Estivating (journal)
The reason I am keeping a journal this season of the hearings and the horses is to put down those “bits of the mind’s string too short to use,” as Joan Didion once said. Things tie themselves together with little quote marks and perhaps the string crosshatches itself into a statement in time, who knows? My son, scanning The New York Times one weekday morning when it was heavy with financial articles of the technical sort, complained, “not even anybody good died today” and I hang onto that phrase as it reflects the kind of stasis I am in, estivating here.
* * *
I came away from the city the first day of June, no longer in the grip of one routine, promptly though voluntarily snared in another one, for my friend and neighbor across the valley has leased me two mares for the riding and gifted me with two foals for the caring. Some impulse toward order propels me into the nonpermissiveness of animals to care for, a schedule to adhere to. I think I am afraid of too much latitude – how else could I handle such large blocks of time? As it is, I sleep less and more lightly than I have in years. One night the bay mare, for reasons of her own, took out a railroad tie and 20 feet of fence board. A week later, the colt and the filly, having spent several hours worrying the top slide board out of its double fixture, exploded out of the barn at 2 a.m. and we went barefoot flapping after them. They wanted only to be in the paddock with the mares, it seems. We want them stabled at night, as they are too young and venturesome to roam. It is a return to the era of earaches and
chicken pox and the nightmares of young children. Presumably, it serves some purposes, vague ones: the animal pleasure of touch, an aesthetic gratification, and it uses up some of my maternal obsessions. And is perhaps a way of hanging loose in between some more sustained efforts. Always the small terror of a prolonged block hovering just off stage, waiting to set in like an Ice Age. In any case, it makes me remember Orwell saying “. . . there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling . . . as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun and am haunted by the fear that there will never be a next one.”
* * *
Noondays, I try to think up here in this lumpy, pale blue room. I think of Virginia Woolf’s aunt who did her the kindness of falling from her horse while riding out to take the air in Bombay and leaving her a legacy for life, enough for that room of one’s own. The desk that I sit at in this room is an old oak piece left over from a schoolhouse when the century turned. It has a shallow pencil drawer and two sturdier deep ones and it stands on four unturned legs. Through the window it overlooks an equally unremarkable barn, once a dairy barn for fifty head of Holsteins. In the utilitarian manner of barns it is built into a slope so that one could in all seasons shovel the cow flops downhill and downwind. Years before our tenancy, an artist lived here and favoring the north light for his gloomy canvases – at least the ones he left behind are unremittingly dour in theme and muddy of color – he built an absurd sort of overhang from the haymow. It juts out like a Hapsburg jaw, looming halfway across the
one-car-width dirt road that divides house and barn. I can sit here and watch swallows come and go through the gap tooth of an upper board where they co-exist with the red squirrels. Yesterday, an owl, late awake in the mizzly weather, flapped his way in, presumably in search of mice. I hope he is snugly tenanted for a while, since he has a habit of hooting his way uphill tree by tree in the small hours annoucing something. A very prepossessing paddock connects into the expired dairy farmer’s dung heap, now levelled out and used as a shelter for the mares. Except they often prefer to stand out in a downpour, looking woebegone but cool.
* * *
From my window I can see the strawberry roan mare tearing up grass by its roots, munching dirt and all, swashbuckling the flies and mosquitoes with her bug repellent-larded tail. Her coloring is rather like that of a redheaded woman, the freckled variety. This, I realize, stands for my four aunts, now deceased, who were always diminishing their spots with cocoa butter.
Privately, I call this mare Amanda and I am writing a cycle of poems for her. She is a sensible and almost never petulant creature, on the enormous side (Aunt Harriet?) with feet as big as dinner plates and the girth of a California wine keg. A broad white blaze down her face lends her a look of continuous startle (Aunt Alma’s plucked eye-brows?). And of course that voluptuous golden tail and mane, brillo consistency. She knots these by rubbing on the fence. We spend hours together. I do the combing and she, placidly, enjoys the small sensual tugs of the bristles. Until I was twelve I suffered two heavy plaits of hair, continually coming unbraided. “Stand still!” my mother would say. “Your part is as crooked as Ridge Avenue.” Now my mother’s hair is as thin and white as spun sugar, coaxed from a baby pink scalp. This is the kind of reflecting that comes of combing.
* * *
Meanwhile, the Watergate unfurls its tattered length daily and we catch bits of it between barn and pond. It is a wondrous decadence, this daytime opera bouffe, beaming in over the hills to this isolated spot. We worm the babies in the middle of John Dean’s testimony and at last I see a connection. Although it makes me want to be sick, I count the nematodes in the little one’s shit – forty the first day, fifty-six the next. I am making sure.
* * *
Carless, two miles from town, we ride the horses down the back way, through the covered bridge, along the old railroad bed, and come out at the laundromat which was once a station stop on the B & M line. We tie them to the VFW flagpole, fifty yards from the general store. It seems a fitting use. When we remount, milk, flour, butter and beer in knapsacks, I see that Amanda has left a little pyramid on the lawn.
* * *
Mornings, early, we go for long trips over corduroy and dirt roads that have lost their destinations, although the county area map still notes the burying grounds and sugaring off houses of a hundred years ago. It is chanterelle time, their dry yellow vases nicely visible in the woods at this height. It is like looking for butter. I remember Laurie telling me that in Provence if you want to go mushrooming you must start at day-break or the other foragers will have picked the woods clean. Here, we can go all day loading our burlap saddle bags with fresh edibles, and not meet another person. It is a delicious depravity, feasting on our find – how far we are from the real world! What does the mushroom know? Only to open the hinges of its gills and shower down its blind spores – white, pink, rusty brown, or the good black of the inky caps. It corrects itself, this fruiting body, it is phototropic. Thanks to gravity, something will fall on fertile ground, though most stay stuck on the gills like words on a
page. I suppose I mean that love is like this; as evanescent, as easily lost, as mindless, blind, instinctual. Or it is all a metaphor for the poem, the genesis of the poem as unexpected as the patient mushroom you come upon.
Today I order 200 lbs. of horse chow from the Feed & Grain Exchange in the next town. I do this by phone, apologetically, because I have no car and must ask for a delivery. The woman taking my $12 order chats with me, a long and cordial conversation between strangers who will likely never meet. Afterwards, I think about the natural courtesy of it and all the surly bank clerks, taxi drivers and cops who throw this moment into high relief.
* * *
Today, two-startling finds: an enormous stand of ripe raspberries that fell off their stems into our pails, and yielded 12 jars of jam, and several fresh boletes of a kind I had never seen before. They matched in every way
boletus mirabilis, which is native to the Pacific Northwest. We ate them gratefully for supper, enfolded into omelets and praised the name and serendipity of their arrival. The mushroom passion freshens with me year by year. Too bad it is such an esoteric subject for Americans – each genus is as distinct as broccoli from cauliflower. A broccoli poem would speak its own universal, but a boletus poem? They are, of course, the toadstools in Alice and all those dreadful fairy books of my childhood, each with an elf underneath. Little children are taught to trample them on sight as something nasty to be eradicated. A pity. Once you have eaten wild mushrooms, the dull store-bought agaricus is a poor substitute. I think of Thoreau’s “a huckleberry never reaches Boston.” I pickle some mushrooms, string others with needle and thread and hang them to dry. Extras I saute and freeze, but they are a pale imitation of the fresh-picked and into the pot ones.
* * *
This morning I hoed between the corn rows and thought up ways to foil the raccoons who will unerringly arrive with the first ripe ears. A transistor radio tuned to an allnight rock and roll station? Camphor balls and creosoted rope around the perimeter? One of my farmer neighbors claims that balls of newspapers between the rows will keep them off; they dislike the crackle. What to make of the foraging and gathering in? One part thrift, one part madness; three parts inexplicable.
* * *
In Yeats’s journal, the worksheets for “the fascination of what’s difficult” contain these lines: “I swear before the dawn comes round again/ I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.” But the domestication has got the better of me; lose half a garden and begin again. “Oh masters of life, give me confidence in something.” Yeats again. So it seems I put my trust in the natural cycle, and bend to it. It is so far removed from self-improvement as to be an escape hatch. Nature pays me no attention, but announces the autonomy of everything. Here nothing is good or bad, but
is, in spite of.
* * *
Adrienne Rich says it.
“I have been standing all my life in the/ direct path of a battery of signals/ the most accurately transmitted most/untranslateable language in the universe/ . . . I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/and the reconstruction of the mind.”
