Dead Letter Department #113

weather report

I knew deer eat lilies, after the debacle last year where I planted an entire Costco bag, watched them shoot gallantly up out of the soil for weeks, thinking pleasantly of the blooms we’d have in June, and stepped out of the house one morning to find that every stalk had been stripped of buds. Later I found a small, distorted survivor, huddled in against the hydrangea, which was the only one to make it all the way to petalling. I didn’t know they’d also eat roses, so this year I made the exact same mistake, carefully selecting a little rose bush to put along the blank slate of the fence, watering it and watching the buds fill out—only to discover yesterday, as I was diligently hauling the hose about, that my hooved neighbors had stripped it sadly back.

For my walk on Monday, I set out in the drizzle to Marine Park, thinking that after the race had finished this weekend, it would be relatively quiet, but the parking lot was full of enthusiastic people zipping themselves into wetsuits and slinging kayaks around, so I went just a little further up to Post Point to see the herons nesting, and then took the trail up into Edgemoor. There were baby bunnies in the underbrush, and a young deer staring me down with her huge brown eyes in the middle of the trail, waiting to see if I would turn at the last minute, or if she had to, finally breaking to vanish up one of the little side narrow side paths, the ones that weren’t made by human feet.

I know summer hasn’t really started yet, not by the calendar of dates or the local lore, which tells us Bellingham summer doesn’t begin until after the Fourth of July, often following a rain that drowns out barbecues and fireworks. But early spring has vanished: the skies are bluer, everything that planned to leaf out has, the generous bounty of early spring flowers now faded. I like summer, but this year I am feeling a little melancholy about the shift, for reasons I can’t quite identify.

Last week I went to the library book sale multiple days, having gotten tremendously lucky there last year. The first day was a total wash, full of book scanners shopping for resale and elbow-y people wedging themselves in next to me far beyond my personal tolerance. (Side note to dudes, especially those who have transitioned, do you feel like there is a certain subset of people who actually grant you less personal space now, assuming you won’t mind? Perhaps this is just a side effect of not often being in crowds, but it felt very pronounced that day.) The second time was more successful, but the third was the most fun, since I went with my niece & my dear friend P., both of whom acquired a bountiful pile, and since we were all still missing things on our perpetual to read list, were amenable to go to the used bookstore afterwards.

We met a 20 year old chihuahua on the way back to the car, the tiniest possible white speck of fur, accompanied by her owner, who was ferrying her to work with the leash in one hand and a plaid dog bed ten times her size in the other. I love old dogs, and I love old dog owners, slowing their steps for their grizzled companions. When J. & I were on Kauai about a million years ago, we stopped to admire to a beautiful old white dog on the beach, clearly nearing the end of their days but so loved she practically glowed with it, one of those ancient, soulful creatures you feel lucky to be in the presence of, and when we were getting into the rental car, the owner chased us down and presented us with a lei. He’d gathered the buds from his sister's tree, and I don’t remember what the flower was called, but it surrounded us with perfume for days.

reading room

I tried and failed at a Neal Stephenson book I found in a tiny free library—much as I love some of his other novels, I found myself unable to summit three and four page descriptions of how different bits of a space station fit together, and now I’m in the beginning bit of Kristin Cashore’s There Is a Door In This Darkness. I’m also taking Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer very slowly, since it’s so concentrated, but it’s got about a billion book darts marking passages at this point, & I expect I’ll have more to say about it when I’m finished. The chapter on Nabokov I found particularly provoking, in a good way, sending me back to when I first read Lolita, and then in later years the classes where his other work was assigned. I think like a lot of people I probably picked it up expecting Dederer to have arrived at an answer, how she grapples with the monstrous nature of so many artists, and instead have found myself in a labyrinth of questions, but the labyrinth does seem more navigable with her book for company.

one good thing

This is an abstract one, but something I’ve run into several times this week, when there’s a difficult or uncomfortable situation of some kind among people who don't know each other well, and then someone does their best to make a joke: usually a pretty weak one, but they’re so clearly doing their best to let the air into the room. So then everyone else stuck in the same tense group, the same airless room, all suddenly become very gracious, all of us our doing our level best to extract the maximum amount of humor out of it. It touches me every time, the way we busy ourselves running over to admire the joke, to fling out a little tendril of appreciation and connection, lightening the load with our laughter.

Thank for reading, and special thanks to those who are able to subscribe to the Dead Letter Department. Another letter will be headed your way soon, and in the meantime, may you find whatever the equivalent of a plaid dog bed ten times your size is, and have a good rest.