Dead Letter Department #91
weekend weather report
The yellowy-green pollen was so thick on my car windshield when I went out to do errands on Saturday morning that I could draw my index finger down it & leave a clean line on the glass. I went to Trader Joe’s (cheese, yogurt, tinned fish), the Co-op (salad greens, Pink Lady apples, & bulk coffee on sale, which apparently excited me so much I overfilled the bag & promptly spilled it all over my stovetop when I got home), Costco to refill the gas tank, up to Lummi Market, & finally to my neighborhood coffee stand.
After I got all that unloaded and gazed into my fridge with the satisfaction of knowing everything is restocked for the week, I downed the coffee & went back out to Zuanich Park, where the Dockside Market was happening. There was a new vendor there, advertising savory seafood pastries, so I got a smoked salmon pastry which proved to be so delicious I ate it outside on a bench, squinting into the sun & watching the tourists configure themselves into various selfie stances against the blue bay water, leaving a blast radius of flaky crumbs behind me for the little brown birds to peck at.
The produce stand near my house was open for the first time this season, with just one edible item & stacks of bright pansies in pots, but when the one item is thick green stalks of perfect asparagus, what more do you need? I bought a single bundle, so fat I had to hold it with both hands, & gave half of it to my mom. When I steamed it, the asparagus tasted like the time of year—green & fresh & a tiny bit sweet.
On Sunday my friend met me here & we drove down to her cabin together to do the YearCompass, which for various reasons we had not managed to get done in the early part of the year. It’s the perfect place to do a process like that: the little room still fragrant with the pine boards in used in the remodel, so quiet that all we could hear was birdsong & tree frogs, and the occasional smack of a bumblebee against the windows. My friend made a fire in the wood stove, and we agonized through the wrap-up of last year, & found, as always that the repetition, & just saying it aloud to each other, made the whole process meaningful in a way that somehow always runs deeper than expected.
Sometimes just listing it all out on paper helps, seeing all the major points of the year, all the struggles. My sense of time, never good, has further eroded in the past few years, and being able to look at things in a container like that, and say, this & this & this all happened in the spring, no wonder I was worn out by summer, can be very useful, since my inclination is always to think the failure is on my end, & I’m simply not working hard enough.
I find it’s even better to ask the questions with a friend than it is alone—I have different explanations & clearer assessments, since I don’t take everything as read, can’t stick to my own cramped scribble when I’m also articulating the answer out loud. We remind each other of things as we go, since we spend so much time together over the course of the year. It’s good practice for me to have to speak my ambitions—they’re big and ambitious enough I’m a little shy of writing them here, since then you would know if I failed at them, but saying them to one person is just about manageable.
Sometimes I think I’ll go back at the midpoint of the year, or some other arbitrary pause, and look over the YearCompass booklet or my answers again, get realigned, but in fact I have never felt moved to do so. The process is frustrating in its repetition, and once a year is about all I can stand, but there’s also something about it that feels complete. Once finished, I don’t need to go back. The door of the old year has closed behind me.
When we drove back up to Bellingham, the rain had drifted back out again & the landscape was really putting on a show for us: bright blue sky above, with enormous puffs of white clouds as we were coming up out of the flatlands in the valley, greener than green on the trees, showing off their new spring leaves, and the very tips of the highest hills in the distance getting thoroughly dusted with white.
reading room
I was helping my dad last weekend, & had some long periods of waiting while I did so. The book I brought to keep me company was The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, which I have probably written about before, because I am obsessed with it. It’s a court intrigue story, essentially, about the unloved, exiled son of the emperor’s fourth wife becoming quite suddenly the heir to the empire.
The thing I love so much about it is how complete it feels—the arcane rituals, the different forms of address for different layers of society, the elaborate clothing, the workings of an ancient court—it reads much less like something created, and more like I strayed into a different world, like Addison fashioned an aperture for us to look through, rather than making the place up whole-cloth. That is to say, I believed it, even more strongly this time through, since this was my second read. I would read five more in the series, if they existed, and had to strongly resist the temptation to flip it over and start again from the beginning, which I managed only because I am conscious of wanting to read it again, and don’t want to rub all the shine off of it by handling it too much or too quickly.
Thank you for reading the Dead Letter Department, & especially to those of you who support it with a subscription. If you want to write to me, you can always send me an email at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com. I’ll see you here again soon, & in the meantime, may something you get to eat taste just like springtime.