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Showing posts from December, 2008

December 22

Back at Morning Star to house sit, where, in spite of an almost catastrophic near-miss with the water system, we feel immeasurably better than we have since beginning our tenure out at Deer Point. Our duties, vaguely extolled from the beginning, boil down to a kind of servitude. We are butlers, under slippery management, hired to fill 40 hours between the two of us & finding ourselves hand & foot servants patching together long weeks both for a couple so distant from us in so many ways. Both working, we can get up to 80 hours, though they have decided that they will give us a flat salary for 40—a conversation we will need to revisit very shortly. Worked their anniversary party last night, on our day off, & three couples attended. Without warning or prior word, we found ourselves tableside after our employer snapped his finger. I mixed drinks for thankless septuagenarians drowning in cologne, all neatly groomed, all with the same practiced smiles smothered across their faces

December 21, Back stock

These entries begin on the 9th & wend towards the present, undated. *** Our last night at the barn, & a strange kind of feeling attending us both. For all of its idiosyncrasies, welcome & unwelcome alike, it has been a simply magical place for us. Usher to deep strife, sheer wonder, joy & a nearly rending sorrow, this place has housed our transformation into whatever it is we have become, however changed (beyond measure, I think, for the better). We talked about our first nights here a moment ago—the whipping wind, the cleft & knotted sideboards in the loft, the soot-black stove that tries & wheezes & tries, its emblazoned Vermont maple sprawled across its front like some argent bird across the grate of a passing locomotive. But beyond its physical presence, a rich & rare profundity deep in its foundation. It has been a place of honest reckoning. We have asked ourselves every conceivable kind of question since we arrived, no single one of them easy to an

December 8

A light, at last. We are hired to care for a six acre garden, flush with rhododendron & rosebush & god knows what, to weed the beds, to amend the rocky soil, to propagate & split stems, to till the compost. I will have a tractor, a chipper, a machine that will split the wood for me. We will live in the basement apartment of a mansion poised above Rosario Strait, 1800 feet of our own private beach beneath, the water swelling & cutting hard half a mile off the shoreline. We move on Wednesday. We almost tremble at it, the way I imagine a pauper trembles at a crust of bread after its long absence, a kind of framing in which to ask, simply, is this real? What telling of my life involves this chapter? It will, for all of its fundamental surreality, again, prove a wonder, without doubt. That we have been absurdly fortunate along the way is without question. That we have faced enormous difficulty along the way, too, is just as certain. & here, on the other side of the isla

December 6 & 7

Hard not to see each passing thing as a lesson these days. The yellow leaves. The sunset shot with violet & whale grey. The way a soft gust through the pond-side reeds can articulate itself in such a plain, sad song. Against this backdrop everything comes rendered already, tailored to a kind of abstract thinking that at this point seems as much a justification as a reality. I teach myself these lessons to fill my time, maybe, while around me, nothing changes. Evening. Morning. Evening. Today, Willa attacked a russet hen, carrying the struggling dun body across an acre before I could convince her to drop it. I washed the blood off of her legs & snout under the pump, perfunctorily tossed her into the barn & returned to the chicken, its right wing almost severed, blood upon its breast & coming in a trickle from within its beak, strange & slow. Its eye was wide & tremulous, a deep amber. It breathed & breathed, these slow, ponderous breaths that seemed a very re

December 2

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Here at La Quinta for a week now, the same beige walls of the hotel room, the same drab carpet, the same continental breakfast each morning. Supposed to hear word on the car this afternoon, & with any luck we may be able to leave tomorrow. Walla Walla yawns all around us, the strange & desolate beauty of the Palouse with their rolling wheat fields, otherworldly, cloaked under a thick mist in the figured distance. We’ve seen blue sky twice, maybe. Cloud & freezing fog appertain, a garb we wear constantly here. & outside the window, the rusting silos of a granary, train tracks that random people walk from time to time, their heads bowed down, looks of strain on their faces apparent even from here. The freeway bridge humming all hours. A birdless sky. We have our routines here, the long-term hotel residents that watch people come & go each day. They serve warm cookies at 7:00 sharp in the lobby. We are on a first-name basis with everyone at the front desk. We have done