Dead Letter Department #76

weather report

There’s a high cold fog this morning, hanging above the tall cedars in my neighbor’s yard, & when I took the little dog I have with me this week out before it was light, all she wanted to do was walk up & down the patio and crunch on blades of frozen grass. Did you ever eat grass? The stems are sweet, sometimes, the white parts—one of those things I have a sense-memory of, though I couldn’t tell you the last time I bent down & plucked up a stem to chew on. My small visitor has been settling in pretty well, although she does not approve of the amount of time I spend at the desk, and feels strongly that the couch should largely be a petting/belly rub station, necessitating a certain amount of one-handed scrolling or page turning on my part.

We’ve been walking together at lunch time in the Elizabeth Park neighborhood, where the houses are mostly old and beautifully well-preserved, and the gardens are still lovely. I paused for a long time in front of a couple of rose bushes, out on a sunny corner, with two bright pink buds still doing their best to bloom, & wondered if they’d have time to do it before too many frosty mornings ended their season.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how best to weather the shortened days, the cold, the nearly-always present rain, & having an excuse to be out in whatever is happening is really one of the nicest reasons to have a dog: a little white fluffball bunny-hopping down the stairs in an ecstasy of excitement for wherever it is we’re about to go, a small black nose pushing through the piles of yellow leaves.

Today we’re going to the graveyard, which is excruciatingly lovely this time of year: all the hidden mossy places showing, now that the leaves are coming down, and the enormous shapes of the ancient trees looming over everything. From a couple of spots you can see all the way down over town to the bay.

Graveyards haven’t ever been personal to me, until recently. Beloved, certainly, resonant with the time I’ve spent there, the history of the place, but my dead relatives are scattered over the country, sometimes literally, so I’ve always felt like a visitor before. I’ve been here in Bellingham long enough now that there are a few names I know: no one close, but a few people I met and can think of when I pass their resting place, local legends now buried, family belonging to my friends. It’s a layer of knowing a place that I didn’t know existed until it settled onto me.

When my friend & I were there a few weeks ago, I spotted something bright and red clinging to the branches of a tree over an old gravestone, & crunched my away across the leaf-covered grass to retrieve two little odd-shaped apples, one for both of us. I keep thinking I need to use it for something appropriately ritualistic and autumnal—a graveyard apple surely has special powers of some kind. For now it’s still sitting on top of my microwave.

reading room

Someone recommended I read The Age of Overwhelm, which I smacked onto my reading list based on the title alone—I certainly feel overwhelmed most days, by the news more than anything else right now, which is one visceral tragedy after another. The book is deeply compassionate, but somehow I couldn’t hook into it, pull useful bits out to actually keep hold of. This could have just been my mindset at the time, because it was also quite clearly written for a large readership, broken down into accessible, bite-sized chapters dotted with cartoons: a very useful format, especially if you are hoping the chronically overwhelmed or deeply traumatized reader, with a necessarily narrow attention span, can actually make use of it. I might try her other book, to see if I can get a little deeper in with that one, but for now I’m back to my slow tread through The Body Keeps the Score (part of what my friends & I jokingly call our trauma bookclub).

I’ve also got, more cheerfully, the first entry in what M. & I decided will be Gay & Beautiful Bookclub, as a useful corrective to all the trauma, on hold at the library, The House in the Cerulean Sea, & I just started The Witch King, by Martha Wells, & am already super immersed in it. She’s the author of my beloved Murderbot books, which feature the character I have been most obsessed with & think about the most after reading since I started the Locked Tomb series. If you feel like you are bad at being a person, I cannot recommend Murderbot enough.

If you have entries you’d like to nominate for either the Trauma or Gay & Beautiful Bookclubs, please drop me a line at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com & I will add them to my list.

one good thing

I stocked up on Prince of Peace Ginger Lemon Tea recently, at the little Asian grocery store down the street. I can’t remember how I first came across this, probably one of those things I can’t live without articles, but ever since I keep a box in the house for when I need something, usually after dinner, that’s sweet and flavorful. There’s something a bit decadent about the fact that it’s little crystals, dissolving easily into the hot water, none of the workaday tea bags sopping damply into the sink to drip afterwards, & it means you can start drinking when it’s still piping hot. The tea is perfect for the season: gingery enough to feel it in the back of your throat, but sweet enough to ease you into the evening.

Thank you for reading. If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend or write to me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I hope to see you here at the Dead Letter Department again soon, & in the meantime, may you figure out the perfect thing to do with the magical graveyard apple that’s waiting for you.