Dead Letter Department #112

weather report

The lilacs have been a glorious cloud for weeks, wafting their scent all over the yard & up to my second story windows. I’ve clipped blooms a couple of times, put them in my old tarnished silver vase & on the upper bookshelf next to the tarot cards & pictures of my dad, but even after smashing the stems, lilacs don’t really last inside. It’s better to just go shove my face into the branches & huff directly from the source. The last of the tulips, in the shady bed by the back of the garage, are having their final hours, including my favorite: an almost lavender colored bloom with delicate looking petals that always surprises me next to the bright reds & yellows.

Yesterday I went for my usual beach walk, & was unsurprised to discover that the warm weather has lured still more people out, speckling the trails, which means if I want to have the place to myself I’ll have to get up even earlier. In past years, that wasn’t as hard: the sun in the window & the birds screaming outside it woke me up before the alarm, but this year I’m not sleeping as well, and the prospect of a solitary walk hasn’t quite beaten the need to sleep in a little bit on the weekend.

There were two May Day protests, the first downtown at the Federal Building at noon, which had a quite a good turn out, mostly of furious retirement aged people (logical enough, since everyone else was probably at work). I feel like I recognize people more and more the oftener I go, not necessarily to speak to, but a familiarity of faces, with how often we’re all brought together in our fury. I was walking back to my car and stopped at the same intersection as an older woman with a walker. While we were waiting for the light, I complimented her sign, and she asked me how to get to a cross street which was about half a mile away. I looked it up on my phone to be sure, and told her some landmarks on the way to make sure she’d be pointed in the right direction. She was petite and sunhatted, with a little glisten of sunscreen on her cheeks, and had clearly devoted a great deal of the day’s energy to coming out to the protest which we were both leaving early.

“I just had to come out and register my dismay,” she told me, as we parted ways.

The second protest was on all the freeway overpasses in town, so I took a spin after work to see it, a little worried it would be a sad turn out after the big one during the day, but found the enormous handwritten signs and throngs of people waving more buoying than expected. There are a lot of us. I keep reminding myself of that: there are a lot of us.

Last week I spent somewhat more time than expected of time ferrying my mom to various appointments, which means I need to try to catch up on things this week. I made rather an ambitious list this morning before I started writing to you, which sometimes backfires as I gaze at it in dismay feeling unproductive, & sometimes spurs me onward so I can vigorously cross things out. I’m within a few chapters of finishing my draft, after which I’ll read it one (only one, I tell my twitching editing fingers) more time and send it off to my agent. I simply cannot wait to have it out of my hands & into hers for a while.

There’s a pile of things to work on when I hit send on that email finally, but I’m not letting myself think about them too much: I need to sink pretty far into the story to get through this next bit, & it takes a lot of focus. I am always relearning that I can’t manufacture focus: I can create the conditions for it, with careful stewardship, but it’s a bit of a delicate animal, and sheer force almost never does the trick. Walking helps, I keep reminding myself, when I don’t feel like I can take the time or don’t have the energy; even just half an hour of music in my headphones & a moving body helps the rest of the day. Uncurling from the keyboard: good. Getting out of the house & into the world for a while everyday: even better.

reading room

Why on earth did none of you tell me about Dorothy Sayers, I want to demand, knowing very well that several people have over the years, and I rather ignored them, thinking—I don’t know what, but not that I would be entranced by what I thought was going to be a pretty standard genre mystery. I think it’s why I’ve been dreaming so much about Bennington—Harriet Vane, the main character, goes back to her college near Oxford for a celebratory evening & is drawn into the mystery from there, but look at this line:

“It was all so long ago; so closely encompassed & complete; so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between. Could one face it now?”

That was on about the third page, when Vane is trying to decide whether she can bear to go back at all, and after it I knew I was really in for something. If you’re feeling internally divided, or more than usually conscious of the turns you’ve taken and what you had to leave behind to take them, I strongly recommend it. I don’t know what to say about the relationship at the core of the book without spoiling it, except that I believed it. The library inexplicably didn’t have the beginning of Sayers’ series, so I ordered it from Biblio & I’ll report back if it’s good all the way through or if Gaudy Night is the star of that particular constellation.

one good thing

Also on May Day, I was driving down my street & saw one of the kids out with a folding table waving at cars as they passed, so of course I immediately pulled over & put my flashers on. I’m a sucker for overly sweet lemonade & kid crafts, but when I got there, my neighbor had actually made a bunch of tiny bouquets, each bound with a ribbon, & was giving them away for free. I was delighted, and did my best to indicate that, but now I wish I’d thought to ask her what inspired her largesse. I wonder if it might have been reading an old book where the May basket tradition was still alive, because I clearly remember reading about that when I was her age, not to mention being delighted by it, & it would have been funny if we’d read the same thing, divided by all those years.

Thank you, as always, for reading, and particularly to those who are able to support the Dead Letter Department by subscribing. If you’re one of the people on the Secret Real Mail list, you should have gotten actual mail to hold in your actual hands quite recently. More soon, and in the meantime, may you have created the right meadow for that beautiful unicorn of focus to lie down in for a while.