The State Of Things

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the work of selling houses and whether and how much I still enjoy it. I do and quite a bit are the short answers (whew) but I’ve been trying for a sharper understanding of this place I seem to have parked the car.

Today, though, on a rare day without a load of appointments, I’m also trying not to think too much about these things. The quest for an examined life is butting up against the need to just take a walk and look up at the sky and also through the trees to where the pink granite rises sheer from great pillows of lichen. The result is a slightly tense sort of peace, one where opposing forces regard each other across a field littered with past decisions.

The wind today is mostly from the west, but sometimes it loses its way middle of the lake below me, circles on itself, stills a beat, and then rushes forward again, though not always in a straight line. The aimless rush of an idiot. Beyond the far-shore trees  - pine and oak and hickory, but mostly maple - there is the occasional boom of a hunter’s gun and then the (imagined) whistle of a duck plummeting, presumably bloody, into the forest canopy. Maple leaves skitter and whirl around my feet like unhooked bumper cars. An hour ago, a praying mantis on the road seemed to very nearly illuminate the gravel, its impossible green jacket more like a couple dozen Skittles crushed together into a sort of armour than anything you could reasonably expect to encounter end of a long curve at the bottom of a big hill.

This is just a quick stock-taking, of course. A sketch to remind myself that October 10, 2021, contained these things above and beyond all the usual paperwork, the normal worries both domestic and work-related. Truth be told,  the movement of the wind was a lot more complicated than I’ve been able to capture. Its frantic back and forth was sometimes more like that of a shuttlecock on a loom fashioned purely from scudding cloud. We saw no actual ducks either. The television was on inside the cabin and familiar voices from a 90s drama were being blown outside like smoke from a stove. 

The air was warmish for mid-October, but the water was colder than at any moment since we bought the place. I barely dipped a toe. I was anxious about things and I was also about as calm as I get. Which is to say not very calm at all, not beyond the most fleeting of moments. 

I read some of a book. I thought back to when I was as young as my son is now, and I had just arrived in Canada. I took solace those early days in glacial till,  the arrangement of land familiar to me from English geography texts. Erratics abandoned in the middle of thin-skinned fields as the ice retreated. I was one of those stones. I peered ahead too, trying to imagine all of us as passengers in the same vehicle, but the vision came blearily, as if the road could only be seen through a shattered windshield.

I remember a great aunt in Reading,  south of Oxford. Rosemary had a large and very old damson tree behind her house. She would just let the fruit rot and drop into the long grass. It seemed the greatest indulgence, a luxury akin to velvet couches, or sleeping well past noon. The plums broke open and hung like meat, like bloody wounds. They were a painting by Bacon or Freud. That tree was besieged every year by butterflies, drunken swarms of them that would drift eventually into more distant lilac, or fall wrecked against my sleeve, catch in my sisters’ hair. The scene was so glorious, so unhinged, that we timed our visits to coincide with theirs. And sitting here with the door open and the hickory out there bending to be included, I realise that those monarchs moved through the world exactly as the wind does today over the lake, and just as I do here. Now.