Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 9

I returned to a familiar place, a place I used to spend alot of...

I returned to a familiar place, a place I used to spend a
lot of time. I returned to the place where my grandmother lived, but she no
longer lives, and the house where she lived belongs now to someone else and is
changed beyond recognition. The familiar story: returning to a hometown, a
childhood place, and finding it altered, othered, gone. A familiar story,
usually sad. But this was not all sad. The light was as good as it always is in
this place at this time of year, as summer begins to collapse and the winds
move the clouds. The water was warm enough to swim and seals slicked their
heads up, bobbing in the waves like dogs made of shine. The pleasures were
simple and real: a roast chicken taken to a beach and eaten with fingers as it
got dark; beers pulled from a bicycle basket and had in the wind by a
lighthouse; smell of hedge, beach plum, clematis, sea. In an unfamiliar house,
there was something familiar in the slant of roof, the atmosphere of attic. I
missed what was gone and loved what was there as the season made an unofficial
shift. Summer gave way under fall’s press and the house made noise in the night
as the wind pushed at all the boards and doors, a beam of light from the
lighthouse sweeping through in silence, again again, passing through the glass of a window
facing north.

August is the month of the most saturated green. Thethickest...

August is the month of the most saturated green. The
thickest sort of verdure. These days crawl and summer bends itself towards rot.
The fruit flies and I do battle in the kitchen. I win and lose. July, the worst
month, ends, and I think, thank god, here we are in August. But I forget I’m
wrong about the beginning. The sky stays flat. It’s still deep summer. But what
I know about August is that the light changes. And the change, the shift in
shadows, the way it makes the leaves glow, the new gold angles that it falls,
it whispers of fall. What I know about August is these first days are hot and
the green is saturated green, the densest green, and in thirteen days, give or
take, it will not be like this. And if is, it won’t stay hot like this for long,
and the sky will have dimensions again – do you remember the
dimensions of the September sky? the sharper edges of the September sky? the
depth and detail of the September sky? – and a long-sleeved shirt
will be pulled from the drawer. I hate wishing time away, but this, each year,
is a sickness and I want to be well.

[Summer in Nidden by
Max Pechstein, 1919-1920]

The body insists on itself. The heart does, too. What Dubus...

The body insists on itself. The heart does, too. What Dubus shows us is
that the heart will keep insisting, a thudding in the chest that longs
to beat in synch with the “fearful certainty of love.” Even in the
grimmest moments, when the demons creep in the shadows and your bed is
empty and the wind howls as if to say you are ever and always going to be alone,
there can be found, in morning light, in a glass of orange juice, an
embrace, a run, moments that will lift you out of the pain and deliver
you into something that looks more like grace. It is as simple, and as
hopeful, as that.

I wrote about revisiting the short stories of Andre Dubus for the Paris Review.

The spoon is made of birch. It’s not quite done. It’s thefirst...

The spoon is made of birch. It’s not quite done. It’s the
first spoon I’ve made. Tools used: A small sharp blade and a small curved
blade, and curls of wood drop to the floor of the porch in the place where I am
right now which is not home. A spoon scoops and moves, stirs the soups and
stews. Just gentle. The act of making it, despite the small sharp blades, has
felt like the gentlest sort of action. Today it rains and the bowl of the spoon
overflows with all sorts of longing.

A Norwegian carpenter named Ole Thorstensen wrote a book called...

A Norwegian carpenter named Ole Thorstensen wrote a book called Making Things Right about a life spent working with one’s hands.

The book is, at its core, about relationships—between carpenter and co-workers; between carpenter and client; and ultimately between worker and work. Thorstensen writes of the simple pleasure of carrying a load with someone: “To hold one end of something heavy and be aware of another’s movements, feel them transmitted through the object, is an experience all its own … it is a good way to get to know one another.”

I’ve found this to be true.

I reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal. Give it a read.

An email arrived yesterday from China with cover samples of the...

An email arrived yesterday from China with cover samples of the Chinese translation of Hammer Head, and the woodcuts that will appear within. I think it’s so beautiful. And it’s a neat sort of mindblow to think of the book existing elsewhere in the world, carried across the bridge into another language. It’ll be available within the next month or two.

Chimney sweeps were here today, working in the building where I...

Chimney sweeps were here today, working in the building where I live, scraping out the soot and tar, relining the chimneys with shining metal throats. Loud work: sledges bashing, screaming saws through metal, drills through brick, and the deep percussion of their coughing. Their lungs, the tarry shoots where smoke turns solid, the residue in bodies, on brick. Their concern was elsewhere. The sweeps were in the basement, yelling back and forth.

      “You got it?”
      “Yeah I got it.”
      “Okay push.”
      Grunting.
      “You pushing?”
      “Yeah I’m pushing.”
      “What?”
      “I’m pushing!”
      Grumbling.
      “Anything?”
      “Nothing.”
      “You want me to screw into it?”
       “That’s what I told you from the start!”
      “What?”
      “YES.”
       Drill noises. Hammering noises. Clangs. Muttering.
      “Okay.”
      “Okay. Turn and push. YES. YES. Right there. Don’t move.”
      “There?”
      “Right there.”
       “It’s slip– oh fuck motherfucking son of a goddamn bitch.”
      “Hey easy with the language over there!”
      Muttering.
      “Ready to try again?”
      “Okay.”
      “Okay. Push.”

The rhythm of their conversation, so familiar. The back and forth. The trying, failing, trying. The simplicity of the communication. M. and I have likely had a thousand of these conversations, more or less verbatim. “You holding?” “Yeah I’m holding. Do you want me to push?” “Push.” “Nothing’s happening.” “Are you twisting it?” And so on, over and over again.

I liked listening to them today (I worried for their lungs) and I felt cheered when they finally got it right.
     “All good.”
     “All good?”
     “All good.”

[Painting: Bill Flood, the Chimney Sweep by Harold Riley, 1970]

A drive to the western part of the state to get some newviews,...

A drive to the western part of the state to get some new
views, we paused in a town called Greenfield to put blood in our legs and see
what was there. Mid-march, still cold, the first Saturday since Daylight Saving
had lengthened the days. On the drive, I thought about all the other drives
west out Route 2. The Wagon Wheel in Gill. A picnic table across a bridge. A
leather and lambswool depot on the side of the road where everything is soft. Now and then-ness. So, a
beer, why not, in this unfamiliar town. A place called Seymour pulled us in and
we sat at the bar which was quiet and golden in the good five pm light. A man
and a woman played cards a few stools down; a trio sat at a table and laughed.
A box of Trivial Pursuit cards, original edition, was there on the bar and we
asked each other questions. What U.S. state is named after a Greek island? How
many feet in a fathom? Who’s the patron saint of Scotland? Who made it big
with Tiptoe through the Tulips in
1968? Do you know? Can you answer? (I guessed Georgia for the state. Wrong.
Rhode Island.) I remember the box in our house as a kid, dark green, somehow
stern, definitively adult. It’s not humbling in a good way, the way tripping on
the sidewalk sometimes is. Though maybe there’s an argument to be made for getting
a reminder of how much you don’t know. What sort of wood is this, I was asked about the bar at which we sat.
Cherry, I said. It was good to touch. Good to place your hands upon, as though
it was touching you back. But then I second guessed. What sort of wood is this,
I asked the bartender. Cherry, he said. Sometimes you don’t know how much you
know. I got most of the trivia answers wrong. I was glad I was right about the wood. We
slipped out before it was dark, the bar filling up, St. Patrick’s Day. If I’d
known who the patron saint of Scotland was, I would’ve asked, do they celebrate
St. Andrew?

Ten stems of daffodils for under two bucks, I bought...

Ten stems of daffodils for under two bucks, I bought three
bunches and walked them home in the cold. They’re spread around my place now.
Closed like beaks two days ago, now throwing their faces open in trumpet blasts
of yellow. I came home last night and was met with an unfamiliar smell. How
jarring it is, to return to your home and find the smell is not usual, like
being in public bathroom and looking up from washing your hands and not being
sure which face of the four others reflected is yours. I sniffed around,
wondering what had gone wrong. An underbridge smell, a little like piss. A
smell that was sour and damp. A smell that hits the deep parts of the nose,
less the nostrils and more the brain. I leaned into one gathering of daffodils
and there it was. Perfumier up close, more floral, but it was guttery around
the edges. It smells like Easter my mind told me, not knowing at all what
Easter smells like. The mini-eggs maybe. Today it’s a snowday. All the plans
were cancelled. I watched the snow and had flowers around me.

It might be that I don’t believe in hobbies. It might bethat...

It might be that I don’t believe in hobbies. It might be
that the things we relegate to pastimes, side projects, extracurriculars, are
as crucial as the more major pursuits (your fulltime job; the ones in your life
you love). It might be that I believe that the actions or activities or
practices that one does for enjoyment, which is to say, for satisfaction,
challenge, focus, and pleasure, should be followed with the same gusto and discipline
as you approach the things you give most time and thought to. Your bicycle
rides, your flower garden, your watercolors, your sewing, your pickling, your
ultimate, your beekeeping, your dioramas, your stamps, your photographs of
discarded wind-bent umbrellas, your tarot, your ping pong, your
guitar/cello/bass/drums/or harmonica, your taxidermy, your kite-flying, your
star-gazing, your bread.

It’s just that they’re not to be dismissed. Where you
choose to pour your attention is the most important choice you have to make.

Recently I’ve started learning woodblock printing from an
artist with a printmaking studio with big windows nearby. For the time being,
circular saws, cordless drills, sawzalls, nail guns, have given way to a set of
six wooden-handled carving tools and thin sheets of plywood from Japan. This
wood work is smaller, slower, quieter than building a deck, framing a wall,
trimming a room. And it’s changing how I move through the world and changing
how and what I see. It is opening my eyes to light. It is reminding me how much
as I child I loved to draw. It’s absorbing.

I guess maybe I hate the word hobby. What are you hobbies? Psssh. Ask
another way: what do you make/collect/enjoy? How do you give shape to your
days?