On a single tiny sentence on the arm of the chair, the year 1000, and access to time
July 2, 2021
Dear Eva,
I am here in your house! This needs no announcement, since you are clearly aware of my physical presence in your space. But it feels critical to mark this rare and momentous in-person time together in the letters. Let the record show we have met IRL on this hot summer weekend!
Currently, you are cutting kohlrabi for our imminent dinner and chatting with M, while I perch on the bed with the laptop warming my thighs. It has been a delightful day in every way. I relished the experience of joining your daily couples jog and getting to see your morning buddies with my own two eyes. There is something very special about dropping into your life that I hear and read about and being able to temporarily partake. You have a very lovely life and home, and I am very happy to now have a visual to match the events and places you have told me about in text and words!
I am peering back at the notes I made for this letter earlier in the week. On the last day of the month, I wrote that I am starting to get really sad about seeing June end, even though July will usher in an official vacation. For many years now, I have been using old-school planners that revolve around the academic year. (I have never really shaken my school-age association of the fall with newness and potential.) That means July is when there is usually a shift in currents within me, where the momentum starts pointing toward fall. This fall will bring lots of newness in my wee family—4th grade in actual school rather than on a computer, kindergarten(!), and even change for me as I slide into a part-time role at work in October. I am still mentally in early summer mode where the thought of all that makes me tired, and I want to focus on barbecues and kid swim lessons instead. I am hopeful that one week of sand between my toes and salt on my skin will be a recipe for stirring within me a reshifting that readies me for the lead up to a new year.
This week I have been rushing toward vacation in a slightly frenzied way. It has felt as if this pace was necessary in order to make space for a true respite when I get to the beach, but I wonder if I am constructing some of this pressure myself—or at least accepting the artificial urgency imposed by others. This same illusion—that I must scramble to complete in order to make room—has started bubbling up for me when thinking about going part-time. It is as if I am sprinting to some magical finish line. Why? Is this the death drive at work?!
On a wholly different note, I want to thank you for taking the time to sit down with me today and look through my project for my niece. It is invaluable to have someone to talk to about such things, and I appreciate it very much! There is a very real but somewhat inarticulable way in which I credit you with helping me start to find my way to produce more creative work these past few years, and to tap into parts of myself that for many moons were dormant.
One thing I have been appreciating with this particular project for C is the way in which its status as “gift” makes it more finishable. Being so clear to myself about why I am doing it and who I am doing it for—even when I have not known what I was creating—makes me less particular, less tormented by ensuring it is perfect or feeling like I must find a way to pour all possible threads together into a single work. This makes me wonder how much of creative block, then, is rooted in a kind of vanity? Any preciousness I might have felt about the project was further avoided when I started cutting up the text into small bits for collage. There is something exhilarating about seeing a single tiny sentence sitting on the arm of my chair, and another paragraph on my thigh. The disaggregation of the text, the physical act of cutting it apart, it was a visceral reminder of how little each individual word matters.
Last weekend I listened to a This American Life story that I cannot stop thinking about. It described an ongoing spoken poetry show where participants are given precisely 2 minutes to perform. The constraints are rigidly enforced to keep the pace moving, and to ensure everyone gets equal time. One night, a poet got on stage to perform and started dramatically pausing and speaking in fits and starts. The audience is initially confused and then eventually it becomes clear—the performer has a stutter, and he was using his time to make a very direct and intentional point: not everyone has the same access to time. It was riveting audio, stunning almost. More than anything else, it opened my eyes to yet another way in which my viewpoint is myopic. Growing older is the gradual learning of all you do not know, can never know firsthand, how small you and your reality are. There is always more to discover about the human experience, and that is a very wonderful thing!
We just enjoyed a splendid meal together in your garden, and my belly and heart are full. Thank you for welcoming me into your home! I will savor it until the next time we meet again in real life. Until then, we have letters to write.
Yours,
Sarah
Wednesday June 30 and Friday July 2 2021
Dear Sarah,
1. I started this letter on Wednesday as a listicle redux. Now you’re here and it’s Friday night and it’s countdown to letter-finishing time! I feel that I owe you some more distinct reflections on your recent letters but now I am getting sleepy and a deeper reflection will have to wait. Onward!
2. Our weekly CSA pickup kicked off last week, and we’re off to a very green start! Our host, A, lives just a few blocks away, and very kindly puts out baked goodies (!) for people gathering their boxes from her porch. M and I have been eating robust salads with lettuces — for some reason I rarely purchase lettuce, generally turning to spinach and arugula — and we enjoyed a pesto made with garlic scapes and swiss chard in addition to the familiar basil, pine nuts, and cheese.
3. This week on Tuesday, M’s office held a Zoom happy hour with a bartender who taught people how to make a good mojito and margarita. He brought me his drinks to test while I plugged away at my computer, and then later he made me a very tasty margarita. I don’t know if it was something about this week or something about margaritas but I wanted more than one, and could tell that more that one would knock me right out. I passed on a second ‘rita on Tuesday, even though every week I feel that between Monday and Tuesday I’ve lived a full week, so Tuesday is figuratively the end of my week, and I *could* have celebrated it in the Friday fashion it deserved, but… Wednesday still threatened to exist!
4. M and I have been picking up the pace of our runs and I procured two new pieces of running clothing to fuel the spirit, a somewhat ugly tank top (“ugly” because it is orange and I don’t typically wear orange, but it was on sale and I liked the idea of differentiating my running colors from the colors I wear otherwise) and a pair of “lagoon”-colored pants whose arrival I am awaiting at this very moment. I don’t think running requires lots of fancy clothing but some new things from time to time can reinvigorate the practice.
5. The mosquitoes were quiet while the weather was dry, but now they’re back, and I have a hot red bite on my left outer shin, sore from scratching yesterday; skeeter syndrome elevating the usual bump into a welt.
6. My dear friend L shared Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of my nonexistence, and I’ve just begun reading it.
7. Our tomatillos are growing nicely and everyone I tell that we’re growing them says now you’ll have them forever, as if that would be a bad thing (see: green salsa and green sauces); those miniscule seeds.
7a. Corollary: The unbelievable fact that most everything comes from a seed, a speck, an egg.
8. A bunny with a small white patch on his head — known to M and I as Diamond Head the Bunny — frequents our yard to nibble grasses and stray kale poking out through the wire fence we’ve erected specifically to counter his efforts.
9. I have a kombucha scoby in the fridge from L. Perhaps this weekend I will put it to work!
10. At bedtime every night for a few weeks now I’ve been reading The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon, from approximately the year 1000, formally referenced by Rivka Galchen in Little Labors. An excerpt (the book is composed of approximately 300 sections): [102] Things with far to go — The work of twisting up the long cord of a hanpi jacket. Someone crossing the Osaka Barrier just beyond the capital, setting out for distant Michinoku. A newborn child, at the start of the long journey to adulthood.
11. I recently realized that at this time I am actively in contact with Five Jessicas. Jessica: the foresighted one. Five Jessicas is a lot of foresight to have in one’s life; it bodes well.
12. It’s a delight to be here with you in person and to have your letter to read momentarily!
Until seconds from now!
Yours,
Eva