ON THE COMFORT OF SIMPLY KNOWING THEY ARE THERE, POSSIBILITY AS SALVE, AND REPRODUCING THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT
Thursday March 4 and Friday March 5 2021
Dear Sarah,
I was thinking about how I said to you after your Ozarks adventure (I may have also said it before!) that I don’t think I know anyone with whom I’d want to live for a month. I am glad you have friends with whom you could do this! I also had a moment of wanting somehow to apologize for the idea that, by definition, I could not imagine spending four weeks in a house with you and yours. I don’t think you’ll take offense at this but I’ll waft an apology your way just in case! I want to say the most time I’ve spent living with someone else (other than M) since my college days is probably around a week or ten days. I’m sure I could do it, could live with other people for a long stretch of time, but would I? Perhaps under experimental conditions with the intention of benefitting science. I shall await a call from Biosphere X or the like.
While I couldn’t imagine living in a house with other non-M people for a whole month, I won’t deny I’m a little bit envious of your pleasant experience! To state the obvious, it is nice to have good friends, nice to spend time with them, and nice to bond even further, to deepen your friendships with each other. I am letting your treasure cast a little glow onto my face!
On Thursday evening I had a phone conversation with someone I don’t know, and I still don’t know him in the most basic of ways — I don’t know his name, where he lives specifically, what he does with his days — but I know some things about how he describes himself, the space from which he spoke to me, some of his memories, and he knows the same kinds of things about me. It was something like a performance, an exchange guided by prompts, an intimate experience between strangers, put on by the Walker and envisioned by the artists 600 Highwaymen. I am still mulling it over. It was a good call.
I recently bought three pieces of artwork, three paintings that I love, and we haven’t yet hung them in our home because we are thinking of installing them over the fireplace and I worried they would pick up airborne ash during fireplace season. Now that we’re making our way into warmer weather it’s time to get them up on the wall! M made me a diagram of the wall of the house where the paintings will hang, a wall with a window to the west, fireplace in the middle, and a doorway to the east, and he included three tiny rectangles, scaled down from life-size to cut out of the page’s margins, so that we could experiment with wall placement strategies. We had also done some staging of taped-up pages as stand-ins for the artwork a while ago — each of the paintings is about the size of a letter-sized sheet of paper — but I took the pages down a while ago. M knows that something like this diagramming activity is a way to nudge me along to doing the thing, in this case getting the paintings up on the wall. My interest lies first in the act of finding and collecting; once objects are in my possession I am often comfortable with simply knowing they’re there: I have them, they are in my space waiting for me. I make sure they are protected and then I move on to something else; an acquisition finished but not completely realized. When I eventually get things up on the wall, as I somehow have done over the years, it is pleasant and I enjoy it thoroughly. It just takes a while to get there!
As this Friday begins to wind down, and as I scooched some of my planned-for-Friday activities on my calendar into next week, I had an epiphany, the hypothesis of which I will introduce here: I wonder if the reason I like freelancing and have pointed myself in this direction, and my love of my google calendar, both come from some desire to reproduce the school environment? The division of my time into regular daily and weekly blocks and streams; the view of my calendar like my old class schedule. I am laughing at myself because it feels very possible! I will examine further and report back to you whether this nascent theory bakes into some kind of truth as the weekend unfolds.
Tonight M and I will be enjoying a lenten fish fry dinner to be acquired from a local Catholic school — not because either of us observe Lent but because I have a fond, if limited, memory of fish fries. I have spoken of fish fries to M as if they were something I did all the time as a youth, but in reality I recall one single time I went with my mother, sister, aunt, and grandma to a church fish fry on a Friday night during Lent. I mentioned it to my mother the other day, who also stated her love of fish fries, and it turns out the one that I’ve been to is also the one she’s been to — the only one! We both love fish fries… having been to that single one! It’s really just a love of fried fish talking for both of us, it would appear.
On that note, I’m going to settle into some week’s end wind-down yoga before I dig into fried fish and celebrate the close of a warming week, with more on the horizon! Glad y’all are back and cozy at home, with a new raft of memories to treasure!
Until soon,
Eva
P.S. I’m still thinking about your words last week, that a person told you that you are unusually obsessed with finding meaning in things. There are so many ways in which unusual seems to me like the best way to be, and this is one of them!
March 5, 2021
Dear Eva,
It is a Friday that feels like a Tuesday, and this is a gift that keeps on giving. It is so rare for a week to feel short these days! But between my Monday off and then driving back to Iowa on Wednesday, it felt like the week started in earnest yesterday. And now, here we are with letters due as we peer into an imminent weekend. I’ll take it!
This will be my first weekend at home after four away. I imagine there will be lots of tidying up, settling back in, filling the fridge. All of these necessities sound comforting. But I will admit that the thought of our solo family weekend also sounds a little lonely after so many days spent surrounded by chaos and fun. As you noted last week, [i]t can be hard to part with places when you know you’re not likely to return. You were speaking of literal places, but the same goes for figurative ones. It is unlikely we will again ever find ourselves living and working communally with friends in a strange, isolated location for an extended period of time. I wouldn’t want to do it forever, but doing it for a while was glorious. There is always a wistfulness to endings, though as you wrote it does become easier as you experience more goodbyes and transitions along the way and realize there is always something new in our future to delight and mesmerize us in new ways.
I took great pleasure hearing about your experience at the Virtual Art Book Fair last week. Poking around the website myself and then hearing your description of the event, it felt like a peek into one of innumerable pockets of possibility in the labyrinth of the internet. So many people doing fascinating, complex work on topics all over the sun! It is nice to be reminded such thriving pockets are there, even if I just pop in and then back out. Maybe this is an echo of the thought above about goodbyes—there are always new places to explore, new ideas to unearth. The knowledge of limitless possibility is a salve.
(Is reseeding this knowledge of limitless possibility what you are doing when you run your digital fingers on all the books? Perhaps!)
Returning back to our abode has me thinking about how—of course!—everything in our regularly scheduled life hummed along while we were absent. And then I started thinking about how unreasonably difficult it can be to truly comprehend the context of somewhere you are not. I feel this most viscerally when I am communicating with someone who I am not with, which is something I do all day, every day for work and very often with friends and loved ones, too. I have not ever been able to find precisely the right words to describe it, but the best I can do is to think about each of us having a little reality bubble in which we are sitting at any given moment. When I am on the phone with you while I am on a walk, my reality bubble is moving through my neighborhood and my attention may be drawn away from our conversation toward something that is physically impossible to ignore at that moment, like a friendly hello from a passerby. Your reality bubble may be moving, too, a few hundreds of miles north of here. We can both intellectually understand this situation perfectly well, but I think it is easy to underestimate just how challenging decontextualized interactions really are for us to grok. I am with you, but then when something pops into your physical reality bubble, I am reminded that I am not with you. I am with my children, but then when a work email comes in that I must address right away, I am not with the people I am with. Long distance communication in all its forms is challenging, and face to face communication is challenging when it is dotted with interventions from people at a distance (text messages, I’m looking at you). It is difficult to have a real sense for the reality bubbles of others, to remember they are not in (and cannot even really perceive) the reality bubbles we are in at any given moment.
It is late on a Friday evening, and I fear this last thought of mine was not articulated in a way that got my ideas across. But the time to wrap up this letter has come, and there is always next week’s letter for me to clarify and expand. From one reality bubble to another, I am sending good cheer!
Your friend,
Sarah