ON UNCHANGED WORDS AND CHANGED SELVES, NATURE'S MARCH, AND LIGHTER MOVEMENTS OF THE BLADE
Thursday August 22 2019
Dear Sarah,
Late in the afternoon today I was staring aimlessly at various work documents, the day winding down, and I was drumming up only the most meager helping of enthusiasm for the tasks at hand, when I recalled that it was (is) Thursday and time to write my letter to you! I briskly proceeded to clear my desk and am invigorated to put pencil to paper now!
There are two things I’ve been thinking about writing about to you this week: bees, and whittling. First, the bees. Two weeks ago, I was headed to a campsite an hour north of Minneapolis, meeting up with folks from the Women’s Woodshop to build an outhouse. Before the camping came the loading of the car with all the camping gear (whether you camp ten nights or one, you need about the same amount of gear, it seems!) and I was questing in our basement for a headlamp, that key part of the camping experience. While I was in the basement I heard a sound that I feared was water — water running, water trickling? — and then, more fearfully, I realized it was not a water noise but an insect noise: a buzzing, pricking sound within a ceiling vent that pointed out toward the backyard. The sound made me tingle but it didn’t seem like the insects were anywhere to be seen, inside; their presence was only revealed through their buzzing. I told M about the insect sounds — he was aware and hadn’t mentioned them to me, I think out of kindness, which did not bother me because I was pleased to have missed out on earlier skin-crawling feelings — and then I left to go camping. (Not to be the primary focus of this letter, I encountered more insects on this weekend, in the form of infinite mosquitos that nibbled me here, there, and everywhere!)
Once ensconced in our campsite, I broke out my box full of camping miscellany and located my whittling block and knife. My whittling block is a now very hard fist-sized block of wood that smells of clove, which I acquired in 2011 while working at Headlands Center for the Arts, during Donald Fortescue’s artist residency and his creation of the aWay Station in Headlands’ public Project Space studio. The aWay Station was a space Donald made to gather people together to whittle, to learn a new and peaceful activity. My wood was a bit hard to work with even in 2011 and I didn’t get too far with it, but it was displayed in the studio with other whittlings, and after the project ended my whittled block was returned to me. I got myself a sharp little Mora Woodcarving 120 knife like we’d used in the studio, thinking I might take up whittling. Instead I find that over the years I’ve taken a bit off the block here and there, and it’s lived in the camp box; it seems whittling by a fire has a certain natural (faux nostalgic?) way about it. After the camping weekend two weeks ago I kept the whittling block and the knife out, brought them to my desk in my office instead of tucking them away. Now in these last two weeks when I want something a little different from my day — some moment — I just whittle a bit here at my desk, then with my right hand sweep a small palmful of whits into my left hand and then into the trash. Shavings. When you’re whittling you hold the knife in one hand and nudge the backside of the blade with the thumb of your other hand. The wood is hard and I try not to let my knife hand cramp up. When I was working on the table I built earlier in the spring and summer, I bandsawed and then hand-planed the taper of the legs; it was my first go with the planer and I was giving it all I had — pushing hard, digging the blade into and down the table legs, removing thick curls of wood and giving myself a blister on my palm. It was tough. I readied myself to return to the shop the next week, to work hard, to try to avoid blisters if I could, but coached myself that maybe they were just a necessary part of the work of planing. Then, when I returned to the woodshop, the planing was just totally different. I hadn’t (intentionally) learned anything new in between, but here now my touch was different — light movements of the blade across the wood yielded long, thin, papery curls, delicate, a new way of making progress. Less force, no deep bites hacked out of the wood, no blisters.
I emailed a man named Yuuki about the bees last weekend (I haven’t heard from him but I have no hard feelings about this; it is August and perhaps he’s vacationing, or working with bees instead of reading his email — but did I possibly put him off by mentioning in my email that the bees were already dying?) And this is the thing: last week M noted that the bee situation had progressed, the bees had breached the vent and were physically in our basement — but instead of the frenzied swarm I feared, they were dead on the floor or slowly crawling their last steps, dying perhaps from lack of food or the connection to the hive that I imagine they need. I’m sorry the bees are dying; I’m not entirely sure I’m sorry that the problem of the bees in the vent in my basement seems to have resolved itself somewhat without my particular intervention. There are times to push, to do something, and there are times to step away, to wait, listen, rest, and if nothing happens a bit of time will pass and maybe the moment and the need will pass, too.
You described in your letter last week the lottery-esque feeling of the job interview process, how so much depends on who is looking for jobs, who comes upon a listing, who is chosen, how their day is going, and on. In a way, timing is everything and nothing in this situation; there are many factors you simply can’t control. And still, as you noted, it generally works out. It’s a light form of “things happen as they should,” or, more, “things will happen as they will,” sometimes. It feels a bit like going with the flow — perhaps more specifically, swimming your preferred stroke with the flow? — instead of pushing upstream. The question that rings in my ears lately is, Why stress? Why anxiety? Beyond the sense that it is the way of things… why? If I say I will not be stressed, will I not be stressed? Perhaps. Fewer blisters, bee season in my basement drawing to a close — but know that there are other bees buzzing behind the electrical outlet off our back porch. We haven’t watched all the bees die. Nature will march on, you and I will each sleep another night, and another Letter Thursday will roll around sooner than expected, right on time. Talk soon!
Your friend,
Eva
August 22, 2019
Dear Eva,
What a week! The silliest part is that nothing of real-life consequence has really happened to me this week. Rather, it’s just been a journey of strange and wildly varying emotions caused by various factors, then mixed with a massive dose of self-imposed stress. My specialty!
Before this wild and wooly week began, I had decided I was going to mark the start of my fifth decade by changing things up a bit. Letting go of pressure I place on myself, generally just loosening up the old metaphorical joints in all the ways. But given the week I’ve had, it seems I’ll be waiting to start the new relaxed Sarah mode until I turn 40 later this year.
In what feels like many moons ago, I took some time last weekend to reread Pancakes After You’re Dead, the teensy memoir I wrote for Jonah and Simon more than one year ago. It had been about 12 months since I’d read the words so I was reading them with fresh eyes, and wow. I certainly remain happy for having written it, maybe even proud. But reading it anew after all this time, I was struck by just how simple and small it really was. I know without a doubt that I am now able to read it more objectively, with some distance, so this reaction is quite a bit closer to truth. The book is just a snapshot, a few words here and there, some memories. But I remember so vividly just how major it felt to have created that little thing. It felt like I bled out on the page, dug up and revealed bits of my life that made me feel bare and exposed in a way I never had. When I shared it with you (you were among the first three humans to read it!), I felt dizzy at the thought of you reading it, like I might as well have asked you to give me your thoughts on my value as a human being. I remember the night Bill read it. I was out at my niece’s dance recital, and the entire time I was thinking about him reading it, wondering and fretting about what he might be thinking. When I came home and he gave me his reaction, he made a teasing offhand comment that he did not mean as an insult but it felt like he might as well have hit me in the stomach with a baseball bat.
The words in the book have not changed. I have. How stunning! What a gift to get such irrefutable evidence of personal change. It is making me think about how a huge part of starting to write is just getting the courage to put anything into words that you feel. When you first do it, it feels like you have won a great war. In a way, I guess you have. As I wrote above, it is ourselves we often battle the most in life. And it is so easy to forget our past selves, to start taking for granted truths that once felt like epiphanies, to take all that was learned and to absorb it so deeply that it is no longer discernible. This experience - of rereading what once felt like my magnum opus and now I see so clearly was just a few patchy memories scattered with some reflections - gives me a brand new appreciation for the many cycles through which the writers we cherish have been through. Yes, there are vomit drafts and endless edits, but it’s more than that. It is about unpacking memories, feelings, thoughts; things most of us go our entire lives without ever touching. There are so many ways to tell our stories, so many ways to dig up what we feel and believe. The final work product is really just one small, almost trivial, part of it. Writing that wee little book changed me. I wonder about all the ways I am changing during this letter exchange. If I read back to week 1, will I be startled by my naivete? I assume the answer is yes, and that makes me happy. It is progress.
Yours,
Sarah