In the morning I awake to tendrils of cold pushing through invisible cracks at the edges of the window sash above my head. Even with the outside air hushed and still – the limbs of the trees unruffled, the wide expanse of sky parked in place like a stolid, immovable stone – the cold feels driven, as if exhaled from the depths of lungs hidden deep in the earth or lurking behind the granite facade of that overly serious sky. The cat dozes by my head. He has two teeth, a pair of rheumy eyes, and an assortment of scabs that I try not to pick at. He’s 16 but I’m thinking I can squeeze another five years out of him. Well. Four, anyway.
You’re wondering where I’ve been. Or maybe you’re not, but if you were, fair enough. And if you were wondering, my apologies for the disappearing act. It wasn’t planned but as time went on, I found that it only got easier and easier to remain mute, as if silence were a muscle that gets stronger with use. And maybe it is. A friend reminds me of something I said to him years ago, back when I was fat with words, smug and satisfied in my productivity. The more you write, the more you write, is what he says I said, and I’m pretty sure that what I was trying to articulate is that the more you write, the more you’re inclined to write, there’s momentum to it and maybe habituation to the pleasure of putting words together in particular ways. And if it’s true that the more you write, the more you write, it only stands to reason that the less you write, the less you write Until you’re writing nothing at all.
Silent or not, life moves on. I meet a woman – a mother, a librarian, a writer with a wit as quick and sharp as lightning and a laugh that somehow reminds me of rain on a roof though it sounds nothing like that at all – and move 50 miles south into a farmhouse at the end of a dirt road in the steep hills outside a town that seems large to me only because with 1200 residents it’s six times the size of the one I left. I bury one of my cats amidst the intertwined roots of a sugar maple after he goes outside to lie in the sun and doesn’t get up. I fly west to visit my son and early one morning we drive into a small town so he can pick up some horseshoes because he has some horses to shoe. Not for the first time (and surely not for the last) I see how the arc of his life has broken into its own orbit and that whatever gravitational pull this boy feels (if at 21 he feels any at all) is not one I can – or even should – try to influence. Then my other son heads west, too, and I guess I didn’t even realize (stupid! stupid! stupid!) how profoundly this would shake me, these two men whose small, slippery bodies I used to bathe in a tin tub by the wood stove before pressing them against my chest to sleep, now launching into their lives with hardly a glance in the rearview to see how their old man is accommodating to their absence. Good Lord. Kids these days. No manners at all.
But that invisible cold. So familiar. So insistent. I lie in bed letting it drift over me. Thinking to myself that even though everything changes, some things do indeed remain the same.
I’ve read a lot of good books over the past year, but none better than this one, by my fellow Vermonter Nathaniel Miller. I highly recommend it.
I’ve listened to a lot of good music over the past year, and I’m particularly enjoying this song by the Delines. Slightly different vibe, but also loving the Droptines a whole lot.
Finally, I’m hosting a book discussion on one of my all time favorite books, The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks Dalton (who also lives in VT if I’m remembering correctly), this coming Monday, 3/23, at the Chelsea Public Library through the Vermont Humanities Vermont Reads program. You should come.
Ben Hewitt 