North Woods

by Daniel Mason

When I bit into it, I had the sense of tasting not only with my tongue, but deep within my palate, a scent more than a flavour, as light as lemon blossoms, before a second wave came spreading through like syrup. What in heaven was this? I wondered. An apple, of course, an apple in all ways, and yet I had never eaten an apple like this. No one had ever eaten an apple like this.

History haunts him who does not honour it.

If life, as the man said, was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse.

I am, of course, guilty of ingratitude, of biting the hand that feeds me, &c, &c, but I seem to have become utterly incapable of painting anything that is demanded of me. Nothing is more likely to make me abandon something than to be told to do it.

Indeed, I have become a connoisseur of ice these days: the sleet that falls like hissing sand, the white that coats the roads like baker’s dustings, the crystalline mesh, thin as spun sugar, that shatters with the passing of my hand.

Spring, suddenly warm. Trees announce themselves with miniature leaves. The two white mounds outside the barn turn out to be a pair of ancient woodpiles, now nearly rotted to soil. Green pushes out the brown everywhere. A kind of amnesia sets in: wasn’t it always so? If

Can there be art without the human in it?

And yet deep down, he dreams—as all historians dream—of a text so pure that reading it would be a form of time travel. For he knows that most accounts are, on some level, propaganda, shaped to outrage the colonial imagination, and to sell.

Flowers were what bloomed in scarlet ruffles on red maples, shone opalescent in the leaf duff, bowed, in late September, on golden sprays beneath the weight of bees.

It was as if she had been made aware of a structure to the world, an architecture which existed beyond her and which her sadness could not consume.