It is raining and supposed to rain all day. My sweater is grey too.
In honor of all things Irish, I’m linking to my post retelling the story of Deirdre from 2016. Some reader of my blog read it yesterday and, as I sometimes do, I went back and reread it as well. It’s one of my favorite posts. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Meanwhile, I’m in search of a turtle for the Smokestacks Quilt. The process has been fun but so far nothing works. The temptation to cut off the bottom of the quilt is growing.
Trump’s insane post last night in which he supposedly vacates Biden’s pardons of the J6 Committee members (and in which he lies AGAIN about how the Committee destroyed evidence) brings to mind MAD KINGS — and our recent viewing of a Lucy Worsley on PBS about King George III. Who knew a British king off his rocker would be so newly relevant in America in 2025?
PS I love Worsley with her cute barretts and charming speech impediment. She has such a great way of taking the viewer back into British history through interviews, site visits, and forays into the archives. It never feels like a rehash.
This scene is less than nine miles from Billy’s. I’m happy to report that at least his power is back on — mainly because if he’s ordered to evacuate, he needs his electric chair to get down the steep stairs to the driveway. Also imagine not having access to news while this is going on.
NYTimes image. About nine miles from Billy
Just past where I would grocery shop for my brother’s household is the eastern edge of the mandatory evacuation zone. Not far, in other words. They say the Eaton fire is moving west and for Billy’s sake, I hope so.
Meanwhile here it is face-hurting cold. Not really worthy of comment given what’s going on elsewhere. We kept our dog walk brief just now.
When walking on a beach or a forest trail, I am generally scouting the ground for two kinds of rocks: rocks with stripes or heart-shaped rocks. Invariably, a find feels like a gift.
This morning in Truro I wasn’t looking but found a heart-shaped rock anyway — one of the best I’ve ever come across.
This being the morning of opening statements in the election interference case against trump in Manhattan, I take the stone to mean something positive — a sign that justice might in fact be coming, coming for a nation starved for it.
Morning on the Cape
Sharp spring light Provincetown
The wind was bracing on the Cape this weekend but my time away with a friend was relaxing nonetheless. We snacked. Walked. Read. Wrote Postcards to Voters. Not a second of TV for two whole days!
On Saturday, I finished North Woods by Daniel Mason, a challenging and extraordinary read that I might put in the same category as The Overstory, in no small part because trees feature so centrally.
The novel takes place over several hundred years in Western Mass where one piece of property in the so-called North Woods is the connecting link between various sequential stories. There are twin girls undone by jealousy. A painter who loves another man and pays the price for that. A mother with a schizophrenic son, forever holding out hope that he will somehow straighten himself out even as he frantically wanders the land, believing his footsteps are stitching the ground and keeping it pieced together.
Chestnut trees come and go. An apple orchard is planted and then goes to ruin. Elm and hemlock suffer from blight or invasive insects and vanish. Mountain lions and passenger pigeons disappear too.
The haunting spirits of people who came before affect subsequent residents to a greater or lesser degree. As my husband said, “It’s essentially a ghost story.”
Yes. And perhaps the central ghost story is the one produced by the land itself. Earlier incarnations of nature haunt the landscape with what came before, producing a sense of profound loss.
Road near where my parents built a house
Because I grew up in Western Mass (sort of), I felt an especially strong connection to the setting. I could see those fields, those trail heads, the banks of snow.
Buffy and me. 1974? Jiminy Peak visible.
Since the Berkshires might be the only place that has ever felt like home to me, the stories made me miss the place. Or the feeling of the place. Or my youth. I guess it’s complicated even though it’s an old and widely-shared story.
Schenectady, early 60’s
And then, because the climate crisis has produced terrifying evidence of the planet’s warming, the descriptions of blizzards (so many blizzards!) caused an acute nostalgia for a vanishing world. Not just dying plants and creatures, but the disruption of seasons and the loss of habitability. In other words, the book prompts mourning not just for our particular past, but for humanity’s collective past.
It’s one of those days where the temperature is [number in the high eighties/low nineties] but feels like [number in the high nineties]. Boston is closing schools because of the heat [cue up local TV footage of box fans arriving at old brick schools in town]. Has that ever happened before? It’s MUGGY out there, a regular swampfest.
Finn and I headed out early and managed to walk the standard loop. My new big-brimmed cotton hat is a godsend.
Me reacting to the heat
While walking, I listened to a couple of episodes of this podcast. A group of us will discuss it tomorrow morning. It’s about the beating of a Black teenaged boy, Lenard Clark, in the late 90’s and the weird alliances that formed in the violence’s wake (not to mention the disappearance of one witness and murder of another and rumored ties of the perpetrator’s family to the Mob).
Calls for reconciliation were made by the perpetrator’s family, Black ministers, and others, even as Lenard remained in a coma. The narrator, a journalist named Yohance Lacour, examines both the impact that had on the community and on him personally. His story telling style is really compelling but you’ll have to listen for yourself because I haven’t yet figured why exactly. I think I fell a little bit in love with him by the end.
But I digress.
Lacour remembers the anger he and his friends felt upon finding out about Clark. He also remembers how quickly the story disappeared in a news ecosystem that seemed fixated with turning the tragedy into a tale of racial reconciliation, he said.
(I remember a similarly weird focus on forgiveness after the massacre at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston).
Here are a few quotes from the series:
“I can’t keep my mouth shut when the Devil got his foot up my behind.” Zakiyyah Muhammad
“Ain’t no reconciliation when Black people only ones wanting it…” Yohance Lacour
“If serious about reconciliation, they’re supposed to wake up every single day with nothing else on their minds but how to repair the damage.” Marcia Chatelain (I think).
Everything else, the script goes on the say, is mere gesture or worse, insult.
For Black people, Pulitzer-prize winning author and historian Marcia Chatelain continues, life is “a series of negotiations that force us to evaluate what our life is worth.”
“I’m not gonna move along. I’m gonna be right here standing in my rage, unreconciled. Because I didn’t see nothing. I saw something.” Yohance Lacour
Hard to complain (I’m not really) with what’s going on elsewhere. I just moderate like mad — two blocks with Finn instead of the usual two plus miles. No gardening. AC is heaven.
Tomorrow we go to the beach in Rockport and a new person comes to stay with Finn. I’m so glad! It means we’re not dropping him somewhere. Five days. I plan to shimmy my fat ass into a bathing suit and get in the water. Eat fried clams. Read. That’s about it, really.
All the rain has been wonderful for the garden.
Not so idyllic in my town, however. There was ANOTHER murder in Newton yesterday. Gawd. Domestic abuse. Man beat his wife to death with a baseball bat in front of their kids. “Dad stop! You’re killing her!” The TRO hadn’t been served (and really, even if it had?)
Three weeks ago, three people were knifed to death across town. Two had just celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary. A man with a grudge off his meds?
What is happening?
And that case in Long Island? Holy shit!
And, just because I need to delete a few screen shots from my phone, here’s a good one.
