tEXt Libris

Better than Sex...

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Sun, 27 May 2007 04:39:00 +0000

www.BookCrossing.com

Know it.
Use it.
Love it.

Birdcages and Vitamin-C: a few thoughts on the impulse to embellish

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:10:00 +0000

A forward: looking back on this post I wish I could say that I was high at the time, or extremely sleep-deprived, or convinced that I was a manic, unintelligible genius, unfortuneately this is not the case. All I can say in my defense is that it made sense at the time (and sounded seriously less pompous in my head) This will undergo major revisions...I promise.

Please go on to the next post.

Seriously.

-S.

When did the idea that basic nature was not sufficient to supply our basic needs? I understand the anthropological roots and the strategic necessity of the city as a citadel or center of trade and commerce. But its very appearance, glass-faced obelisks that compete with each other for attention on the skyline, seems to be an attempt to mimic a forest; impersonalized, efficient, birdcages stacked one on top of another till they tower above the streets. Their inmates kept to produce "revenues" and "results" to "marginalize fiscal attrition" and maximize "quarterly gains". These ends are seen in today's society to be representative of happiness. Money = Enjoyment. And perhaps, to some extent this is true, but how then, are we any different than songbirds, singing for another's pleasure, each song a transitory moment of gratification.

This raises the question of whether or not birds themselves appreciate their songs as an artistic embellishment to basic existence or whether they understand only that their music is only a language used to communicate the desire or achievement of the basic necessities for survival? I would be inclined to believe the later as today's biologists categorize birdsong as an iteration of "bioacoustics". And there is little if any evidence of the prior. How is it that we are so egocentric and yet so naive? I suppose one is a function of the other...

This leads me to the original reason for this post: VitaminWater. I know, how banal, ludicrous even, but still, the stuff is everywhere. The local family-run grocery store, the big chains, the gas stations, hotdog stands, even the local cafes and the library at _ College. Why is it that so many people, myself included, have bought into the idea that water in its most basic form, H2O, is somehow lacking? It is one of the essentials for life, and sustained countless civilizations before the 21st century. Why is it that all of the sudden we feel compelled to engineer a "better" water, one that is flavored and color-coded, in packaging complete with prominent logo, witty quips and pop culture references? The label claims that the drinks are made with "vapor distilled, deionized, and/or reverse osmosis water," and yet it also claims the "the inside is natural." Personally I differentiate between a component that has been modified by chemical (or other) process, and a component that is presented before you as, essentially, it appears in nature.

If birdsong is, scientifically, the pursuit of basic communication; then the introduction of VitaminWater and the ideas that it rides on, are like birds marketing their conversations to philosophers and intellectuals as podcasts. (This analogy is still under construction...)

Now I'm off to dink my Multi-V lemonade with vitamin supplements from a-zinc.

This is Not "A Field Guide to North American Birds"

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 22:58:00 +0000

There are a few things you should know about Cancer. People whisper the word in grocery store corridors and block parties as if it’s a cuss word, a dirty word, as if just mentioning it is contagious. I could tell you that I hadn’t heard it before, that when I did, it hit me like a ton of bricks, that my thoughts and emotions whirled out of control, spinning like the arrival and departure times on the information board at Heathrow. But I would be lying. Maybe that would pique your interest, gratify some voyeuristic pleasure, confirm everyone’s secret hope that when something big happens to them the world stops turning. It doesn’t.

Cancer first slunk into my awareness as I sat in a church pew, at 7, playing with the hem of my dress and wondering why, if my friend’s mom, with her water balloon tying knowledge, and barely noticeable blond wig was gone, why my friend sat through the entire ceremony and laughed. Cancer, that’s what it does to you, it doesn’t make you put on a put on a Joni Mitchell CD and stay in bed, not moving, with the covers over your head in mid March. It doesn’t make you have that third gin and tonic or sit on the floor of the shower to scream while your clothes are soaked through. No, Cancer makes you want to stand at the edge of the world, and look into the abyss and laugh, because there is nothing, nothing, that you can control, or ignore, or understand, or change. So you laugh.

You should know that Cancer is like finding a library book, buried under some papers on your desk, unpaid bills, grocery lists, an old book report, and knowing that it is so overdue that nothing can be done, but sit and wait for a bill with a charge so high you could never have imagined or foreseen. And all you can do is laugh, laugh at a world where you have to pay two hundred and fifty dollars for A Field Guide to North American Birds, or some other book you never even had the time to read. Cancer is listening to Wynton Marsalis or Duke Ellington while your Father’s face turns the color of sunflowers from jaundice. Cancer is reading a childhood book amid tubes and medical implements that drip and hum. Cancer is about talking about movies with ever increasing levels of evisceration. Cancer is about sitting there, and calmly conducting the final interview. This is what you should know about Cancer: Have your interview questions prepared in advance.

The Group

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 04:23:00 +0000

There we all sat, in a lopsided circle of mismatched chairs. Eleven chairs, ten other people with their other problems, ready to display their war wounds like vendors spreading their wares at a bazaar. I would say the world had gone mad but it had not. It was starkly sane, blue-gray paint peeling off the walls, the heater whining, and the general rustle and shift of a room of strangers unseasonably hot and uncomfortably close. As each woman spoke, I felt like a jury member sitting in judgment, ready to gather a stone from the ground to toss. I feel like I need a shower, I feel mundane and exhausted.

The Desk

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 03:20:00 +0000

“If thou could’st empty all thyself of self, Like to a shell dishabited…” – Sir Thomas Browne

The background image on my laptop is a picture of a desk. The white paint that originally covered the writing surface has long since chipped and peeled off, the wood stripped to the grain, the left front corner stained a darker brown from a cup of coffee injudiciously placed. A dusty round clock sits on the top-right corner, reading four-eighteen, though you can tell that it hasn’t worked for years. The top-left corner is occupied by a simple brass lamp, missing a shade, its naked bulb exposed. Some papers are crumpled between the back of the desk and the windowsill, as if someone had lost patience with what the papers had to say.

Rising behind and above the desk is a bay window which stretches from one side of the frame to the other, dividing the world outside into what can be captured in the regularly spaced panes and omitting the rest. At the center of the window, just above the far edge of the desk is one large pane, cracked open so that the light falling on the desk dissects it into sharp abstract shapes. The space in the picture is pregnant with possibility; it stands boldly empty displaying the vestiges of a previous owner’s thought processes, tastes, and life. This could have been Tennessee Williams’ desk or Virginia Woolf’s. Perhaps, I think to myself, as the photograph hovers, visible at the borders of the paper I am typing, today I will write something good.

Ladybugs

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 20:41:00 +0000

I went out on the back porch overlooking Rhoads Beach and sat on the wall beneath the windows of the common room. Some one was plaing chopin on the piano, and the closer I listened the farther I drifted away in my thoughts, towards our house in California, picking blackberries around the lake, my dad, and how all the fallen leaves here look like dried orange and apple peels turned in on themselves with the chill.

When the music paused for a moment I came back to myself, realizing that my arms, the book I was holding, (Richard Ford’s “The Lay of the Land”) the wall I was leaning on, was dancing with ladybugs. My mother always told me they were good luck. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I waited until they had all flown off, paper-thin wings beating frantically as they hurtled away, dipping with the changes in wind current and the burden of their own weight, before climbing off the wall and heading back indoors.

The Lay of the Land

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 17:45:00 +0000

“A book’s voice is in the music of its intellect”

After we heard Richard Ford speak on friday night my mom and I escaped the crowds rushing to get their copies of his books signed. We went downstairs to my favorite room where it was quiet and the darkness outside seemed to comfort and enclose, not threaten. We talked about everything and dad, and I think that for the most part we told the truth. There was no great show of mourning, no tearing of the hair or beating of breasts, just a quiet shared grief for what life’s changes had taken away and for the uncertainty over what was to come.

Afterwards she asked again if I would like to get a book and have it signed by Mr. Ford, she was unusually insistin and so I agreed, partly curious over what compelled her to press this, and partly because there was a question in my own mind that I wanted an answer to, especially then, at that moment I needed a reassurance a promise only a stranger could give.

“Mr. Ford, do you write to escape life or to make it more real?”

He signed my book: “For Sarah – on the happy occasion of the beginning of college.” What more he wrote I did not read then, not until my mother and I had left Thomas Hall and were out in the night, headed toward her car and my room and tomorrow and whatever may come after that.

His answer to my question, written on the title page beneath the dedication was this:

“All literature is to make life more Vivid

Richard Ford

2006″

All that is left now is to read the book.

Chinoiserie

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 22:22:00 +0000

chi‧noi‧se‧rie

1.	a style of ornamentation current chiefly in the 18th century in Europe, characterized by intricate patterns and an extensive use of motifs identified as Chines

The phone woke me up at 9:48am, I didn’t realize it was ringing until it stopped. I walked down to eat; grabbed a bagel and some coffee, and headed to the library. I was generally in a black and cold mood, it was a frigid 45 degrees and windy.

I stepped on somthing that ground against the concrete. It was a shard of percelain, with a blue on white Chinoiserie pattern. There were pieces of it everywhere, covered in lines and patterns like fish-scales. I one in my pocket, feeling its sharp edge against my thumb, not sharp enough to cut, and thats ok with me, I’ve never been too melodramatic.

Nadia brought me a plant yesterday, a little succulent, not disimilar to the ice plants that my brother and I used snap off the sprawling plants that carpeted the dunes by Sea Ranch. When you snap them into they make a crisp, clean break, squirting moisture on your face and hands like beads of fog.

I put it in a little jar, with a similar pattern to the one on the peice of plate I found this morning. Makes you pause, doesn't it?

The End

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 01:00:00 +0000

Daddy passed away last Saturday, the 21s, early in the morning, between 4 and 5. Mom had drifted in and out of sleep all night, when she woke again he was gone. I arrived at school yesterday afternoon.

[Several months since I originally posted this, and Dad sits on a bookshelf (quite appropriate really) waiting for August when we will take him to Nantucket and Block Island as a carry-on in his plastic container. At least he won't have to worry about leg-room.]

The Secret Language (another Old Essay)

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:37:00 +0000

Every 22 minutes someone is killed by a landmine. Every 17 minutes there is a wedding. Every 5 minutes a woman in India dies. Every 360 years there is a total eclipse of the sun. Every 8 seconds a baby is born. Every 8766 hours the earth rotates around the sun.

I scanned the facts and figures in my father’s almanac. It was so early it was still dark. They meant very little to my seven year-old self, drops in the bucket of things I would later learn to take in, filter, analyze, and echo in a different tone, things I’m still waiting to understand. At the “thunk, thunk” sound of a densely packed duffel bag being dragged down the stairs above my head, I snapped to attention.

I sat watching for a second the slightly unsteady gait of my father, a most sober and serious man, who was struggling to maintain his composure under a massive hoard of boxes and bags. He seemed to me a Seuss-ean beast of burden, dead set on getting his Gortex millstone through the narrow front door, while directions and last minute items were, courtesy of my somewhat frantic mother, sent flying past his ears. Closing the book with a “thud,” I followed my father out the door and into our car.

It was the same every year, the mad rush to pack, then my father’s stoic combat with the luggage, like rats from a sinking ship we would climb into the family car, slam the doors, and back down our ridiculous driveway.

Then the tortuous 3 hour drive would ensue before my brother and I, our noses to the car’s windows — our breath making cloudy circles on the glass — would see the first speck of cerulean blue among the hills and bluffs on the coast of Northern California.

Over the years, the sight of the sea-water crashing against the lonely rock-formations just offshore and the feeling of my stomach lurching as our car sped, quite precisely and with surprising athleticism, around the turns with my father at the wheel stay with me still. I know every bend and view, not like the back of my hand, but like the palm, with its lines that lengthened and branched out and deepened with each passing year and each trip to the sea.
My Father and I were on the beach almost constantly. My little hands and feet covered in sand, wet cuffs of wet jeans smacking my calves, rubbing the skin just below my knees raw. I would follow my father from tide pool to tide pool, poking sea squirts who spit salt water in little jets at their attacker, or trying to pry mussels off the slippery, barnacled rocks they fastidiously clung to, while he clambered among the abalone shells and driftwood looking for sea anemones or examined the always-mystifying tide chart. We upended rocks and dug in the sand and found innumerable starfish and sea-cucumbers, clams, and snails, a certain variety of which I came to call “China Hats” because of their resemblance to the bamboo hats I had seen Chinese rice farmers wearing in a photograph.

I now know that what I thought were precious and packed into the sandy pockets of my sweater are Limpets, singularly common and unremarkable, but I don’t think it would have mattered a whole lot to me had I known that then. I was sublimely content just to follow my father, shoving handfuls of rocks and broken shells into his hands, telling him to keep them safe for me, not to let them break or lose even one, so that I could put each one into a cup when we returned to the house and watch the faded blues and yellows and pinks of the shells surge into vibrant hues underwater.

There is something magnetic about the throb and rush of waves. I would lay in bed, my body wound and twisted in the sheets, listening; sensing moist memories of the womb blurring at the edges of my vision. The water would draw me out of bed, pulling me towards a place, towards a call, the gulls.

I would get up, hoping that no one would be awake, and creep to the screen door. Sliding it in its rusty, sand encrusted tracks until I could edge through, sideways, my back pressing though my nightshirt against the metal frame. My bare feet would touch the deck first. The wood up there is all the same, rubbed and worn until it’s a rough kind of smooth. You can almost taste the evaporated saltwater it absorbed once during a storm.

There never was a storm. I would sit on the steps of the deck and watch the gulls hoping that if I held my breath and watched hard enough, listened hard enough, waited, I would understand what they were saying. If I was lucky, my family would wake up in pieces, each person shuffling sleepily into the kitchen (except my father, who never shuffles) until the only part missing was me. They never called me in, but I came anyway. I was small and young, and grew tired of listening.

Years later I would close a different book and set it on the table where the almanac once sat. My chest would feel tight and the echoes of these memories would race behind my eyelids as I thought about Steinbeck’s “Doc” and his jars, the incredible, subtle power of the ocean and the tide pools to awe my young mind, and the knowledge that I can hold my breath, and watch, and listen, and wait, and wait, but the I will never understand the gulls.

Every 1440 minutes the Earth turns.

The Movie and King Lear

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:19:00 +0000

“Is there…is there a movie going on with ever higher levels of eviceration?”

…what is eviceration?

“cutting”

No Daddy I don’t think so.

“I might have to ask you to make it stop, Sarah…”

ok Daddy.

e·vis·cer·ate (-vs-rt) v.

To remove the entrails of; disembowel.
To take away a vital or essential part of: a compromise that eviscerated the proposed bill.
Medicine.
1. To remove the contents of (an organ).
2. To remove an organ, such as an eye, from (a patient)

Like King Lear?

Here I Dreamt I was an Architect

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 05:02:00 +0000

“And I am nothing of a builder

But here I dreamt I was an architect

And I built this balustrade

To keep you home, to keep you safe

From the outside world

But the angles and the corners

Even though my work is unparalleled

They never seemed to meet

This structure fell about our feet

And we were free to go.” - The Decemberists

I’ve been listing to this song over and over, part lullaby, part story, part personal narrative, part hazy dream…there is a sympathetic echo in me of the speaker’s words. All the imaginary castles of our childhood, the heros we make of our parents and relatives, all our beautiful dreams for ourselves seem to crumble and fall to our feet.

Daddy can’t really walk anymore, he is so weak, he almost has to crawl up the stairs to get to bed. I told him he will have a lot to explain/tell his Dad about. Daddy said he’d tell his Dad about us, Will and me. I am gonna miss daddy so much. I told him so and he said he’d miss me too. I don’t know if I can handle this, mostly I feel so numb, but today everything stung.

He said that yesterday morning he thought he may die, but that now he has talked to the lawyers and finished his important business it would be ok, he wouldn’t be scared now. How can this be happening to my tall, strong Daddy who could walk miles and miles farther than any sane person, London or Paris or Barcelona end to end? Who insisted on driving when we visited the San Juans after his first episode? Who used to carry me on his shoulders everywhere and tell me when to duck under signs..how high up I felt, as if I was sitting in the top branches of a tree. He’s taught me to make things, to use his tools and his father’s, how to dismantle, to peice together, to hone, and to repair. That is somthing that his being gone can’t change; all the knowledge he has given me, and the impetus to ask questions, and to strive to understand. These will not change, these I will not lose.

Its almost 3:30 in the morning, I need sleep…

Talking About it

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 01:45:00 +0000

Its the second day of October, and I’m at home, where it feels like the first day of Fall. Its brisk out and a bit overcast and there is lentil soup in the fridge from last night’s dinner. I would like nothing better than sitting by the window with a mug of hot Chai tea and honey, and feeling so safe and warm, hidden in the clouds up here in the Portland hills. I missed the Northwest.

Its wonderful to be home, painful too, sometimes, but a good pain, an I-am-so-alive pain not a numbness, no more confusion of emotions and much less overt fear. Talking is a wonderful thing, and Daddy is very good at it! Ha! We have talked about school and marriage, what I want to be when I grow up, and what I want to drive. There is somthing so comfortable about it, our conversations have been repeated and rehashed year after year, and there is a familiar rythm to it, sharing mutually understood opinions and well-known remembrances.

Dad says he wants to be cremated, and have his ashes spread on a beach in Nantucket, where we went claming and beach-walking when Will and I were little, about four and seven years old. I especially remember Dad carrying home white utility buckets full of dense off-white clams, “bivalves”, and seawater. I remember eating Fruit Loops, never permitted by my Mother at home, and watching them bob around in the pink-stained milk. And eating lobster for the first time and crab with thoes litte, three-tined forks, and ramacans of foaming, golden-hot melted butter. And I remember the sand dunes, great curves and arcs on the blufs covered in sea grasses and blown by a cool wind that coats your skin in salt and mist, clinging stickily to arm-hairs and tangling hair.

Dad has asked me to speak at his funeral…I’ve already started thinking about what I want to say, mostly because I couldn’t help it but also because I want to speak the best that I can and say what he would want me to say.

An Old Excerpt from a Story About Childhood

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 00:22:00 +0000

Ann unsnapped the turquoise silk flap that held her sister’s makeup bag closed. I bit my lip, frowned; Ann’s older sister, Audrey, would hate me if she knew we had gone through her things.

Licking the sticky orange-juice residue off her fingers, Ann grinned at me, a conspirator’s grin, and upended the bag.

Lipstick tubes hit the brick steps like shell casings, “thack! thackthackthack.” She shook the bag. One more tube hit the ground, rolling under one of the arcing whorls of a fern.

The mid afternoon humidity necessitated bare feet and arms and legs. We had found shade in the tarnished, leaf-covered aviary in her yard. The green copper bars, covered in mandala-shaped bursts of lichen, cast shadow-columns across our faces as we examined the pigments in their dented tubes.

The heat had caused the lipstick to soften; the pigment to ran as we carefully applied shades of Rendezvous and sheer Persimmon.

Ann was a year older than me and lived five houses down, on La Espiral.

Audrey was beautiful; she had almost translucent skin, innumerable freckles, and a mass of soft brown curls. I think we both half believed that if we coated our lips with enough of her make-up, it might seep into our pores, transforming us into tall, curly haired sirens who smelled like soap and Jolly Ranchers.

That was before we knew what a siren was, or a woman for that matter. I know no more now about what being a woman means than I did then; when Ann and I strutted around in bare f, belting out the lyrics of “American Woman” and blowing sticky kisses at each other through the wavy, bottle-green glass panes of the Aviary.

Writing at Lake Tahoe

noreply@blogger.com (S.) — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 04:38:00 +0000

wrote this in early 2005 I later revised it down to 500 words in 2006, This is the essay as I originally wrote it.

Essay V. I

I told myself to imagine she was my great-aunt, that going to her house-on-the-lake would be like visiting an exotic country.

The doorbell rang while it was still dark outside; she had left the truck running. My mother firmly instructed me to go answer the door. I twisted the deadbolt, slowly until it slid back with a condemning thud. The first thing I saw were her hands. They were smooth and her fingers were long and tapered like in all the hand-crème commercials. The fingernails were cut almost to the quick, exposing the raw pink skin underneath. I was terrified.
“Hi Sarah” she seemed utterly sure that she was where she was supposed to be, talking to who she was supposed to address. I wished she would be anywhere else, talk to anyone else. She told me her name was Marion. It was French and reminded me of fairytale heroines. So I decided to trust her.

My mother came to say goodbye, smearing a kiss across my cheek and wiping toast crumbs off my jacket. Then she propelled me onto the porch towards M-air-I-ohn, and closed the door.
The houses at 45, then 47, then 49 La Vuelta blurred in the window as the truck sped northeast. The hours on the digital clock in the dashboard clicked and rotated like the arrivals and departures board at Heathrow. It was as if the stronger I wished we would never arrive, the closer we got, as it the progress of the tires on the dusty road was fueled by the apprehension that jarred my stomach.

There were four other girls in the truck: Dakota, her brown curls shivering as she readjusted her headphones. Madeleine and Laurel sat next to Dakota in the backseat, and watched me watch them, giggling. Sara was asleep against the window, her breath making clouds on the glass. She was clutching her pink stuffed duck while snot dripped glistened above her upper lip.
I leaned forward, resting my forehead on the cool glass, bumping my head every time the truck hit a bump or pothole. By the end of the trip I had an angry red bump the size of silver dollar sitting like a bindhi between my brows. The truck lurched as we turned onto a gravel road, my head thumped painfully against the window, making my eyes water. She turned down the music and looked back at us, smiling at something above my head.

Gradually the sky began to lighten. The truck pulled into a rugged, overgrown driveway just as the sun was beginning to make the leather of the seats uncomfortably warm. Marion wrenched the key out of the ignition and stepped down into the clouds of red dust that had been sent flying into the air.

She hauled on the backseat door. I felt exposed under the sun’s direct light, which caught me in the eyes, but which framed her in a red-gold blaze of dust and daylight. The rays wrapped around every strand of her frizzy black hair. I was so jealous of her curls, so sure that Joan of Arc, and Boudica, and Queen Isabella of Spain had possessed curls just like Marion’s. That’s why I followed her into the house, holding Sara’s hand and dragging my jacket in the dust.

We stepped into a hallway that smelled like mothballs and vacuum bags. Then I saw the lake. I was stunned. The water winked and dipped, beckoning from beyond the sliding glass door. The glare on the glass hurt my eyes. She watched, unconcerned, as I dropped Sara’s hand and marched to the door. I stood there, looking out at the lake, for what must have been nearly two hours.

I remember looking at the dilapidated dock, encroached on by the foamy green algae that floated just below the surface, ready to grab swimmer’s bare arms and legs. Vines stretched from the warped willow tree on the right bank of the lake, they seemed to be pulling the tree into the water, slowly coaxing it year after year.

That afternoon Marion called us all into the large sunny central room. We sat in a circle, scabby knees scraping boney shins. She passed out frozen strawberry pop tarts, and gave each of us a box with our names written in green cursive across the top. She must have thought I spelled my name like the other Sara, without the “H”, so she had left it off. I loved her for that; it seemed more elegant when spelled that way.

My box held a blue and a black pen, a black and white-speckled notebook, and a journal with thick, egg-colored pages and a blue and green marbled cover. I hugged the journal to my knees, leaning over as I craned my neck to see what was in Madeleine’s box.

Just as I reached out to touch the red and pink cover of the journal that Madeleine held out to me, Marion said, “Well, girls, welcome to my home, and to your first day of writing camp. We will do writing exercises in the mornings and you are free to do what you want in the afternoons.”

She rocked back onto her heels as she knelt, smacking the front of her thighs and smiling so widely that her whole face wrinkled to accommodate her grin. I remember wishing that she really were my great-aunt; that I could sit on her lap and smooth out the crows feet and dimples of her face with my thumbs. I settled for adjusting the sleeves of my jacket, which would take me several more years to grow into.

Marion told the five of us that we would sleep in the loft, that all meals would consist of lemonade (the kind from a powder), Beef Ramen (the type in an orange packet and looks like over-permed hair), and strawberry pop tarts.

The following two weeks are more impressions for me that memories, the pervasiveness of light, the warmth, being simply, basically, happy. What I do recall has the texture of an old Polaroid, grainy and tinged with a color it did not originally possess: the beautiful assault of bitterly cold water as it hit bare skin when I jumped off the dock, the early morning pilgrimages I made every morning we were there.

Just after dawn I would get up and wait until I could hear the other girls’ slow breathing. Then I tiptoed barefoot down the cold stairs from the loft to the kitchen. I knew that there would be a crisply folded slip of paper waiting on the kitchen table, with a note at the bottom in scrawling green ink.

Each morning I would slide the note across the surface of the table, replacing it with a new story or observation I had penned the previous day, neatly folded into quarters. Then I would go back to bed, saving the old poem, festooned with her notes, for later. Sleep would come easily then, secure and content in the knowledge that Marion would get up in a few hours and go directly to the kitchen. She would take my poem off the table, and save it in one of the deep pockets in her denim shorts to be read later that afternoon while the five of us swam.

I liked, and still like, to imagine that she smiled to herself, with the knowledge that she was fostering in me a passion to write; smiling as she pulled the strawberry pop tarts out of the freezer, placing them on the counter to thaw.