Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 11

Rain was in the forecast, a 70% chance ofthunderstorms in the...

Rain was in the forecast, a 70% chance of
thunderstorms in the afternoon. Plans had been made to walk up a mountain, and
plans were changed to lessen the risk of being lightening-bolted off that
mountain. We fled the weather and headed east and walked up another mountain
instead, this on a weekday in New Hampshire in summer’s second half.

There’s weather wherever you go. We ascended
this plan B, up up up, and found ourselves in a cloud, a close and humid
enveloping. Droplets drifted, not rain exactly. They dampened but did not wet. Mid-afternoon,
the light was dim along the path. Heaps of bear shit along the way, fresh and
frequent, alerted us whose mountain this was. Around a bend and a rock
outcropping offered itself. We stepped on the ledge and instead of big views – trees
and peaks and ponds unfolding below for miles and miles, that gasping sense of
awe of being above the world – we were faced with a grey-white nothing, a wall of cloud. Two
close trees were silhouetted and then — blank. It was the color I imagine blindness
to be. Not dark, but a muted, glowing grey. A shadowless spread, endless and
depthless and silent. It was not comfortable.

A scowl crossed the face of the person with me
on the rock, steps were taken back to the path, a disturbance in the
electricity suggested fear had inserted itself into the afternoon, as did the
pace of the words, “let’s keep moving.”

The ocean can gulp you up whole. A mountain
can make you disappear. We moved on. Fear, for me, registered closer to
exhilaration, the feeling of coming up against something vast and rare. What
good luck, to glimpse the abyss. To look upon it, feel it speed the heart and
tighten the guts, make the blood chug faster in the veins, and then, to turn
and walk away. To use the muscles of the legs to move yourself along the path,
press against the solid things of earth: roots and rocks and dirt. But the
energy shifted after that; conversation slowed. We’d climbed and climbed and
focus turned towards landing each next step. It got darker. We worried, separately,
and not outloud, if we’d missed a chance of a flat surface to spend the night.

Fear and the cessation of fear. Tension and
relief. I realized recently: at the start of any extended walk in the woods,
any clamber up a mountain, I always believe the destination to be unreachable.
So when the steps accumulate and a distance is crossed and whoa, here we are!, the sense of thrill is wild, a euphoric sort of
relief.

So it was that night. Later, higher still, a
flat spot was found, the tent set up, the clouds gave way, and a beaming and
benevolent crescent moon appeared. We listened to the wind. It moved above us
with power, flirting with the tops of the trees. It sounded like someone’s
breath in your ear when you’re pressed in a half-light
trance and breath comes quickened and unchecked.

There are no bad winds, someone I knew said
once. Ontop the mountain what we heard seemed less like wind — the
grass-swaying, leaf-bothering breezes of regular days at sea level — and more like pure force, a deep and breathy
whorling. And then, all at once, it stopped. An abrupt and total evacuation of
sound. It paused my heart. The silence roared of infinity, more than the great
grey-white abyss from the rock. It roared of end. I found myself frightened, wanting
the world to start breathing again, wanting to feel the heated touch of the
hand next to me, to know we were still bones and blood, still had heft, and were
not about to be sucked off the mountain and into the gaping silence. Only moments and the wind
started up again, like a lover finally able to exhale, a pause before
the gust.

[Painting: Eartham Woods by Koen Lybaert]

Theair was thick today. A thunderstorm is...

The
air was thick today. A thunderstorm is right now thinning it. Fat raindrops
fall hard, drumming off the trash bins outside the window, and my phone buzzes
with emergency alerts for floods. The air, earlier, before the storm, held the
prickle of electricity, the static heat of standing too close to the TV. I like
the charge. Sometimes a weather report is all there is to offer, and sometimes it
feels like more than enough, given how the shifting pressure carried with it an
expansive sense of possibility, of the wide-openness of things. It’s made me
miss some people, and made me feel lucky to have people to miss, a wild sort of
luck and an electric sort of longing. The downpour, the damp, the cracks and
flashes, the light yellowed like a bruise – here we are in the
center of summer, and the tight places loosen, the hard things dissolve, and
time melts. Time melts. The storm brought an early dark. It’s getting dark
earlier. You can feel it at the edges.

[Painting: I have moved to a bucket inside a cave. Do not visit. Thanks, by John Lurie, 2015]

I hunt for old wood at Longleaf Lumber on an industrial...

I hunt for old wood at Longleaf Lumber on an industrial back
street in Cambridge. Planks lean up against the high warehouse walls, white
oak, black walnut, yellow pine. Boards pulled from old barns, old floors,
weather-worn, bug-chewed, time-beautied.

On a search for a slab for a front-hall table I’m making for a
friend, one plank sat apart with a group of miscellaneous wood, unidentified.
My brother, on the hunting mission with me, saw it first and pulled it from the
pile. The folks at Longleaf weren’t sure what it was. There have been guesses:
butternut, elm. I like the mystery, but tell me if you know.

The swirl plunging down the right looks like a braid, a
spine. On the inside of a tree, one finds bone, a thick lash of plaited hair. I’ll
say it again and again: so much below the surface! Everything with its secrets,
aspects dazzling and unexpected, in this ongoing process of unearthing, of
slowly, slowly, getting to know.

[The drawing: Making Love with Debi by Danica Phelps]

I bought the car off my brother for a thousand bucks. Itruns...

I bought the car off my brother for a thousand bucks. It
runs hot, and loud, and you feel every bump in the road. I admit: I like all of
this because it makes you know you’re driving.
Last weekend, making my way an hour-and-a-half south towards my family for
Memorial Day, the car caught a fever. A red light came on signaling a spiking
temperature and I blasted the heat and hoped no flames would be involved before
I reached a spot to pull myself off the highway.

No flames and a pull-off appeared in no time. A Salvation
Army receptacle overflowed with old coats and pairs of boots tied together at
the laces; two mattresses leaned against the dumpster (is it even worth
remarking how unsavory discarded highway-side mattresses are? especially damp
with dew?). Pre-nine a.m., a Saturday, the sky was grey and the air was cool,
and a Western Express 16-wheeler was also parked in the pull-off, engine
running.

I watched birds as I let the car cool. After time enough to
let the fever break, I started it again and it roared its opposition to being
asked back into action and the red light came on and an unfamiliar whine said,
definitively: do not drive me. I glanced back at the truck and wondered if I
should solicit help. I opened the hood and peered in, could’ve gotten a tan off
the heat from the engine. The coolant tank was empty. I looked at the truck
again. Maybe he would have some? I decided to err on the side of not wandering
up to a truck parked on the side of the highway, erring on the side of not
turning myself into a cautionary tale.

I called my dad, twenty minutes away, and asked if he could
bring a jug of coolant to me. He and my stepmother arrived soon and the three
of us stood looking into the front of the car. It was then that the truck
driver walked over, asked what was amiss. He had thatchy shoulder length hair,
strawberry blonde giving way to white, a thick goatee, and sunglasses I
associate with 70s-era southern rock bands.

“Where you based?” asked my dad, dropping verbs to suggest
he, too, knew something of life on the road.

“I’m based wherever I’ve parked my rig,” the driver said,
with a wistfulness that nearly brought me to tears.

It was then that a French bulldog revealed itself in the
shotgun seat of his truck, sticking its head out the window.  

“What’s the dog’s name?” I asked.

“Sugar,” he said. We all looked her way. “That truck is the
only world she knows. I’ve had her since she was six weeks old.” It’s nice to
have a friend, I thought but did not say. I know nothing of life on the road,
but the loneliness of miles is something easy to imagine.

We chatted some more and he diagnosed the issue and said if
he’d known he would’ve come over to offer help earlier. I was flooded all at
once with gratitude, not just for his help, but because in that moment I
understood for sure that he’d waited to approach, that he understood the
side-of-the-road scene, of a woman alone, a truck-driver, of potential sensed
threat, and he waited until more people arrived to come over.

“You be safe,” he said to me and I put my hand on his
shoulder instead hugging him
which is what I wanted to do so badly. “Thank you,” I said. “You, too.”

[Painting: Grant Haffner, Country Road]

I can’t remember a time I’ve felt so embraced by spring.Real...

I can’t remember a time I’ve felt so embraced by spring.
Real warmth hasn’t settled in yet, but the trees get greener by the day, and I can’t
believe the colors of the tulips. Purple so dark it’s almost black, magenta,
gold, swirls of fuchsia and white, a red that seems to define the very color.
They’re the most generous looking flower. Full cups wide open.

This weekend on a beach, all sorts of sea detritus littered
the shore: fish heads with eyes plucked out by hungry gulls, a dead skate, the
large hard shells of horseshoe crabs, some sort of shining pile of jellyfish.
The bleached seaweed in my hands felt like one of the softest and most delicate
things I’ve touched.

Sometimes pictures say it better. To that end, my tumblr pals, I’m on Instagram. If you want, join me
there as well. Pics from my small life – seaweed, rafters, decks, work, home,
and faces sometimes.

The forsythia are giving way to lilacs. Less glow, bettersmell....

The forsythia are giving way to lilacs. Less glow, better
smell. I came out of my apartment this morning, taking out a bag of trash, and
the air smelled like bloom. I breathed deep and felt thrilled – some days in
May the air is filled with flowers. What a good thing we get to sense. May’s a
month that in its very name begins a question, grants permission, holds
possibility. May I? You may. It may. I may. We may. So much potential energy.

I rounded the corner of the building, moving quickly on my
small errand to take out the trash, and was halted in the street. Standing ontop
of the trash bin was a hawk. We locked eyes and I stood still and we stared at
each other, four feet apart. Oh fuck, I heard myself say quietly. I broke the
lock between our eyes to see that it stood ontop of some dead animal, bird or
squirrel I do not know, it was mostly guts, a shocking red, and my heart beat
faster in my chest and the hawk sensed it maybe and flew off along the fence,
its prey gripped tight in its talons, some dark bit of entrail dangling. There
was blood on the lid of the barrel and my heart flew, and I felt lucky and
scared and glad, glad to be gripped for a moment in silent union, exhilarated




by the sudden stop of time. It made me wonder, with excitement: what may happen
next?

[Leonard Baskin, from Cave Birds]

M. is rebuilding her porch and needed help installing...

M. is rebuilding her porch and needed help installing some
cumbersome columns today. A warm April afternoon and the azalea seemed to be
celebrating while we rolled and wrestled columns into place to hold up the roof
above the deck. The only tools I’ve used these last three-plus months have been
in the kitchen: knives, teaspoons, wooden spoons, a microplane for turning
garlic and ginger into pulp. I
forgot about the solidity of things. The muscles in my arms got soft over this
long winter, the dim interior of my mind became a place inhospitable, and
working today, feeling the weight of things, made me long to be strong again.
And there was a flicker of comfort – the first taste I’ve had of that feeling
in some time – that getting strong again was possible. It did not last, but it was there, for a moment. That things can be
repaired, reinforced, and strengthened. It’s possible. I say it now to try and
make it true.

There was once a place I loved. It still exists. I could...

There was once a place I loved. It still exists. I could be
there by tonight. But the house that was there is gone and without that place
to land, to sit on the porch and watch the sky, it’s not a place for me. I ache
for this place. Or maybe I ache for the love I loved.

All the gones and dones make holes in us. Does it turn out that
our losses define our lives?

In a letter, Emily Dickinson wrote about the death of a
maid. “I winced at her loss, because I was in the habit of her.”

It’s one way to describe love. I am in the habit of you. You
are part of the pattern of my days. And there is the note of addiction, too – a
hookedness, a need. Habit, have it. I have to have it. What is love if not a
habit? A behavior pattern regularly followed until it becomes almost
involuntary, a tendency or practice that’s especially hard to give up. And even
more, to inhabit, to exist or be
situated within. I am in the habit of you. I inhabit you. I exist within.

And you exist within and what’s gone doesn’t go,
it seems. The love I loved remains. And sometimes it’s summer and sometimes it’s
spring and sometimes it’s hard and dark and all we can do is share the burden
of our days.

Two years ago, a warm weekday evening at the ice cream shopthe three of us used to go as teenage...

Two years ago, a warm weekday evening at the ice cream shop
the three of us used to go as teenage girls. We sat underneath the cold blaze
of fluorescent lights, the three of us again, licking at our cones, and I had
never seen pain so etched on someone’s face before. My friend talked of a
second miscarriage. She spoke of so much blood, of labor pains, contractions, of
birthing something spongy and incomplete into the toilet. Her pain seemed more
whole than anything I had ever seen or felt. I ate my ice cream and remembered
the rumors that they made the softserve there with seaweed and sawdust to keep
the calories low, and I listened as she talked and watched as she tried not to
cry and then cried.

Do you remember when you were initiated into pain? Not the dumb
hot pain of a stubbed toe or a bit lip. Not the annihilating pain of a broken
tibia or the cold static of a migraine. But the pain of loss. The pain of
wanting something you may not ever get. The pain that gives a new and first-time look at yourself in
ways you hadn’t seen before, when regret and sorrow cleave space for light to reach
places no light had reached before. I came late to pain, or it came late to me.
But when it arrived last winter, I learned how loss leads to lost. And in the midst of the hurt and ache and the
loosening grip on what was real, I felt myself, for the first time, human. And
it made me wonder: what had I been before?

“What about pain?” I heard someone ask a teacher the other
night. “Remember that it unites us as people,” the teacher said, and there’s
heart-softening solace there. “Remember that it’s something all of us share,” the teacher said. “Pain
and love. Pain and love.” How did it take me so long to
know? That they are paired, plaited, that you cannot have one without the other.

Milkweed has sap that’s poison, but not to monarchbutterflies...

Milkweed has sap that’s poison, but not to monarch
butterflies whose larvae feed on the leaves so much that the amount of toxin
they contain make them unappetizing to bugs and birds who might otherwise want
to eat them. For humans, it’s said the sap makes warts go away. You can eat
milkweed if you want. Boil it. It might be bitter. (But Dogbane is milkweed’s
poisonous look-alike; take care.) Chew the roots to rid yourself of dysentery.
Coughs, typhus fever, and asthma have been treated with infusions of milkweed
roots and leaves. I am no evangelist for natural remedies. Some facts just feel
good to know.

The
snow-white rabbitsoft silk has been used to stuff quilts and pillows, and it
makes me think strange, good dreams would happen with a head on a pillow stuffed
such. Dreams about being lifted off the surface of the earth and carried on the
currents of the air, maybe, or finding yourself living inside a tree. Along the
Charles River yesterday afternoon, tall milkweed stalked along the banks with
empty husks, seeds with their feather-light fur long gone. The interiors of the
pods were smooth and cracked like animal hide and now, when it is spring in name alone, I wondered when things would green again, and when the milk sap would start to flow.