Kaatsbaan

Heat lamps huddle in the off-season, and by off-season, I mean daytime.

The liquid shadows of wooden fences, the fences taller than me. The music barn open to the wind, a monarch the size of my hand. The draping willow. A place at rest.

At the inn: paintings hung or leaning, layered rugs. It looks effortless and permanent in both directions, unlike my own home, which requires constant tending. The crowded breakfast still-life, a smattering of jams, muffins and scones split in half, giving an air of abundance.

Coffee. A symphony on the radio, geese in the sky.

The cat asleep on a blanket draped on the banister on the third floor.

*

The trouble with writing anything, is figuring out where to start – how far back to go. Everything is connected, and once you start to set things down on the page, you realize you're gonna be there awhile, and who has that kind of time.

You walk away from it.

A rock star who walks off the stage, face shining, hair wet, knows they will be right back to sing another song. They have to walk off the stage in order for the return to mean something – to be, well, a return.

So it is with you and the page, you walk away from it, you give up, but it's for show, you are compelled to come back, and you know it, and you come back, you do.

Do.

*

“How are you,” a friend asked me – we hadn't talked in some months – and before I could answer, he said – “I feel like I know everything that’s going on with you, because I read your letters.”

"I get that a lot," I said.

And also: when people ask me how I am, I sometimes think (with some exasperation), “Don’t you read the letters,” even as I know that the letters do not, cannot, contain me.

Thank you, A Public Space, for a generative and regenerative weekend!

Friends! You can still order A Public Space No. 33 and read my story, "Junco and Wolf."

XO