That Michigan granary. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall there or a horse horsing
in the window as you whipped out yet another of your novels, your six-week wonders.
Although tempting, what with the birds and the bees and the country music blaring
on the phonograph (who were you listening to? Emmylou? Parton?), I resist my urge
to over-romanticize your writing nook. It was a granary for God’s sake. So spartan.
Close to the bone. A fitting metaphor for life in the days when you were thirty-four.
You thought your age was noon, halfway down the river. You soldiered on to seventy-
eight though so you bested your expected expiration date by another good ten years.
Still, I can see how it felt like the noon of your life. My father made it to eighty, we
hoorayed him over a Zoom call because to travel then meant you didn’t love your loved
ones, or some such official bullshit that to think on now borders on the absurd. All
we like sheep were so led astray. I mean, what would Chief Joseph have done when
COVID hit? What about Brown Dog? What about you? I feel shame over those days.
A total solar eclipse dots the skies this coming Monday. Here in Hot Springs, AR
(have I mentioned my locale?), we’re one of two national parks in the Path of Totality.
Sounds like a spot in Pilgrim’s Progress. An estimated 200,000 people will overshadow
our town. We’re already a tourist town, with a shady past. The woman who owns the
wine store I support said, “Hot Springs is a good place to hide.” She didn’t elaborate.
I’m not thrilled at the swell of humanity around here but I take strange comfort in the
chance that someone cut from Annie Dillard cloth will be snaking through and waking
up in the crowd, squinting, peering at the sun as it wanes fashionably like the moon.
Her piece “Total Eclipse” is quite a ride, a doozy that concludes in a hurry for home.
Did you ever hear what Dillard said about The Road Home? I quote: “Boy, can he ever
do it. He is so good!” That’s pretty high praise. Then again that wonder of a novel took
more than six-weeks, right? Those hidden days of writing and dancing and napping
in the granary with the mice and horses paid off, seconds of your ten-thousand hours.
No granary here. I still write at our kitchen table. But hidden? Yes. At times, exiled.