Dead Letter Department #88

weather report

This is very much what it feels like, the past week or so—here we are, finally pushing up out of the dirt. Everyone seemed to pour out of their houses at once last weekend. The first 60 degree day appears, and suddenly the floodgates are open, people are running into the streets in their little shorts, desperate to clamber on a mountain bike and start zipping around in the sunshine. As someone who’s out in the elements year around, although in a very minor way, there’s always something a little funny & odd about having all the quiet, rainy places fill up again, like the once winter-empty beach, where a walk on Sunday morning ended with me rounding the point to be confronted with a pack of bristling, long-lens cameras pointed my way. I know they weren’t photographing me, but it was a bit of an intimidating prospect after a peaceful sandy wander, and I always blanch at the thought of a dozen bird photographers back home, all painstakingly editing their beautiful picture of juvenile bald eagles to eliminate the little fat guy in a hoodie who keeps wandering up the side of the shot.

I do wonder where everyone was all winter, but they’re certainly out and about now: the outdoor breweries have been filling up, and the bike lanes, and the parks. Even my little neighborhood walks have been more populated.

I rode down to Skagit with my friend twice in a week, first to pick up and then to check on all her new native plants, and it seemed like everywhere we went, there were packs of roaring motorcycles. We passed through one of the low bits of farmland that I love so much, where you can see all the way to the ring of the mountains around us, right by a field briefly housing one of the enormous flocks of snow geese that pass through every year, and a much smaller group of swans, and stayed in line for an implausibly long time for coffee that ended up being worth the wait.

We wandered around their property on the newly laid trails, listening to the frogs screaming down in the swamp & looking for the secret trillium bloom from last year. It’s so peaceful there. I keep thinking what a good place it would be to go & write for some concentrated days, which my friends have generously offered to let me do. I’ll be traveling soon, deliberately not bringing my laptop, or any other way to do work, and going there to try to do a mini writing retreat when I get home again might be the way to dive back in after a break. I have almost 18 chapters of the new project, & I need dedicated, brain-refreshed time to get another fat chunk down.

The last time I had more than a couple of days off in a row was last year at almost exactly this time when I was having top surgery—not exactly a vacation, my best friend reminded me. I feel more than ready to try to have a few days unaccompanied by work or guilt about not working enough, which is too often what time off turns into. Either I pack too much in & run ragged, obliviating the effect of getting actual rest, or I fall into a shallow pattern of doing things that aren’t work but aren’t restorative either, surfacing back into the work week feeling no better off than when I left it.

No matter what I end up doing on my break, I’ll be doing it far from home, which is its own kind of rest, to not constantly be doing maintenance and care tasks, or feeling like I should be doing them. I’ll also be with one of my dearest old friends and his partner, who I adore, so no matter what we do, even if it’s just lying on his couch as we all three attempt to recover from the past few months, I will enjoy it.

I’ve done so little travel since the pandemic, and on that trip last year I was in such an intense state of nervous anticipation & then post-surgery fog that I was essentially just attached to the friend who was taking care of me like a stoned tugboat as she navigated us around the city and through the airport to get us back home. I’m trying to remember how I used to do it more regularly—what books to bring, playlists to make, snacks to pack, how to be polite & project calmness during the inevitable studying of the ID, which isn’t fixed yet, & god I can’t wait to have that taken care of.

Frankly, part of the nerves are just related to how little time I spend in public these days: I work from home, socialize in a very small way, & do feel rather like a soft little hermit crab scuttling from one shell to another at the prospect of the airport. I’m sure it’ll wear off, once I’m moving, & there’s a certain pleasure in being between places I’m looking forward to rediscovering, but it’s odd to feel that something I used to be pretty matter-of-fact about is substantially more daunting than it used to be. It’s nonsensical to pretend like it hasn’t changed, though, that I haven’t changed, so perhaps facing it head on will help? I’ll report back, afterwards.

one good thing

The spring flowers currently blooming in the back yard: grape hyacinth & daffodils, regular hyacinth, in all its gaudy glory (I forever remember von Arnim’s description of it as smelling unchaste), the beginnings of the plum tree in the front, sending a few pale petals down to the lawn every day, but not yet in its full powers, the neighbor’s early blossoming tree which is a crown of blushing white right out my kitchen window, forsythia around every corner, the floppy green leaves telling me that some of the tulips will be emerging: spring, all of it, and so terribly welcome.

Thank you for being part of the Dead Letter Department. You can access the paid subscriber only content here, if you’re interested. I’ll write to you again soon, and in the meantime, I hope something you’ve missed is beginning to bloom.