Dead Letter Department #130

dream report

In the dream, I bought a house, an enormous, sprawling thing, set in a beautiful English garden, with little hallways and hidden rooms. I was delighted with my purchase, until I realized that there was a modern duplex literally attached to one side, meaning that any changes and repairs would have to be negotiated with my co-owners, who I had not met or even registered the existence of before buying. Also, all of the closets were still full, largely with Boy Scout memorabilia, and a little digging informed me that the house had been owned by Ursula K. Vernon, so I was going to have to somehow get in touch to give all the photographs and patches back to her.

weather report

I picked up one of those nasty head colds last week, the kind with a lung-rattling cough and improbable amounts of snot. It came on rapidly; Wednesday I was fine enough to have a coffee work date and by Thursday I was laid out on the couch dripping from my face-holes and feeling quite sorry for myself. I applied various Quils, according to the time of day, and wonton soup, but mostly I was down for the count, trying to sleep it off as rapidly as possible. There’s nothing like waking up and looking at yourself in the mirror only to discover that you’ve burst several small blood vessels, what with the coughing, which really did make it all feel much more dramatic than it was.

It throws everything off, being sick, partially because it’s a bit miserable, and partially because I then have to figure out how to take care of my mom without exposing her to any stray germs, since a head cold could turn into something much more serious for her. We managed, but not tremendously well, and now I have another subsection of the to-do list: back up plans.

I spent a lot of time in a muzzy, half-asleep state, horizontal on various surfaces and blowing my nose, occasionally poking at a game or a book, rousing once in a while to get more fluids. Yesterday I felt well enough to venture out to Trader Joe’s for a resupply, and some peonies for Mother’s Day, and it felt a little uncanny to be anywhere except the couch. The world looked bright and enormous; I am looking forward to being back it in more, although I am now behind on absolutely everything, it feels like, and it’s no good telling me my standards are mostly made up by, well, me, because I already know, and it doesn’t much help.

One of those things is gardening, or at least watering, because it’s been perilously dry for the season, and I don’t want any of my precious new plants to wither up. The exception to this is the hanging fuchsia in the back, which I had been diligently keeping nice and moist until a couple of weeks ago when I hit it with the shower setting one afternoon only to see a little dark-winged bird surge up out of the pot and flutter into the lilac in a panic. A little poking revealed a tiny nest tucked in underneath the green vines and pink buds, with several small white eggs, so I backed off, and decided to go ahead & sacrifice the plant to dryness for the sake of the small family.

My neighbor’s cat has taken to napping in the sunny spots around the rosemary again, coiled and glossy, which I love, but he is a fierce hunter, and when I stepped outside to find a spray of feathers and two disarticulated black wings, I was immediately sure it was the mother bird, who had been spending a great deal of her afternoon hours sitting in a nearby bush and shrieking the same note over and over again. “Cat!” I suspect it meant, or “Murderer!” which he is, and I immediately thought he must have gotten her, and there would be no small birds, only a dead plant and an empty nest.

Yesterday, though, when I was sitting outside reading, I caught a little flutter in the branches: black wings, hopping here and there in the shrubbery, and then hastily vanishing into the nest. It’s really remarkable how sneaky they are about it, evading the eye as they dart about, keeping the nest a secret, but I did end up seeing both parents, so there is still hope.

reading room

First on the list, and first in my heart at the moment, is Gabrielle Hamilton’s Next of Kin, which I cannot recommend highly enough. I have been with her all along, since Blood, Bones & Butter, since the Prune cookbook, since the NYT essays. She’s one of the greats. If you love autobiographical writing in any of its thousand forms, if you have contemplated your own difficult family of origin, if you simply want to read truly stellar writing, you must immediately procure yourself a copy.

For the less functional brain times, I also fortunately had laid aside a couple new-to-me Kathleen Norris books, which are perfect for a head cold. The heroine (usually blonde) nearly always falls in love with the big beautiful house and/or the big beautiful family before she even meets the hero (accurate, sensible, echoes of Pemberley), and the plots carry you along like the familiar swoops of a roller coaster: oh, here’s the drop off, here we are rattling upward to the danger point, here’s the loop. Here’s a description of dresses and hats; here’s an adorable child, off we go to fall in love again. Tremendously satisfying, especially when all you want to do is sleep.

More soon, as my head finally clears, and in the meantime may you find that the birds have a chance at it after all.