Bitter Sweet September
Open your eyes,
Dream but don't guess.
Your biggest surprise
Comes after Yes.
Muriel Rukeyser
Happy October!
The road has officially called us home!
Betty (the 4Runner) has a new set of tires (and, thanks to some ghetto curbside maintenance, fresh breaks and oil) and we're ON THE ROAD TO MAINE ... via Georgia.
The path home will be a little fandangled and indirect. (Isn't it always?) We're taking a few days to drive to Greensboro, GA, where Meghan's parents live, to pack up what was left there after Savannah, along with a few items being generously gifted to the new-old home — or, "The 1820," as my parents have affectionately named it.
I'll be flying out from Atlanta a few days after we get there. Destination: my South Sudanese home away from home. No Russian smirch rockets knocking on our doors this time. Just some of the normal, joyful chaos of a week of cleft lip surgeries.
We got some final hikes in before we left, including getting Meghan up to Sacagawea, which never disappoints. She (Meghan) is as lovely as always.
Jack has been living large and cozy on the drive. The setup in the car is a little different each time we pack up, but I think this has been his favorite to date. He like to be where we are, and if he feels consigned to the back seat by himself, he gets grumpy. With an extra foot of elevation this time from the baggage stuffed under his two beds and a pillow extending over the armrest, he gets to be an honorary member of the front seat.
Cooler weather, all the backyard squirrel guard duty he could hope for, close proximity to beaches — all this awaits him and he doesn't even know it. I'd like to think that the months he has spent, on his bed or on the couch, looking out his favorite glass door to the east, he's been thinking about his future home.
Here are a few things worth reading or listening to:
- I think my favorite music artist is Jason Isbell. I listened to an interview with him titled "Our Revisionist (Personal) Histories" and it hits home. Maybe it will for you too. You can also find it on a podcast platform titled "On resisting the mythos of sobriety."
- Anne Snyder's editorial for the Fall 2023 issue of Comment Magazine is thought-provoking, and I'm looking forward to sitting down with a paper copy of the magazine when I get home.
- "How do literature and theology help us make sense of the world in distinct ways?" Matthew Mullins, reflecting the work of Frederick Buechner, has a lovely answer.
Literature doesn't try to tell you what to think about the things that happen to you; it tries to make things happen to you.
- I also enjoyed this interview between Eve Tushnet and Erika Bachiochi, on the "the rights of women."
And here are some things from the commonplace blog:
- Reflecting on Mullins's piece above, I wrote a little about the unsystematized life.
- Some thoughts on Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.
- A thought on childhood as something "naive and healthy."
- "Oceans of facts, deserts of knowledge" — an old, old problem.
- I opened my big dumb mouth about a certain pop artist. It won't happen again.
- Part of the reason I so liked that interview with Jason Isbell, and why I like his music in general, is connected to what I had in mind when I wrote this back in April of 2020. Specifically, who I had in mind, before things got really bad.
- Since I'm headed over to South Sudan, here's a link to a post from one of the trips a couple years ago, which also has links to some photos and a link to a very good essay by Alan Jacobs.
That's it for September! And that's it for Bozeman. This is a bitter sweet moment. Looking back through the archive of photos, there have been a lot of fun adventures in the last two years. The funnest part is thinking back to when we first left, not having any idea what the travels would bring us or where we would land. Now we're headed back to the northeast with a house, a ring, and a baby — and a life in momentum.
I'll end with two poems this time, because I feel them both, and because poems are at their best when you don't feel like explaining the "why" of a thing.
"Lore" by R. S. Thomas
Job Davies, eighty-five
Winters old, and still alive
After the slow poison
And treachery of the seasons.
Miserable? Kick my arse!
It needs more than the rain's hearse,
Wind-drawn to pull me off
The great perch of my laugh.
What's living but courage?
Paunch full of hot porridge
Nerves strengthened with tea,
Peat-black, dawn found me
Mowing where the grass grew,
Bearded with golden dew.
Rhythm of the long scythe
Kept this tall frame lithe
What to do? Stay green.
Never mind the machine,
Whose fuel is human souls
Live large, man, and dream small.
"Consider the Hands that Write this Letter" by Aracelis Girmay
Consider the hands
that write this letter.
Left palm pressed flat against paper,
as we have done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence to the sea,
some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or strangest of strange birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I've held a spade,
the horse's reins, loping, the very fists
I've seen from roads through Limay & Estelí.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up;
food will come from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder,
my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how I pray,
I pray for this to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body's position to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.
Thanks for reading! For more commonplace stuff, you can go to tinyroofnail.micro.blog. Or you can email me at tinyroofnail@hey.com. Or you can just wait for next month's newsletter.