The Week: So Much about the Sky

Tuesday, 8/6/24

Speak, Memory.

I have arranged all the books I’ve loved and tabbed over the years and put them on their own book shelf so that I can revisit their passages daily, like a prayer.

I possess a terrible memory so browsing through these books is like new to me. Brian once told me that he’s jealous of how easily I forget movies and shows so that when I watch them again, it is almost like new. I wasn’t always this way but in my adult years, less has begun to stick. It has nothing to do with boredom or disinterest. My mind just doesn’t remember narratives or names or events all that well. I will remember the sensuous--how when dealing with an ant infestation in the old apartment, the ants smelled sweet. How when hiking in Rothrock, what I thought was a squeaky mountain bike heading my way was actually a Bald Eagle. How after I broke my ankles, it was difficult for me to watch hockey. Every time they’d bend their ankles in weird directions, my feet buzzed.

Not long ago, Brian and I were on some trip (I can’t remember but it was likely our eclipse trip in April) and we were discussing super powers. I told him that I would love to possess total recall. I possess a mind that makes fascinating-to-me connections between unrelated things and how amazing would it be to connect Napoleon to violets or Marco Polo to the rhinoceros using context and passages and storytelling? I thought more deeply about it--about how troublesome it could possibly be. How forgetting can be a form of healing, etc., but despite it all, I want it. I live with painful and curious memories in my pockets, like anyone else. The controlling, abusive ex who had a gun. The pallor of my sister as she lay dying. The careful work of tending to her needs. The time I hit a deer and sat with her on the grassy berm as she died, my hands on her ribs. Every detail of when I broke my ankles and the months following. Fifth grade. That one creepy guy who ended up getting arrested. Another creepy guy that I never talk about. Imagining my grandmother’s last free day in the sunshine before a freak accident. We all carry a lot with us. We all have deep pockets full of their seeds. Some of us continue to carry the seeds, our fingers running smoothly through the grain of them. Some of us plant them carefully, feeding them so that they can become something beautiful. Some of us take handfuls of them and throw them in the wind, scattering them. Let them land where they land. Every time I get low on my haunches to look at an insect or mushroom or what-have-you, doing my silly little things, it’s as if a seed is being planted.

As Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough.” That’s why I always seek it.

Wednesday, 8/7/24

Whether I’m reading a book or listening to a podcast, a common theme as of late is that the sun will eat us. That ancient relic. That eight-minute-long waiting. Its tendrils of charged particles. Its various names for which it has no brain to care: Helios, Ra, Sol, Inti. Many folks have written about this god-like orb of hydrogen and helium; how the sun is something we absolutely need, yet cannot look at directly. How eventually it will become a vacuum. There is a meme that floats around out there, mentioning some significant idea that instills in the reader a sense of insignificance or nihilism and then saying and you have to buy groceries.What a life it is that we humans have curated--living on the middle path between your little life is simply a little life and be all that you can be and be sure to pay your taxes.

Thursday, 8/8/24

Brian Is Out of Town: A List:

·      Go browse the book store. It will be a rainy day tomorrow and nothing makes a rainy day more splendid than a new book that I won’t start reading for another few months

·      Oh, those are nice pens

·      I can’t believe I still don’t have all of Robert Macfarlane’s books so I guess I’ll buy this one

·      A book about ancient knowledge, gods, and history? Okay!

·      A book about the senses by this author whose other books I’ve read before? I had no idea she wrote another book. Okay!

·      Wow, I am buying a lot of stuff. Might as well buy a new reusable bag too!

·      I have cash in my wallet! That’s free money, right?

·      Buy everything with the free money

·      Go home to two dogs and no husband

·      Make sure dogs needs are met before I settle in for a cozy evening

·      Do a bunch of cleaning instead

·      Pick vegetables from the garden

·      Make lunch for work tomorrow so I don’t have to do it in the morning

·      Steam some dumplings because time is getting away from me and I need to have my cozy evening with a horror movie because I rarely watch TV

·      Make a nest on the couch surrounded by my journal, laptop, books, and two different beverages

·      Spend a half hour finding a movie to watch

·      Oh geez, it’s in German. I don’t want to concentrate too hard while watching a horror movie

·      Give up on finding a horror movie and put a dumb show on

·      Watch political footage

·      Read blogs

·      What happened to Amanda Bynes?

·      Rabbit holes

·      More rabbit holes

·      Give the dogs some frozen green beans

·      Give the dogs meds

·      Sit on the patio in the dark, excited for all the tropical rain that is coming tomorrow and the cozy evening of horror movies I will have tomorrow while the wind howls and the rain slants by

Friday, 8/9/24

The tropical rain had a ten-hour work day, just like me. I arrived home to a beautiful evening of comfortable temperatures and a sun blazing. Like the animals, I wanted to hunker down through the storm in my little human way. But instead, I had to be at work. And because my brain is the way it is, I couldn’t do what I actually wanted to do once I got home. Instead, I visited the river, swollen with silt. It had grown so wide that from a distance where I was looking at rocks, it appeared bronze through the trees. Accidentally walking through cellophane-like spiderwebs, I laughed at how ridiculous my little brain is. Silly Sarah.

Saturday, 8/10/24

Sometimes we wonder how something will be in the future. Like how our parents will be when they get old. For most of my adulthood, I didn’t see my parents as old. The older they got, the older old got. However, I will admit that I am now in that garden, browsing my parents as their leaves begin to wither just a little and their soil is a bit dry. Their fruit and flowers are the same--still vibrant, still blooming in indeterminate inflorescence.

I drove up to the Allegheny National Forest where my family owns a hunting camp to celebrate my parents’ 40th anniversary. 40 years. Two years more than my own life, one year less than my deceased sister’s entire life. We went to a brewery in Ridgway to celebrate, elk heads on the walls and alcohol in our glasses. We had the typical, bubbly, heading-off-to-college-in-the-fall waitress to whom my parents shared very minor details about a variety of topics: the town they live in, the town I live in, and where those towns are situated. How my sister died of cancer, how many grandchildren they have, how many great-grandchildren they have. How the one great-granddaughter enjoys rides on the tractor and while on the tractor she makes all left turns and how she would be great in NASCAR because she drives in circles. How when she was driving the tractor, she had the wheel in one hand and a drink in the other. Where I went to college, where I went to grad school, what I studied, what I do now, how intelligent I am yet very modest. What my husband does for a living, where he was this weekend, what band he saw last night. Going to church. Where the waitress is going to college, what she will study in college, and how my dad would be a perfect research subject for her college psychology classes. How old her grandmother is and how she has cancer and how the church prayed for her. Where she lives and how far away. By the end of the evening, the waitress and my mother were going to pray for one another.

While some may feel that this is too much, I say this was beautiful to witness and I will never forget it.

Sunday, 8/11/24

At nearly midnight, Silas and I hopped into the car to drive the windy road down to the Clarion River to get a better view of the northern sky. Some meteors scored the sky in the little sky I was able to see. In the Allegheny National Forest, canopy punctures the sky with the pointed heads of conifers. A speckled sky appears web-like, almost like a kaleidoscope, as you move. Moving in darkness puts the senses on high alert. The heart may pound with caution, just a little bit. Driving a car in the darkness on a meandering road in the deep forest pricks up the ears and widens the lenses. The road sounds different at night. The smells, cooler, lighter, but still strong. I spotted a deer and let her bound across the road. I waited another few seconds before resuming velocity. We made it down to the river where I turned off the car. Silas sat confused and intrigued in the back seat, likely wondering why I got out of bed, burst out the door with my keys, and encouraged him to follow me into the car. I held my phone up to the sky and took a long exposure. And there it was, a grainy, red spectre. The aurora. I took a few more shots and my phone in my pocket so I could adjust to the darkness. Black as pitch, no one around. A dog in a tin can and me beside the tin can. The lovely Clarion River doing her long, unstoppable call of water over and against rock. I felt like I was deep in an ocean. I felt like the darkness had me in a vice, yet I was not afraid. I had been in that exact spot just hours before and all that has changed is the lighting and insect song and the millions of other minutiae. A Great Horned Owl hooted in the far distance. I imagined myself as a pin on a map. My pin, lodged into the dark green of forest next to a meandering blue line. Another pin, Brian to the southeast of me, in light green, near an interstate. As he looked north toward the charged sky, he was looking at his wife standing alone in the darkness, his dog next to her in a tin can.

Monday, 8/12/24

At 2:20 am, our garage cam captured towers of auroral light. This morning, while reading and writing on my family camp’s porch during the forest-morning, a Ring cam watched me and the surrounding environs. When navigating the forest, camouflaged cameras are everywhere, watching. Typically, a notification illuminates a person’s phone when there is movement. Those are the pivotal moments, right? But what about those times of silence and stillness?

Brian and I have cameras all over our property, not for safety, but for the surveillance of sky events, birds, and other wildlife. When Brian shares with me the images of deer congregating in the woods, my mind wanders to the leaf-littered floor before the hooves arrived. Not one of our cameras have captured the slow apocalypse (which etymologically means great revealing) of flowers blooming. We wander around the land we live on and report back about this or that sunflower, this or that newly unfolding leaf, a dead baby bat, a new pile of scat, strange bulbs that appeared under the Norway Maple. Brian walked over to me, a small bulb in his hands, like a gift. I stabbed its green sprigs with a fingernail and sniffed it. Green. I then stabbed the bulb. Inconclusive green. No must, no spice.

Would it be body horror to be covered in eyes, opening them all at once, and squinting? Imagine watching the sunset and all that is illuminated by it at the same time. My favorite thing to do during a sunset is turn my back to it. Illuminated in Golden Hour is one of my favorite colors. There is such a thing called a Claude Glass which is a mirror one would use to see a landscape as if it were a painting. One would simply turn their back to the sunset and look in the mirror at what is behind them. The glass is named after French landscape painter Claude Lorrain. It is a tiny, dark mirror. Much like your phone when disengaged.

This evening while sitting on the patio with Brian, I looked at the sunflowers at the bottom of the yard. Their bright yellow look away from us and at the yellow flowers of the tickseed. Beyond that, the woods.

Photo by my husband, Brian Lada