Maybe it's worth describing my writing circumstances. Out the screen-less window of this treehouse, the morning forest sings and squawks and hums and buzzes. The knotweed below is lush and green but notably not occupying the expanse of yard we've rid of it over these 12 years. The tent we pitched last night to practice camping with Tucker before heading up to Baxter State Park next week is drying. Jordy is up on the deck drinking coffee and reading on his Kindle. Cove and Kauai figure out how get up and down the ladder to the treehouse. An occasional cluck reminds me of the neighbors, six chicken ladies in their swanky digs built by Duncan Ira and Jordan Casey this spring during lockdown. The garden behind me teams with squash, tomatoes and sunflower stalks getting ready to bloom, while the lettuce, carrots and onions grow without thriving (RIP the cabbage starts Helen gave me). I'm swatting mosquitoes as I hunch over my laptop on a homemade child's play table with fading hand-drawn chess squares, relics of kids' play at my feet include swords and other medieval weapons made of foam, PVC and duct tape from Camp Half-Blood days in Brooklyn, a snowball maker, whiffle ball, parachute with plastic man figure, and soccer ball. I look around at the walls dad built from wood shop scraps, centuries-old beams reclaimed from the Baptist church in the village, and the snow-fencing railings Tucker clutched above his two-year-old shoulder height in the era of the famous photo of 3 green boys peeing off the deck.
The treehouse rope ladder that could be retracted once climbed was replaced over time with a fixed wooden ladder, angled just enough for dogs to join the troops. Barrett Companion fell flat on his back when a rotten rung ripped out of the old rope one at Duncan's third grade sleepover party (when little Charles Palmer also got a tick on his scrotum). The treehouse has never been the western frontier defense like our Fort Apache in Greenwich in the '70s or dad's equivalent in New Canaan in the '50s. Good/bad guys battle it out in outer space or cyber space now. A retractable ladder was hard to climb and not strategically necessary.
Yesterday we put in to the Connecticut river at Sumner Falls with the intention to float to Cornish landing, 8 miles or so. We got a late start, proper inner tubes are scarce (supply chains interrupted by Covid), and our inflatable vessels (including a slice of pizza) weren't particularly aquadynamic, and, the water being low, there wasn't much current. So we decided to stay put and splash in the falls. The boys found a "spiral of infinity" where a split in the flow reverses direction, then hits a rock outcropping such that the current catches, creating a large circular pool. If you position your slice of inflatable pizza just right, it will rotate infinitely. Reeve lay back, arms folded under head resting on the crust, eyes closed to the sun, and drifted in forever.
The thing about the blog form in the worldwide web is that the world itself becomes a possible audience, so you write as if anyone could read it. It's helpful and distorting. I wanted to put this public accountability to use to force me beyond lazy journal writing, the way I make declarations of marathon running or run for charity to shame myself into sticking to the training regime. Just imagining them out there waiting for my next post would make me do it. If I did it, maybe one day I'd get good, maybe even great, or at least good enough to matter.
I looked back to the date of my first entry – June 13, 2007. Thirteen years and a few lifetimes ago. I remember typing, one-handed in the dining room in Brooklyn while Jordy was in London and I was home alone with two toddlers, as if my life depended on it, as if that one post might be the last evidence of my being when the existential forensic team went looking for me.
Since 2007 we've all been living as if the world were watching at all times, because it is (kind of). Everyone's a filmmaker, photographer, writer. Everyone is performing for the darkened room of infinite possible observers. It's chaotic and relentless. Every experience is already being edited for presentation in the happening. The audience is mostly imagined, like the infinite armies of computer-generated orcs our heroes battle in the Lord of the Rings. An apotheosis of cultural narcissism. Almost no one is paying attention. The sad truth is the liberation.
But you, dear readers, are paying attention and have been all along. Thank you for showing up for this blog, all five of you, these 13 years, you, the same people who show up for family birthday parties and are available on the other end of the phone when I'm cooking dinner and need to vent. You are the true audience who made sure I didn't go missing after all.
I've tried on a lot of voices here, all and none of them mine, some of them yours. I'd like to say I've "found mine," but I don't think I have just one. From now on, new metaphor – I aim to be an adept rider as of so many wild horses. I want to leap confidently from one to the next and ride where we will.
The ladder has got pretty gosh-darn (as Reeve would say) rickety at times, swaying and cracking under wind and strain. I came at the project of my life with a lot of missing or broken rungs. I knew it but hid it, often from myself most of all. I thought I chose the rickety ladder, even glorified it, but it just was me, the only one I had to climb. Worthy neither of blame nor glory.
I thought I was climbing up, as if there were somewhere to go. Ambition, striving, affirmation, worth, achievement, success – always out in front, always above. A railing above shoulder height I was reaching for. Safety, I thought, I was taught, is above, out there.
But the ladder leads also down to the ground. This is where my soul was leading all along. My ego is finally letting go the desperate grasp. Silver linings of middle age, a pandemic, and the jubilee year of integration. I have a lot to learn about the ground. I like the feel of it. The puppies are teaching me about it. They show me how security lets you settle down and rest deeply. The garden is teaching me about it. I like the fact that the sunflowers will bloom because its their nature to do so, not 'cuz anyone is watching.
I find the inevitability of my body one day sleeping in the earth, as Lola is below me now, comforting, not scary. As long as the wind keeps blowing and new leaves bud each spring. I feel the company of Mr. Jimmy, Judy, Memar and Gar, John Morgan close more often, hear their voices saying "Samantha, in retrospect, this, not that." I feel at peace with my parents and our journey into being together. I long to live more kindly, walk more lightly, make less noise, and create whatever ephemeral beauty is mine to make beside the sunflowers, as is in my nature. Grace comes in finding my own nothingness in the spiral of infinity.
This feels like solid enough ground to build on for now.
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