Dead Letter Department #54

weather report

The grape hyacinth are just poking their little green heads up around the gas meter in the side yard, & I have become obsessed with Elizabeth von Arnim. She’s probably most known these days for her book Enchanted April (& the delicious film adaptation), in which a downtrodden woman in a grey, soggy place (relatable) sees an advertisement for a castle in Italy (wisteria, sunshine) & decides, after a lifetime of dutiful work, to spend her carefully hoarded nest egg in one glorious burst of pleasure. I reread it every couple of years to have that lovely feeling of setting down the heavy yoke & stepping out into a fresh spring day.

Somehow it had never occurred to me until recently that von Arnim had written other books, including a lightly fictionalized memoir about her own creation of a garden on her German estate, with cameo appearances by various visiting friends, & the sort of family portrait drawn by someone who is almost too clear-sighted to be kind. Her children she all refers to by the month of birth—the June Baby, the April Baby—& her husband is known exclusively by the moniker the Man of Wrath. It is intended to be joking, but I didn’t think it was a happy marriage, as I was reading, which led me to her Wikipedia page, where I spent a delirious few minutes learning about her life. To summarize for you, incredible: three husbands, including a German aristocrat & an English earl, plus E.M. Forster was her children’s tutor?? She was H.G. Wells’ mistress for three years? & wrote TWENTY books? What on earth was her life like? All I want now is one of those huge, juicy biographies that is really only possible when you have access to all the letters of the major figures, & I suspect von Arnim was the type to burn her particularly delicious correspondence.

In other reading, I’m making my way rather slowly through the Audre Lorde collection that Roxane Gay edited, which is now so stippled with little metal book darts it looks like an inverted porcupine. Lorde always blows my mind wide open with her clarity of language & leaves me looking around the suddenly emptied room, reassessing my priorities. The entire back half is poetry, which is the thing I read the most slowly of all genres: the compression of images & emotion can’t be swallowed up the same way great swathes of prose can. It takes time to metabolize it properly.

I accidentally got day drunk on Sunday, which I haven’t done in a million years. I was talking to one of my oldest friends—they were making very fancy cocktails down in Texas, which I can’t recall the name of, & I was putting whiskey into a French press’s worth of coffee while we were on the phone. That amount of coffee & whiskey goes faster than you’d think when you’re catching up with one of your best beloveds on all the important happenings of the past six months, & it didn’t take long before I was both caffeinated & tipsy, which might be the ideal combination for a long conversation.

I haven’t been great at staying in touch recently—everyone’s so busy all the time, & I just haven’t had the emotional capacity to chase schedules & send follow up texts if one gets missed. A while back I was doing a lot of reading about current day polyamory, its particular pitfalls & useful communication strategies, & I kept running across the same scenario: a very young person, usually brand new to being poly, or even dating, asking a lot of questions about how best to set up a living situation where all their partners could live with them. Often the person in question didn’t have any partners at all yet, but was holding firmly on to a lovely fantasy of everyone living together on some land somewhere, sharing chores & bills & responsibilities. Tiny houses seemed to feature heavily, although I did wonder if they’d ever been in a tiny house themselves. If you’ve ever had to hop down those horrible loft ladders when you’ve been sick or had a sprained ankle, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

The older, more experienced poly people kept gently drawing forth the potential problems with this—how will you buy the land? How do you know your partners will all get along with each other? What happens when someone wants to leave? Do you understand you’re basically trying to establish a commune, & just how complicated that is? As a side-note, are you ensuring that you’re not actually making your very own cult?

I did a lot of studying on communal living back in the day, visited a ton of small alternative schools, read pretty deeply on various religious communities, and the through-lines are so similar it’s really stuck with me: the idea, in this increasingly isolated world, of living with a group, not a family of origin, but one chosen in adulthood, having lots of the people you love close at hand, working towards something together. I’ve never been one whose friends all got along, & I can’t imagine them all living in close proximity together, so this ‘we all live on the same block & have a big garden’ fantasy isn’t particularly robust for me, but the core of it does resonate. I’ve moved a lot, and adulthood scatters people like dandelion seeds anyway. At any moment various important inhabitants of my heart are thousands of miles away & not likely to get any closer except for brief, bright visitations. At least we can have those long phone calls & do some day drinking together.

one good thing

The beach park closest to my house has been, frankly, a little sketchy since I moved in: huge potholes in the gravel parking lot, various crime reports on the trails, although I’d never run into any trouble there. As the city expands, there’s an effort to make more green spaces, not just in the downtown core & the fancy neighborhoods, but also on the north side & in the odd industrial districts, which means my shitty little park has recently gotten a makeover: landscaping installed, huge concrete blocks removed. It’ll also be getting a full face lift in the form of a over-water walkway on the bones of an old industrial pier, which means someday in the not too distant I’ll be able to walk across the water a little closer to home.

If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or consider subscribing to the secret edition, where I’m writing about transition & shifting identity. Thank you to my current subscribers, who make these letters possible. Write to me anytime at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, if you’ve got a good line on a castle in Italy for spring break (wisteria, sunshine), please invite me: I promise to have as many emotional revelations as the narrative requires.