Dead Letter Department #70

weather report

The smoke’s gone for now, but while it was here, hanging low over everything, it suffocated what was left of summer. There were closer fires this time, up near Mount Baker, a little one (although under other circumstances it’s hard to imagine 30 acres being little) caused by a lightning strike in dry brush down at the southern end of the lake. It was too remote to get the fire fighting equipment in, so they were scooping up water from the lake by helicopter & dumping it onto the flames until they got control. The lake access & trails were closed for a few day, since ash & fire debris was falling into the water, and everyone on Blue Mountain Road was temporarily evacuated.

They’ve managed to contain both of them now, & the air’s less bitter, but it lasted just long enough for the weather to shift. Sometimes the seasons trade places lovingly, dance lightly around each other for a few weeks giving compliments before one of them departs, and sometimes fall creeps up in a cloud of acrid smoke & punts summer offstage before she has a chance to say goodbye.

The trees are already starting to change—I keep catching little glimpses of red and orange when I’m not expecting it, and the plantings on Coronado are already putting on quite a show. The garden’s marching into fall, too: last of the daisies, the final gladiolus, and then the only bright colors left will be the stalwart lavender & a nightshade vine that has claimed the broken trellis with invasive enthusiasm and poured out an enormous crop of shiny red berries. They even look poisonous, somehow.

There will still be plenty of good days to be outside, especially if you don’t mind a little rain, but I’m having a hard time letting go of the warmth this year, and have perhaps been overcompensating by scrambling around my apartment to get things in order. The bookshelf project is finished, and looks substantially better than the old crate & board situation I’ve been using off & on for years, and after a great deal of sweating & cursing & angry fist-shaking at the infuriating Ikea glyphs, so is the double wardrobe, which means my clothes, such as they are, are all back on hangers. I have a little row of scented candles to try, more hoodies than any one man could possibly need, and I found where last year’s self cleverly hid all my hats, so I guess I’m ready to embark.

The smoke was oppressive while it lasted—I don’t realize how thoroughly I rely on weekly expeditions outdoors, somewhere where I can look out a beautiful distance, and think thoughts I can’t think in my usual daily round, until I can’t do it, and I’m stuck glumly in, looking out at the haze. I started to feel locked in, more stir-crazy than the amount of time it lasted probably warranted, and it made everything else a full factor harder.

It’s good to see everything starting to green up again now, and the true harbinger of early fall, the Greek Festival at Saint Sophia’s Orthodox Church, starts on Thursday, so I plan to spend the back half of the week eating my body weight in gyros, spanakopita & every cookie the good people of the congregation can be induced to sell me.

reading room

I just finished Ducks, by Kate Beaton, who I’ve adored since her early days of Hark, A Vagrant. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking graphic novel rendering of her two years spent working in the oil sands, a place & industry I hear about all the time, due to Canadian proximity, but didn’t have any real grasp on. The other real standout was Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, which I think I found on one of Roxane Gay’s recommendation lists. It’s an incredibly smart & compassionate take on true crime, and our exploitation of it, set at a little New Hampshire boarding school attended by the narrator in high school & later returned to, when she’s an adult, to teach a podcasting class. It captures perfectly the oddities & the horrors of being a teenager in an isolated, supposedly education environment, and while my boarding school was much smaller & probably weirder than the one in the book, I definitely saw reflections of my own experience. Some of the fiction I’ve read about the early days of the #metoo movement has been limp & dull, but Makkai grabs onto the messy, disgusting nuance of it all and makes it live on the page.

one good thing

I was sweatily heaving bags of bark mulch around the front yard yesterday when one of the little kids who lives next door ran up and thrust a tiny bouquet into my hand: two bright flowers and a little spring of green wound up in a blue rubber band. “This is for your mom!” she announced, and I realized that must have been what she was talking to my neighbor across the street about, too: a little flower delivery, out of nowhere. “She’ll be thrilled,” I told her, and she dashed off again, presumably to make more deliveries.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. There’s a secret edition, too, where I’m writing my way through transition.

I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may the smoke be lifting, wherever you are.