It Seemed That We Had Hardly Begun And We Were Already There

We see only the leaves and branches of the trees close in around the house.
Those submissive games were sensual. I was no more than three or four years
old, but when crossed I would hold my breath, not from rage but from
stubbornness, until I lost consciousness.
The shadows one day deeper. Every family has its own collection of stories, but
not every family has someone to tell them. In a small studio in an old farmhouse,
it is the musical expression of a glowing optimism. A bird would reach but be
secret. Absence of allusion: once, and ring alone. The downstairs telephone was
in a little room as dark as a closet. It made a difference between the immediate
and the sudden in a theater filled with transitions. Without what can a person
function as the sea functions without me. A typical set of errands. My mother
stood between us and held our hands as we waded into the gray-blue water,
lecturing us on the undertow, more to add to the thrill of the approaching water
than to warn us of any real danger, since she would continue to grip us by the
hand when the wave came in and we tried to jump over it. The curve of the rain,
more, comes over more often. Four seasons circle a square year. A mirror set
in the crotch of the tree was like a hole in the out-of-doors. I could have ridden
in the car forever, or so it seemed, watching the scenery go by, alert as to the
circumstances of a dream, and that peaceful. Roller coast. The fog lifts a late
sunrise.
There are floral twigs in position on it. The roots of the locust tree were
lifting the corner of the little cabin. Our unease grows before the newly restless.
There you are, and you know it’s good, and all you have to do is make it better.
He sailed to the war. A life no more free than the life of a lost puppy. It became
popular and then we were inundated with imitations. My old aunt entertained
us with her lie, a story about an event in her girlhood, a catastrophe in a sailboat
that never occurred, but she was blameless, unaccountable, since, in the course
of the telling, she had come to believe the lie herself. A kind of burbling in the
waters of inspiration. Because of their recurrence, what had originally seemed
merely details of atmosphere became, in time, thematic. As if sky plus sun must
make leaves. A snapdragon volunteering in the garden among the cineraria
gapes its maw between the fingers, and we pinched the buds of the fuchsia to
make them pop. Is that willful. Inclines. They have big calves because of those
hills. Flip over small stones, dried mud. We thought that the mica might be gold.
A pause, a rose, something on paper, in a nature scrapbook. What follows a
strict chronology has no memory. For me, they must exist, the contents of that
absent reality, the objects and occasions which now I reconsidered. The smells
of the house were thus a peculiar mix of heavy interior air and the air from
outdoors lingering over the rose bushes, the camellias, the hydrangeas, the
rhododendron and azalea bushes. Hard to distinguish hunger from wanting to
eat. My grandmother was in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, wearing what
she called a “washdress,” watching a line of ants cross behind the faucets of the
sink, and she said to us, “Now I am waging war.” There are strings in the terrible
distance. They are against the blue. The trees are continually receiving their
own shadows.