where i live now
It's raining, the yard next door slick with yellow leaves. When we got back to Boston this summer I bought a small wooden desk, technically a console table, installed it over the radiator next to the window in the bedroom. I haven't had a desk of my own in longer than I can remember. Sometimes I still work on the bed or the couch but most days I sit on the chair that belonged to my grandmother and open the blinds and work, and watch. I keep a small jar of moon juice next to me. (That's rainwater I collected and then bathed in the light of the full moon. The water has been in that jar for, oof, I dunno, a year and a half? Since I was pregnant, I think. Honestly, I don't know what I'm meant to do with it, but I like the clarity of it. There could be power there.)
Anyway. Outside, the leaves are marigold yellow, sweet corn yellow, creamy afternoon sun. We'll be gone before they fall. I've been watching this squirrel, the one without a tail. This place—our terrace—is overrun with squirrels, but in a good way. There are mating pairs of blue jays and cardinals. There are raccoons—we hear them in the trees at night and find their prints on the tops of the garbage cans. We had a bunny nest in our herb garden last year, six velvet-soft kits that Vic and I promised we wouldn't touch but then couldn't help ourselves, stroking their ears with the back of our fingers. The solitary turkey, a female, who roosted under our tomatoes and plucked them one by one when they were ripe with a lazy gulp, who spent sunny days sleeping on our neighbors' outdoor table. It's what sealed it, for me, this apartment. Even before we came inside, we turned down the narrow street and it felt a bit like stumbling onto a country laneway, and then the riot of birds in the tree, like we'd been let in on a secret. It's a place that could make me forget the place I'm living, I thought.
Hannah noticed the squirrel when she was here, just for an afternoon, an hour where we dragged folding chairs out into the drive and wore our masks and she stared at the baby and I stared at her. She'd been changed since I last saw her, a great loss, a great shift, and the months of sun and salt that had turned her skin dark. The squirrel crept across the chain link fence and Hannah saw it and exclaimed, That squirrel has no tail! I was excited she'd noticed; I didn't imagine anyone else would care. I don't know what happened to his tail; I like to think it was painless, like maybe a sibling gnawed at it in the nest? Orphaned kittens do this, too, suckle at each other for comfort until they have to be separated for fear of hot spots. In the early days, Mira sucked hickeys on our forearms or the soft divots of our collarbones. All the squirrel has in place of his tail is this panicked tuft. But he's surviving. If I don't see him for a few days I get nervous, but so far he's always shown up. I couldn't touch Hannah, and that was hard. Hannah is a great force of a human, makes space in the air with her body, lavishes her friends. Hands in your hair, fingers entwined with yours. She's taught me a lot about presence, physical and otherwise. There have been so many people I have wanted to hold in the last few months.
I identify with this squirrel. Can you tell? Winter is coming and I watch him gather his acorns, bury them in the flower pots that belong to the older couple who live behind us in the Cape Cod house that looks like it has been there since the 1800s. For all I know it has, and they've been living there that whole time. They are both hard of hearing and they scream at each other constantly, a lot of, "Get in the fucking car!" But they also sing, or she does, a warbling, just-left-of-on-key soprano, and their yard and driveway is overflowing with pots containing plants in various stages of life and death. I worry about the squirrel. I worry he won't have enough. I worry that when we come back I won't see him anymore, and I will know what that means, and I will think he died alone.
I live here now, but only for another three days. Then we'll go to a place where we can hold and be held. I'll find a new window to look out of. I'll write to you from there.
radically consuming
- I've made this soup twice in the last month (the squash takes twice as long as it says it does, and you should use full-fat coconut milk), and these scones have been a quarantine treat, but the best recipe we've discovered in the past year is this pasta, which I can promise you is better than you're imagining.
- Interview with a death doula
- My most recent anxiety outlet has been searching for vintage sweaters on Poshmark. Recommend.
- "There was teaching, and there are deadlines for talks or things, but mostly I have control of my time, and what I do with it is keep to myself," she says. "I am grateful for my life, for my time. I read and think. I have been privileged to do almost exclusively what I want."
- Pre-pandemic me slept on Insecure. Don't be pre-pandemic me.
- Want, Luster, The Old Drift