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 answer. We found ourselves shored up against ourselves, secluded, left to our devices after thousands of miles of ceaseless motion, the cold bitter some nights about our tensed bodies. Only yesterday did we think to lay socks across the outhouse seat. We’ve grown here, in small & great measure both.
Earlier, I stepped outside in its dark, the moon muted behind thick layers of cloud, no star seen, none of that stillness that hovers in some nights (last night I heard very clearly the mastication of the black-tailed deer in the beds). I looked up the hill towards the soft aureate glow of the main house, over past the sloping drive towards where I know the chapel sits nested by the pond at the valley floor. I can fill this darkness with detail now, with the wet of the blades of grass in the morning, with the peculiar caw of the ravens hunting out hens’ eggs, the creak of the loft doors, the sussuration of gentle breeze playing over the tall grass in the pasture. I can spot the grade in the nightscape, play the lane up to the gate, feel the cold weight of the damp rope we use to tie it closed. I can smell the wood-fires drifting from our stove & theirs & theirs beyond. & I can fill these loaming fir shadows with their own diaphanous bark, dapple it in dawn’s sunlight or attire it in the cloaking gloaming dusk. All of this, to suggest that we have lived this brief while in something other than merely a place—we have been living, beyond the tired architecture of words, a life. I have never felt it so keenly as I do now, turning to say goodbye to this magical barn. Such an emblem of the finite, of the way we are meant to collide with & turn momentarily coeval with & leave behind these ineffable moments, of how simple beauty functions & how we come to participate in its swift passage, paupers with outspread hands. Somehow, somehow, this barn will reconstruct itself in the landscape of my memory, haunted warmly by its precious detail, & it will stand firm even as other bits of my life are built around it, & even as they begin their slow erosion over the years. It will perch there, in the back of my mind, & it will tell me stories about love & beauty & wonder, & I will sit like a child to hear them, tears in my eyes, over & over again.
***
The way the black waves mirror the moon conjures something for which I have no tool of enunciation. Full, or a clipped sliver, it trembles long over the heaving swelter. I have never seen a moon so full of grace & so ripe with power.
It was twenty degrees today, which does not account for the absolutely constant, ineluctable, relentless thrashing the wind has given the point these last three days straight. There has not been a still moment. My hands in doubled gloves, I heaped mulch halfway up the rosebushes, covering their bulk with bags to stay them against the cold snap. Bedded down a dozen annuals we hid up by the compost, stocked the woodpiles. After lunch, we stayed in, an odd job here & there.
Stef & I talked about our odd holiday schedule ahead. We house-sit back at Morning Star starting this Friday & ending on January 2. In the meantime, we watch the whole house here for eight days starting this Thursday. The net result will be that we will spend the next two weeks on separate sides of the island. I’ll come here to work during the days & then head back to tend to the horse & chickens & dogs back by the ferry landing, back by the old barn. Thanksgiving was odd enough, empty of its simple mores. Now, Christmas & New Years. It will require a certain fortitude, an ability to not be drawn along by the expectations of the season. I will miss her terribly, even as she sleeps only miles away. A bizarre way to ring in the new year, but we will survive, I’m sure.
***
The night outside embittered & cold, the wind whipping the waves white & tumultuous against the point beyond our window. Last night, a full moon, a silver disc hung just so in a gaping clear sky. We have been here in our basement apartment of this 10,000 square foot home that sits upon the water of Rosario Strait for three nights & days. Stef is in Olympia visiting Denise, & Willa & I put in the hours today. We work a three acre garden that is renowned at least regionally for its picturesque beauty. It slopes over to the eastern side of the home, fenced in by majestic black wrought iron gates, its winding beds littered with old growth firs & young madronas. Gravel paths wind around beds of rhododendron, layered with pruned hedges or hearty rose bushes or god knows what else. It is, I am fairly certain, a gardener’s dream, each plant brought over from the mainland where they used to live. & so today I bedded down the potted annuals behind the coffee shed, covering them to the lips of the pots with yellow leaves & young compost, hanging a gray tarp I hung with nails from the roof of the building, wrapping its other end in a fifteen foot log to hold it against the burgeoning storm. I moved a lemon tree. I mulched the iris rhizomes. Then, after lunch, I washed two cars & changed a fire alarm battery & hung Winnie the Pooh Christmas lights. I live an odd kind of life these days. I watch myself & think, often out loud, how incredibly bizarre. Nonetheless, here I sit upon this couch, & out my window I see the water, the swirling eddies about Otter Point. & nonetheless I am now, somehow, a caretaker of sorts. I find such ample evidence these days, around every corner, with each passing moment, that expectation is more than a fiction—it is an outright fantasy.
I delight in it, though. There is no attending heaviness here; more a shrug & a befuddled nod. Okay, I say to myself. Why not. What I am & what I am becoming.
***
This morning the swelling of the green sea, a sharply undulating field of emerald, white-capped, pregnant with unspeakable force. The waves collide with the rocky outcroppings with muted thuds, & in my line of vision, small pines whip violently while the more stolid deciduous madronas hold firm anchor in the soil & crag. It is a magnificent thing to behold—I get a sense that were I to toss a bough into the waves it would return to me in shards within moments. Great lengths of driftwood battle against the grey shore like battlements unsoldiered. & then somehow, the sun seems only obscured by a thin layer of cloud, gauze-lit, soft but present. Mount Baker in the distance glows snow-white through & through, & the closer archipelago offers a spectrum of shaded & shadowed relief, the detail in quick fade, the furthest islands hovering upon the sight line like black ghosts in repose behind the tumble of the sea.
Yesterday, I looked up briefly in time to see an eagle hover in flight for thirty seconds, its wings holding it taut & still, before it turned & dove straight towards the waves with terrible speed. There are nests on either side of the house here. Eagles did little for me before I took the time to observe them, but then, isn’t that the case with so many things. I could engage myself, I am the more convinced, with playing witness & scribe to what rests naturally about me. There is such drama in a sounding gale, such struggle in the slow growth of a tree. Flux & rest, & over & again.
Today, perhaps, a long walk in the maddening wind. I’ve no car, no means of transport at present, with much to do besides here at home. Since we arrived on this island a month & a half ago, though, I’ve learned to make my peace with whatever weather surrounds me by going forth into it & retreating again respectfully. At least now I can return to heat, insulation, indoor plumbing—all the amenities of comfort (though I still can’t help but dearly miss the drafty, frigid air of the barn).
A brief list of tasks to undertake: books on carpentry & gardening at library; set up desk; bake cookies & an apple pie; bring order to apartment here; check tarp by garden shed.
***
This morning the snow upon the boughs of pine outside the window, the water charged with a deep illumination, an opaque sea-green that takes the aspect of cut stone, even in its swelling & breaking. The horizon a white line of light, cast against the relief of this broad grey expanse overhead. The snowflakes here fine & sharp, wind-thrashed into miniscule shards that scatter as if sprayed. A brittle glass. Where the waves thunder against the point the snow & water have formed a layer of thick ice. The island wears winter well.
The storm took out the satellite & the television broke besides, so I have ample time without distraction to stand at the window & let me eyes pan where they will. It is a striking kind of beauty, one in which I want no immediate part, content with the crackle & spit of the woodstove, the orange glow in the den where my journal & my books sit. It wears the countenance of the Arve, the way I think on it, after Shelley’s poem; or the rugged ineffable violence of the wilderness in early American tellings, Brockdon Brown, Jefferson, Bartram. To feel anything but its essential otherness a hazard on days like this, when merely to regard the hulking waves is to shudder with cold. A part of me used to never step further, some imagined line I marked between myself & my environs; I know now that my only revelations come from that wild language. Sounds pretentious & sophomoric, but there is truth in it. I can sit at a book & contemplate its pages for hours & find nothing lucid in my thinking, whereas one hour of quiet hiking & I am flooded with unsought rumination. It floods from my mouth in words spoken to no one, to Willa, who could care less, or to blackbirds, or felled spruce, peregrine & stellar jay. Their listening profound.
Last night, I started a new story in which a father & three brothers move to the west before the Second World War. Something of battle speaks volumes in fiction, to me at least. A kind of elevated crux, a gauge, even if a character is mere witness to its violence. There is something in it, though, an order we throw against a force that will know no real reckoning, a rubric for misunderstanding, a quick disappearance of the elemental, the humane. What there is of simple instinct, maybe. & besides, I think I often rely upon solitary figures in stories & imaginings, when in the end it is fraternity I know best & deeply cherish. So.
The fire needs tending. Willa grows the more anxious by the minute, cloistered in when the first snowfall sits virginal on the soil. We’ll rise, then, & end up joining it after all.
***
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 answer. We found ourselves shored up against ourselves, secluded, left to our devices after thousands of miles of ceaseless motion, the cold bitter some nights about our tensed bodies. Only yesterday did we think to lay socks across the outhouse seat. We’ve grown here, in small & great measure both.
Earlier, I stepped outside in its dark, the moon muted behind thick layers of cloud, no star seen, none of that stillness that hovers in some nights (last night I heard very clearly the mastication of the black-tailed deer in the beds). I looked up the hill towards the soft aureate glow of the main house, over past the sloping drive towards where I know the chapel sits nested by the pond at the valley floor. I can fill this darkness with detail now, with the wet of the blades of grass in the morning, with the peculiar caw of the ravens hunting out hens’ eggs, the creak of the loft doors, the sussuration of gentle breeze playing over the tall grass in the pasture. I can spot the grade in the nightscape, play the lane up to the gate, feel the cold weight of the damp rope we use to tie it closed. I can smell the wood-fires drifting from our stove & theirs & theirs beyond. & I can fill these loaming fir shadows with their own diaphanous bark, dapple it in dawn’s sunlight or attire it in the cloaking gloaming dusk. All of this, to suggest that we have lived this brief while in something other than merely a place—we have been living, beyond the tired architecture of words, a life. I have never felt it so keenly as I do now, turning to say goodbye to this magical barn. Such an emblem of the finite, of the way we are meant to collide with & turn momentarily coeval with & leave behind these ineffable moments, of how simple beauty functions & how we come to participate in its swift passage, paupers with outspread hands. Somehow, somehow, this barn will reconstruct itself in the landscape of my memory, haunted warmly by its precious detail, & it will stand firm even as other bits of my life are built around it, & even as they begin their slow erosion over the years. It will perch there, in the back of my mind, & it will tell me stories about love & beauty & wonder, & I will sit like a child to hear them, tears in my eyes, over & over again.
***
The way the black waves mirror the moon conjures something for which I have no tool of enunciation. Full, or a clipped sliver, it trembles long over the heaving swelter. I have never seen a moon so full of grace & so ripe with power.
It was twenty degrees today, which does not account for the absolutely constant, ineluctable, relentless thrashing the wind has given the point these last three days straight. There has not been a still moment. My hands in doubled gloves, I heaped mulch halfway up the rosebushes, covering their bulk with bags to stay them against the cold snap. Bedded down a dozen annuals we hid up by the compost, stocked the woodpiles. After lunch, we stayed in, an odd job here & there.
Stef & I talked about our odd holiday schedule ahead. We house-sit back at Morning Star starting this Friday & ending on January 2. In the meantime, we watch the whole house here for eight days starting this Thursday. The net result will be that we will spend the next two weeks on separate sides of the island. I’ll come here to work during the days & then head back to tend to the horse & chickens & dogs back by the ferry landing, back by the old barn. Thanksgiving was odd enough, empty of its simple mores. Now, Christmas & New Years. It will require a certain fortitude, an ability to not be drawn along by the expectations of the season. I will miss her terribly, even as she sleeps only miles away. A bizarre way to ring in the new year, but we will survive, I’m sure.
***
The night outside embittered & cold, the wind whipping the waves white & tumultuous against the point beyond our window. Last night, a full moon, a silver disc hung just so in a gaping clear sky. We have been here in our basement apartment of this 10,000 square foot home that sits upon the water of Rosario Strait for three nights & days. Stef is in Olympia visiting Denise, & Willa & I put in the hours today. We work a three acre garden that is renowned at least regionally for its picturesque beauty. It slopes over to the eastern side of the home, fenced in by majestic black wrought iron gates, its winding beds littered with old growth firs & young madronas. Gravel paths wind around beds of rhododendron, layered with pruned hedges or hearty rose bushes or god knows what else. It is, I am fairly certain, a gardener’s dream, each plant brought over from the mainland where they used to live. & so today I bedded down the potted annuals behind the coffee shed, covering them to the lips of the pots with yellow leaves & young compost, hanging a gray tarp I hung with nails from the roof of the building, wrapping its other end in a fifteen foot log to hold it against the burgeoning storm. I moved a lemon tree. I mulched the iris rhizomes. Then, after lunch, I washed two cars & changed a fire alarm battery & hung Winnie the Pooh Christmas lights. I live an odd kind of life these days. I watch myself & think, often out loud, how incredibly bizarre. Nonetheless, here I sit upon this couch, & out my window I see the water, the swirling eddies about Otter Point. & nonetheless I am now, somehow, a caretaker of sorts. I find such ample evidence these days, around every corner, with each passing moment, that expectation is more than a fiction—it is an outright fantasy.
I delight in it, though. There is no attending heaviness here; more a shrug & a befuddled nod. Okay, I say to myself. Why not. What I am & what I am becoming.
***
This morning the swelling of the green sea, a sharply undulating field of emerald, white-capped, pregnant with unspeakable force. The waves collide with the rocky outcroppings with muted thuds, & in my line of vision, small pines whip violently while the more stolid deciduous madronas hold firm anchor in the soil & crag. It is a magnificent thing to behold—I get a sense that were I to toss a bough into the waves it would return to me in shards within moments. Great lengths of driftwood battle against the grey shore like battlements unsoldiered. & then somehow, the sun seems only obscured by a thin layer of cloud, gauze-lit, soft but present. Mount Baker in the distance glows snow-white through & through, & the closer archipelago offers a spectrum of shaded & shadowed relief, the detail in quick fade, the furthest islands hovering upon the sight line like black ghosts in repose behind the tumble of the sea.
Yesterday, I looked up briefly in time to see an eagle hover in flight for thirty seconds, its wings holding it taut & still, before it turned & dove straight towards the waves with terrible speed. There are nests on either side of the house here. Eagles did little for me before I took the time to observe them, but then, isn’t that the case with so many things. I could engage myself, I am the more convinced, with playing witness & scribe to what rests naturally about me. There is such drama in a sounding gale, such struggle in the slow growth of a tree. Flux & rest, & over & again.
Today, perhaps, a long walk in the maddening wind. I’ve no car, no means of transport at present, with much to do besides here at home. Since we arrived on this island a month & a half ago, though, I’ve learned to make my peace with whatever weather surrounds me by going forth into it & retreating again respectfully. At least now I can return to heat, insulation, indoor plumbing—all the amenities of comfort (though I still can’t help but dearly miss the drafty, frigid air of the barn).
A brief list of tasks to undertake: books on carpentry & gardening at library; set up desk; bake cookies & an apple pie; bring order to apartment here; check tarp by garden shed.
***
This morning the snow upon the boughs of pine outside the window, the water charged with a deep illumination, an opaque sea-green that takes the aspect of cut stone, even in its swelling & breaking. The horizon a white line of light, cast against the relief of this broad grey expanse overhead. The snowflakes here fine & sharp, wind-thrashed into miniscule shards that scatter as if sprayed. A brittle glass. Where the waves thunder against the point the snow & water have formed a layer of thick ice. The island wears winter well.
The storm took out the satellite & the television broke besides, so I have ample time without distraction to stand at the window & let me eyes pan where they will. It is a striking kind of beauty, one in which I want no immediate part, content with the crackle & spit of the woodstove, the orange glow in the den where my journal & my books sit. It wears the countenance of the Arve, the way I think on it, after Shelley’s poem; or the rugged ineffable violence of the wilderness in early American tellings, Brockdon Brown, Jefferson, Bartram. To feel anything but its essential otherness a hazard on days like this, when merely to regard the hulking waves is to shudder with cold. A part of me used to never step further, some imagined line I marked between myself & my environs; I know now that my only revelations come from that wild language. Sounds pretentious & sophomoric, but there is truth in it. I can sit at a book & contemplate its pages for hours & find nothing lucid in my thinking, whereas one hour of quiet hiking & I am flooded with unsought rumination. It floods from my mouth in words spoken to no one, to Willa, who could care less, or to blackbirds, or felled spruce, peregrine & stellar jay. Their listening profound.
Last night, I started a new story in which a father & three brothers move to the west before the Second World War. Something of battle speaks volumes in fiction, to me at least. A kind of elevated crux, a gauge, even if a character is mere witness to its violence. There is something in it, though, an order we throw against a force that will know no real reckoning, a rubric for misunderstanding, a quick disappearance of the elemental, the humane. What there is of simple instinct, maybe. & besides, I think I often rely upon solitary figures in stories & imaginings, when in the end it is fraternity I know best & deeply cherish. So.
The fire needs tending. Willa grows the more anxious by the minute, cloistered in when the first snowfall sits virginal on the soil. We’ll rise, then, & end up joining it after all.
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