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 in the same contorted grimace. We washed dishes & overheard the conversation in its fluid motion oscillate between yachting & stocks, until the wild one of the group, upon some small urging, told the tale of his one experience with moonshine. Enraptured, the crowd hung upon his every word, as if his tale were remarkable, extraordinary in any way. It occurred to me to take pause & measure both—a life of riches & a rich life seemed so clearly, cleanly divided, the former almost a vulgarity last night, the latter unfurling with my every breath. My fundamental instability right now cannot be questioned, but for all of that, I remain its captive pupil, watching myself take to its diffuse & opaque lessons with a voracity I’ve never experienced. A lifelong student & never, never so attuned to my every waking move.
& so we drove here to Morning Star afterwards, our old barn down the hill, the snow unrelenting & the wind gusting to 90 mph. & pulled up the drive, thick with slick ice & powder. & checked on the pump house where I’d done some work in order to get our water working again. & found the door iced over, the sound of rushing water from a ruptured pipe roaring from within. Shaking the door with all of my strength, the gales whipping hard, frigid water finally soaking me from the neck down in the ten degree night once I cracked the door, I found myself not at all livid. Emergencies, dire situations, circumstances that push & bend my patience & sense of self—these have become, in this extraordinary epoch of my life, rather ordinary. To find myself bailing buckets of freezing water from a foot-deep flood out into a blizzard at 10:30 at night was nothing unusual. & I loved it, truly, however odd it is merely to write. & afterwards I led the horse from pasture back to the pen, fed her grains & hay & replaced her frozen water-bed with a bucket I’d melted down from snow earlier. & slept a comforted sleep.
This morning, a fresh foot of snow, our old valley brilliant under a snow sky, the softwoods hung with heavy white boughs, the flakes still falling all day. The wheat, half-buried, stranded above the snow. The scotch brush defiant & brittle both. I think of Wyath’s watercolor sketches, perhaps my favorite paintings of all time, grain-beige & charcoal & egg-white; stubble-fields & patches of struggling copper-wire; blackbirds oildark against the spotting white snow. The way the most mundane of things is charged ever with an ineffable grace. To read histories entire in the passing of a stellar jay, or the swift descent of a raven clutching after the henhouse eggs. & today I did little of great import—led the horse to & from pasture, cleared a path for the chickens from their roost to the food, brushed snow off the plastic greenhouse roofs, etc. What I feel, though, as a result is a richness I have never known, my heart in its revolutions, poised on this ache not spurred by some pain but by the beauty, the marvel of mere being. To be rich is a birthright—to lose one’s wonder at it chasing a fiction is a paucity I wish on no one.
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 in the same contorted grimace. We washed dishes & overheard the conversation in its fluid motion oscillate between yachting & stocks, until the wild one of the group, upon some small urging, told the tale of his one experience with moonshine. Enraptured, the crowd hung upon his every word, as if his tale were remarkable, extraordinary in any way. It occurred to me to take pause & measure both—a life of riches & a rich life seemed so clearly, cleanly divided, the former almost a vulgarity last night, the latter unfurling with my every breath. My fundamental instability right now cannot be questioned, but for all of that, I remain its captive pupil, watching myself take to its diffuse & opaque lessons with a voracity I’ve never experienced. A lifelong student & never, never so attuned to my every waking move.
& so we drove here to Morning Star afterwards, our old barn down the hill, the snow unrelenting & the wind gusting to 90 mph. & pulled up the drive, thick with slick ice & powder. & checked on the pump house where I’d done some work in order to get our water working again. & found the door iced over, the sound of rushing water from a ruptured pipe roaring from within. Shaking the door with all of my strength, the gales whipping hard, frigid water finally soaking me from the neck down in the ten degree night once I cracked the door, I found myself not at all livid. Emergencies, dire situations, circumstances that push & bend my patience & sense of self—these have become, in this extraordinary epoch of my life, rather ordinary. To find myself bailing buckets of freezing water from a foot-deep flood out into a blizzard at 10:30 at night was nothing unusual. & I loved it, truly, however odd it is merely to write. & afterwards I led the horse from pasture back to the pen, fed her grains & hay & replaced her frozen water-bed with a bucket I’d melted down from snow earlier. & slept a comforted sleep.
This morning, a fresh foot of snow, our old valley brilliant under a snow sky, the softwoods hung with heavy white boughs, the flakes still falling all day. The wheat, half-buried, stranded above the snow. The scotch brush defiant & brittle both. I think of Wyath’s watercolor sketches, perhaps my favorite paintings of all time, grain-beige & charcoal & egg-white; stubble-fields & patches of struggling copper-wire; blackbirds oildark against the spotting white snow. The way the most mundane of things is charged ever with an ineffable grace. To read histories entire in the passing of a stellar jay, or the swift descent of a raven clutching after the henhouse eggs. & today I did little of great import—led the horse to & from pasture, cleared a path for the chickens from their roost to the food, brushed snow off the plastic greenhouse roofs, etc. What I feel, though, as a result is a richness I have never known, my heart in its revolutions, poised on this ache not spurred by some pain but by the beauty, the marvel of mere being. To be rich is a birthright—to lose one’s wonder at it chasing a fiction is a paucity I wish on no one.
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