I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was six, they had sold it. They had their apartment in the city and the house where my parents live now, the one we return to every summer, the one “Out East,” we say, at the almost very end of Long Island.

But some of my earliest memories are from the Stony Brook House, and although the image in the email was merely a floor plan, just a map drawn up in pencil, I recognized each room immediately.

I was alone in my house when I saw it, but I think I gasped aloud. I looked down at a two-dimension drawing on the flat screen of my cell phone, but what I saw somehow was the full house, upright, entire. Room for room, closet, bathroom, window. The yard, the front porch, the smell of the boxwood out front, and the way the sunlight came into the rooms.

***

Lisa grew up just outside of D.C. Her house was a split level with columns across the front on a lot marked with grand old trees. She moved there with her family when she was two and called that house home through her college years. Now in her early forties, she and her siblings last year completed a difficult if not-uncommon task: they helped their aging parents sort through a lifetime of things, gather up what they needed, and move closer to family.

The house quickly sold to some people from Boston. They bought it without seeing it first-hand, via website and an obliging realtor. It fetched an excellent price.

Recently, Lisa told me she’d had news of her childhood home: it’s gone. They razed it. Not just the house, but the entire property: the trees and all the grass. So it wasn’t the house the buyers were after, apparently. It was the lot.

That is, of course, their prerogative.

But just yesterday, Lisa mentioned it to me again in passing. Just a quick comment that opened a view onto loss. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. And she has a full life here in North Carolina: a lovely home of her own, a thriving marriage, three beautiful children. But the empty lot reported by her sister is nonetheless on her mind. “I’ve known the house is gone for a month now,” she said. “I’m still sad.”

***

My sister and her husband have a large old house in the country in western Massachusetts. It’s set back from the road; you have to know where to look, when passing, to see one ivory peak under the roof and a window next to the chimney.

It was built in 1922 and is quietly grand: warm wood floors; glass doorknobs; built-in bookcases and a broad staircase, with landing, that descends into a generous center hall.

It has a second staircase that goes to what might have been servants’ quarters, but if the house ever enjoyed that kind of exalted service, it’s long lost to memory. My sister and her husband bought the house nearly ten years ago from a widow who had lived there alone for a long time.

But one afternoon, not long after they moved in, my sister found herself with smiling and unexpected guests in the driveway. It was a woman with her grown daughter, and the woman explained that she had grown up in that house, perhaps forty years before.

Together they walked through the rooms, the woman recalling to her daughter and my sister how her family had lived in those spaces. This had been her brother’s room; here they had done their homework. Her mother had the sewing machine in this room, and they would talk together while they did their school work and she sewed. And on Christmas mornings, she and her siblings stood like this on the staircase, waiting for their parents to call them into the living room, with the fireplace blazing to warm the room, to the Christmas tree and the presents.

***

The news this morning is of fires continuing to rage in California. With no rain in sight and a persistent dry heat, the fires have progressed, at times, to consume the length of three football fields in a minute.

The path of these fires is indiscriminate. Houses, streets, wineries, strip-malls– they eat through everything, and their wake is charred shells of places, barely recognizable rubbish. One can identify remains because of where they are, not what.

The damage from a hurricane is different: belongings disappear completely or are found the length of a football field away. In its rage, a hurricane trashes things, hurls them, twists rain gutter and rebar alike.

We have had too much of this kind of thing lately. And the news is of the loss of life and property, of businesses undone. Of the incalculable costs and where to turn for recompense or justice. Of fear and failed infrastructure and climate change, of when and where this will happen again.

***

Of course in all instances like these, the loss of life is the most terrible of the losses.

But in my privileged and safe distance (this time) from disaster, I find myself caught on the loss of homes. Be it trailer, apartment, or warm wood floors and columns out front, a home is a shelter from the elements. The place to come in from the wind and rain, a filter for light and weather.

At its best, a home is also a filter for everything outside. It’s a space where one can be still and can be oneself unmolested, where one can comfortably consider what it means to be alive in the world even while enjoying a little distance from it.

I know that not everyone has a home, and that not every home is safe.

But a home should always be someplace safe. And it should never be snatched indiscriminately from the landscape.

***

Waiting at the traffic light, Emma and I saw them emerge from the house: the boy, maybe seven; his sister, five. Both with their heads down, their sandy brown hair drifting at their ears, the napes of their necks. He descended first, and she followed with their mother, and each of the children wore backpacks.

The steps to their house are concrete and slathered in leaves. Their window blind was closed crookedly, and a bluebird house sat askew on the tree next to their front walk.

They live in one of those charming old neighborhoods that has recently been rediscovered in Durham, and as we drove away I wondered if those children knew that. I thought of their backpacks and their mother, of the school-day awaiting them both. Of the bluebird house and the window-blind and maybe the lunches inside their backpacks.

I am glad to think that the up-and-coming-ness of their neighborhood– for now, anyway– probably makes no difference to them at all.

***

We have an empty bedroom in our house. Will won’t be coming back to it, as he got married in July. And Everett is gone for six months, on the travel portion of his gap year.

The boys shared that room for fourteen years, and it looks pretty much the way it did when they slept there every night, except that, for now anyway, there are no clothes lying–clean or dirty–on the floor.

Many times as I walk past that room, I think how glad I am of where they are now, that they have left us and are on their own doing brave, interesting, meaningful things.

But more often, I think of a single afternoon –which may have happened just as I recall it, or it may be an amalgam of many:

It is late spring or early fall. Their sister is upstairs sleeping. They are eight and six, or seven and five, and the Legos are spilled around them on the floor. The sun is shining through the windows and they are playing in it.

All they know is the Legos and perhaps Star Wars and, in a peripheral and obvious way, each other. They don’t know the sunlight, they don’t know the carpet or the bunk-beds, the desk or the dresser, because these things are just as they should be.

And their mother is nearby somewhere. Upstairs, probably. It doesn’t matter. They don’t know that she is standing there, just for a quick minute, to watch her sons playing in the sunlight on the floor.

The post Home appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I don’t hear the jays every day. At our feeder we get chickadees and finches, a nuthatch, and a small brown bird with a dart of white behind its eye. Every time I see it, I intend to learn its name, and then I forget to follow through when I go on to everything else.

These days I awake to birdsong. One of them starts up before five a.m., and by the time seven rolls around, lots of them are going at it out there. Some are songs I know, but not all. I would like to know.

But today I heard the blue-jays. One crying, then another. It’s a distinctive song, less music than call. A conversation. I was standing in the kitchen–feeding the dog? Putting the granola away? And I heard the jays out there under the cloud-covered sky.

When I was a child in July at my grandparents’ house, the jays woke me up every morning. It’s a bird sanctuary where they lived, where my parents live now, everywhere trees until you get to beach. I knew all sorts of birds by song and sight.

The blue-jays woke us up every morning.

And they were the birds that sang in the rain. Those rare, rainy days when the world was dark with clouds and the shade of trees, when we didn’t go to the beach but sat inside and read, and heard the rain on the leaves.

I thought of that this morning, standing in the kitchen, listening to the jays. The clouds made the world darker outside this morning, and it seemed right to me that the jays should be calling to one another just off edge of our deck.

And it was right, I thought, that the jays cried in the rain at my grandparents’ house, as they cry in the rain at my parents’ house even now.

Except that, in those days when I was eleven with a book on my lap, it wasn’t right to listen to the blue-jays in the rain. It wasn’t right to listen to them in those days, and I didn’t listen, no more than I listened to the rain on the leaves. I just heard the rain. I heard the birds.

And all was right with the world.

The post Blue-Jays appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

The field guides were kept in the dining room. Not obtrusively on the kitchen table or counter, but just around the corner, accessible to a quick eye and step.

I can’t say I was raised with them, not exactly. Not any more, anyway, than I was raised with frequent dictionary consultations, which came at home year-round, during dinner and other times. The field guides were a summertime thing, a July thing, a component of that month-every-summer with my grandparents on eastern Long Island. As much a part of summertime life as the pineapple wallpaper in the bedroom.

Mostly, I think, it was the bird and wildflower guides we used, evidence of which is here and there in marker on the pages: my initials, my cousin’s, a sister’s, followed by the date. Apparently Meghan and I both discovered a Lady Slipper on 6/13/76; Meghan alone found the Trailing Arbutus on the same day. Our cousin Nathaniel found Chicory on 9/9/78. His initials appear with the date on page 75, written in ballpoint in my grandmother’s fluent script. And on page 38, where my initials (no date) also appear, my grandmother has noted (9/20/78) the Knotweed, underscoring “Smartweed” in the paragraph description, and adding the words “long bristled” in the margin.With my initials in yellow, I laid claim to discovering Crowned Vetch (p. 59); but I recorded no date, and I wonder if that was a nod at honesty, as that vining weed covered the entirety of my neighbor’s backyard hill in Pittsburgh.

My grandparents knew the names of birds and trees, of wildflowers and mollusks. Such knowledge–and an interest in it–was an extension of who they were. As important as knowing words (and their definitions); as knowing how to use “lay” and “lie” correctly. As knowing all the books of the Bible– in order, of course. It wasn’t that they ever lectured on the value of knowing; they just knew. And if they didn’t, they looked it up.

Hence the field guides on the bookcase in the dining room.

I have inherited these field guides, and Birds: a Guide to the Most Familiar American Birds often lives on (rather than in) our home school cabinet in the breakfast room.  (On December 29, 1960, my grandfather spotted a Bobwhite; on the seventh of that same month, my grandmother saw a Yellow-Shafted Flicker.) This recent winter, Emma and I worked at keeping our window bird feeder filled, hoping that we’d learn something (someone?) new. But mostly it was the regulars: cardinal, chickadee, tufted titmouse, bluejay. Birds my children already know because I taught them, because my grandparents (and parents) taught me.

What is the value in knowing these names? There are few people we are likely to impress. But there is yet something satisfying in it. Something of Adam, maybe, or Aristotle: to name is to know? To love?

When my sons were very young, I called out names of vehicles in answer to their questions (even now, sitting alone and idle at a traffic light, I have to suppress an instinct to share recognition with an otherwise empty car: “Excavator!” “Cherry-picker!”). And regardless of whether they were interested, all three of my children throughout their childhoods were regularly notified of remarkable vegetation we passed: Forsythia! Pyracantha! Wisteria, its purple blossoms festooning the roadside and trees with “grapes.”

But why do I want to know? Why do I want my children to know? With all that is necessary in life, all that is going on both here and abroad, what is the value in alleviating this (small and insignificant) ignorance? They–the world–can get along quite nicely, thank you, amid unknown flora and fauna.

So many people live in cities, in high-rises, surrounded by concrete and macadam. Squirrel. Pigeon…. Pigeon.

Nonetheless, the interest grows. In these recent weeks, the effort to name has taken on new dimension for me. This year, watching the greening of the spring world, I have been attending anew to the trees. While throughout the winter their identity, distinguishable (somewhat?) by dun trunk and branch, seems (to me) unknowable and even irrelevant, their leaves’ emergence exposes them for what they are. Lately I am trying to name them–and the color of their green.

 “Green,” a word that covers but can’t epitomize what I’m seeing. Because the color of the newborn locust leaves is not the same as the crabapple. And the Bradford pears have been, by comparison, a dark green for the better part of the month. Meanwhile, the pendant seeds of the pin oak make that tree’s leaves look almost white. The leaves of the backyard maple are fair. And the distant tulip tree, whose uppermost branches I watch all summer from my kitchen sink window, might be that Crayola spring green I’ve known since I was six.

I find myself reaching for more names. Is there a field guide for green? Celadon, chartreuse, the silver tint of sage. The rich depth of emerald, the blue-bordered jade, the pale and honest shock of peridot. It’s a new and not entirely safe enterprise, this effort to claim names for tree and leaf color together as I’m driving down the road. I think I’ve got it: lime! loden! in what I know is birch; but by the time I name it, the tree and its color are gone, replaced by maple, by white oak, by pin oak, by … oak. All of them turning green.

I imagine I can do a better job staring out my bedroom window. I–and the trees–are standing still now, but it’s nonetheless difficult to bring them into focus. The trees appear in layers, this one and that one closer to or further from the house, strata of leaves in stages of emergence, layers playing tricks on my eyes.

What is it with naming anyway? To identify, to classify, to pin it down in construct of consonant and vowel. The leaves and their color come on without me, they will emerge and expand, and it will matter little or not at all that this afternoon at 3:46 that leaf was the shade of an avocado. The inside of an avocado, to be specific. Guacamole green.

The morning light is coming through the kitchen window above the sink. It catches and hangs on the leaves of the forsythia branch I brought in some weeks ago. The golden yellow blossoms have dropped away, but there is the green of the serrated leaves, all lit up with the sun. This illumination catches my eye and I hang there for a moment, studying blade and vein, the faint polygonal structure of its surface. Words rise and cluster in my brain: photosynthesis, chlorophyll, chloroplast.

And then, just beyond the window sill, the wind hits and the newborn leaves answer. The sun strikes them. They are diaphanous, incandescent, a shifting, glowing mass of light-bearing green. All words leave me, save some chorused by an organ, sung by the congregation-choir of my grandparents’ church there on the eastern end of Long Island, so many summers, every summer of my life.

Let all things their Creator bless
And worship Him in humbleness
O, praise Him
Alleluia!

There is something to naming that opens the eyes. That’s what it is. It’s when we know it that we see it–and not the other way round. Was this what my grandparents knew? Teaching me–so early–to open my eyes. Helping me to see things seen and unseen. To love. And then, so naturally, to praise.

Praise, praise the Father, praise the Son
And praise the Spirit–Three in One!
Oh praise Him!
Alleluia!

Oh, praise Him!

The post The Color Green appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Again I am newly amazed at the miracle of modern transit. A single day of driving, the small and obligatory sacrifice. We are home– and suddenly “now” is transformed, an unlooked for conversion into history, into memory, into “last summer.” I wake to risk: the subsumption of it all into laundry, into errands, into vacuuming up the dog hair.

So.

Will and Everett brought Andrew and Peter this year, adding their names to the small collection we’ve “brought” over the years. Is it unfair to say that you can’t really know us until you’ve been there and heard that wind in those trees and tasted that salt?

My father and I bicycled into town and sat near an open window in the library, and talked about politics as we pedaled home.

We descended (and then ascended) the many (many) steep steps at Horton Light.

I bought sunflowers and blackberries from Krupski’s farm stand.

There was a mound of multi-colored cherry tomatoes from Wickham’s in a glazed bowl on the kitchen counter.

I listened to my mother practice the organ in the Presbyterian Church founded in 1732, and then we sat together in the first pew and talked about the faithfulness of God.

Emma and her grandfather picked raspberries from the bushes along the driveway; Emma and Everett picked raspberries from the bushes along the path to the beach.

We bought deli sandwiches and took them to a winery and shared a bottle of blush.

Some of us clammed with our toes at Fisherman’s Beach, and Bill bought some clams from the little boy with the rake, and I scrubbed the clams clean at the salad sink, and then Bill made “the best baked clams ever,”

Which made up part of the feast: baked clams, and fish tacos with spicy slaw and grilled zucchini, and sushi salad

With homemade carrot cake for dessert, because we were celebrating Emily,

Who turned forty.

We were reminded how to rig a sunfish from a video on YouTube, using the free Internet at the library.

I was reminded of all those sailing terms (sheet and halyard, stern and mast and coming about), and against all my better judgment and some rapidly approaching ill weather, I took each of my sons for a sail and realized I remembered how.

I decided that to sail was a decision against fear and against growing old, and it occurred to me that my grandfather would be pleased with me in any case.

Janke took the boys sailing and now they really know how.

Will and Everett spent the whole day on the water with Iota and Pachysandra (not their real names) and we thought we were very funny, and Will said, “She’s my only friend that I know how to get to her house by sea but not by land.”

I watched the entire second season of Call the Midwife with my parents.

I went for a four-mile run by myself; I went for a four-mile walk with my father; I went for a four-mile run with my son; I went for a four-mile walk with my sister– and every time with That View at the mid-point, where continuing with the walk-or-run means tearing one’s eyes away for the ascension of the hill.

Emma and I (each) read two (2) (different) novels.

Emma and I water-colored.

Everyone (nearly) played Chinese War, and I discovered the playing cards with the paintings by Hiroshige, and one of them was ripped in two, but it was only the extra joker; but still, couldn’t you just have put it safely away in the box, because of the beautiful painting of the hatted men crossing the bridge singly and in the rain?

It rained more than once, charming us (again) with the sound of that rain on those trees.

Theo came with his parents (Janke and Emily) and charmed us with his curls and his dimples and his extraordinary diction (he is only two), and rode his tractor in the driveway and ate everything (nearly) that was put in front of him, and played and played and played with Emma– and Will and Everett, too– but mostly Emma.

The Rochester cousins came with their parents and there were sparklers and smoke bombs in the driveway and taking turns with the sunfish and the canoe and Ben and Jerry’s late at night.

We missed the Alaska cousins.

We went to the winery with Emily and Janke and sat in the shade overlooking the vines and drank a bottle of Cab Franc and ate olives and thought that this would be a very fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon. And it was.

We had air so clear it was almost sharp, like the mouth of a mussel when you are pulling the sailboat in over the tall grass and it slices your foot open, so could that air, breathing in so gently at the windows, manage to slice your heart wide. And that, with the tawny sand, with the blue-grey-green water of the bay, was enough to make a summer of a week and a half.

The post All of Summer in a Week and a Half appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

I would imagine, too, that it’s almost universal: that sense of having a deadline, Something Due, and so everything else must wait, or take a back seat to it, anyway.

Of course, deadlines are helpful. Even necessary. I have talked about this before. I have always been grateful for deadlines– but that doesn’t mean I like them.

I find it especially difficult as a mother. Certainly I faced deadlines before I was a mother, and they were troubling (and helpful!) enough back then. But as a mother, the pressure of a deadline takes on side-effects that I don’t much care for. Because right now, my kitchen floor is filthy, and the Entire House wants a good vacuuming, and this morning I caught the dying mint plant only just before it kicked the proverbial bucket: it is now reviving nicely (freshly watered) on the deck. But a few hours’ more neglect and it would have been money (very) poorly spent.

This is not to say that I didn’t (necessarily) have floor-scrubbing, carpet-vacuuming, plant-watering duties before I was a mother. But it is to say that, around the edges of meeting a deadline, I have only enough (also) time to take care of my family– and Nothing Else.

It begins to wear on one, doesn’t it?: the Noticing of all that one must tend to, and the Not Being Able To Get To It. Yet.

But once again we are closing in. Tomorrow evening, in fact, at 11:59, I am Absolutely Committed to sending this New and Improved draft of my novel to my editor– and this will be the first time that anyone at all (other than me) has read the entire thing in full, and then I won’t be (Oh, I am So Glad) alone in this project anymore.

Until then, it is all hovering over the computer for me. Yes, I took Sunday off. But most of Friday and Saturday were spend reading, reading, reading the manuscript. And yesterday it was all about tending to my notes and making those additions, those vital little pieces that must be inserted here and there if the thing as a whole is going to make sense. Today it is more of the same: my head locked in this little story, my mind overtaken by these characters and plot– so that everything else (nearly everything else) must take a backseat.

Focused in this way on this small thing, the rest of the world grows unfamiliar. It weighs on my brain as annoyance, as tedious and distracting obligation. Last night, tired beyond what seemed reasonable, I had to make myself quit the book and go to bed– and read Something Different, just to clear my mind.

We as a family have faced this before: way back when I wrote my Master’s thesis; or when I was writing curriculum; or when, periodically, it was time to grade essays, write report card comments, grade and comment on a new raft of papers. Mom in the throws of some assignment-or-other, working hard against a deadline.

Yes, we are all too familiar with this.

Yesterday it was so bad that I didn’t even take time to exercise– something that is ohsogood for a hard-working brain. I asked Emma and her friend Jewel to walk the dog–which they gladly did, and let her off the leash, and didn’t notice until it was too late that she had rolled in something rotting (“it had maggots!,” they told me), and consequently bathed her in the backyard using Will and Everett’s Old Spice Denali body wash because we are out of dog shampoo. And then for the rest of the evening, the dog smelled like wet dog (yuck) and Denali body wash, which is really quite pleasant.

Emma also brought home to me a fistful of honeysuckle– and I wouldn’t have known but for that bouquet that it is blooming now all along the edges of the woods. It’s in a little vase on the kitchen counter, and it smells wonderful.

I remember my father introducing me to honeysuckle when I was maybe six, discovering where it grew in a hedge up the road from my grandparents’ house on Long Island. He taught my sisters and me how to choose the ripe blossom and pull it off the vine, how to break and then tug so gently at the pedicel and so pull the filaments through. At the base of the filament: treasure! The sweetest drip of honey that we sucked right off the plant.

Later I showed this to my children. It grows so near our house. William was probably two when I showed it to him for the first time; the same was likely true with the others. But they’ve always loved honeysuckle since then, and I distinctly remember one of them (Everett?) instructing me as to the parts of a plant (pistil and stamen, petal and style) when he was (maybe?) in the first grade and learning about the parts of a plant.

You can look them up in the dictionary, you know– these botanical terms. Merriam-Webster is more than happy to oblige the curious with an accompanying drawing, and I went there just now to look up the parts of a blossom because, don’t you know, I can’t
ever remember them.

Which made me think that someone (who?) does the drawings for Merriam-Webster. Someone has that job– a botanist, maybe. And she works against a deadline, perhaps, to get her drawings in on time.

But for me it was an escape: looking up the image, writing this blog post, standing a moment too long at my kitchen counter and inhaling– not wet dog– the smell of the honeysuckle there.

We will get past this deadline, as we have all the deadlines before it.

I walked the dog this morning. A brisk walk that my entire self– mind and body and soul– was so glad for. And in a shady patch down where the creek overflows its banks after rain, I saw a little tree– a dogwood, maybe?– that was all entwined in honeysuckle. The tendrils brooded over the top of the tree, hanging down like a lock of hair, all yellow and white with blossoms.

The post Familiar appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Here’s news– or is it?:  I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline.

There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing like writing those days.

And then there were the days of Thanksgiving itself: those three beautiful days on eastern Long Island, with my parents and my aunt and some cousins and my sister and her family. Nothing could induce me over those three brief days to steal away– even if only for an hour– to work (by myself) on a book.

So, no, I didn’t make my Thanksgiving deadline to finish my novel. And that’s fine. It really is. The entire goal was, to be honest, probably somewhat foolish, or bold, or both. Aren’t they often the same thing?

*sigh*

I made myself a new goal, which was Christmas, and which Lynne wisely pointed out was likely unlikely due to all the Everything. She’s right about that.

“It takes years to write a book– somewhere between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out suchbooks?”– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Still, I am plugging away, sitting down for an hour or two (or more, if I can manage it) to churn out the words, making my incremental progress, telling this bit, discovering that, uncovering for my own self what the means of this story are. Sometimes it’s dreadful (the silence, the idealessness, the yawning blankness of my laptop screen). And sometimes it’s like holding to the end of a firehose while it’s letting loose with full force in my hands. Then it’s allIcando to seize an idea and jet out a paragraph, full of fear lest the next realization escape me.

It’s good work and hard work, and I’m getting used to it– to its claims on my energies and brain, to its constant insistence.

What’s troublesome about it much of the time is its lack of beauty. There. I said it. It’s not the novel’s fault, and repairs– I tell myself– are on the way. But for now I am just telling it, getting it down, doing what I imagine those wonderful NaNoWriMo people do: spitting it out. The edits (I tell myself, I comfort myself) will come later. I can’t wait for that– but I have to.

My brilliant advisor in grad school said as much about my thesis: if you can’t say it the way you want to now, just write the idea down badly. You can always go back and fix it.

Of course, he was Far More Eloquent than that, and his was excellent advice.

So for now I am being obedient to my craft and I am writing it down badly– but at least I am writing it down. I try not to wish for Something Else, like a sudden giftedness in writing poetry, say, which is ohsoefficient a medium. No. What I’ve got to work with is sentences and paragraphs, chapters and even (gasp!) the occasional dialogue. Thomas Mann comforts me:

Each separate unit of a work requires its special bulk, a certain mass of reequisite significance for the whole.  — Doctor Faustus

It is taking a Very Long Time.

As my friend Rachel said to me recently, “You are writing a novel.”

Indeed.

The post The Reason Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

Perhaps we love the shore
because the debris here could not be ours
no matter how hard our lives.

Or because the long shelf of land
continues on under the water
so even here at the edge

of the world the edge is uncertain.
Perhaps we love that the water rises
to uncertain levels leaving

and returning. We may love
the shore as we love the madwoman
who repeats the same phrase

endlessly, as we love the dying
who go on living, the traveller
who promises return.

Here, just here, we leave
no mark. Spume renders footprints,
castle, cry the same.

It’s all the same
what we say to the traveller,
the dying, the madwoman:

Come back, I love you, come back.

-Penelope Austin

The post Yes, That’s Why appeared first on Rebecca Brewster Stevenson.

It Must. And it must have a significant impact on persons– perceptions, understandings of space and time, distance, culture. We can’t go leaping about the earth’s surface, adjusting (or not) to time zone changes, climate changes and the like without it having Some Effect.

The difficulty, I think, in doing a study like this is that it would have to be (and here I exhibit, I’m sure, my dim understanding of sociological studies) a comparative kind of study, for which one would need a culture that doesn’t go leaping about the earth’s surface. But that would require time-travel: you’d have to go back in time to get someone like Pa Ingalls for a study like that, and I’m thinking that the sudden shock of time-travel on Pa’s system would sort of ruin him for your study. Maybe you could do a study like this with a contemporary, someone who doesn’t like to fly, or with someone who never goes on long car trips, or, say, an Amish person– but all of us live in a culture wherein this kind of thing Can and Does Happen, whether or not we all take part in it, so I don’t really think we can find a “clean sample,” if you know what I mean.

Maybe no one has done a study like this because it can be argued that a study of this kind isn’t merited. Maybe most people– maybe all of us– take this willy-nilly leap-frogging around in their stride. We all understand (to one extent or another) the modes of travel, the road and railway systems, the flight schedules that make such movement possible. We understand, too, the rotation of our planet and the rising and setting of the sun, the consequent changes in time zones and the differentials between time-in-transit and what-time-will-it-be-when-I-get-there. We all have our methods of dealing with travel and jet-lag and sleep deprivation and remembering (or forgetting) one’s toothbrush.

So then why, I ask you, does it So Completely Throw Me? What is it about my not-so-very-extraordinary make-up that finds me reeling after only a weekend away? And it’s not just fatigue, so don’t try that. I mean, it was an exhausting weekend: we were at the airport at 5 a.m. on Friday and then again at 6 a.m. on Sunday, between which times we saw Almost My Entire family of origin plus two cousins and their wives and my Dearest Aunt and my first-cousin-once-removed-and-god-son Sebastian. Plus we attended a wedding (Hooray, Ben and Vickie!!!). Plus a rehearsal dinner (that was a Good Time). Plus we stayed up Way Too Late visiting with Emily and Janke because, really, can you blame us?

And in-between we (sometimes) tried to steal some sleep and we sat by the fire in my parent’s living room and we visited with our dear friends the Bramsons (my mother served breakfast for 19 people) and we went for a walk down to the beach, following the same path I’ve followed to the beach for the last thirty-two years of my life, the one I know so well (even in the winter) that I could follow it with my eyes closed.

(Have I mentioned that the water in Little Peconic Bay is even more blue in the winter than in the summer, and that the blond reeds at the water’s edge sway stiffly in the wind? The leaves of the oak trees, which have in some places fallen, scrape their way across the sand and are the color of rust, and the crabs have all gone away. And the wind that so often in the summer makes that roaring sound in the Collins’ trees is there in the winter still, pulling at the oak leaves that still cling to the branches, and all of it can make your heart ache with memories of the summer and at the same time for it to always look like this: your beach in winter, where the blond and the rust of winter makes the water look oh! so blue.)

And then, after All Of This, we are home again. And in no time at all– indeed, in just about the same amount of time it took to get there– I have found time to sweep our decks and rake all the leaves from our yard, to unpack the clothes and to (with Bill’s help) set up our Christmas tree. And in the amount of time we were away, I have already had a day and two nights here in Durham, and have taught my students for yet another day, and have even endured an overdue visit to WalMart.

The Daily consumes me. The residue of this recent and brief trip wasn’t even a glimmer in the rear-view mirror as I pulled away from the school parking lot this afternoon, fumbling for my phone even as I made the left-hand turn. But when I opened it, here was a surprise: a message from my cousin; he has sent me a photo, and I think it’s the one he told me about, the one he sent last week but that I didn’t get, of Sebastian playing in the snow.

Then I open the photo, and it takes me a minute: what’s this? Oh, there, you see? A little evidence on my cell-phone: it’s Bill and me and the children and Janke, standing there in the sand, only just– was it?– two days ago now. We are wearing our coats and our skin is colored amber from the light of a three o’clock sun. And there, in the background, is the Collins’ dock and the winter-blue water of the bay.

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Just some of the reasons.

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