November 🦂🕯️🍂
typing by candlelight.
Lately I’ve been lighting candles.
As I type this in my bedroom I have four burning: two by my bedside; one across the room on my altar, illuminating a photo of my mom; another, beside it, illuminating a drawing I made that says ‘God Bless the Grass’* in a green gothic font. All of my mirrors reflect their light further.
Some nights require this quality of light.
I’ve been putting off writing this letter because it doesn’t feel important. So many other letters are asking to be written (or faxed). For the past month I’ve been writing to my representatives for a ceasefire in Palestine, writing texts to check up on my friends after a mass shooting in my beloved state, and writing to the Portland City Council to stop destroying the encampments of unhoused folks in my city.
My body is heavy with grief and I know I’m not alone. While I write, the candles burn out and I replace them with new ones. When these burn out, I will save this as a draft and go to sleep.
The Barn
When I was eighteen I fell in love for the first time. It wasn't with another person, but with an old barn.
The first time I saw the barn I was in a 16 passenger van and it took my breath away. The scenery out my window was all trees and fields until suddenly I was reading giant white letters carefully painted on the side of a gray barn clad in shingles -
SUN RAIN WIND SWEPT
BLOSSOM BLOSSOM BLOSSOM
SWEET EARTH ROOTS KEPT
My eyes went wide as I read the words and said them quietly under my breath. They read like a spell. The words went through my body and were instantly memorized. Who are you? I almost asked aloud. The moment was quick, so fleeting I believed I imagined it. The van moved on, the window filling again with the green blur of the forest.
On this day I was traveling with a group of classmates to a farm that used draft horses instead of tractors to work the land. While walking over the freshly harrowed fields we saw a killdeer limping through the soil, trying to lure us away from her nest. That spring we were learning how to work draft horses and I had fallen in love with them, too. The way their giant, beautiful bodies stood so solidly on the earth, strong and graceful, even playful. I loved listening to their movements, to the gentle music of their harnesses and the percussion of their hooves on the packed dirt. On the way home from the farm, I looked for the barn to see if it was indeed real, and there it came, sooner than expected, bearing the strange and beautiful poem on its side. For weeks afterward I recited the words, which evoked teeming, pastoral visions, and wrote them down on my arm, enamored with their rhythm.
***
Over the years I have returned to the barn, faithfully visiting it like a secret. Each time I believe that I must have dreamed it up, and that I will be driving along that road forever looking and the barn will never appear. My heart leaps every time I round the bend and see it. Once or twice a year I take the 10 minute detour, pulling off to the side of the road to quietly greet the old barn. I take a picture every time and little changes, my camera mainly capturing the shifting greenery that frames the structure throughout the year.
My love for the barn is simple. There are many aging barns throughout rural Maine, some standing alone in hayfields, others in young forests, crowded with saplings. In their original state they perform a function, and many are beautified by their builders - the shape, the color, all chosen to create something functional as well as beautiful. I swoon at the sight of most barns, in any state of decay. But all those years ago my poet heart had never seen a poem written on a barn, and it hasn't since. To this day, I don't know who wrote the poem; I have never talked to the people who live there. I think I like the mystery, for now, while the barn still stands.
***
My ex, who throughout the years has driven me to visit the barn, texts me a photo of it and it almost makes me weep. The roof is covered in tarps and parts of the siding have been peeled away, revealing the log cabin-like structures that have been created to support the beams. “it’s dying” I text back. He tells me it looks like they are trying to save it, that I shouldn’t worry. This knowledge makes me happy and sad in the same moment, as metaphor and reality meld in my heart: How long can we preserve the past? How much should we take into the future?
As a mender of cloth, I think about this all of the time. I regularly weigh the scales of practicality and sentimentality when I work, examining the fraying cloth of beloved garments. Sometimes the fabric falls apart in my hands and I'm left wondering how much can be saved? Is it worth it? Who does this serve?
‘Nostalgia can be toxic’ I’m reminded by the artist Crystal Cawley, who printed these words with a letterpress on an antique cloth. The cloth now hangs on my wall and serves both as a reminder and a moment of pause. In this post-Trump era, in the second autumn of the pandemic, these words apply to more than the physical objects we surround ourselves with; instead they refer to institutions and ideologies - a toxic legacy of white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy.
***
Throughout my life I have discovered that old ways of doing anything are often worth the time and effort. For me, slowing the process is something I choose as a way of connecting with my energy, of re-enchanting myself with the world. Making things with my hands, reading by candlelight, sewing my clothes and then mending them feels like magic. A connection with the past and the future in one measured, present, moment. Attention well spent. As I work, I think of which parts of this life I chose and which parts I inherited, and I confront all of the privileges that have allowed me to choose. Though I've lit candles and oil lamps out of necessity during the periods of time I've lived off the grid, I light them now in my little apartment on nights that require more darkness than my dimmest lamp.
The questions spin in my head. When to repair something that is damaged? When to dismantle it? Can we save the parts, and should we? Can we transform something that doesn't serve us into something that does? I untangle the legacy left to me, imagining the future I might forge with its parts. The scraps that I've inherited are treasured, complicated pieces of the story. I'm reminded that one hundred little scraps of fabric can become a quilt that keeps you warm.
I don't know if I will ever be able to answer the questions I have asked here, but I look to the words on the old barn for comfort, and a starting point -
SWEET EARTH ROOTS KEPT
I think of my mother's garden, which she inherited from her grandmother, and the growing and fading and cycles over the seasons, over the decades. There is something so beautiful and forgiving about a garden; something always comes back, even if it's dandelions and milkweed. The weeds and tomatoes both give way to rot after a season of growth, and in the spring - the ecstatic blossoming. The poem on the barn is an ode to endlessness, and in its ending, curiosity. What newness awaits?
-2021
Notes
I recently turned the above essay into a tiny book and bound it with fluorescent green thread, given to me by
. If you’d like a copy I will have them at my holiday markets and on my website in December. Details to come in next month’s missive.Thanks for reading, thank you for being here. This is a free, monthly newsletter. Feel free to forward this to someone you think might enjoy it.
In the paid newsletter last month I wrote about the books that got me here, self romance in the forest, a poem about beginning again, unraveling heartbreak, and the web that connects us all.
Take heart and take care xoxo
m
* Lyrics from one of my favorite songs by folk singer Malvina Reynolds from her album Malvina Reynolds…Sings the truth (1966). Here is the first verse:
God bless the grass that grows thru the crack.
They roll the concrete over it to try and keep it back.
The concrete gets tired of what it has to do,
It breaks and it buckles and the grass grows thru,
And God bless the grass.
My dad grew up on a farm and it was sold after my grandfather died over 20 years ago. The barn eventually collapsed and the people who had bought the farm gifted an old photo of it to my aunt, and the frame was made from the wood of the barn. I thought it was a sweet connection to the way of preserving the past.