On offhand comments turned real-life plans, bad college beer, and your little archaeology brush
February 4, 2021
Dear Eva,
It is the day before we are embarking upon a grand adventure in communal living, and I am rapidly entering that frenzied pre-travel state of mind. Tomorrow in the late afternoon we will hit the road to Branson, Missouri where we will be meeting our friends from Chicago to live with them in a house near a lake for four weeks. Last week you wrote that you were appreciating your cold weather runs because they are a reminder that the world is bigger than the frame of [your] screen(s). I am anxious for a similar reminder when we relocate for this stretch of time. A change of scenery, and with real life human contact, no less! It is an offhand-comment (“it would be nice to go away in the winter”) turned-real-life-plan, and it does not yet seem like it could possibly really be happening. But as our living room continues to pile up with bags of toys and books, it is a visual reminder that it’s about to get real! Next time we speak, I’ll be in the middle of it, and it is fun to think about how different my perspective—and my day-to-day life—will be in just a few short days.
This past week I heard an interview with an author named Katherine May that very much made me think of you. She has written a book called Wintering, about both the natural season of winter and the restorative process of rest and retreat that we need at various points of our lives no matter the time of year. After the interview, I actually then bought the book with the intent of sending it to you, but then I decided I should read books before gifting them so you will have to await your present until I make sure it is worthy! (I suppose that is similar to my infamous act of showing you the birthday card I bought you and failed to actually fill out and give you when we were in Toronto together many moons ago. A gesture that says look, I thought about you and started to act and then failed to follow through!) In any case, the ideas she shared in the interview were resonant with much of your previous writing about seasons and about the need for respite. Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Wintering is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. I find this notion of wintering, or enduring unhappiness, as a kind of natural cycle of human life to be comforting, and even fortifying.
I wonder what transformations will occur once the human population completes its long, collective wintering during this pandemic? Like you, I have found some solace during this quiet time, some surprising comfort in the smallness and repetition of my days. There is so much I look forward to reintroducing into post-pandemic life, but I do not want to forget the clarity this unusual season in life has given me—about what is important, and perhaps even more so, about what is not.
You mentioned in last week’s letter that you noticed a striking difference in age in your photos of us from our Berlin 2016 trip. I have no doubt! It has been a wild and wooly few years, and as you noted, we may have been at the prime of our fresh-faced adulthood in those days. Strangely, I always find that peering at old photos where I [by definition] appear younger, gives me a feeling of longing, at least until I remind myself that we either get older or we die, and I know what I choose! And I like to think about how these present selves will look fresh-faced to our mid-40s selves, and so on. I think I recall you chuckling awhile ago when I told you how my aunt replied to my birthday wishes via text saying, I can’t believe I’m 82! I think this might be the most genuinely surprising thing about aging—the way we never quite feel the age we are. I always assumed once we got older, we would feel older. But instead, suddenly you realize that you have had clothes since college and that makes them two decades old! And things like bad college beer feel eons away but yet at the same time you don’t feel any older. It’s nonsensical but it’s real.
Perhaps in direct contradiction to that, I’m actually feeling particularly aged lately. The bones in my back and neck are all a bit discombobulated, and I’m finding I need Ibuprofen to get comfortably through the day. Maybe I do not need to ask my walking neighbor whether he feels like the same self as his body grows weary; I can just ask myself. The answer is yes!
Wow, I am delighted to see that I have knocked out this letter on a Thursday without much fuss, despite my aforementioned pre-travel jitters. I look forward to sitting down with your letter tomorrow night in a new abode, in a new place, surrounded by a few new humans.
Until then,
Sarah
Friday February 5 2021
Dear Sarah,
It’s Friday evening, not too late, and M and I have broken our Dry January with a beer and a cocktail, respectively! Yesterday we went to a specialty shop that sells nice beverages and cheeses and other goodies and we procured ourselves a soft cheese and a harder cheese and a baguette, and we’ve nibbled (gobbled, really) cheese and bread and I’m feeling fizzy-fuzzy from the first drink with alcohol I’ve had since New Year’s Eve! I did also just feel a pinging pain above my left ear, in my temple, so perhaps my body is not quite ready to welcome back the effects of alcohol! Don’t worry, we’ll recover.
It’s been a long week — in fact it feels like it’s been a long few weeks — but today I felt like I had a bit of a mental breakthrough (thankfully, rather than a mental breakdown) after chugging through some work for days in a fairly mechanical way. Earlier in the week I had some good moments with something I was writing, and today I had some flashes of insight about some other things I was working on (both work-work rather than personal work, mind you) and that is the feeling that helps power all the other days — that moment when you get a little glimmer of something new, and you feel yourself settle into something you are thinking or writing, do a little mental flexing of the hands interlocked at the knuckles, feel yourself working less like a machine poking through the days and more like a person bringing built-up knowledge and intuition to the task at hand. Perhaps that makes it all sound grander than what it was, but there is something very satisfying about feeling like you’re excavating something and instead of just pushing dirt and dust around, suddenly you find a bone, and you’re dusting it off with your little archaeology brush, ever so gently, and you realize you have found something new, and you are ready for what new doors it will open, and what new doors you will open with it.
This weekend I have a bit of work to do to prepare for the woodblock printmaking class I’ll be taking on Tuesday night, and I am very, very excited. I tend to get excited for new skills and new projects, and sometimes my excitement fizzles after the initial spark, when I see how much preparation is involved in continuing with a certain skill, and my interest wanes a bit when I have to set up a new environment for a kind of work that is not well aligned with my current environment. I may be speaking from the glow of anticipation, but I think it’s possible that woodblock printing is a thing I could get into (always hopeful!). Printmaking, and specifically woodblock printmaking, combines a few things I love: printing, pages, ephemera; wood and carving and the delicate action of simply chipping away at wood; and, to start, the simplicity of black ink on a white page. It’s a woodworking project, though the goal isn’t exactly to make a thing out of wood; the goal is to make an image out of wood, to split background from foreground in the flat space of a block of wood. Then you ink up your block and print your pages one by one! I know the design(s) I am going to work with, working from some sketches I made and tucked away in a folder a while ago, and I am excited to get going with the immediacy of inking my block and printing my pages.
I was certain I had written some notes while reading your letter of last week, but it is possible I felt the notes moving through my body and didn’t jot them down on an actual page. I was intrigued to read about your process of gathering and sifting through examples of the work [ you ] have done professionally over the years. It would be a bit taxing to conduct such a review on the entire-career scale! As I read those words I thought about how we’ve been living through different work patterns (and many other patterns, of course) over the last decade-plus; I’ve worked at a few different jobs and am onto the fourth iteration of my work life within the span of the last decade. I would definitely agree with you around the difficulty of pulling together samples — I am finding it lucky that I’ve had to do it more regularly along the way, condensing and aggregating my skills and learnings through the process of picking a few illustrative examples of my work as I move from one place to the next. To be frank, it’s often necessary because leaving one place means I won’t have access anymore to the files I worked on, so it’s important to save copies for myself if I want a record of those things I worked on! It’s probably a worthwhile exercise to conduct annually no matter what. The months and years blend into each other if too much time passes, as we’ve found writing these letters — the act of capturing in the moment an idea or a story from the day firms it up in a way that would be hard to pin down if you had to pull it from memory. I don’t think a comprehensive list of anecdotes and examples exactly sticks in anyone’s mind — it is a process that is sparked by intentional review, impending change, and that’s that! It all takes effort, both the doing and the reflecting. Note to self: it’s time for me, too, to gather up examples of my work!
I also loved your experiment with restarting a book you’d started just a few weeks ago (and I loved and was able to access your Finding Nemo reference!). I was reminded of an undergrad professor of mine teaching James Joyce’s Ulysses and discussing how he found something new in the book every time he read it (not so wild in hindsight, since the book is so full of words and ideas it would be almost impossible to read it the same way twice). I’ve started reading some short stories by Deborah Eisenberg on recommendation from a friend (though I am mildly unsettled by the odd title of the collection I’m starting, Your Duck is My Duck) and I’ve found that just opening the book and reading a few pages of fiction this week has been an absolute relief: words on the page whose sole intention is to spin a tale that I can wrap around my mind and body, no to-do lists, language and the joining of words for the sheer pleasure of it. I know it was hard work for Deborah — I was particularly compelled by an article I read in The New York Times that described how it takes her about a year to write a story — but now on the page her words are here for me to enjoy fast or slow, as a pleasure or as a thought experiment, however I feel like taking them. It’s a luxury to read (and to re-read) as one wishes, and I could do it all day!
Your story of the older man in your neighborhood with whom you’ve regularly crossed paths over the years was a special treat in your letter last week (I don’t know quite how to describe it but that’s what’s coming to me right now). I felt like I was there with you on your walks (and wouldn’t that be nice). There are times in our lives, I think, when we are more visibly changing — when we are young and getting bigger and smarter every day; and when we are older, shedding bits of our young and confident selves day by day, becoming a bit less steady on our feet (certainly so on slick midwestern ice)... and sadly losing our dogs, clear evidence of a decade or more passing. It’s nice to see and know the people in your neighborhood, and a bit heartbreaking to see them changing over time. I wonder if anyone in your neighborhood is observing you changing? (Or me, for that matter? Though I’ve not been in my neighborhood quite as long yet as you have been in yours.) That sounds a little creepy, but I just mean that we each see others changing, while it is so hard to see ourselves changing. In any case, for the moment we’re tucked into that middle stretch of years where the change is perhaps a little less evident.
I’d forgotten just how pleasant it can be to feel alcohol gently flowing into my bloodstream! Slightly dangerous (only because it feels good, not because I’m going anywhere or doing anything rash with alcohol in my system these days) and yet so delightful. My forearms on my desk are getting a bit noodly as I poke out my letter to you. It’s funny to be reminded of a sensation that was absent for a handful of weeks. Tonight I will be pleased to conk out under a light cloud of beverages and cheese and lemony shrimp, and to sleep in tomorrow morning. My parents each received their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine today and I’m settling into the sense that we just might be beginning to turn the corner on this pandemic time of our lives. I hope you have had an easy and excellent travel day today, and that you are comfortably settling into your new locale for the next bit!
Until soon!
Eva