Jumbo July Mumbo
Sometimes I was grateful because I knew I ought to be, sometimes because I wanted to be, and sometimes a sweet thankfulness came to me on its own, like a singing from somewhere out in the dark. I was grateful because I knew, even in my fear and grief, that my life had been filled with gifts.
~Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter~
An august August to you all!
First contact: I'm writing this on Sunday, August 6th. This morning was the first time I was able to feel the baby kick! Or punch, or headbutt, or whatever he was doing in there. One of my apps tells me he likes to do somersaults, but I think he's pretending to pedal a mountain bike.
Well, I said last month that we may have more big news, and July did not disappoint!
News #1: We's engaged! To be married, etc.
One of our favorite landmarks since we started traveling is the Tetons. And one our favorite places to see them is the top of Grand Targhee in the Winter. We took a summer trip down there a few weeks ago and decided to make official what we've been talking about for two years. The wedding will likely be a small, backyard thing next June or July.
News #2: We's home (loan) owners and we're moving back to Maine! To live, etc.
All the rejections did finally lead to a new home — and by "new" I mean less than 200 years old. The original house was built in 1820. (Fun fact: that's when Maine was established as a State.) Starting in October, New Castle/Damariscotta will be the place we call home.
Here we are in Damariscotta, in October 2020, taking a selfie outside Renys for our fellow Renys-obsessed friends Janie and Max.
That's a bout a five-minute walk from our house. If you know anything about this store, you know that, aside from groceries, it means we will never again need to shop at any other store for the rest of our lives. (If it did have groceries, it would be Maine's Food and Stuff.)
The daylilies, (aka Hemerocallis 'Ruby Spiders') finally popped!
I know absolutely nothing about flowers. So everything that happens in this little flowerbed is pure surprise. These guys have a pattern where one pops — almost always at night — struts its stuff for a day, then gives up the ghost. Most of the time, another bud pops open overnight, and the pattern repeats. I counted 18 buds when it started.
Jack the spoiled-o dog-o is doing just fine. He's taken to chewing up some cardboard as a nearly daily activity now. Our current theory is that when we leave for work during the day, he just thinks we've gone for a walk without him. Which of course he thinks is bullshit and just plain selfish of us. In Jack's opinion, every day should be family hiking day. And I can't say he's wrong.
That is a 1936 painting of Main Street, Damariscotta, Maine, by Allen Philbrick.
Here are a few things worth reading or listening to:
- David Brooks wrote about "gifts-based liberalism" in a recent article in the Atlantic, "The Outer Limits of Liberalism." This might be the finest piece Brooks has ever written. The underlying argument is not new, but it is very well put.
- Christian Wiman has a new book coming out in December, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair. Image Journal published an excerpt from the book, here. Wiman is a favorite author, and I am very excited for the new book.
- I went back and listened to an interview with Christian Wiman that I very much like on the On Being podcast. For a taste of his poetry, here he is reading some of his work in 2016. I love the last line from the last poem he reads: "filled with a shine / that was most intimately me / and not mine."
And here are a couple things I wrote down in July:
- I had a couple of, uh ... negative things to say last month. But the more positive way to put it is that I'm looking for the cracks in it all.
- On a similar topic, I put up a piece I wrote back in May, on Matthew Crawford's excellent book Why We Drive.
That's it for July. The hard part now is the wait. Our contracts go to the end of September, but we're ready to be home. And Jack is ready for a new, more entertaining backyard. He's tired of the squirrel- and gopher-free backyard we have here in Bozeman — which he also thinks is bullshit.
Jack is pretty much a constant in our lives, and we think a lot of our thoughts through him, usually in humorous ways. I think he is not wrong to want a less manicured yard to play in. And that thought is not entirely unrelated to the blog posts I linked to above.
There is a way to express a less gritty or turbulent need for the natural world. I find something like that in Eugenio Montale's poem "The Lemons." It's a softer way of saying nearly the same thing.
The Lemons
Listen to me, the poets laureate
move only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.
Better if the riot of the birds
dies out, swallowed by the blue:
we’ll hear more of the whispering
of friendly branches in not-quite-quiet air,
and the sensations of this smell
that can’t divorce itself from earth
and rains a restless sweetness on the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of troubled passions calls a truce;
here we poor, too, receive our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemons.
See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge
of betraying their final secret,
sometimes we feel we’re about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won’t hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally
lead to the heart of a truth.
The eye scans its surroundings,
the mind inquires aligns divides
in the perfume that diffuses
at the day’s most languid.
It’s in these silences you see
in every fleeting human shadow
some disturbed Divinity.
But the illusion fails, and time returns us
to noisy cities where the blue
is seen in patches, up between the roofs.
And the rain exhausts the earth;
winter’s tedium weighs the houses down,
the light turns miserly – the soul bitter.
Till one day through a half-shut gate
in a courtyard, there among the trees,
the yellow of the lemons is revealed;
and the chill in the heart
thaws, and deep in us
the golden horns of sunlight
pelt their songs.
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.