Dead Letter Department #19

(did you miss dead letter department #18? catch up here!)

weather report

The sun’s out today & I feel colossally relieved about it. Flood sirens were going in Sumas again yesterday. I had an appointment to get the booster shot & after driving around for 20 minutes trying to figure out how to ford the rushing stream that the Guide Meridian had become in order to get into the Rite Aid parking lot, I had to give up & cancel it. “I can’t get to you?” I somewhat unpersuasively explained to the person who answered the phone at the pharmacy. “You know, the flooding everywhere?”

“Oh yes,” she said. “I’ll cancel it.”

“I hope you get home okay,” I told her, & she just laughed bitterly & said thank you.

I was feeling weirdly emotional, & mad at myself about being emotional until I put together that I had just canceled the vaccine I was getting to decrease the likelihood that I infect someone else or die myself from an incredibly destructive multi-year pandemic because of unprecedented & dangerous local flooding closing roads literally two blocks from my house. If someone else described this to me, I would think it perfectly normal that they were kind of upset about it. Sometimes I think it would be helpful to have a small pop up screen or tiny banner that just says, “You are allowed to feel your feelings,” but in reality I would just get salty about the implication that I had a feeling to feel at the moment & would refuse to engage with it. Apparently the next step after feeling them is locating the feelings in your body, that actual physical form you keep having to haul around, but that sounds fake to me.

beloved stranger of the week

I was waiting for my mom to come out of the co-op the other day when I saw a young guy stop to watch the same crow I was looking at, an extremely jaunty bird strutting back and forth on the metal roof that shields the entrance to the store. The guy was dressed for the weather, bundled up in a coat & hat & already carrying a bulging blue plastic bag but he paused to look up & make careful eye contact with the crow before making an elegant little bow. The crow dipped its head, clearly bowing in return, and jumped off the roof, vanishing immediately. The guy went on his way to do whatever necessary shopping was waiting at the co-op, but clearly a message of some kind had been exchanged. Although I accidentally intercepted it, I cannot decipher the meaning.

reading room

Well, here we are with L.M. Montgomery, author of both Anne of Green Gables, & as we discussed in a recent newsletter, my beloved Emily books. The journals start when she’s fourteen & her style is already clearly emerging. Apparently there were other notebooks from her actual childhood but she very sensibly burned them. People get kind of hysterical about artists & authors destroying their own work, & I do very much understand the slightly rabid desire to look at or read everything by a particular mind, but I think it’s weird to imagine that you should have access to something the creator has decided to destroy. Posthumous work is a little tricky for me from that perspective—much as my dirtbag literary heart thrilled to the rumor that J.D. Salinger’s later work might someday be available, I’m not sure I’ll read it if that ever actually happens.

No such questions arise for me with Montgomery’s journals, though—she re-transcribed them herself from the original notebooks into legal ledgers with an intention of publishing them one day. The editors of the volume are persuaded that she was largely true to her original entries but there are a couple of interesting & obvious exceptions. The page where she described her first meeting with her future husband, Reverend Ewan Macdonald, for example, was carefully sliced out and replaced which means she reframed that encounter at least three times: the initial writing, the first transcription & the final copy she decided to append. I haven’t gotten to her marriage yet, but that doesn’t seem like a particularly good omen.

At the moment I’m writing this to you, she’s traveling to take her first school & presumably be proposed to by another unsuitable man. By the age of 20 she’d declined at least two proposals and headed at least one more off at the pass before she had to outright refuse him. She despairs over the soap she finds in the bread at her boarding house (the landlady was negligent to the point of cruelty), tells us that one of her school teachers punishes the boys with an actual raw-hide whip & in the next entry seems sustained only by nature’s beauty. Here she is on one of her long walks in the woods:

“All the little fears and chafings shrank into nothing and vanished. Standing there beneath that endless blue dome, deep with the breathing of universal space, I felt as if all the world had a claim on my love—as if there were nothing of good I could not assimilate—no noble thought I could not echo. I put my arm around a lichened old spruce and laid my cheek against its rough side—it seemed like an old friend.”

It’s good company for winter. More on her next time.

game time

I’m in social media jail again, having found myself singing way too many TikTok songs while bumbling around the house. It’s actually not a bad way to find music (as you know if you are a recipient of my other project, Why Are You Like This) but you never hear the whole song so I just keep getting caught in a loop & then I can’t get out again, which is unfortunately also how I behave on TikTok itself.

My head empty, no thoughts activity of choice instead is a return to Animal Crossing on the Nintendo Switch. If you’re not familiar, it’s a video game where you move to a deserted island with a couple of villagers and build a little dream town. I nuked my old island & started over completely, but I must say my first villagers are really not doing it for me. I got a kangaroo resident who has a little joey in her pouch which sounds cute at first, but it doesn’t talk or emote or do anything at all & will presumably never grow up so then it’s like she’s carrying a weird little ghost around! Every time I talk to her in game I find myself fixated on it, & it doesn’t help that they’re wearing matching outfits. Is she okay? Should I be referring her to some sort of service? I don’t think the flowers I’m bringing her as a gift are going to help a problem of this magnitude.

write back

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime I hope all your pharmacy parking lots are dry.