Post-Season on the Black River

Camped out at the private Twin Rivers Landing on the Black River for two nights, on a writers' retreat with seven others. This area, the Arcadia Valley, is gorgeous, and will be even more so in a week or so when the foliage turns. Quite remote; 68 miles as the crow flies was more than 100 miles on the road. Perfect weather; we might as well have been indoors as out. Only two other campsites out of about 30 or so were occupied. It really is the post-season but they made an exception for us.

Mostly I either wrote in a notebook in the shade beneath a tree, supine in a zero-gravity chair; or we sat around the campfire with skewers and weenies, reading each other stories, recommending books, websites, and organizations. Saturday night I took a long walk by starlight; no moon, because the New Moon was Monday. This is sunrise on Sunday, one of the very few photos I took. The light was powder-pink.

What struck me is how I took for granted that I could take home my dew-sodden Kelty tent and tent-fly and lay them on my gravel to dry before packing them. The city dwellers had no room to do this. Draping the tent over a car parked on the street was not possible. Didn't have floor space indoors. Didn't have a back yard. Couldn't hang it from a window. That was once me, in a studio apartment. . . I camped state parks often, renting a car when I had to, because the city stifled me. . . How did I cope? I don't recall. I know only that I am blessed. On October 1, I have lived on the Divine property for 17 unbroken years.

Draw a Line Through His Name

Nearly six years Demetrius has been gone. He is most present in the garage, in his gardening tools. His massive old wheelbarrow I gave to the first person who could move it. In the garage he left rolls of plastic, and vinyl-coated concrete discs and 2x4s, and two fishing reels still in their packaging. (Fishing is about hope.) When dragging 50 pounds of rock salt or oilseed, I sometimes ask him aloud, "Why did you leave me?," and walking where we used to walk, I say, "Where are you? Are you okay?" I thank him for the ramp he built it from particle board, allowing me easily to roll the portable dishwasher into the kitchen; I won't be able to replace it if it breaks. I tell him, "I remember the retired lamplighter" he knew when he was a boy, because that lamplighter will live as long as we remember him, and "I'll never forget Polka the Giraffe," a character in a children's book he was writing but didn't finish. He perfected one short story, about a farm laborer, I'm still sending to literary magazines. In his final months he dreamed that the closet door opened onto a polar landscape with warm furs and a sled and sled dogs waiting for him. (He liked biographies and stories about polar explorers.) In January he rode Amtrak to the Rocky Mountains, bedridden all the while because he'd forgotten about high altitudes. He returned skeletal, angry at everyone, and lived 12 more days, dying less than 5 miles from where he was born.

Seed catalogs still arrive with his name on them, as do letters and newsletters from the radical organizations he so much wanted to be a part of. I write on them "Return to Sender," draw a line through his name, and write "Deceased Feb. '09."

A Rare Look Inside the Divine Cabin

Began this blog in June 2007. By now you're wondering, what's her writing space like? Now you know. Welcome. This is the Divine living room. That's a "kneeling chair" that keeps my back straight while I tinker with words, building houses of words, for hours and hours just about every day. A second, faster laptop I take with me onto the porch and move around the house with; they are synchronized.