Dead Letter Department #121

weather report

Friends, I have been remiss in writing to you, caught up partially in my big rewrite project but even more in the lowering darkness of the season, both internally & externally. The sun does really feel like it starts slipping away at about 3:30 p.m., & the crows are already flying off to roost for the night when I take my late afternoon break. Things slow down in town, it feels like, with lots of people cocooning up for the upcoming season with their immediate family.

I have been trying the usual mitigating influences: sunlamp in the morning, scented candles in the evening, yoga videos at lunch time to move my body instead of instinctively curling up under the alpaca blanket E. got me & plainly refusing to stir, taking in a wider array of books & music to make sure I’m not stultifyingly bored on top of everything else. I remain unimpressed with my results.

And then, of course, the news is a horror show, an assault on decency, some of my best friends stubbornly continue to be thousands of miles away, and it somehow feels like my first holiday season without my dad, in spite of last year really having been the first. I think now because Thanksgiving was only weeks after he died, I was still so in the first tides of grief that it didn’t really register. Not much was registering, at the time. This year it is, in spite of the fact that I am emphatically not a holiday person, having done my level best to carve the various obligations down into something I can usually manage.

It’s the time of year where, if I had fucking around money, I would be planning some sort of decadent, sun-streaked vacation for January or February, something to reach out to across the choppy chasm of winter and ferry me a little closer to spring.

That being utterly out of the question, I decided I at least need to regularly go Do Something Else, so yesterday I took a field trip down to Lynnwood to hit the HMart, armed with an index card of required pantry staples, and took a long time wandering up and down every aisle, choosing the best looking mushrooms & little striped eggplant, replenishing my supply of chili crisp & Korean instant coffee, getting seduced by a bottle of yuzu extract I have no idea how I’ll use.

Afterwards I hit the 85 Degrees Celsius Bakery for treats to bring my mom, and then the Half Price Books a few miles away, which turned out to have an absolutely spectacular array of old sci fi paperbacks, filling in the end of a trilogy, the middle of the Vorkosigan Saga, & a book by Robin McKinley I had been meaning to reacquire for some time.

There was a great deal of shedding of books, over the years, as I heaved boxes from one apartment to the next, and for the most part I don’t miss them, but there is a little part of me that would love to have a row of Mercedes Lackey on my shelf again, for old times’ sake, if nothing else, but shelf space really does preclude it. It turns out there are three Half Price Books within about 17 miles of each other, & I’m hoping to convince my equally nerdy friend J. to go run a circuit with me sometime and see what we can turn up in all of them.

On the way back, I pulled over at the rest stop outside of Marysville to finish my coffee. I like rest stops, as a category of place. In a weird way, they’re about as liminal as airport terminals: you’re not on the highway, but you’re not really off it either, and you can always hear the roar of traffic. It’s a pocket you spend some time in before driving on again, and there’s nowhere to go except the bathroom, but everyone needs a bathroom, and to stretch their legs, and possibly get something out of the vending machine, assuming you can get it to work. There are usually puzzled dogs being walked along the swathe of green, people napping in their cars before they drive off again to some unknowable destination, & of course the whole side of the parking lot where the eighteen wheelers are parked like huge sleeping animals.

This one in particular has an enormous stump, nearly as tall as the building next to it, with the name of the species of tree on it (which I cannot remember) and a carve out for people to stand in, so while I drank my taro lavender latte, I could see various people detouring on their way back from the bathrooms to arrange themselves or their children under the sign and take photos, and I was glad I’d taken that way home.

reading room

I finally read An Honest Woman, by Charlotte Shane, who is one of my all time favorite writers on love and sex, and it was just as unexpected & beautifully written as I wanted it to be. When J. & I were at Powell’s a couple of weeks ago, I ran across Strange Pictures, by Uketsu, but didn’t have the budget for it, so I was pleased when I encountered it again at the library. I’ve been trying to expand my appreciation for scary things & not be such a weenie, and the story construction on this was so intriguing.

Most of my reading time, though, has been devoted to Katherine Addison, because after reading The Witness for the Dead, I of course had to go back & reread The Goblin Emperor, which then clung so tenaciously that I somehow needed to begin it again as soon as I finished it. It really is one of my favorite books: courtly intrigue, immaculate world building, where you can never see the edges of it, and feel the world extending around you in all directions as you read. It is also, I realized as I was devouring it for the second time in a row without stopping, a book that is almost entirely about a father’s absence, & has a minor but important plot line about an older character suffering and dying from a ‘brainstorm.’ When that finally came together, suddenly my devotion to reading it not once but twice in this moment made a great deal more sense. I am frankly a little bereft, after finishing it last night.

one good thing

There was a guy ahead of me giving a personal tour of the baked goods at 85 Degrees, talking up various items to some confused-looking people who had never been in there before, chit-chattering away as they happily filled their trays up based entirely on his recommendations. Then they asked him some question that I could not quite hear, and he said, “Oh, I’m not an employee! I just love this place,” which was followed by uproarious laughter from all of them. By the time they all got through the line they had exchanged hometowns, bun preferences, and a great deal of good cheer.

More soon, and in the meantime, may you find an unexpected guide when you need them.