Nina MacLaughlin's Blog

Twins in their final days of being five made drawings on my living room floor. One drew as though…

Twins in their final days of being five made drawings on my living room floor. One drew as though dancing, swoops and leaps, fast stops and flourishes, more sophisticated than scribbles, a choreographed abstraction. The other curled over his sketchpad and worked in silence until he came to the couch to show me what he’d done.

“This is the tower of the ghost rats,” he said. “This is the kitchen where they make fried scrambled fox.”

“That’s what they eat?”

“Yes.”

He pointed to a chamber at the lower half of the tower with bands of light color, pale yellow, pale green, pale pink.

“The ghost rats don’t pee. Instead they release different colored mist and this is where that happens.”

“I see it,” I said. We both continued to look at his drawing.

“I don’t think I’d want to eat a fox,” I said. He didn’t care. He knew what he could disregard. He considered his tower in silence. “They’re like moving flames, like living animal flames,” I continued. And he looked up fast and his eyes were lit and it is one of the best feelings to light up a kid’s eyes this way. To find the thing that translates through the dull dust of adulthood and to see it land in the wild imagination, the fire behind the eyes. To light anyone up this way, to be lit up.

Earlier, his nine-year-old brother told me facts about a lizard I’d never heard of.

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “picture a lizard.”

Some descents invite. Down here, here below, come. To drop into a place of strange welcome, eyes…

Some descents invite. Down here, here below, come. To drop into a place of strange welcome, eyes adjusting to the dim, foreign syllables whispered in the hush, smell of black tea, warm candle wax, dust, a sense that the plants are listening in, unmistakable charge of potential, and water out the windows. A bookstore on a boat parked in a canal in Paris, L'Eau et Les Rêves it’s called, Water and Dreams, the title of a book by Gaston Bachelard. “The stream doesn’t have to be ours,” he writes, “the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets.”  

Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo….

Posters for lost cats appear in the neighborhood, now and then stapled to the telephone polls. Oreo. Sparkles. Bongo. A cat slips off, joins up with the raccoons and coyotes, makes a wild way of things. It happens. Then yesterday, in front of a grand brick apartment building across from the river on Memorial Drive, a little laminated sign hung from a low bush. “LOST: Have you seen me?” read the sign with a photograph below of a bonsai tree, delicate and elegant, gnarling out of a grey ceramic pot with what looked like tiny bay leaves spiking from the branches. Below the photo, an explanation: On December 27th, someone walked off with two small bonsai trees that had been left briefly on the sidewalk. “Those trees were not free,” the poster reads. “I think it was a big misunderstanding,” with a smiley face emoji. They’re a fragile species, wrote the owner, he wants them back, and leaves his cell and email. “No questions asked, no worries!” The first floor bay window on the corner is a forest of bonsai trees. I see the tiny trees on night walks when the window glows. Maybe these two slipped off to join the mighty sycamores that they’ve seen from their perch in the window. Maybe they fled further, running on their roots, to grow in a deeper set of woods, with the raccoons and the coyotes and all the missing cats.

[Image: from Views of Instructions for Bonsai along the Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō by Utagawa Yoshishige, 1848.]

Sun comes up on a fresh year and everything is new and everything is the same. Sun moves through a…

Sun comes up on a fresh year and everything is new and everything is the same. Sun moves through a glass of water and a shadow like an x-ray of the wingtip of ghost falls on someone else’s counter. Sun warms the bowl of a spoon made of apple wood, carved from a log got at an orchard in the western part of the state, made as a gift for someone who gives me kindness, kindness for this fresh year, an apple wood spoon in the hand. Sun shows time’s wing, moving always, same and new.

I have a hard time explaining it to myself, the breathless heated feeling I get to see a bare…

I have a hard time explaining it to myself, the breathless heated feeling I get to see a bare November-December tree silhouetted against an early-evening November-December sky. Something in my body tells my brain: it turns you on, you are turned on, it is erotic. And my brain tells my body: come on, please get real, we’re talking about trees and light and sky, this is not sex. And my body says: please trust me, eros, lifeforce, the great and wild heat, the breathless thrill, the all-the-way-there feeling of aliveness and luck, it’s happening now, take it in, all your cells awake and speeded up, you are turned on, that’s what this is. You are turned on. And I am. I am. But I don’t know how to say it outloud.

At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. “I walk around the neighborhood this time of…

At dusk these early evenings, the windows glow amber. “I walk around the neighborhood this time of year and I look in the windows and I feel homesick,” a man in his seventies said to me recently. With his home — its kitchen counter and its checkered dishtowels, soft blankets on the bed he shares with his wife, old dog dreaming and atwitch on a pillow in the livingroom — just a few blocks away. Homesick for what, then? For a long-gone childhood sense of home? For a long-gone childhood? For some only-imagined sense of comfort and safety? (May we all, all of us, find it and have it.) The nights are long. Late afternoon brings the deep and aching blue. The original hearth burns somewhere.

[Print: Uncle Henry’s (Monhegan Island) by Mary Teichman, 2013]

Dropa word into the well of the brain, it...

Dropa word into the well of the brain, it sinks in deep and the ripples move out tothe skull and ripple back from there, and somewhere between the bottom of thewell and the ripples, meaning is made. An image enters differently, a color, a shape,a pulsing shaft of light on the bedroom floor. It’s thrown into the well like ahandful of pebbles that sizzle across the surface. The ripples ring out againsteach other, and out against the wall of the skull. What do you see? Lucien Freudpainted the eye of a teenager, her vessels, bolting and looped, the milkyweight of her lid, the light reflecting off her glisten. Count the colors — midnight,cinnamon, moss, pond. Orange, light brown, pink, wheat. The delicate penetrability.You, unseen, see what she sees with.

Now is the season when the corpses of...

Now is the season when the corpses of theChristmas trees line the sidewalks of the city. Needled and not withoutdignity, they’ve been laid to rest on their sides by the trash bins, by thecurbs, stripped of lights, tinsel, strands of cranberries or popcorn, all the ornamentsin their yearly dangle. It is the new season now. The sky is low today, nostars tonight, the moon’s fullness felt behind a woolly blanket of cloud. Wemove into winter. A friend on the phone spoke of thinking gone was the onlygood option. Two days ago, another friend made me a mug of warmed milk with honey,turmeric, cinnamon, ginger. The color of pale egg yolk, it tasted like kindnessand my whole nervous system responded, melting and soothed. I haven’t takendown my small tree. Its final days are here, but I do love its glow.

[Painting: Skating by Linden Frederick.]

It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch...

It’s dark. I am up early enough to see the stars. The porch light on the house across the street shines bright enough to bring shadows into the room. The neighborhood is still. Frost not dew, the grass is stiff; a woman scrapes ice off her windshield and I feel it in my teeth. Mothwinged darkness opens itself widest now. Today is the shortest day of the year.

What now on this longest night? What now as Holly King surrenders and Oak King takes charge? What now as the wheel of the year tips to its lightening side? What now in this season of sorrow? What now as the solstice fire opens a doorway to our secret souls? The soul is thicker in winter.

We stand in the dark with strands of light between us. Feel the warmth, the heat, the glow, it’s yours to know. I want to give it name and say it to you, but I don’t know the words. The soul doesn’t let us know, not all the way. We flail and give name to simpler needs. Here, sit. Get warm.

Winter Solstice at the Paris Review.

[Print: Mood Indigo, by Mary Teichman, 2014.]

The dragonflies hover and dip at the edge...

The dragonflies hover and dip at the edge ofthe pond at the cemetery. Light catches in the net of their wings as they rushand pause, rush and pause above the mud and turtles and hungry ducks. Flotillasof lilypads make a thin ground on the water. This is in the summer when it’s warm.Now, ice has come to the pond. We stood at the edge and threw small stones totest it. They landed with an otherwordly whang, skiddled across the ice, andbrought beautiful action below the surface, a slow-motion rolling of dark coldwater. Strange music, small stones on ice, like the sound of stars acrossdarkness frozen over, like a licked thumb around the lip of a glass, ringing inthe all-ears of those below the cold and silent stones. It’s almost winter. Thedead don’t know the cold. Sleeping are the turtles. Sleeping are the bugs.

[Watercolor Drawings of Japanese Dragonflies, collected by Lafcadio Hearn, artist unknown, 1900.]