Saunterathon

The problem is that where once—thirteen days ago, let’s be specific!—I had a wall of glass to sit in front of every morning and view nature—birds and woodchucks and squirrels and so forth which I happily fed and, in summer months, watered—now I have a wall of books, which is fine, given I am a writer, but more so, I like to think of myself as a naturalist, a Walt Whitman type, or, no, wait, a… Who wrote Walden Woods? Or was it Walden Pond? On Walden Pond? No, now I am confusing the movie On Golden Pond with the work of this writer. I can’t believe I am forgetting the name of! But due to the seemingly uncontrollable tendencies for violence and the expression of one’s anger and unhappiness in a juvenile, child-stomping-foot way that was your way and that of my former neighbor—you dumping ashtrays on me, spitting on me, squishing my face between your fingers when upset with me, and the neighbor throwing around his rake, kicking at objects I could not see, and screaming obscenities from the end of his drive that tilted more and more over time toward the more specifically misogynistic ones—I decided on the first day of the new year to pack up my belongings and leave my otherwise cherished home near the river and woods in which I had sauntered every morning, and some evenings, with the dog, and, on happier and more peaceful occasions, with you.

Does anyone saunter anymore? You certainly do not hear that word used today, if they do. They certainly call it something else, even if, what they are doing is still sauntering. But mostly now people seem to have what we call agendas, prescribed time allotments for activities even as formerly informal as walking about a wood.

I once, in fact, participated in a saunterathon. Or was it a saunterthon, minus the a? Anyway, I don’t know if I ever told you that. It’s hard to remember already what I told you and what I didn’t. Isn’t that funny? Funny how close we once felt, not so terribly long ago, and now it is almost already as though we barely know one another. Human beings are funny like that. Funny creatures. The funniest? Maybe.

The saunterathon was a fundraiser for Walden Woods, which is why I mentioned, or didn’t mention, that author. The Walden Woods writer. Who can remember the old (canonized?) writers’ names? When I think of Whitman, I think of Bill Clinton, how he gifted both Hillary and Monica with the same book of Whitman’s, in different years, of course. Very different years. But for the same effect: romantic longing. Men are like this: Creatures of habit. What works on one of us might as well work on another of us, I suppose, is your thinking. And for the most part, unfortunately, you are right. Before me, you gave your son’s mother a bicycle and then later, on our second Christmas as marrieds, though already, at that time, estranged, gave one to me. But so too I played boardgames with all three of my husbands, you included. Scrabble. Boggle. Parcheesi. And gin, which isn’t a boardgame, but same idea: A game one often plays with one’s lover between lovemaking and other related activities. So, there you go!

I do remember us—you and I—sort of…what could definitely be construed as “sauntering” in better times, times up north near your family’s cabin and times here at various metroparks and the woods near your house and the woods near mine. You remember, don’t you? The muskrat dens we found that one February afternoon in 2022, I believe it was, reunited after another long separation, after you leaving me on our aborted honeymoon to focus on your addictions and relationship with your son’s mother, I believe, was the reason (not given). The trails we walked a year ago, January, out to the hunting blinds once used by you and your brothers and father. You told me that trip, a year after our divorce, you were more in love with me than ever, then proceeded again to cheat on me once back home. It’s funny, or not funny, I mean, people don’t laugh but look astounded, when I tell them we never actually lived together. We were “together” in some fashion for five years, married two and a half, and never managed to cohabitate successfully (longer than six weeks) due to your “addictions” or biological drive to procreate as so many men, Bill Clinton, as aforementioned comes, again, to mind here, but so, too, does Jacob in the Bible and many, many, many others, seem to be, however we want to think of it, and to tell you the truth, a phrase you often implored when lying to me, I don’t want to think about it at all anymore, anyway. So.

I can’t recall how much money I raised back then, for the saunterathon, I mean. I do recall a wonderful sweatshirt they sent me for my efforts. Oversized and a thick cotton, white with green lettering that said Walden Woods across the chest with an image of a woods. I think that one guy from the Eagles was involved in the promotion of it, of the saunterathon, and in bringing awareness to the saving of Walden Woods. Funny, you never hear much about it anymore: Walden Woods or Walden Pond, any of the Waldens.

Presently, I am 1.4 miles from the woods my dog and I walked in every morning for nine months before the move. 1.4 miles too from the view afforded me then by the long wall of window that was one quarter of that dining room. But it may as well be forty or fifty: Miles. It isn’t as though I am going to get up in my pajamas and walk the dog a mile and a half just to walk a quarter mile in the woods and then turn right around and walk the mile and a half or 1.4 miles back to my current house with the view of books, now, is it?

Though I have been quite depressed of late, I’ll admit, because of the lack of close proximity to the woods that I forgot to mention also contained a winding river (are all rivers, though, winding?). It really was idyllic. That house. Those woods. The river. And woodchuck and birds and squirrels. I have been worried chiefly about the squirrels. Perhaps I should not have been feeding them every morning, for now it is unusually frigid and I wake every morning thinking of them and of them wondering where I am. I envision them peeking in the dining room wall of window where normally I would be seated at the dining room table working on my laptop as I am now, though now I am, of course, facing that wall of books, instead. It isn’t an unpleasant view, but it will not make my face light up as it did each time the woodchuck sauntered out of his hole to see what food I had placed beneath the birdfeeder all the months of last summer. There was watermelon, a variety of berries, of course, even pineapple, and sometimes beans or squash or pumpkin, seeds, nuts, crackers, and once: Part of an olive oil cake I had baked for you, and you had failed to appear to eat.

It was you who gifted me the birdfeeder, which I told you at the time was one of the best presents you ever gave me. I brought it over here, to this new house, shoved it in the ground out back, filled it with seed, before even the movers came with their big truck to move the rest of my belongings. It stayed out there, in the new backyard, a full week before I saw one bird visit it. What a desolate week! I even spilled birdseed along the front porch’s railing, and that seed is still there. I began to suspect this whole neighborhood was a set, like in that movie with Jim Carey. Who ever heard of a whole street with no squirrels or birds? It was incredibly depressing, not to mention unsettling. Then, finally, one morning: birds. Birds out back, and then a few mornings later: A single squirrel, and the morning after, I swear there was a hawk on the fence! But I only saw the hawk a moment and then it was gone.

The problem is, also, I just have no motivation for sauntering here. It is just row after row of two-story houses. No woods. No river. No woodchuck. And I have been terribly depressed. I know I keep mentioning it. I just have not felt much like moving or doing anything.

I suppose I may as well tell you I have been angry with you. Terribly angry. Even though I am not speaking to you and have trained myself if ever you present yourself to me again out in the world to react as I would to either of my other ex-husbands were I to run into them on the street. Something like, “Oh, hey! How are you? Good to see you. Seems like you’re doing well. That’s great. Okay, well, bye!” just completely unaffected, you know? Rather than how I actually feel deep down inside, which is something akin to what one might call murderous rage. I truly have never in my life felt homicidal before. Suicidal, yes, of course. But never homicidal, which I have now felt for, let’s say, nine months, give or take a month. It honestly frightens me at times, how homicidal I feel. I keep saying if I didn’t have a daughter…which is the same thing I have said in the past when I have felt suicidal. If I didn’t have a daughter… but you do, Blanche, you do have a daughter! You are in a wheelchair! Just an inside joke. Just an old movie reference. You probably never saw the movie, … anyway.

I think when one feels they have been conned by a man for five years, that is enough to cause even the meekest woman to contemplate homicide. And that’s something I keep telling my friends and family members about us, human beings, which are, of course, just mammals, after all: We are inherently violent creatures. Same as the squirrels I saw daily chasing each other away from the food. I would spread out an enormous bowl of food, and no matter how much there was, they would fight over it, dominate each other over it, be greedy and selfish in their protection of it. I once, too, saw a female rabbit hop atop the back of a male rabbit and proceed to kick the male rabbit vigorously, nay, violently, with her back feet after the male rabbit first attempted to, I suppose we humans would say: Rape her.

We can ban guns. We will use knives. We will drive our cars into crowds. We will make bombs and tape them to our bodies and blow up those around us.

Mostly, though, we will murder people we love.

I wonder if any of the squirrels or rabbits murder their past lovers. Of course, we would never know. It would be impossible to tell. We can never know, truly, the motivations behind the killings of one mammal by another. And they cannot know ours.

If I ever were to murder you, for instance, and a rabbit happened upon your body there in the woods, there lying in the snow, blood prettying the purveying whiteness, the rabbit might think you were killed for food, to prevent starvation, or, to defend against a rapist.

The rabbit would just see you dead and maybe sniff and hop on, as we sort of do when we walk upon a dead squirrel or snake or grasshopper, even, there in the woods or field.

We do not assign motivation where other mammals or reptiles and certainly not amphibians are involved. Motivation does not concern us much in the case of other dead mammals.

But in matters of our own species and murder, we are mostly outraged. The outrage only pertains to the more recent of crimes, as though the body itself need still be warm for us to muster much in the way of passion concerning it. If something occurred more than a hundred years ago, then we are more mildly interested. 

***

Thinking of nature, woods and animals, more broadly, here, I am reminded of the first time the two of us, you and I, sauntered an entire day together. This was on the eve of my birthday, the first one we spent together. You had taken me away to a cabin on the west side of the state on a lake, and after lunch we removed our shoes as it was spring and the sort of spring day that feels more like summer, and stepped, carefully at first, and later, less carefully, into and amongst the woods. I was overly grateful to be away with you after the late winter months feeling busied on your end, in theory with your son and work, though visions of your son’s mother kept appearing, absent consent, in my mind, and along with them the undercurrent of feeling myself fooled or foolish in some manner, though, of course, when I tried to articulate this feeling, it was denied outright and vehemently (by you), and I chose each time then to drop the matter entirely until another time I would have a similar and pestering feeling. So, I was ecstatic to be physically present and away with you. Every moment alone with you a happy gift. I remember you holding my hand as we walked along the trail through the woods to the lake, stopping every so many feet to crouch down beside one another, squatting or stooped over, forearms or hands resting casually on knees, to observe some insect or another, a gathering of ants, for instance, making a unified trek toward a hole made haphazardly on the path itself. We studied one such collection of ants for some time, an hour, perhaps? Do you remember? It’s hard to say now what made us so giddy in our observations but I do remember the giddiness, the pervasive joy the two of us felt, alone in the woods, alone in our scientific exploration of animals (are insects animals? I remember you laughing at this question!), as though we could have been any age at all, children walking the woods together rather than adults, a childlike awe of our surroundings and of each other, the bonding of two youths not yet familiar with human coldness or indifference. Later we carried on toward the lake. It was dusk by now and we took photographs on your phone with the light of that hour illuminating our close, smiling faces. You kept one of these photos for a long time as your phone’s background photo, claiming, any time you pointed it out, how that was one of the happiest days of your life, the day we became best friends.

Which makes it all the more disheartening and troubling to detail what occurred later, in the hours after we fell asleep and into the next morning. The first notable event that occurred: My trying to wake you, a gentle hand placed on your left arm, a gentle nudge to waken you just enough to ask you quietly to roll over. I had made such gestures several times in the last nine months. You yourself had been the one to warn me when we met and first began dating of your snoring which was, as you said, notoriously loud and frequent. So, I expected you to somewhere in your subconscious acknowledge me and roll yourself from your back onto your side, after which I would snuggle up behind you and return also to sleep.

Instead, you uncharacteristically pulled your body away from me, thrashed it away, really, and began to yell and curse. I believe you said something like, “What difference will it make? You’ve been being a bitch all day anyway.” This was the first instance of you using that word with regard to me and I bristled at the sound of it in your throat and mouth. Jarred by your accusation, too, due to the new level of intimacy we had agreed we had shared earlier in the day, anointed best friends in the woods, and up until the time we fell asleep, watching TV in bed snuggled up together after you had sat on the edge of the tub, washing and drying, in your hands, my feet.

That colored the remainder of our time together: You lashing out, your mid slumber unhappiness with me. The next morning you were distant and sullen and spent a majority of the time before check out in the bathroom, door closed. The drive home was equally frosty. You complained of feeling sick, of having a sore throat, congestion. Mostly you seemed impatient to be home, eager to be separated from me. Feelings I would come to feel familiar with again and again, when with you longer than two consecutive days. Something akin to a punishment for a crime I did not have memory or knowledge of having committed.

***

But, as long as we are on the subject of crime, which we were before my momentary lapse in memory, I may as well get to telling you the other reason for my move, which wasn’t a crime, but I think, should have been. Or, I’ll go completely the other way about it and say, fine, it was not a crime, but then I should have been exempt too from punishment for any retaliatory measures I may have taken in my defense. Or, offense?

It is just fitting that this happened!

It was only a couple weeks into my move to that house, the one before this one, the one close in proximity to the woods and river and all the lovely and violent creatures within, that the non-crime first took place. It was yet summer, and so my windows were characteristically open. The dog and I were reading, or I was reading, and the dog was lying next to me when suddenly it began: The neighbor’s screaming. It began, and it went on for at least a quarter hour. Just screaming expletives, profanities, the throwing of garden tools across the lawn. My dog immediately began to tremble and ran upstairs, and I followed. The man’s rage had unsettled us both to the point of hiding within our home, though there was little threat the man would come inside, would prove himself an intruder. His anger, still, was injurious chiefly in its unknownness, with no known motivation or cause, nothing my dog or I had done to breed this unbridled, almost showy contempt, which was, perhaps, the most frightening aspect of the prolonged screaming. If, say, he had told me when he came to apologize later in the week that he suffers from some disorder such as Tourette’s or the like, that would have been understandable. But there was no such medical explanation provided, only a promise he was not a violent person, though what proof other than his word did I have for that? And was not the hurling of the garden tool some sort of act of violence, anyway? In my view, as his close-in-proximity neighbor forced to listen, it was.

And after that initial outburst, it was quiet a while again, incredibly so, to the point I almost forgot it had happened. I remember writing in my journal one morning staring out at the scene at the feeder that this was the most peaceful I had felt in my adult life. I adored living in such close proximity to both nature—the river and woods, the trails, and hills, my animals—and the shops and cafes that were only a quarter mile in the other direction. It is not a leap to say it was idyllic, and perhaps I already have made this claim.

But then there would be another outburst. Ugly, horrid words screamed at a decibel that was unignorable and profoundly disturbing for my dog and for me: Nothing could be done as it was happening but to sit and wait, the dog again shaking, both of us moving away from the windows as though his words could pierce through the glass and enter us. It got, after three or four of the outbursts, so I was trepidatious about leaving the house at all, stepping out the front door to walk the dog or check the mail. I went only early in the morning or after dusk, avoiding the afternoon hours when it was known to happen, when the outbursts, if they were to occur, began and ended, ten feet from the foot of my driveway.

And, then, more recently, in the winter weeks, when I had thought they might die out completely, these outbursts, what with the cold temperatures, the natural inclination of humans to stay inside, they, instead, escalated and intensified. Suddenly, this neighbor, who lived alone in a house three times the size of mine, began adding to his expletives, words specific to gender, my gender. I suppose you know the ones I mean; you yourself not disoften bellowed them at me.

I think, though I cannot know, I could have murdered both you and this neighbor and felt okay about doing so. Again, of course, I cannot know for certain what I would have felt if I actually perpetrated such crimes. But I do know I was told one day I would feel deep regret and shame for the two abortions I had in my youth and, so far, I feel nothing, only gratitude the abortions were, then, legal options. It is possible, then, I could have killed you and the neighbor and felt nothing as well.

Does a dog that kills a bird feel anything? It is likely not. Or, put another way: It is unlikely they do—feel anything.

Does a hamster mother who devours her infant rather than care for it feel anything in the way of moral guilt? Again, unlikely.

Does anyone really care that the hamster consumed her offspring? Not really. We accept infanticide and homicide in the animal kingdom much more easily than in the human world in which we cohabitate, in constant judgement of one another, naming certain behaviors crimes, while ignoring others just as horrifying (the constant and consistent copulation with multiple females by you while with me, for instance, resulting in your lack of copulating, at times, much of the time, honestly, with me, and resulting further in other females exhibiting their own violent tendencies toward me, in your name!).

Would anyone really care if, say, I had poisoned my neighbor? The one who screams obscenities for fifteen minutes once or twice or thrice a week, disrupting our peace and solitude on the edge of such beautiful and serene woods and a river that winds? He has no one. I have never seen a visitor to his house. He is only a nuisance, a disturbance. I would be doing the other neighbors a favor. I would be doing him, most likely, a favor, also, for his existence seems, from my vantage point, at least, one of solitary misery. Something I know something about. Though I would not say my life is miserable, but, more, at the moment: lonely.

But I did not poison him, as we, by now, know. Instead, I moved. And it cost me, not him: The loss of the woods and river and aforementioned animals I still long for in my absence and worry about in theirs. (Nor did I murder you or the other women, as I fantasized, on occasion, doing—an indie film scene in my head for how these murders would play out: Glamorously! Magnificently! Cinematically! Me feeling the gun’s heat in my hand, in my pocket after; that warmth creating warmth elsewhere in my adrenalized—and, ironically, sexualized—body.)

Now, when I am wanting to walk in the woods, to saunter, and so forth, I must first get in my car, put the dog in her crate in the backseat, and drive thirty minutes to the metropark you and I, so many times together, walked, but, so, too, did I and my second husband, and maybe even my first, though I think my first husband and I more often walked woods in Ohio than Michigan, Ohio being where we met, where I sauntered that time for the saunterathon, the original sauntering! (Yes, I could drive the mile and a half, park somewhere near the woods by my old house, but then, too, I might pass my former neighbor, as I often did, in the woods, he, returning from the cafes and restaurants up the hill, carrying bags of Styrofoamed food, defeating the purpose of sauntering, which is a pleasurable sort of meandering, almost meditative, peaceful, serene. I suppose I would be too on edge, wondering, every turn of every bend of that glorious path by the river, if at the next step would appear the neighbor, the horribleness of confrontation with a recent past I have chosen to escape, rather than murder.)

Yesterday, I will admit, in the woods there, at the metropark, I had the fantastical thought of walking further and further out into the woods, off the trail. There was an actual sign that said, “Leaving trail.” And perhaps that was what put in my head the idea. But, also, that book and movie about the young man who wandered off somewhere in, Alaska, was it? Ultimately, he starved to death. He was a city boy of means, as they say, and was unprepared for foraging and hunting properly, something I would have liked to attempt with you, had you ever gotten free your addictions: I would have liked to, as we discussed multiple times, lived off the land with you, hunted and fished, eaten venison and whatever fish Hemingway wrote of Nick Adams catching in the river in the woods of northern Michigan.

Though yesterday’s instinct to wander off the trail was more in line with the young man who starved to death, I would assume, more in line with wanting to vanish quietly, almost romantically, in a frozen wilderness, tundra, if you will, amongst other mammals more indifferent but also more hospitable to my existence. I just sometimes now know not where to go. There is that annoying bumper sticker coming to mind: Not all who wander are lost. But I was lost, momentarily, yesterday, willingly lost, and almost willing to be lost further. But the dog was in her crate in the backseat of the car, dogs not allowed on this specific trail (I had already walked her on another), and I could not leave her to starve or freeze to death, due to my own lack of concern or care for my survival. I am not, like you, that cruel.

I guess, regrettably, I always sort of imagined we would grow old together, you and I, in a cabin in a wood like Laura Ingalls and her family, perhaps even living temporarily in a dugout on the side of a hill, like we read about, so often, or like you read aloud to me, from her books. You were, I remember, mid one of them last December, reading to me, by means of my voicemail, a chapter a day, when, finally, at my therapist’s urging, I blocked your number and filled my voicemail box so that you could no longer leave a message. I had been saving your messages, admittedly, for the nighttime hours when I could gather my tea and cigarettes around me on the floor and listen to you orate the chapter as I smoked and sipped my tea beside the open window of my upstairs bedroom. It was not unlike being read to by a parent at bedtime and I was not wanting to give it up, though I had given up seeing you and talking to you weeks earlier after your most recent episodes of violence and betrayal, the former escalating to an early morning argument regarding a new coldness—you toward me, the sort that often followed or coincided with (your) sexual infidelity—that resulted in not one incident of my being forced down on a bed, arms wrangled somewhere behind me or under you, the whir of violence leaves the details fuzzy, but a second incident, immediately following, in another room to which I had run in my failed attempt to escape, on another bed on which you also forced me down, forced me, before subsequently leaving me, before storming out of the house, abandoning me again, forced me to beg for my life, “Please, I love you. I love you. I love you. Please let me go, please, I love you, please don’t do this, please, I love you so much, please.” I remember the last chapter you read before I blocked you was about the girls—Laura and her older sister, Mary—walking four or five miles into town, as children did then, unaccompanied, to attend a party given by the infamous snob, Nellie Olson. Upon their return, at the end of the chapter, Ma said to the girls that the following Saturday they should have a party at their house, invite the town girls out to the prairie. Of course, I never found out how that went, the party Ma and the girls threw for the town girls. I could go to the library or bookstore and read it, obviously. But I do not want to read about it, or hear about it, but from your lips, which is, I suppose, the melodramatic Brontë sister, Emily, in me. 

I think I thought this ending, sauntering off trail, toward my frozen ending, an ending of romance; romantic, remembering all the books we read together about survival, and, often, death, in the elements, in blizzard conditions: Ice and snow and temperatures below zero.

The windchill yesterday was something, at times, like negative five.

Something beautiful about the words: my lifeless body. The lightness, of the lifeless body, an illusion. It would be just as heavy, if not heavier, dead weight, but within the words themselves it is airy, feathery, weightless, magical.

Perhaps imagining one’s death is an answer to an unknown future and I do not know, or cannot imagine, my future now, having given up, finally, the one in which we live in our country house, hunting and fishing, you and I.

I thought you would find it fitting, my body discovered somewhere out in that wood, in the recently fallen snow, untouched by the greater mammals (humans), only sniffed or lightly pawed perhaps by lesser ones, our friends from the Bambi book you also read to me, just before or after our divorce, I can no longer remember.

The brain of the human mammal is a tricky thing, what it wants us or has us misremember (and as interesting: What it has us not remember, or, forget).

I once misremembered having always hated my mother’s asshole boyfriend. But then I found my teenage journal and the truth was I had initially adored him, been seduced by him, wished for him to be my father and my lover. Paradoxically, I think I am misremembering, already, our past as mostly one of love and affection, with only minor windows of the other, more violent and awful days, when I know, in fact, if I read my journals, there were more days of violence, even if the violence of indifference (yours), than there were serene happiness and joy.

Who knows what and how animals remember, the memories, say, of woodpeckers or voles or the animals we classify as pets.

Someone, another writer to whom I had sent portions of my memoir recently, told me I was suffering from American puritanism (in writing about Laura Ingalls and her family in conversation with us). Me! Can you believe that? If anything, I would have said nostalgia, for a “simpler time.” Of course, there are no simple times. Only how memory frames them. Or our idea of memory, at any rate.

I’ll just say again, if you ever were able to or wanting to give up your various addictions—I won’t name them anymore in this story as it is beginning to feel as though I am wanting to humiliate you in my writing, which is most definitely not the case, the desire has always been for you to simply admit with consistency what the addictions are, step one: Your powerlessness over them—we would very well spend our evenings sauntering through our woods, over our fields.

There I go again: the romantic in me. Hopeless, as they say. As ever! (A saunterer is, by nature, if nothing else: a romantic!)

But one’s addictions keep one in a perpetual state of arrested development so that no dreams can ever be actualized, no plans for the future bear actual fruit.

Or, perhaps they are not addictions, per se, at all, but rather, a chosen lifestyle, a lifestyle long ago, long before you and I met, chosen by you and clung to even after our introduction.  

My therapist told me the other day of another client of hers, male, with a problem—or lifestyle—similar to yours, with a marriage under duress, about to be lost if he does not change his ways. “I just really like chasing women,” he said to my therapist, and my only hope is that his wife steps aside, out of the marriage, I mean, and allows him his pursuits, but in her absence.

I remember hearing a female scientist speak a year or two ago about her pet dog, about the guilt she felt for having him, for having unwittingly robbed him of his freedom. She said she would not have another, that this would be the last dog she would name as a pet. She said all animals should have the freedom to make their own choices and decisions, to come and go and frolic and walk where and when they like and with whom. She was advocating for the liberation of cats and dogs and other mammals we have until now categorized as pets.

And maybe too, in that thinking, we should liberate the human species from the idea of marriage, another form of pet ownership, of revoking one’s personal freedom, choices and desires and ability to fulfill them.

But with freedom comes the solitariness of self-reliance. Something I know all too well, these days, of walking metroparks by myself or with my dog (not the last I shall own!), sauntering, observing, solitary, but also: serene, peaceful, introspective.

***

My homicidal instincts or ideations have been lessening during the writing of this story, replaced by the knowledge and awareness I can create for myself my own future, one in which I live in a cabin by a wood, by a river, feed and watch the birds and small land mammals, write and saunter. I have been remembering the woman we read about in a book your father had at the cabin when you were a boy and reclaimed after his death; the woman who, newly widowed and with children, had to develop survival techniques on her own, who—this image I will forever remember along with you reading in your old house by the lake, the two of us on the couch, my gaze out the front window on the suburban landscape, snow dirtied by automobile exhaust—plucked single strands of hair from her head in order to make traps for rabbits. Over the course of a winter, she was rendered almost entirely bald by her making of said traps. But she fed her children and herself. She was able to make milk for the baby by way of her nourished breasts.

I carry with me in your absence the knowledge of this skill, how to trap and eat rabbits. How to survive in a wood without a husband. How to feed oneself. How to survive.

Of course, I had no idea when you read to me that story or collection of stories about that woman that one day you would abandon me, a series, first, of minor abandonments before the final one I chose to make the last, as her husband, in death, in drowning, abandoned her.

We should all prepare for solitude, I suppose, is the lesson, if there is one, here. Cats, dogs, women, all of us. That I may one day be bald out of a necessity to eat is a comfort. I wonder if you remember that story, if you are prepared to pluck single strands of your hair every day for your own survival. I wonder if you have enough grit left to survive.

Interview coming soon

〰️

Interview coming soon 〰️

INTERVIEW COMING SOON