The Week: Serendipity & Coincidences & Lisps

Tuesday, 8/13/24

The inside of the cover said DISCARD in bold, threatening sharpie. Flipping through the delicately illustrated pages, I was relieved that the book found my friend Denice’s hands and not the darkness of a plastic bag in a landfill. Or maybe DISCARD simply meant our library no longer wants this book, so let someone else want it. 

Published 22 years after Rachel Carson’s article “Help Your Child to Wonder” (after her death, it was turned into the better-known “The Sense of Wonder”), this book, On the Forest Edge by Carol Lerner contains similar merits. Holding the book, one may wonder if it’s a book for a child. Open the book to its black and white ink drawings of a cottontail rabbit that “stops to sniff the air as the first rays of sunlight slant across the weedy field” and you still may believe that the book is for a child. The book begins by narrating the cottontail’s journey amongst the mullein and its encounter with a weasel. Keep reading and the rabbit’s journey leads to a tangle of bushes and vines that protects them. Turn a page and there appears a two-page spread--a drawing of a forest’s edge before it meets the blank, negative space of fields and pasture. The ink drawings of the brambles are simply dark, curved lines with teardrop-shaped circles for leaves. The trees in the foreground are detailed with plates of bark, light-to-shadow. The trees in the background are simply parallel lines forming the silhouette of a tree. Oh, the edge effect or ecotone I said to myself. Those two terms were new to me earlier this year and resonate with me in myriad ways. These terms have been composting in my mind for months, influencing the way I think and write. What a nice book for children. I turned the page and the words “ecologists”, “ecotone”, and “edge effect” are present. Like Rachel Carson’s writing, these terms are explained for the layperson in graspable and interesting ways. It explains ecotone as “the plant and animal life in these areas where two different kinds of habitat meet” and edge effect as the “concentration of wildlife” in those areas.

Mouth wide open, I looked up at Denice in the serendipitous shock that she would introduce a lovely, thin book to me that contains ideas that have been so meaningful and at one time esoteric to me. The book smelled good, too. Denice gets immense pleasure out of sharing old books and illustrations with us three ladies. She is an artist, among other things, and so are the other two ladies, all old enough to be my mother. Upon seeing my thrill and hearing me explain my affinity for the edge effect, she let me keep the book.

Wednesday, 8/14/24

Tomatoes ferment on my countertop. I pick up a spoonful tomato--smaller than a pea--and pop it in my mouth. Tomato wine.

And there are so many of them to pick and all one can do is turn that slow churn of time into meditation.

Barefoot and on my knees, my arms stretch into the dense jungle of tomato vines to grab and twist the glowing red orb. Tiny, itchy bumps raise on my arms. My hair smells like tomato leaves.

And when I stand up, my knees are pale with grass indentations. The grass resumes its posture.

Thursday, 8/15/24

I made a large batch of tomato bisque, measuring all the ingredients with my heart. At one point, I thought I was holding my heart, aiming a knife at it.

But it was a tomato.

Friday, 8/16/24

A long time ago (was it long?), I was a college student in the evening-time, going for a walk to one of the lakes on campus. I walked down the winding hill past the more wild lake where men fished. It was always interesting seeing strange men on campus considering that it was an all-girl’s college. Interesting in a novel way--not a fearful way. I was glad to see them. I kept walking and ended up at the larger lake’s spillway where one can walk or stand or sit as long as they don’t lose balance. Another girl was there--my memory is poor so in my memory, she was either of two people. I sat next to her. I do remember that she was a melancholy sort much like myself. I don’t remember if we had much of a conversation. I think we were both there together to be alone. Humans are drawn to bodies of water, especially if they’re the melancholy sort. The abyssness of it. The disappear of it. The vastness of it. The possibility of it. The mysteriousness of it. The sound and smell of it. A water’s surface allows one to think deeply--the surface being static enough to allow contemplation but moving enough to encourage momentum. And when the water senses that you have been thinking too much, it sends a fish flying up and plopping down to interrupt you. Or it sends the royal highness of shores, the Great Blue Heron, to dip its beak on the other side of the water.

But I am rambling. What I want to talk about has nothing to do with this girl or the lake or melancholia or the heron with his s-shaped neck. At one point, the girl stood up, about to leave. I said something to her as she left and when I said it, I had a lisp.

Ever since, during warm evenings only, I have experienced this magical, peaceful lisp about a dozen times. I could feel it on the tip of my tongue. I could hear it. It happened a couple nights ago at 8 pm while talking with my husband Brian on the patio. And it happened this evening at 8 pm as I was at my friend Maddie’s house. She bounced around in her hospitality, refusing most of my help, so I sat with a beer and talked with her and out came the lisp. Someone suggested that it may indicate that I feel at peace. Perhaps my whole body is relaxed and lazy, only doing half the work. The s less sharp, asking the theta of th to do its work.

And I kind of love that.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A UMass Amherst professor was being interviewed on TV regarding the current political race. I looked at him, thinking of the narratives of our lives. In one narrative my life could have followed, I might have known that man. If I had gone to UMass Amherst for my master’s degree I might have walked past his office or seen him in a coffee shop. Maybe my relationship to snow would be different. Or my relationship to humans. Maybe I would have fallen in love with a writer and then out-of-love because they were too much like me. Maybe I would have worked at Amherst Books and still be there today. I wouldn’t have broken both ankles at the same time. Maybe something else terrible would have happened. I wouldn’t have been at my sister’s death bed as often, tending to her. My parents would be making regular visits to New England or I’d rarely see them.

I don’t know what the number is if asked how many opportunities a day we have to change the narrative of our future. How many times has petting my dogs before leaving the house saved my life or at least prevented me from hitting all the red lights? I’m sitting in my dining room right now. Swing music is playing and dogs sleep at my feet. I am surrounded by books and outside the window, pokeweed is blowing in the breeze. Things hang on the walls. The fridge hums. The ice in my glass melts. Gravity has everything situated in its equilibrium until I knock something with my elbow or pull a book from a stack. The plants do their work of turning light and water into shoots and leaves. All these narratives and wow, it sure is comforting not to be the main character.

Sunday, 8/18/24

I am sitting on our patio after rain has come and gone. It came and went when I was not here, of course. I love this space, our patio. I live next to an ecotone where the birds sing and pass from one side of the yard to the next. A catbird calls from the nearby woods and then another catbird, in the Norway Maple in our yard, calls back to them. They go back and forth in their sex or possession-dominated language.

But despite how much I covet this space, I am missing a different space desperately. It is a bookstore in Montague, Massachussetts. It sits on the bank of the Sawmill River, facing a waterfall that is crowned with trees. The bookstore has large, old windows and large, stuffed chairs at those windows where you can relax with your favorite book and feel like you’re outside at the same time. The wooden floors creak. The windows are almost as wide as I am tall. They don’t have screens.

Like most, I enjoy travel. I enjoy ingraining myself in new places, even if they’re not terribly far from my own nest. There are places I have visited that resonate very deeply with me, not because they’re grand vistas or Instagram-impressive, but because they embody something that I also want to embody. I remember walking into this bookstore and seeing the relaxed posture of a woman worker sitting at a front desk, flipping through donated books, deeming whether or not the book is sellable. I imagined what her life must be like, flipping through old, used books. Going home to the donated books she slipped onto her own shelves. I imagine the interesting folks she must have met or hosted when they came to share their own work at a reading. I imagined having the keys to the store and letting myself in during a midnight thunderstorm so that I can hear and smell and feel the rain come in through an open window. The river sweeping by.

Places in Vermont have a grip on me, as well. In some parts of Vermont, if you want to slip into the woods to swim in a pothole (geologic pothole), you can. People briefly close their places of business so that they can escape into the woods for a little while. In some parts of Vermont, so many yards are wild with native plants and food forests. Places like these are dear to me and I revere them the way I would revere a human I admire. They have traits. They have thoughts. They have their own umwelt. And I want to understand that umwelt. I want to embody that umwelt.

Meanwhile, we will continue on our little slice of land, which I love and tend to. I praise it, knowing full well that my words accomplish nothing here, but the language of how I navigate the land brings the buds to flower.

Monday, 8/18/24

A theme this past week, other than 8 pm lisps, is that we perceive things based on who and how we are. From Anais Nin’s “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are” and Mark Doty’s “…when we describe the world we come closer to saying what we are.” I am currently lingering in an Am I everything? frame of mind, wondering where I end and the soil starts. I spent some of the morning organizing and sweeping the dirt out of garden shed (its previous life was a summer kitchen). I spent the following hour sneezing, blowing my nose, the dust and dirt mixed with the mucous of me.

And for the shape of the horizon, a tree, a chair, and passing sign as I drive on the highway--their images are stored somewhere.

Brian and I were talking about a show we started watching, “Three Body Problem”. In the show, a historical character claims to have invented calculus. Brian laughed at the idea of calculus being invented. I was surprised by his reaction and told him Well, yeah. Math is a language and language is human-made. I went on about how sure, math and the sciences measure and evaluate to the point of precision, whatever that is. But it’s simply language to help us understand and make weird sense of it. Numbers, equations, and all those other math terms that I know nothing about, are figures of speech. They wouldn’t exist without humans creating them.

“I am a human” is as correct as 2+2=4.