The Dead Letter Department #8
(did you miss dead letter department #7? catch up here!)
The lilacs in my backyard, deep purple and nearly a full story tall, are just about to blow all the way open. A little farther south, one county down, the white ones are already going full blast, great clusters of them along the highway, in between the just-leafing trees. I found this out accidentally when I took my mom down to look at tulips last week, both of us being thoroughly sick of our own four walls. Tulips are a big deal here, thanks to the low lying farms and all the Dutch farmers, big enough that there’s a whole festival for them. People come a long ways to see the places where you can stand, in the right season, engulfed in color, unending, uncannily even rows of red and white and yellow stretching out almost to the horizon. It’s usually a mix of gorgeous and weird but we saw not a particle of it, because by the time we got far enough south a huge, heavy haze was laying over the whole valley, drenching everything in a grey-brown almost like last summer’s smoke.
It made for a strange drive, passing dim rows in the distance, the occasional farmhouse or ancient tree heaving out of the mist only to disappear again a few moments later. I lived in the valley when I first moved back to this coast, renting a falling-down cabin right on the water from a guy who had a 99 year lease from a local tribe. It was a relief back then, every time I saw those wide spaces, fields rolling right down to the water and then past it into the green sea turtle backs of scattered islands, after having spent years in the short hills and shorter horizons of New England. I was expecting to feel some relief this time.
I didn’t, of course. There wasn’t really anything to see: just endless grey-brown in all directions.
It’s been such a bad year, a mudslide of a bad year, ground constantly giving way under my feet every time I think I might have found a solid patch to stand on again. Relief honestly seems a long ways off, even now that I’m half-vaccinated. I stood in line at the Rite-Aid to get my first shot and it was the first time I’d been inside a store, been near other people, in more months than I care to count.
We gave up, finally, drove to a familiar beach that looks across the swell of Padilla Bay, out to the oil refinery. I’ve taken people to that beach before that don’t quite appreciate it. They look across the water and get distressed at the sight of the refinery churning away, which I understand. They don’t know it looks like Oz at night; colored lights, towers of steam rising up to the stars. If you get lucky & you’re patient enough to be quiet, sometimes you can hear the mud snails scraping along, scraping together.
reading room
The Pursuit of Love, y’all. I am late to this book, despite a rather intense Mitford sisters period a couple of years ago during which I read their collected letters (riveting, massive) and several biographies. It’s rather like Austen, if Jane Austen had been writing right before World War II, and I think it might be similarly brushed off, by inattentive readers, as being too light, as novels about manners and love too often are. In fact it’s so sharply characterized and the dialogue is so perfect I suspect I’ll be returning to it more than once. It’s also fascinating structurally: the narrator’s own life barely shows around the edges of the story, which is almost completely focused on her cousin Linda, so closely observed and beloved by the narrator that she can convincingly show us Linda’s own interiority, her own thoughts. Here’s a passage I keep thinking about:
“But she was filled with a strange, wild, unfamiliar happiness, and knew that this was love. Twice in her life she had mistaken something else for it; it was like seeing somebody in the street who you think is a friend, you whistle and wave and run after him. A few minutes later the real friend appears in view, and then you can’t imagine how you ever mistook that other person for him. Linda was now looking upon the authentic face of love, and she knew it, but it frightened her. That it should come so casually, so much by a series of accidents, was frightening.”
one good thing
American cheese slices. This is a perfect food item. It comes, handily, in its own little plastic sleeve, like a library book, or a document important enough to be laminated. Nothing tastes quite like it, even actual cheese. I am unspeakably sick of cooking for myself (& not getting to cook for anyone else), and this beautiful little square of orange over my lunchtime staple of spicy ramen has been surprisingly cheering.
write back (a little differently now)
So here we are at Ghost! The (slender) existing archives have moved over here & so far the only thing I haven’t been able to add back is a comment section. The solution to that so far seems to be either learn to code (lol) or pay an additional fee for the service, which I can’t quite stretch to at the moment. For now, I sincerely hope you’ll email me if you want to tell me anything about the Dead Letter Department, whether that be something you’d like to see me write about or a suggestion for other things I can do with a slice of cheese.
If you like the Dead Letter Department, please share it with a friend! I hope to see you here again.