Dead Letter Department #39

(did you miss Dead Letter Department #38? read about the drive from Rockaway to Bellingham here!)

weather report

After the trip back from the Oregon Coast, I got sick. In between mentally wrapping up my affairs should it actually be COVID & taking naps so abrupt & deep it felt like sleep was giving me the People’s Elbow, I started to go a little stir crazy. I was trying very hard to not give anyone what I had, so I holed up in my apartment like a particularly irritable badger & it took almost zero time before I was out of soothing, low attention span activities.

Social media scrolling is bad for your immune system (or at least it feels that way) and reading anything except the most marshmallow of fluff was untenable. I started making a friendship bracelet for the first time in probably twenty-seven years because I needed something to do with my hands, & that’s when it struck me that I didn’t have any place good to sit & listen to a podcast or watch TV while I do something with my hands. I’m not a huge listener/watcher these days, partially because the pandemic anhedonia still has me in a pretty firm grip (I’m wriggling as best I can to get out of it, I swear), & partially because my attention span has not recovered enough to embrace longer form storytelling.

But fall is coming! I know because I got sent a picture of one perfect red maple leaf from Vermont the other day, & also the dogwood leaves are starting to drift onto the lawn, & the stellar jays are going HAM on the nuts off the neighbor’s tree. Fall means the days will get shorter & there will come a time before too long when it’s dark so early that the idea of settling in with a project & a show will appeal. More importantly, I had my colors all picked out for the friendship bracelet.

Still coughing & slightly feverish, I decided to rearrange my entire apartment.
If you’ve never tried shoving a six foot tall mirrored wardrobe across a room by yourself, I cannot un-recommend it more, but I did get everything shifted, dusted & vacuumed behind, including a literal wall of bookshelves that I hadn’t moved since they were delivered. The vast majority of my furniture is either hand-me-down, IKEA in spirit if not in actual label, or thrift store finds, but those three bookshelves are a matched set, made of actual wood, purchased on one of the rare occasions when I felt like I had the money to buy something that would last. They have lasted, beautifully, & my only current quarrel with them is that real wood is extremely heavy, especially when you are so congested you’re only breathing intermittently through one sorry husk of a nostril.

I kept having to stop & spend some quality time with a handkerchief or a bottle of water, & while I’d told myself I could just finish this project ‘casually’ in the after work hours over the course of a week or so, somewhere around the third hour of hoisting & shifting & cleaning, a gear slipped in my head & I became completely obsessed with getting everything back into good order. It felt like I couldn’t rest or think about anything else until I was finished, which obviously took much longer than an evening, & even when I was trying to sleep, my brain kept spinning furniture into different places & reorganizing hidden storage.

Part of this is that I work from home, & so having any kind of disorder, let alone the kind that involves vaulting precarious piles of paperbacks to get into the bathroom, is wildly distracting. Part of it is, I think, the sheer number of long term or unsolvable problems I’m confronting on a daily basis, from the tiny to the soul-crushingly large. Having something I could see & put hands on & fix, something I could physically manipulate to make the way I wanted, was great in that I could actually see change occurring but dispiriting in that it was not happening nearly fast enough to keep up with my desires.

There were some missteps along the way. I am not a person who can imagine what something looks like in another location—weird, given how much time I spend imagining things, but it’s always off in one dimension or another unless I physically move the object & see it actually standing in its new spot. This meant I had to unearth all the semi-dead storage under the bed (journals, gift wrap, the electric typewriter), turn the frame, see immediately that it was Quite Wrong, sigh pitifully, & then put the whole business back where it had started.  And, of course, once I had the shelving nudged into the exact right location, then I had to get all of the books back on it.

There are three main sections: poetry, non-fiction, & fiction. Fiction takes up almost an entire wall, non-fiction is about half that, & poetry, as the most slowly read of all genres for me, is only one tiny bookcase.  There’s also the unread pile, which we won’t speak of except to say nothing gets shelved elsewhere without being read. Every single time I have occasion to move or reorganize my library, I decide I’m going to do a proper cull & I’m definitely going to end up with a huge stack to sell or give away, because there’s no sane way to justify how many I have, so surely some of them must be unnecessary. Then, as I ferry stacks from one side of the apartment to the other, as I dust & alphabetize, they all end up being quite necessary after all.

The utterly unimpressive pile of discards (several hardbacks that were beautiful but never going to be read again, a couple things I’d taken a run at more than once & failed to get into, two cookbooks that don’t suit the way I eat these days but were in excellent shape) fit neatly into a paper grocery bag this time.

What I had turned out to be a cold, after everyone involved went through multiple rounds of testing. There’s something weirdly embarrassing about getting a cold during a pandemic, like hitting yourself in the face with a rake while everyone else is frantically fighting off rapier-wielding opponents. The relief propelled me through the last of the reshelving, & I finished the friendship bracelet in my new TV watching spot, completely involved in the fourth season of Real Housewives of Potomac. The bracelet is extremely bad, but that’s not going to stop me from making another one.

one good thing

The grass is dead—dried up & crisped into sad brown tufts except for where the shadow of the house has managed to cling on to a little lushness. Fortunately my approach to lawn care is extremely slipshod, so the dandelions are busy doing the lord’s work despite the heat, making patchy spots of green & tossing their ragged golden heads around. I was admiring them the other day & noticed for the first time that a single bee has enough weight to bow a dandelion stem. If I looked closely enough I could see them all working in concert, one bloom after another bowing down toward the ground under the tiny bodies & then curling back up again when the harvesting was done.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may there be a little green still left to carry you through the end of the season.