Dead Letter Department #117

weather report

Today it is supposed to be 80 degrees, the last such summery weather in the forecast, after which we are likely to subside into grey skies and lightly misting rain. I am not exactly melancholy about this, but I keep thinking—did I make the most of the summer? Now, of course, the actual question is do I ever? What would a summer even look like, that had been vigorously jostled until the most had been made? It would be nice to find out some year, but I do think the pensive looking back on warm weeks & long days is an inevitability of autumn, sort of casting a glance over my shoulder into sunlight while I step as lightly as I can into the grey. Yesterday, as I was working on a short story, I looked out the window to see a positively cinematic swirl of yellow leaves carried off my neighbor’s tree by a gust of wind, immediately followed by the sound of wild geese, pouring over the horizon in a lop-sided v. Well, I thought, that’s begun.

I am currently waiting on feedback from my brilliant agent on a project, which leaves me in a bit of a ditch between roads, and I don’t always realize just how dependent I am on the forward propulsion of a singular goal until I tip over into the muddy bit in between. I’ve taken a crack at several short stories, opened novel drafts & then immediately closed them again, not quite being willing to people my brain with a new cast when I don’t know how long I’ll have for them before the old one comes flooding back in, and done rather a lot of work on the garden in the meantime, after working hours.

There’s a trumpet vine that I planted back when I moved into the house, which has grown luxuriously, but no matter often I go out to hack it back, it always manages to send a couple of rude little tendrils up to do some damage to the paint. The ground there is a bit soft, making it perilous to try to stand my bulk on a ladder, so I spend a lot of time stretching my hamstrings to the breaking point, holding clippers at the very top of my reach, on tiptoes, to try to coax the recalcitrant vines down. Yesterday I finally lost all patience for it and took a saw to the base, severing just enough of the branches that I could pull the whole thing down, arbor and all, and drag it into the backyard.

I found, tucked in the thickest canopy of trumpet vines above the arbor, a perfect little round bird’s nest. It’s very much not the season for anything to be inhabiting it, let alone raising little bird children, but I did check, hoisting my phone up to take a video of the interior since I could not see inside, before I disrupted whatever proceedings might be occurring. It somehow stayed intact even as I wrestled the arbor down, and it is a marvel of engineering, now occupied by several ambitious snails.

Now of course I have to dig what I can of the rootball out, and do something to suppress further growth, but following the do the chore you’re dreading the most rule does have its own satisfactions, and also helps eliminate a little free-floating dread, which I suspect we all have more than enough of these days. I’ve been hauling bags of bark from the supermarket, doing my best efforts at weed suppression, and hoping that will yield results next growing season. There are three huge bags of bulbs to plant, because spring beauty is worth aching muscles in fall. It’s like a sweaty little prayer, to be here next year, to have done something for my future self, to believe that spring will come again.

When I was downtown, I saw a bunch of people fishing off the bridge so I pulled over to see if the salmon were running yet. There was only a flash of something large and silvery, nothing more, but I’ll be back to see them when it starts properly.

reading room

Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger is very, very good, but I’m having to take it slowly, since it’s also almost too relevant to the times we live in, spinning me into a hall of social media mirrors, behind each of which is a door into a different dangerously conspiratorial path. She is the OG when it comes to thinking about branding, so her take on the world in which everyone has become a personal brand is fascinating. I had to pick up something frothy to accompany it, which ended up being Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. The du Maurier is gothic, feels gay even it isn’t explicitly (although that may be the result of reading a biography of her that makes everything she touched feel pretty gay), and is, of course, also a love story about a house. I suppose it’s really an estate, but the endless dusty rooms and the aging dogs and the windswept fields are all rather perfect for the season, especially sitting outside to read as the light begins to go.

one good thing

Though I haven’t seen any salmon up in the streams yet, I think I did glimpse them in the bay. P & I met down at the Bellwether, went to Fenex for coffee & sat on the wall with our snickerdoodle lattes. There were glossy grey seal heads popping up now and then before vanishing into the depths, black cormorants cruising by, and every now and then a loud splash as long silver fish jetted up out of the water and plummeted back again. Now I am not exactly good at identifying a fish under even the most ideal of circumstances, let alone at a distance of 15 feet while moving at high speeds (the fish, not me), but they did have the shape of salmon, and the bright color, so I remain convinced that we have in fact had our first sighting of the season, which is an important holiday in my personal calendar.

Thank you for reading the Dead Letter Department. You can write to me about your own early autumn sightings at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. More soon, and in the meantime, may you catch a glimpse of what’s to come and find it beautiful.