No.232
March ending, a list:
Here, in town, I have decided that our Post Office is something of a Schrödinger situation, because you can go to the Post Office, or you can not go to the Post Office, but you cannot know whether it will be open or closed until you actually get there i.e. it might be open until the exact moment you leave the house with a parcel, whereupon it will immediately be closed, or, it will be open every time you walk past not needing to go the the Post Office and firmly closed as soon as you do
“Sometimes all of these people were the last people she wanted to see.” — Kate Briggs, The Long Form
Speaking with a far-flung friend about time, and the way it weighs itself differently depending on how much and how long of it a person might have in any particular context—ten years feels a different weight to six, though sometimes a few days can carry within them a heftiness never felt again—and that her father calls it ‘accumulated history’, which made me wonder what it is exactly that we are accumulating, and deciding maybe it is deceptively little but that is also, deceptively, everything
The first leaves on the ancient apple trees have started to crane their leaf-necks out, and it all seems terribly vulnerable
Thinking about how people manage to change size depending on whether you encounter them in a small room, or a very large space, and this makes me wonder if we would like everybody else more or less if we lived with huge gaps in between—if we all appeared small, perhaps we wouldn’t have needed to makes everything around us so big
Again, and again, wondering how it is possible for us to live on a planet where a genocide has been happening almost entirely unchecked for 174 days
One of our neighbour’s cats still refusing to venture beyond the row of outside bins and consequently becoming extremely physically large to the point where I’m concerned there will soon come a day where she cannot fit through the cat flap
This old drawing of differing interactions of eye contact, which was trying to explain and visualise the effect such differences have on conversation between any two people:
At 8am on Friday an insulation specialist called Mark comes to the house, he goes up into the attic in muddied, clomping boots and makes beeping noises with some device, taps on walls to hear things, before measuring everything with more beeping, and discussing at length all things insulation and I can almost feel this old building groan and roll its ancient eyes at our modern attempts to warm, to improve, to meddle with cavities and corners
The sun coming out
Every time, the sun coming out
Why do we say the sun is coming out when it has never once left
How this town is acutely woven together, by school drop-offs and the buying of groceries and the constant changing of weather and the dinners at other people’s houses and the early dog walkers and cars always going too fast down small residential streets and the people who visit and then leave but also those who stay and also those who never left, and roof slates falling off and being put back on and all of the televisions which sit glowing inside and sparrows nesting in walls and windows constantly being opened, closed
The jade plants (Crassula ovata) I’ve inherited from my grandparents cliff-edge home, two of them, one likely an offspring of the other, and having no idea how old they are but possibly more than fifty years, that they are still growing despite not having their soil or containers changed for maybe all that time, this fact showing all of us up—because these plants have not asked for more, for larger, and have remained healthy despite the unchanging nature of their rootedness
Gleeful at the prospect of a friend visiting in early April, telling them this fizzing-of-self is partly because the tulips in the garden will likely have flowered, the silence following because they live in London and there the tulips are already over—we are weeks behind
I have never seen these tulips flower, we moved house over New Year; I did not know they were there waiting underneath frozen ground and similarly the tulips did not know I was going to be here
WORK-RELATED NEWS:
The spring issue of Orion arrived, centred around ‘rites of nature’ and with it the new uncoated paper. It is lovely. Within, my Root Catalog column is pinned onto the Finnish lintukoto, ‘a paradise-like place where birds migrate to every winter’. The column isn’t available online, but you can read a good slice of it below:
“Since a young age I've held onto the habit of saluting any magpie seen on its own, something I once noticed the mother of a friend doing while driving, and I suppose even aged six or seven it seemed a wise thing to do. This woman would salute and ask the magpie aloud “Good evening sir, how are your wife and children?” which, although a wildly outdated assumption of family order, still sticks. Any paying-attention encounter with a bird feels notable, like the time when a small sparrow came in through the window from the feeders hanging outside and jumped about for a short time on the floor before realising, I suppose, that the landscape in here didn't quite make sense. I picked her up gently from her panicked flapping against a closed window on the other side of the room, carefully and the way I know I'm meant to—the way I've seen scientists hold birds when ringing them—and in the handful of hand-full-of-feather seconds it took to carry her to the open air, I was acutely aware of the smallness of her organs, the tiny-strong heartbeat, the determined fragility.
The stretch of birds in Finnic mythology is long, their feathery roles as messengers, harbingers, and soul-carriers running backwards like sinew to the first person who suspected that a goldfinch knew better. It reassures me that all birds were thought to migrate every winter to a place where the earth and sky met, the lintukoto, literally “bird-home,” a place of bliss where bird souls were reinvigorated before they brought back the warmth and sun to the world in spring.”
“Perhaps it is the betweenness of birds, largely living above us in the meeting of sky and earth, that so naturally puts them in an imagined place of knowledge, of overseeing. Effortlessly finding their way to all the places we can't, holding the perspective we almost always lack, and forming such crucial feathery pieces of the ecosystems we so eagerly mash up.”
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Works by artist Jeremy Miranda, whose paintings (of greenhouses) I have fallen in love with before, though I cannot recall when so this probably means some years. We are at the last edges of this low, blue, wintery light, and I won’t miss it but I also will.
“They had a knack, somehow, for each other’s happiness.”
“Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: “This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.””
— Kate Briggs, The Long Form
“We are stupider at some times than at others, and this intermittence lends variety and colour to the experiences we receive.”
— E. M. Forster
Paid supporters receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, longer illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. A Street Three Times is the latest of these paid posts, and an excerpt is readable below:
A Street Three Times
The room of the house that I’ve been working from has two windows, one facing northeast, the other facing northwest. For this reason, it is also the coldest room in the house, a fact which became additionally clear during the intermittently very cold weather we’ve had here in Scotland during the past two months. It is a room of one’s own, but it is also a room of one having very cold hands.
P.s. If you are in the habit of brushing your teeth alongside another person, morning, or night, or both, remember once in a while to gaze tenderly at them while you engage in this most ordinary and odd and ongoing of tasks.
"If you are in the habit of brushing your teeth alongside another person, morning, or night, or both, remember once in a while to gaze tenderly at them while you engage in this most ordinary and odd and ongoing of tasks." Thank you for this reminder, Ella and for your beautiful lists always.
“We are at the last edges of this low, blue, wintery light, and I won’t miss it but I also will.” 💙💙💙