Dead Letter Deparment: Bulbs & Norman Maclean

weather report

Remember how last letter I said I could feel the rains coming from around the bend in the river? They’re here, though not in their fullness yet—rain in the forecast for six days, then two of clouds, then more rain. I did manage to wrangle the sunlamp out of the garage & get it set up, even used it this morning, and the brightness over cereal is a pleasant thing when it is beginning to be the time when I wake up in full darkness and watch the dawn slowly come in out of the grey skies.

This weekend was mostly chores. I had intended to make a day trip on Sunday, but I bumped up one of my medications on Friday & am feeling the resulting mild unpleasantness: a little nausea, a helping of fatigue that seemed like it would make any attempted out-of-town enjoyment more of a struggle than it was worth. Instead I did all the usual mom chores: grocery shopping, her hair appointment, various outings for a walk, plus finally remembered to replace her broken fireplace grate so she can have a fire if she wants to, now that the evenings are getting so dark and cool.

Yesterday, in a break from the sky-moisture, I planted two big bags of bulbs from Costco—tulips & narcissus—half in the front and half in the back. There’s some planning to do in the front especially, with the changes the ramp made to the way the garden looks, but nothing much I can do about it in this season except for flip through my garden books & hope for inspiration. The master gardener down the street is constantly putting out cardboard boxes of her cullings, carefully labeled in artist’s handwriting with the plant’s name and preferred living conditions, so I also picked up a couple of roots of Solomon’s seal & placed them hopefully around the birdbath.

Then it was time to put the vent & hose covers on and haul the hoses into the garage for the season—both so battered a little freezing would only slightly hasten their demise, I suspect, but there’s no reason not to try to limp them along for another growing season.

By the end of it, my knees and knuckles ached a little, and I had dirt ground into my nails for probably the last time this year. The only thing left to do is throw some mulch down in a few places, maybe try to smother the lemon balm so I can put something hardy there in the spring.

The phone use recalibration I’m doing continues—I keep wanting to say detox or fast, but that honestly sounds a little ludicrous to me, maybe a bit self-serious. It’s helping, though. I almost wish I could compare the actual screentime minutes/hours before & now, but I had that function turned off because it was simply too depressing to see the time I was losing every day. I’ve read tons more, though I need to re-sort my reading list because it’s mostly been serious and/or very challenging books, and I haven’t gotten back into a good cadence of note-taking yet, which is making the finished pile stack up in a rather ominous fashion. I’ve been doing more small projects around the house, the little things that stack up & annoy until they’re finished, and found myself pulling out some perfume samples I hadn’t tried out thoroughly—small pleasures I had put down without realizing it, because my anesthetized brain simply didn’t remember to reach for them anymore, which is more than a little strange to realize, how even things I enjoy can just disappear.

What hasn’t come back yet, though it’s early days, is the focus, the stamina, whatever mix of mysterious forces and exercised muscle that makes sitting down to work on the big projects easier—and then staying there, and then finding that same groove again the next day. This is never a perfect process—see said mysterious forces—but there are ways to carve out the path, make it a little easier to follow, and I am doggedly trying those.

reading room

Someone I was reading—it might have been Joan Didion—wrote almost ecstatically about Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, enough that I got over the strongest association I have with him, the movie version of the story, which I watched at a formative age & which I am now convinced has only limited links to the book, though that could be just my early teens memory, which mostly involved Brad Pitt looking soulful & my knee-jerk distaste for —

(OMG, pause. So I was convinced that the flickering mental images I was having of a long ago movie with Brad Pitt that bore absolutely NO resemblance to the story by Norman Maclean were from the film version of A River Runs Through It, but a simple google has led me to learn that I have been thinking of the movie Legends of The Fall this whole time! TO BE FAIR TO ME both of these movies have Brad Pitt, are set in Montana, and are largely about brothers & fathers—I think, though obviously I don’t have much of a grasp on either of them. Probably someone goes fishing in both? If either of them pass the Bechdel test, I’d be surprised.

Anyway, the knee-jerk distaste is for Aidan Quinn, I can’t explain it, I don’t like looking at his face, & it’s no longer relevant since he’s not even in the fucking movie.)

Back to the book.

Even if you don’t give a shit about fishing, it’s so clearly and beautifully written. The thing that kept striking me as I read it is the fact that it was his first fiction publication—not just because it’s unusual for something so well-executed to be a first, but because he only began to write the book after his retirement. It felt as I was reading it like he had been building it inside himself for years, for decades, and so the words on the page hold all of that time, the polish of an often-told story with the utter vulnerability of grief that just cannot be ground down by the passing years. There was a completeness to it, the deepened perspective only available after decades of life.

There’s only one more book by him, and though I do not keep closely to my rather silly old rule about not reading posthumous unfinished works, feeling them to sometimes be a bit of a violation, I do always pause before I break it, as I might, in this case.

More soon, and in the meantime may your own hoses or seasonal hose-equivalents be neatly coiled and stored appropriately for the season. There was a (Secret) Dead Letter last week, about caretaking while trying to work, available here if you are a financial supporter of the DLD or want to become one.