Hello Again

Ooo. This is a little awkward. I've thought about you plenty of times over the last month, but I didn't write. I kept waiting for the right time. I had so much to share I didn't know where to begin or end, or--do you still remember me? I'm at the edge of the water; it's cold; my arms prickle with goosebumps. I'd better just jump in!

It's coooold in here.

After rain, the trees that have sprung up all over the hill gleam dark in the blank, white humidity that I will always associate with Pennsylvania summer. Insects are so loud that when Martin recorded a poem for the British literary magazine Anon the other evening, his voice was a stone at the bottom of a river of crickets' song. We had to shut all the windows.

Let me reach into the last busy week and pull a few things to show you: Elspeth's starfish, wrapped in tissue, perfectly intact even after a day in airports. Beatrix poised on the landing, riding her tricycle down our stairs. Elspeth boarding a big yellow bus for her first ride during kindergarten orientation. Martin swapping his yard clothes for a dress shirt and tie, heading off to work again. I, buried in books and papers, my eyes crossed in the effort of figuring grading percentages for a syllabus for the class I'll be teaching, "Life Writing." Merry at the edge of a circle of adults, her long limbs never still, not quite knowing where she belongs.

Last night, I just about finished my syllabus, and now I feel as if the world is opening up again. I feel as if I should throw myself a party. Martin's not quite in party mode yet.

Brr. It's a little chilly in here yet, though I'm stroking as fast as I can to build up the heat. I haven't written regularly in so long, my limbs are stiff.

I find myself thinking of Nancy all the time, tucking away tidbits to share with her or reminding myself to save a magazine to pass her way. It's strange to be back, walking up her front steps by the garden she watched carefully, planned at one point, picking out plants, digging holes, settling them into the ground. Her garden is still blooming, still producing fruit and vegetables. At one point as I fell asleep, I started, as if jerking to the surface of water, realizing afresh that she was gone, that her body was buried, under a tree, in a graveyard outside of town. Most of the time, though, the strangeness of her absence feels less profound than the presence of a new reality: her smiling face, her body moving as it often did through my house, settling at the kitchen table for tea--all so strong in my imagination it feels as if it must be true that she is still with us, that if I could only open the doors to what is truly real I would understand how she can be gone and here at the same time.

It can all be chalked up to wishful thinking, to love, to denial or the wanderings of hope. I realize too that I will always be partly the skeptic of my own faith, raising an eyebrow and shaking my head at my childlike imaginings. But I have lived so often in the world of my faith that it is almost more real than the shifting plates of this earth, vibrating in the air filled with cricket song, under my hands when I lift a plant from the soil, waiting for me in the morning when I step outside, in the far-off call of a bird or even in the ants that cover my kitchen counter in late summer. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, and at times I feel that charge so acutely I can believe in the unseen, believe in the eternal depths of a small stone or a lifted voice--believe it with every fiber of my material existence. At times. At times I feel a sort of murky sadness or dullness that is hard separate from my joy, and the older I grow, the more I realize that this is okay, and should not go away. I can be comfortable with this question, just as Rilke encourages, to live questions.

And. . .speaking of shifting plates of this earth, I experienced my first earthquake two days ago. . .sitting in a chair in the sun room, I felt a wave pass underneath me, as though someone had taken my chair from behind and tilted it first one way and then the other. I hushed to hear the sound of rattling or shaking, but there was nothing else. Martin was evacuated from his building for a half an hour, but I went on drinking tea in the bottom floor of our brick house, trusting that one little wave was the end. And so it was. We felt just part of the quake that brought down the National Cathedral's spires in DC, and many of us, including Merry and Elspeth, who were playing upstairs, didn't even notice.

Better get the water going for mac n cheese. Oh, one last thing: yesterday I looked outside through a morning rain, and there were the girls, with three good friends, huddled under a little lean-to of rugs, one pink umbrella titled toward the wind, their faces upturned like a little crop of wildflowers. I felt indescribably happy. Childhood should always be so sweet.