Huntin' Season

There are earnest looking men in camouflage and bright orange hats driving around in pickup trucks full of hounds everywhere I look, which I assume means that it is hunting season. Hunting what, I do not know. What they do with what they have hunted, I do not know. Why they are so earnest looking, I do not know. I find their bright orange hats vaguely amusing. I find it hard to imagine that any of them could be mistaken for deer or what-not, as they all seem to be 30-50 and extremely tall and heavyset. How they can all be extremely tall and heavyset, I do not know. I imagine them crouched low in the leaves, meaty hands clutching guns, accidentally shooting one of their fellow hunters. Chagrined, one will exclaim, Well, you weren't wearing an orange hat! How was I to know that you are not a majestic stag?

I doubt they would share my amusement. And consider wearing more brightly colored clothing when I'm out walking. Woods-tromping may have to be postponed until the hunt is all hunted and the hunters all huntless. Whatever they were hunting. Deer I hope, because if it's pheasants or something the hats really seem extra ridiculous.

Woods-tromping may have to be postponed, alternatively, because Tropical Storm Ida has gone and turned the whole island into gooey salty marsh ground. I suppose it's all part of living in an area referred to as the Tidewater, but still, 5 feet high tide? Shame on you, Ida. The winds ripped all the bird feeders and bird houses down. The tide came crawling over the lowland and left, upon its retreat, great rambling lines of pine needles, trash, pine cones, and driftwood. I, of course, missed everything but the aftermath. Today the islanders emerged to pile the debris in their yards and set smoking, wet fires of brush. The ones that weren't out hunting, anyway.

The Splendid Quiet

It was hard to be calm at first, in the silence. The quiet here at night can be all encompassing, almost unrelenting. Sitting on the porch it is possible to hear fish jump in the dark water, an owl's wings as he lands in the pines. It is that quiet. Before moving here I would have not believed myself to be a person intolerant to silence. But, growing up on a street within a block of a high school, elementary school, and junior high, I became used to the constancy of sound. Lunch time at the elementary school yielded a ceaseless din. The high school echoed with bells and announcements. Band practices, soccer practices, football practice, Vanguard practices on the weekend. A life set to the omnipresent thunder of the drum line. Santa Cruz was not much different. On campus, the all-hours cacophony of college students, drum circles, quad protests. Off campus, the orchestra of sorority girls vomiting beneath my window, the incoherent proclamations of yet another intoxicated homeless man, the blip blip of rookie police officers sounding off on Laurel Street. Ever present sound.

I should not have been surprised to find myself unnerved by prevailing silence, but I was. The near constancy of sound in my life up to this point seemed unimportant until its absence. There are times, in this house, when I will hear the rumbling off board motor of a fishing boat across the channel and run to the window, convinced a convoy of motorcycles has thundered up the drive. In the absence of sound wind can be unsettling, the creaking of a twenty year old seaside home settling, rocking, enough to drive me from bed. To hear myself breathe every breath, uncomfortable.

I have accustomed myself to living in silence. The sound of my feet on the hard wood floor no longer surprises me, the sound of the phone no longer makes me jump. I do not rise in the night to suspiciously stare out the window onto the driveway, convinced I heard pebbles crunching beneath the tires of an sinister assailant's van. I do not leave the TV on to comfort me. Now, I seek it. I walk barefoot down the salt-worn planks of the dock at night and sit, feet dangling above brackish water, listening to the softest lap of the tide against the marsh. I listen to the Canadian geese at Hole in the Wall, all cackling and ruffling and honking as they set to rest. I lie back on the boards and watch satellites and stars and clouds moving in. If I leave here having accomplished nothing that I can hold in my hands or describe to another human being I think I can still be content. I will know that I came here afraid to hear myself breathe and left content to live in the quiet.

Routine

After a somewhat whirlwind Halloween weekend in Brooklyn I have returned to my beautiful corner of the country. When I stepped off the train at Penn Station I had a definite moment of "I have not seen this many people in the last 3 months combined." It was somewhat overwhelming, and a strange realization. I found Jessica and Travis well and lovely and much as I'd remembered them, though now relocated to Brooklyn, which seemed like a very grown up, hard-co Santa Cruz. A hella legit version of Santa Cruz, one might say. When I was in high school a boy a year or two ahead of me campaigned for student body president with the slogan: Rohit. Hella Legit. Ah, Fremont.

It is good and comforting to be back in my hermitude. One of the strangest parts of life on Gwynn's Island is that I can't just invite someone over every time I feel lonely or antsy. To the left is a map of where I live. It looks awfully small, though I still get the feeling that I haven't explored most of the land I live on. A good half of it is still forest-locked or water-locked, and I admittedly haven't suited up and gone tromping around the dingle and thickets yet. I live right around the tiny 5, by the way, on the mainland-facing side of the island. So, on my list of things to accomplish: tromping. I stick mostly to the bicycle and exploring the roads, as it is easier and less insect-ful. I've found that in living alone, staving off descent into chaos is most easily achieved by developing some kind of routine. My routine is very loose in nature, built around unpredictable things like the calmness of the water or more concrete things like what time Gilmore Girls is on ABC Family. Yes, I just admitted that. Right now I am indulging in one of the looser aspects of my routine: mid-afternoon sitting in bendy chair on indoor porch and drinking hot beverage (today, home-made apple cider from a vegetable stand in Gloucester). My grandparents arrived this morning to stay the weekend; Aunt Lynne, David, and Zoe arrive tomorrow. It no longer disrupts my routine to have people here, though I find it harder to write. All in all I would say that I am fairly content right now, and feeling somewhat forward-looking for the first time in a year or so. I registered for GREs on a whim and have been researching Creative Writing MFA programs, including the highly-touted one at the University of Virginia. Rather silly perhaps to apply to graduate school in a field I have had so much trouble with as of late. Maybe brilliant.

My big crumb coffee cake is ready to come out of the oven and I must get in a bike ride before the sun sets. More to follow.

Vacant Hands

I cook all the time here, but I think it may be misplaced energy. Because, I am never actually that hungry. I think it is the desire to do something with my hands that drives me - drives me to cook, to smoke, to drink. To have something to hold and control. I should just buy mounds of clay and shape things of it, or wade into the muddy shallows in front of the house and scoop the black underbelly of the Chesapeake into my restless hands. If only writing were a more physical task. Writing by hand is too slow - my hands can't keep up with the words. If only writing were more like shaping things from clay, or chipping away at a marble square. Sometimes that is how it feels if I have a good writing hour, a good writing moment. Like the words were all there before I came across them and put them together, like I just had to discover them in the great piles of wrong words lying in my head. Just the few perfect beautiful words, all buried and waiting and lonely until I dig them out and string them together and they are right. I have not had a good writing day in three weeks. I have been away, or with people. It scares me that I can only seem to write when I am totally alone.

Today I went to see Where the Wild Things Are in Gloucester, and thought I saw it for what Spike Jonze intended it to be, despite the bored children that surrounded me in the dark theater, gently shushed by their confused parents. How wonderful to know exactly what you want to make and to be able to, critics, production companies, and children be damned. When I got home I went on a bike ride with my new camera and was disappointed by the light. Too dulled by wimpy clouds, too washed out. I biked to the empty Pickle house on Stingray Point to take a look around when the clouds opened up and I knew. I pedaled so hard I thought I'd faint. I knew I had to get there. Pounding down the broken-down dock camera in hand I held my breath, afraid that the clouds would close again. They did not close, and the gulls whipped over my head in the wind off the storm coming. It was like shaping something with my hands, like cutting onions. Like plucking the right words from a tangled mess, paring them out and shaving off the excess until it was just them. How lucky to live in a place that opens up in front of me, that begs to be chased.

Houses

It is raining in DC, and I am thirteen floors up, on top of the Watergate. Strange to live so far off the ground. I think I could never get used to it. My grandparents love this apartment, and I love the roof. But still, strange to know you are floating up so far from anything. I like to imagine buildings as if they have suddenly turned transparent, to see all the furniture and rugs and people set up in little geometric shapes so far off the ground.

When I am sad in Virginia I go to the abandoned houses. There are several on the island, and many in the county. I think of them as left places. Many are so overrun that it is hard to imagine that they were ever anything but left houses. Some I have been in, others are inaccessible, too part of the forest now to have floors or doors. They are full of remnants. In one, a piano stands, keys uncovered, against the wall, a green hardshell suitcase on the floor beneath. Old light switches that do nothing, a rocking horse. Curtains, some ragged and dirty and some hanging brittle but preserved. A tinseled sprig of fabric holly and a small rocking chair with the hand woven wicker punched through. I like the air in left houses. It is still and quiet and full of dust, so that when you bust through the door into a left house it feels as if a long-held breath has just been let forth. When the roof on a left house goes the whole house will soon follow, birds nesting in the attic and the summer storms and salt air eating away at old heart pine. The old houses there stand longer than new houses would, their parts sturdier and construction sounder. They don't build houses to last anymore. They are built with obsolescence planned into their foundations, their frames.

The houses comfort me in their leftness. They stand still while the weather and time picks at them, smoothing away the details of their construction as an ocean does to driftwood. They remain though most if not all of the people who lived within them have died. I suppose that the left houses remind me that time does not stop for anyone. Though their time is coming to a close and the forest is coming home to claim its dirt I am a girl alive right now, and I am standing at the window a person used to open and shut and look out of, thinking about that person and who she might have been and how she might have lived and died and how it came to be that her piano was left there, with this window and this house and this dirt. I find a comfort in that I cannot explain, and when one of the left houses is finally burnt or pulled apart to make room for more houses which may some day be left, I grieve the loss, but know I am a being pulled along by the same time as the house and the person and the piano and the window and the dirt and the forest. And I can feel the ground solid beneath my feet.

1 year, 10 days

Fall is proving to be more difficult than I expected. This time of year seems steeped in portent, and nostalgia; the combination is confusing. On the one hand it is beautiful, and I associate the fall with return to UCSC, pumpkin squatting, and general revelry. It makes me miss my friends as they were my friends two or three years ago. Good memories have turned bittersweet in light of what has happened. Fall is also Laura's time now, and probably will be from here on. I find myself in moments of anxious dizziness, fighting back the mounting panic I long associated with my sister. I find my moods changeable and unpredictable, and my focus shaky. I wonder if my memories differ from the memories of my friends. I have trouble reconciling the past with the present, navigating the transitions, accepting the way things are. Sometimes I am bitter. I wish I had not felt so isolated from them before Laura died, and after. I wish that things had turned out differently. But they didn't. It is strange that while I never think of Laura and think what-if? I often think of Sam or Maria in that very regard. This is made more difficult by the fact that I haven't made any new friends in Virginia, mostly because there don't seem to be any people my age in Mathews without spouses and children. The empty places aren't full, and while I will say that being farther away from all the people I used to have wonderful relationships with has helped cure me of some of my feelings of anger/abandonment, I still miss them. I wonder how things would be different had I been more open about my family life in the year before Laura died, but I have no answer for myself. I wonder how things would be different if I hadn't been too proud to ask for help, or to tell them how hurt I was, and am.

I find myself nervous about visiting California around Thanksgiving, anxious about the social aspect of it all. I find it strange that in the year following Laura's death navigating my relationships with the living was much more difficult for me than accepting or processing her suicide. I am afraid to go to California.

October

A year ago today was a bad day, worse even than the one before, and it seems like a longer time since then than it has been. I feel so much older I can't stand it sometimes. My parents came to Virginia for the anniversary and it was not what you might expect- no crying, no little leftover family huddled together. A very different day than the day one year ago, when I went out to sushi with Kai and the police called my boyfriend to tell him to drive me to Fremont. He said, A 510 number, and I bristled. And he picked up, paused, and said, Yes sir, she's right here, and I knew what had happened. I had been expecting it for so long there was relief in it, and after the memorial service was all done and the family all gone I slept and slept, and found myself tired for months. And then I lived in a haze for months.

I am not the same person I was before everything started to go so wrong. I have spent a great deal of my time worrying what other people thought of me- caring more than I could really explain. And then, all at once, it didn't matter a whole lot anymore. Now sometimes I realize I am pretty boring, but it doesn't bother me how it would have two years ago, or three. I am content to be pretty boring, and find I no longer have the energy to put on much of a show. I miss my sister, but I don't, and that is hard to explain to anyone else. There is loneliness in that.

Yesterday I found a wild persimmon tree, and another, and wondered at never having noticed before. Not that I like persimmons, but I do like wild things, enough so that I can forget the bitter sliminess of the fruit and be excited about their existence. I will try to make pudding when I come back. I leave for Pennsylvania on Tuesday, a trip I am taking with my mother to visit her side of the family. I am a little anxious to leave Homagin for so long, afraid I will forget how to live here or forget how to be alone all the time, but okay. Maybe I am afraid of feeling like I did before I got here. I have to remind myself that this place will wait, that it almost never changes, and that the time I will be away is not so long at all.