It is my birthday. I am forty-one years old, which means I am the age of I have no idea which fictional characters—I will take suggestions, since the only one to occur to me was dubiously omened. This is a harder birthday to celebrate than some years, but I woke to three cards and a book and the air is full of buffeting sunshine. The cats are purring. It must count for something to be still here.
2022-10-09
Some years there are elaborate birthday plans with or without my knowledge, but this year I had a small and low-key birthday with my parents and my brother and my husbands and it was lovely. For getting out of doors, there was a walk in the late afternoon through a hitherto unexplored trail of the Great Meadows, branching through stands of yellow-leaved shivering birches and silver-topped walls of common reed and cattails and eventually an open field backed by a low drystone wall where a man was clearing brambles with hedge clippers, his sweatshirt and the knees of his jeans showing that the brambles had been clipping back. He had an older boyish face and silver-streaked dark hair and a discernible old-school Boston accent and was surprised and pleased when I asked if we had right of way, since we didn't want to crash through his back yard; it turned out that he was maintaining a track which had been opened up decades ago by a neighbor who had since died. "Where do you want to go?" he asked us. My folklorically unwise and honest answer was "Anywhere," since we had been walking the meadows all summer. He gestured toward the line of the trees where the well-trodden path wound off and said, "Well, you can go that way or the other way," and partly because he was standing in the middle of a late-lit autumn field, my brain instinctively supplied, "Of course, some people do go both ways." We went the other way and came out onto a familiar trail by which we returned home in time for dinner. We'll have to go that way next time.
( How much will you hold? )
Our oven has been defunct for weeks; I remain impressed at my mother's ability to bake a two-layered almond-flour cake in a toaster oven and then to drape it in marzipan and decorate it with sour cherry sauce, whipped cream, and a Halloween-pointing arrangement of ghosts and cats from Burdick's. I can eat just about as much chocolate as most of a cat minus its plumy cashew tail and it was worth it. There are tragically no pictures.
My brother had found me an extraordinary present, which he had been holding onto for the last six months: a locket of gilt metal in the shape of a book, decorated with a dolphin and a harp and inlays of blue ground sea glass. The tiny accordion of flash fiction folded inside is called "Sea Tea." All of that is thoughtful enough in its own right, but I recognized it at once as the work of an artist named Raelinda Woad, who has been making these little jewelry stories since the 1990's. I had one in high school; it was silver and purple, decorated with a dragon. I never wore it, but it was talismanically precious to me. It was stolen in the break-in of my parents' house in 2013. My brother remembered. He was as stunned as I would have been to discover the artist at a craft fair in Vermont earlier this year and he chose the most ocean-themed of her pieces on offer. I wore it for the rest of the night.
Otherwise I was given to understand that my major gift this year was to be assistance with a piece of necessary bureaucracy and now I have several books including James Ivory's Autobiography of a Princess, Also Being the Adventures of an American Film Director in the Land of the Maharajas (1975) and Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2013), which I had to be discouraged from disappearing into: it looks as though I may disagree with some of her film criticism, but her attention to his biography and screen persona is exactly the sort of thing that interests me and she is entirely right to make a centerpiece of Pimpernel Smith (1941). I have also some IOUs. It is 2022. God forbid anything arrive in the mail.
The stars are very crisp and clear: telescope weather. I am tired of the future being such a tough proposition, but this was a good day to have been here for.
( How much will you hold? )Our oven has been defunct for weeks; I remain impressed at my mother's ability to bake a two-layered almond-flour cake in a toaster oven and then to drape it in marzipan and decorate it with sour cherry sauce, whipped cream, and a Halloween-pointing arrangement of ghosts and cats from Burdick's. I can eat just about as much chocolate as most of a cat minus its plumy cashew tail and it was worth it. There are tragically no pictures.
My brother had found me an extraordinary present, which he had been holding onto for the last six months: a locket of gilt metal in the shape of a book, decorated with a dolphin and a harp and inlays of blue ground sea glass. The tiny accordion of flash fiction folded inside is called "Sea Tea." All of that is thoughtful enough in its own right, but I recognized it at once as the work of an artist named Raelinda Woad, who has been making these little jewelry stories since the 1990's. I had one in high school; it was silver and purple, decorated with a dragon. I never wore it, but it was talismanically precious to me. It was stolen in the break-in of my parents' house in 2013. My brother remembered. He was as stunned as I would have been to discover the artist at a craft fair in Vermont earlier this year and he chose the most ocean-themed of her pieces on offer. I wore it for the rest of the night.
Otherwise I was given to understand that my major gift this year was to be assistance with a piece of necessary bureaucracy and now I have several books including James Ivory's Autobiography of a Princess, Also Being the Adventures of an American Film Director in the Land of the Maharajas (1975) and Estel Eforgan's Leslie Howard: The Lost Actor (2013), which I had to be discouraged from disappearing into: it looks as though I may disagree with some of her film criticism, but her attention to his biography and screen persona is exactly the sort of thing that interests me and she is entirely right to make a centerpiece of Pimpernel Smith (1941). I have also some IOUs. It is 2022. God forbid anything arrive in the mail.
The stars are very crisp and clear: telescope weather. I am tired of the future being such a tough proposition, but this was a good day to have been here for.
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