Dead Letter Department #144

weather report

Happy fall equinox, my friends. Autumn came fast here, with brilliant blazes of red everywhere I turn, and a great deal of frantic squirrel activity on the fence-line & in the parks. I did a bunch of garden clean up last weekend—pulled out the leather gloves to wrestle the blackberry runners, bane of my existence, trimmed back the various spent flowers, tried my best to haul the morning glory vines down out of the lilac and the holly, mulched the new rose bed and the side yard where I am still feebly fighting trumpet vine resurgence. I emptied most of the container plants out, using the soil in other parts of the yard, and took a long while opening all the sweet pea pods to save seeds for next year. It’s a nice thing to do in this season, plan a little bit for when things are bright and green again.

Things were slightly less bucolic inside, where my defective freezer door suddenly decided to take a dive directly onto the floor. I managed to control the trajectory so it didn’t crush my feet or shatter three quarts of frozen chicken stock, but getting it back on was enough of an ordeal that it resigned me somewhat to the idea of finally replacing the whole unit. It’s been slightly broken for long enough that I just worked around the various quirks, including occasionally chipping out blocks of ice, but I’m afraid I do rather insist that the door needs to stay with the rest of the unit and not try to break out for an independent floor-based career of some kind, so it’s time to do some research on refrigerators.

It’s also extremely noisy around these parts this week, because the ramps for the front & back steps are finally getting built, after the whole wildly protracted process of trying to get quotes. Lots of businesses simply are not staffed anymore to return messages or emails, I think, not to mention the problem in so many single proprietor establishments of every kind that a person may be extremely gifted in their field & absolutely terrible at the admin side, so we simply did not hear back from a ton of places that had good reviews, etc.

Of the four that came out, one quoted in direct contradiction to the project (i.e., metal instead of wood), one had to be chased, and two were really lined up with each other, so we ended up going with the guy who redid my kitchen, because he does wonderful work & is extremely pleasant to deal with. (If you’re local, and need anything from a ramp to a remodel, hit me up at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & I’ll give you his name.)

This means a couple of weeks of chaos as the back deck is removed and the ramps are built, but when that’s all over my mom will actually be able to leave the house on her own for the first time since last fall. God, that’s a long haul when I write it out that way, isn’t it?

I’m hoping that she’ll be able to at least take some walks right away, and once she learns how to ride the bus on her own, have some independence again for smaller errands and outings. I keep thinking about how hard it would be to spend your whole adult life under your own steam & then suddenly not be able to even get down the front steps anymore. I know I wrote about this last week, how extremely strange it is to think about the difference between earlier this spring at the skilled nursing facility when I wasn’t sure she would ever be coming back home and now, when we’re working on getting her more and more independence back.

There’s a certain amount of whiplash, swinging back and forth between relief and confusion, setting aside the half-formed plans for worse outcomes, and the strong sense that I need to make the most of this plateau for as long as it lasts.

My friend N. had his birthday party last Friday, and it’s been a while since I went anywhere and met a whole bunch of new people at once, but I should have known that N’s gravitational pull would create a really delightful evening. We took over a couple of tables at a local brewery, and it was so charming to watch everyone arriving with cards and presents & jars of dahlias for him. C graciously agreed to come with me, on account of the social anxieties rearing their ugly head, and we ended up talking to N’s oldest friend & his very newest one, plus a whole bunch of other interesting people, and it was really nice & easy in a way I had almost forgotten bigger social events could even be, when I emerge from my hermitous cave.

reading room

I finally finished MFK Fisher’s letters with an almost mournful feeling, since they kept me such good company through the ten days or so when I was sick, and also the Paris Review Writers at Work Vol II interviews. These were fascinating; such a wide range of ways of working, of even conceiving of the work of writing, nearly every one of them contradicting the next. One author would make it clear that their writing process is completely transparent, exposed, even, and the next would refuse to even answer too many questions about how they work for fear of brushing some of the magic loose (Hemingway, I’m looking at you.)

I think I’ll have more to tell you when I go through my notes on it, possibly in a secret letter I’m working on, but right now I am mostly just frustrated that all the other writers got to talk about background & process & their influences, and Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man, spent most of his interview getting needled about whether the Black American experience could ever resonate with a larger audience. At one point, Ellison actually stops and says, Look, didn’t you find the book funny at all? It was truly egregious.

For fiction, I’m reading Queen Demon, given to me a few months back by N (PLP), and I’m obsessed with it. The world is so vast, and so fully, beautifully conceived that the mind boggles on how Martha Wells could keep it all in her head at one time. My kingdom for a long chatty interview about her writing process & influences! I may actually go back & reread Witch King afterwards, because I don’t remember it well & I might not feel ready to leave her behind after this.

More soon, and in the meantime may whatever interlocutors you encounter at least engage with you in good faith.