Winter
I used to be all seasons or perhaps no season, but now winter lives within me. How much more real or cold or white is the winter I harbor than actual snow, thin air, the sky’s take this stakeout — all the sinister season a floozy, profligate and neglectful, prone to the casual casualty, and also something more calculating, a plot, you not winning at cards or anything. The winteriest winter I know now is North Dakota winter, and that’s not even my winter; it’s my husband’s winter: Dairy Queen tilting under a heap of white, cars left running in a smoking black parking lot, houses hot as static. But me, I was a child in my winter, at the ski lodge in Vermont, my parents a bustling concern, getting the lift tickets, buying hot chocolate in the clomping, melting din. We stayed at a white farmhouse on a lonely straight road. Across the street was a long field with a forest behind it and a fence in front of it: field of white, the fence posts glitches, acquiescence. You can’t get it all, there is no master plan, everything has a limit. Turn back to the house and the bedroom I share with Alex. A country breakfast: bacon, pancakes, orange juice. Did people really live in these mystifying locations, so far from us? I bought a rabbit fur on the way home for a dollar and spent months/years with the fur under my cheek at night, me, the animal lover. Here is the little skin of a little animal that died violently. Here is what I think of winter now: a tall tree in a repeating forest, no underbrush, the snow a theme, shadows cylindrical and so long, just giant — passing over the solid, the logical, laying out over everything with disregard for your petty bullshit, and a light that comes from the turn of the earth, from planets colliding three trillion light years away, from a pebble turning under a collision of storms, the residue of time, death, passing, journey. Deep utter ruthless aloneness. That’s the kind of light. And by the tree is a rabbit, brown roll, terrified.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Forgetting
What I do is I write down things I am especially sure I might forget. I am against forgetting. I write dreams down on pieces of paper that slip in with other pieces of paper and are lost. Lost is better than forgotten. I sometimes write down conversations. If someone says something egregious, I write it down before I forget. This is because when someone says something egregious it goes in a certain funnel and is mixed up inside my brain with a volcanic blast of understanding, speculation, and commiseration, and is thus instantly diluted or even distorted. It is then impossible for me to remember what the thing was in the first place. Of course, I am all for understanding, speculation, and commiseration — just not too soon, is what I’m saying. Because of the blast and the concomitant smothering. Is it smart to try to remember words that are confused, damning? I believe it could be, at least, important. But like the dreams, I do not go back to these conversation notes. They are also dreams, shuffled into the paperscape surrounding my desk, leaves fallen off a tree, a dog’s stash of bones. When I write things down, these few words develop their own weight and reality, and I can then relax the rest of my brain and not worry so much about forgetting. I am like a little old man leaning on a cane and whistling. The day will surely never come when I gather up these fragments and assemble a model of the life I had. The husks of experience: discard them! And yet, it is a pleasure to tease out the past, which is all of my life. Except for the future, which is, surely, also something that shouldn’t be forgotten.
[Excerpts from Once Into the Night appear with permission of University of Alabama Press. Copyright 2019 Aurelie Sheehan]