Dead Letter Department #42

weather report

Every couple weeks in the summer, if I am feeling flush, I head down to the other end of the street where there’s a wooden garden stand with the most exquisite little bouquets for five dollars. It’s at the beginning of a long gravel driveway, one of those house-behind-a-house situations, so you can’t actually see any part of the garden from which the flowers are emanating. There’s a metal box bolted underneath one of the shelves to shove your money into, & a basket for people to leave jars in.

Two months ago I was down there to buy a bouquet & found the box hanging open with a small pile of bills blowing into the shrubbery. It looked as though it had probably just happened as most of the money was still pretty close. I chased it all down and found one of the empty glass jars to shove it into. It seemed like a bad idea to leave a transparent container holding cash sitting in plain sight from the road, so I tucked the jar into a hidden place underneath the stand, found my neighbor’s phone number on the venmo sign & texted them so they’d know where to find their money.

They thanked me very nicely & I thought that was the end of it, but last week I got a message from a number I had saved only as Flower Neighbor, to me and a bunch of other people. “It’s the end of the season,” the text said. “Would you like to come pick the last of the dahlias? $20 for everything you can put into a florist’s bucket.” Never have I been happier to get added to a group chat.

Without any understanding of what a florist’s bucket might be, I set off with twenty bucks in one pocket & my garden shears in the other, down the long driveway, past the basketball court, into what turns out to be a secret dahlia kingdom hidden between the houses & the creek. My neighbor let me in through the tall wooden gate, introduced me to her dogs & set me loose. Most of the rest of the garden was well past its peak, but the dahlias have gone unusually late, & she had more kinds than I’d ever seen before: crimson & violet & creamy white, yellow blooms almost the size of a dinner plate & bobbing pink ones like folded silk. I like the fat round ones best, they’re such a pleasing shape I have a hard time not wobbling them all gently against my palm, the way I see topiary cutters do with shrubs when they’re tidying up.

At first I was a little tentative, cutting the stems too short to save the not-yet-bloomed for later, but she told me to take whatever I wanted, that the tightest-furled buds probably wouldn’t make it, so I cut until the bucket was full & then, when invited, piled marigolds on top of it, because I always want marigolds this time of year.

The neighbors I passed kept beaming at me as I walked home again & I guess I probably was a bit of a sight, big sweaty guy with a double armload of flowers tromping along the road in the hazy light.  I split them with my mom, & now there’s vases everywhere I look in my apartment.

This weekend I also went to an estate sale out on Eldridge, in one of the stretches of fancy houses on the cliff that overlooks the bay. I’d passed the signs once already, convinced myself I didn’t need to stop, & then ended up going back because I had a feeling there was something there I wanted. I turned out to be right, leaving with a metal steamer ($1), a Terry Tempest Williams book ($2) & a set of three handmade bowls in deep blue & purple ($10). “We used these so often,” the lady told me, looking at them tenderly. “They’re great for salad, soup…even ice cream.” I might have thought it was odd that she was explaining how to use bowls to me as though they were unfamiliar technology, but I’d just heard her telling another shopper that they were selling everything that didn’t fit into their suitcases.

"We’ve been here ten years & we’ve loved this house,” she said (& with that view of the bay, how could they not!) “But our daughters are all grown, & well married, & now we’re going to travel.” I could tell she was saying goodbye to everything as she was selling it, to a whole life in that house, watching storms roll in across the bay & raising daughters, & although she seemed to be happy to be giving it up, it was a lot to let go of all at once. I can’t get over ‘well married’—not just married, but well married. I’ll think of her family when I’m eating out of the bowls, wonder where they are in the world, with just their suitcases, and their well married daughters anchored in their own lives, just like I’ll think of the secret kingdom of dahlias when I pass my neighbor’s house.

book report

I finally finished Complex PTSD by Pete Walker, which was recommended to me a couple of years ago by a friend. It took me this long to get up the fortitude to actually embark on it, & I read a single chapter at time, which is not at all the way I usually do things, but was definitely the right pace for this book. It’s now so heavily tagged with book darts that it’ll take me a million years to finish taking notes on it. If you’re dealing with CPTSD or interesting in understanding it better, I can’t recommend it enough. There’s something so compassionate about the way Pete Walker writes—he’s writing to and for his patients, who he cares about, not for clinicians, not for the broader culture, & I think that difference in tone is tremendous. Also, he’s a person who had to learn how to have self-love himself & so his writing on it doesn’t have the annoying vibe of those toothless, easy affirmations that always get my hackles up.

I think I’ll be writing more about it as I continue to digest, but due to the nature of trauma that’s something I’ll likely send to the Secret Dead Letter Department—so if you’re interested, please consider subscribing to that here. If the price is out of reach, you can send me an email at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & I’ll see if I can comp you a subscription.

Thank you so much to all the people who have already subscribed to the Secret DLD—you’ll be getting your first letter later today.

one good thing

All summer there’s been a solitary raven in my neighborhood—distinguishable from the crows due to its much louder & lower voice & significantly greater wingspan. I kept hearing him croak, seeing him pass overhead, going from the woods by the creek back to the park, fluttering up into the tallest pines in my neighbor’s yard, but he was always by himself, & sometimes the crows seemed to be trying to pester him into relocating. This may sound ridiculous, but I was kind of worried about him. Crows & ravens are social, & the idea of him flying around by himself all the time, calling out but never being answered, gave me the same sort of lonely feeling that I got when thinking about the 52 hertz whale. Sometime in the past couple of weeks, though, he was joined by another raven. Now they’re always flying around together, and when he calls, the other raven answers in their own low, rattling voice.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or subscribe to the secret edition. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may your bowls be exactly the right size for whatever you’re eating.