applesauce and apple butter this fall to survive the apocalypse.
And in the back garden, the cover crop is growing to beat the band. Because of the side-sewer disruption, I didn’t get the vegetables in until late, but, this week, finally, I found a tomato.
The apples, the cover crop, the tomato. All good signs, but hard, hard work. I’ve been out every morning for an hour or so the last week, and everything hurts—lower back, hips, shoulders. (At the Red Hot the other day, I had to ask my pal to finish his beer and dog so we could head out. “This wooden chair is killing me.”) I have been under the evidently false impression that infirmity and decrepitude wouldn’t impact the gardening for another ten years or so. But mostly it’s a good soreness, reminding me I’m still alive, dammit.
Sometimes I wish I had known how to ask for help in the garden after the Mortal Peril. Although, it was already beginning to get out of control when I ended up in the hospital.
Usually I only find dismembered toy dolls in the gardens. Or auto parts. But today I found a volunteer oak tree, thigh high. That’s right. OAK. TREE.
So. If I had asked for help, that forgotten stash left by some industrious squirrel might not have taken root.
And on Friday both my boys will be home with their particular friends for feasting and end-of-summer reveling.
