Dead Letter Department #90

weather report

I somehow took no pictures, so you’ll just have to imagine: grey skies, like soft cotton stretched above us, a little mist of rain falling, and the fields full: of snow geese, calling out to each other, rising up in great companies only to resettle again in the next field, all those white wings beating against the air. Then, the early crops, greens and yellow so fresh they almost glowed against the brown earth, the tips of buds on the berry bushes already bristling outward, ready to leaf as soon as it gets a little warmer. Finally, the tulips, long rows marching away towards the horizon, bands of red, yellow, orange, white, one most memorably of an almost hallucinatory pink, so bright it was hard to look at.

There’s a whole route you can drive down in Skagit to look at the tulip fields, and we did a big loop of it, sometimes following the road signs, sometimes the directions on my phone, & we got so lucky: it was early enough in the day & bad enough weather that there were only a few other stalwart flower-gazers out there, so we completely avoided the crush of traffic. Mostly it seemed to be young couples absolutely determined to have a good romantic time, god bless them for it, or families with small children who had equipped their toddlers with galoshes and raincoats and were trying to make the most of the photo shoot opportunity, despite the dampness.

It’s a weird sight, I think every year that I go. It’s striking, certainly—nothing with that much color & bloom could avoid it, but there’s also something so oddly regimented about the enormous sameness of it, one color repeating and repeating, next to another even, ruler-straight band doing the exact same thing. I find myself looking for the errors: the daffodils stranded in a field of bright red heads, the few bulbs of the wrong color springing up, just for the relief of it, to let my eye rest.

At least we saw the tulips this time, which was a better record than the last time we went, when we seemed to be enclosed in a fog that had swept through the valley, curling so close in around us that we could barely see the road, let alone the monochromatic fields.

Afterwards, we got coffee in downtown Mount Vernon, which has a charming main street I want to poke around more sometime, & drank it at Riverwalk Park, which was also nearly empty, nothing but the green water rushing by and the roar of cars coming over the bridge in the distance.

It was good to have a proper weekend—last week was a bit of a struggle, what with coming back from vacation & missing the shit out of my friends, doing my best to step back into a disciplined state I can work from. I had trouble finding it again, & the days were very up and down.

Now that I seem to be sleeping well again (can you hear me knocking on wood with great vigor in the background), it’s a lot easier to have plans on days off that don’t just consist of doing the bare minimum of chores & then collapsing again. It’s good timing, with the longer, brighter days.

Next weekend hopefully my friend & I will do the YearCompass process—four months late, but we collectively decided it’s better to do it late than not at all. She was traveling right around New Year’s, when we usually sit & have coffee & whiskey & brunch & scribble it all out, & then I think we were both kind of struggling with launching into the year at all, let alone thinking about improvements & ambitions. It did feel incomplete to not write my through the booklet to try to get my hands around 2024. It’s one of those processes that can feel deeply frustrating while you’re going through it, but I’ve never gotten to the other side of it without feeling like it was very much worth the time & effort. I’ll report back to you on how this year goes.

reading room

I was reading Dr. Zhivago on the plane to Austin & back, & I finally finished it, much to my relief, as the long monologues about politics & philosophy made it a pretty heavy lift for me. Never in my entire life have I sat down with someone who holds a lot of extremely twisty philosophical opinions they’re dying to express & said, “Please just go ahead & talk as much as you like, dear madam,” but characters in the book were doing it absolutely constantly, either that or trying hopelessly to escape from other characters whose monologuing they did not like as well. I suspect it might have been just the wrong time for me for the book, or the wrong translation, so if you’ve got a version you recommend, do write me at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com so I can try to do better.

Now I’m onto Diana Vreeland’s delicious, scampering autobiography, because my friends were reading it & made it sound super fun, & I think it’ll be quite the chaser after the shot of snow & sorrow & revolution.

one good thing

The prayer plant that lives by my desk had a tough winter. I think I let the apartment get too cold for her, which meant she had to shed several long branches, & I’ve never been very good at keeping the humidity up, so several of her more venerable leaves do have brown tips now. But she’s been sending up the little rolled sentinels of new leaves, since the warmth is coming back, & the days are brighter, and yesterday I saw a tiny bright white flower emerging from the depths. Long may she bloom.

Thank you for reading the Dead Letter Department, & especially to those of you who support it with a subscription. The next secret dead letter will likely be about loneliness, though I’ve started & stopped it several times now, since it’s such a tender & embarrassing subject. If you want to write to me personally, email departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I’ll see you here again soon, & in the meantime, may any monologues you hear be the kind you like best.