November 28, 2020

Made my step count again. Did so though it was a gorgeous day on a holiday weekend and all the pull-overs were crowded. I did find solitude to walk in. Found a single wand of lyre-leafed sage blooming pale sky-blue in the middle of a path. Watched a father and his tiny son walk hand-in-hand under the trees, I envying the memories they were making, blessing them with great blessings beamed at the backs of their heads. The music of the walk was Copland’s “Old American Songs.” Came home to find two messages of praise for OBN, messages I desperately needed to hear, fearing with frozen heart that one more of my children was going to drop into oblivion. DF said they had read Kindle versions, but re-ordered because “it’s the kind of book you want to hold in your hands.” SH said it was engrossing and asked for my address so she could send me something. Is it too much to ask for that everyday? Suppose it is. . . .

 

November 27, 2020

Hiking has been oddly connected to music this season. A few days ago I heard the Taize “Within our darkest night” as I walked. Later on the same hike it had turned into Ravel’s setting of Rilke poems that I sang in college. Today, briefly, on the steep road between the Bent Creek gatehouse and Owl Creek, it was “O Jesus I Have Promised.” Because of the situation, they all become more or less marches. I needed today’s hike grievously, apparently, for I felt hugely better afterward. The roads were full of people looking for something to do in a long holiday weekend with the sky clear and the temperature at 70. Brevard Road coming north was bumper to bumper–maybe there was a hold up on 26. But I found a place to park at the entrance to the arboretum and set out on the upward grade of the Hard Times. A couple things need to be said. One is that I was going at a good rate, uphill, long even strides, without being the least short of breath. I keep remarking on this because the degree to which I let a curable affliction afflict me continues to amaze. I am wondrous slow, but that’s OK. I have achieved, I say with some wonder, the biblical three score and ten. I turned when I came to the fence and the gate. I could have gone farther but one of the effects of a diet rich in root vegetables, as I have been having for the last week, makes it prudent never to be too far from modern plumbing. I actually looked around for a place in case the event could not be staved off, but the winter woods are open, everything visible, for acres on every side. Coming down the light was softer, somehow, and understanding my remaining energy made it possible for me to linger and peer into the forest. At the top of a deep, beautiful wooded valley a profound, random emotion came over me. I thought of my mother. Forty-five years after her death, I missed her again. I stood at the roadside and wept, grateful that few were venturing that high. I wondered if I would see her in the life to come, and then I wondered if she wanted to see me. Did I make her proud in any way? Did she love me? Kindness and forbearance may have seemed enough like love. I have no one to ask. I have no memory that can guide me firmly. I wept deeply, bitterly, thinking of her. I am of a mythopoeic frame of mind, so what happened next is explained by that, I suppose. I saw her. She came to me out of the forest and took my hand. I had not been thinking of her at all until her image clove my heart, so the unexpected encounter meant that she had been thinking of me. I blessed the merciful spirit of the place. In one thing at least I have been answered.

Thanksgiving

 

November 26, 2020

Thanksgiving. Bought a cooked turkey breast from Ingles, forgetting how awful turkey can be. Threw it to the crows. Started a hike up the hill south from the Sleepy Gap pullover, but the steepness (and the mud) defeated me, and I didn’t make it to the top. Excellent exercise, though not that many steps. Kelly brought over a Thanksgiving plate for me, full of portions from the delicious meal she had served to her family. She reported remarking to her mother how her neighbor (me) was her age, and yet had just brought out a book. Most people have indeed finished their careers by this point. I have been tardy in everything. 

 November 25, 2020

Second day begun at the Toyota dealership– they installing the part they ordered yesterday. Barely opened my notebook before they were finished. As yesterday, drove to the Parkway and took as much of the Hard Times as I thought I could before the rain. It was both raining and not– like standing under a gigantic gray block of ice while it thaws slowly. The forest is bare, and one may peer deeply into its secrets; that’s how I like it best. Someone had tied apparently lost keys to a branch. Almost no traffic, except for two grim women on bicycles, close together on the way out, widely separated on the way back. The rain began in earnest just as I got back to the car. I am lucky in that way– however catastrophic the large passages of my life, in small things-- finding the parking space, getting to the plane at the exact last second, never losing my keys– I can call myself lucky. Watching the movie Genius on TV, an excellent study of Thomas Wolfe with a faultless small ensemble of actors. I thought how I would pass out dead if I were ever fussed over as an author the way he was. Am I better than Wolfe? Well, more concise. Infinitely less self-referential. And I have more than one subject matter. But someone would actually have to read me for it to make any difference. When I was a kid I thought his own Maxwell Perkins came to every author. . . . 

 

November 24, 2020

Drove to Fred Anderson Toyota to get the damage to the car’s undercarriage seen to. Turns out the fuel tank cover was ripped to pieces by my running over something, I can’t think now what. Diagnosis today, repair tomorrow. Sat in the waiting room, wrote a little, then read Poets in Their Youth. I never thought either Delmore or John B that interesting as poets. Perhaps their fame was set because they were at Harvard. The difference between contemporary poets and poets of the past (so far as I judge) is that actual achievement, actual quality in the work, has little relationship to the renown of the contemporary poet. Since I was already almost there, drove to the Parkway and hiked up the MST, from just north of the French Broad bridge northward. Almost no old-growth forest, except on the sides of mountains, anywhere I’ve hiked this fall. Yet again achieved my steps goal, and passed it. Fourth time, I think, three times in two weeks. Counter tenors one after the other on Youtube. 

 

November 23, 2020

Drove to Marshall to pick up the painting I bought in the art center. Left copies of OBN for LB, and for the lady at Penland Dry Goods, where, apparently, books are sold in town. In the window were copies of Madison-County-themed books, dusty and faded. She wanted to read the book before she agreed to sell it. I can foresee opposition from the local history crowd, for the book can be perceived by the literal minded as claiming to present history without actually doing so. “Now, where’s Two Mountains again?” People hereabouts are very careful about who tells their story. Plus, it alleges a lynching right there in front of the courthouse. Perhaps that isn’t so shocking. Made a thick savory soup out of root vegetables. Unexpected laxative properties. . . . 

 

November 22, 2020

The Anniversary. I was sitting in Mr. Tucker’s history class.

Turned north and wandered through the woods here and there. It was the Day of Non-vascular plants. Didn’t go far under the melancholy sky.  Maud is in her bury-yourself-under the-covers mode.

 November 21, 2020

Bad night last night. I was freezing and couldn’t get warm, even though the furnace worked as it always worked. Plugged in the electric blanket, which solved one problem, but gave me a kind of fever dream of my trying to figure how a dozen different warming apparatuses could be shut off, when there was only one. Finished a thorough revision of The Nurseryman’s Wedding. Beautiful Necklaces got its first review, from M, who said it’s the richest and most beautiful thing I’ve ever written. The last box of peonies arrived. I planted them and a witch hazel, stored the tools in the shed for winter.

C forwarded a recording of himself singing with the Boston Camerata. Voice of an angel.

Chestnut Gap

 

November 20, 2020

In September four checks were stolen from my mailbox, the envelopes slit open with a razor and the bills the checks were to pay left behind. I thought this deeply weird. Today I received an envelope with my address and “Grace Station Lost and Found” handwritten on it, and containing those four checks and the note “Found in the PO parking lot 11/18.” The checks are in perfect condition, not creased or stained in any way, so I doubt they just randomly appeared in the parking lot. When I reported the incident, the supervisor said of my mail carrier, “Yes, he was off that day.” Perhaps he didn’t mean he was absent, but something else. Someone in the post office pulled this prank, but it’s a failed prank because I can’t figure out the point of it. 

After some computer work, drove to the Parkway and began hiking at Chestnut Gap, heading north, the exact slope that defeated me a week or so ago, and inspired me, once again, to get to the root of my weakness. Made it today, all the way to the top. I’d stopped before less than a tenth of the climb. All the traffic was three young men hurdling past me at a full run. They did stop before the last and steepest slope, because running down that would be like running down a wall. The actual image that came into my head was Patroclus running the walls of Troy. I have never had the wind to run uphill like that, nor the confidence to run down. A tree at the top spreads out at the base, and one may sit as if enthroned in the woodland. Dropped a paper beside that tree, with Jonathan’s name and address on it, to see if by some wild happenstance it came back to him. Note in a bottle at 3 thousand feet. The walk was less than 1/4 of yesterday’s, but equally tiring, because vertical both ways. 

Have agreed to stand for Vestry. I did so, finally, because the “Vestry Retreat” that always sounded so awful to me is made impossible by the pandemic. It took real thought to say “yes.” Can I do it? Should I do it? Only one way to know for sure.

 

November 19, 2020

Some writing in the morning, then I set out for the forest. The coats I had in the car were barely enough for the first chill of morning. Wandering the tangle of trails around Bent Creek I broke my record set earlier this week, my phone counting 11,000 steps, quite the longest hike I’ve taken since the thin blood set in. It was too long, but the complainant is not the pneumatic system, but the feet, and that because I hadn’t planned on going so long and wore the wrong shoes. Years of debility SEEM to have been largely undone in a week. I think back. . . . dumfounded. . .I was so sick I figured it couldn’t be iron deficiency, but something much worse. It wasn’t. I have lost years of vigor, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine. You think you’re being realistic, you’re putting yourself past surprise and dismay when you assume the worst. Sometimes you’re just an idiot. Down by the road I ran into AM hiking with some of her neighbors. She introduced me as “the famous writer.” The Bent Creek forest is really quite poor in animal life. Maybe too much human traffic. The path kept crossing the Bent Creek Road, upon which I strolled, remembering coming to it for the first time 37 years ago, when I looked to the trees and the river and the changing light, but also for sex. I recalled the pine alcoves and rhododendron thickets I crawled into to meet pleasure. Sat on a bench that now looks at a Liriodendron grandiflora against which I braced my back while strangers knelt on the ground in front of me. These things cannot be spoken of, not because one is ashamed, but because one cannot imagine the proper audience. But I smiled thinking of it. That, anyway, I would go back and do again. 

Face of Apollo

 

November 17, 2020

Cartons of my new book arrived last evening, in fact as I was entering the shipping numbers to trace the shipment, deeming it lost. The book is substantial, fine to look at. I found 3 errors (two of them errant periods) in the first 20 pages. We worked so hard on that! But mostly I noticed that it reads well, and that–as I noted with my other books– I can find no intimacy with it, no conviction that it is actually mine. This is a good thing, allowing discovery of the thing I made, which is the reason for making. Good early word of mouth from others who have ordered the book, and in general received it before I did. I have a good feeling about its prospects. It’s not a better book than Wyona, but it’s friendlier. I think my oeuvre is destined to be like a family, some familial similarity, but wide variety from each to each. Variety caused confusion in my reception as a painter. I think it will do less harm here. I never strive for it, never try to seduce variety into my words; it merely comes to me, like beauty to the face of Apollo.

 

November 16, 2020

Rose early. Intended to write, but the weather was too good, so I drove to the spot where Hard Times runs closest to the Parkway. I had taken Hard Times Road many times, but maybe only once the trail I did select, blazed but rough, heading north between Hard Times and the road. It would have come out, had I continued to follow, at Bent Creek at the Arboretum entrance. It was very beautiful, clean, serene. Tulip and holly reigned. I was happy. For the third time I achieved my steps goal, for the first time in a single hike. Met two handsome, sweaty, blue-eyed men, one of the by-products of going to the trouble. One had a dog who was frightened of me. I’m dismayed when a dog fears me, and I can never imagine why. Most dogs adore or ignore me on the trail, but the ones that shy and bark are remembered. Trying to put It down as canine misapprehension.

 

November 14, 2020

Fascinating phenomenon that people have received their copies of Beautiful Necklaces, and shown them to me on Facebook, and I have not seen it yet. How will I know what excuses to make? They did not after all, I think, include the genealogy. Doing an edit of Nurseryman, making explicit my conception that Sam-sam descends from the lost Columba Keenan. 

 

November 13, 2020  

Pointed my identification app at Maud and it said “Domestic Cat.” I thought that was hilarious. Christmas fern. . . . striped wintergreen . . . . 

At the end of two days remarkable in a way my life has not been remarkable for a long time– for physical achievement. Yesterday I did the nature walk around the main building at the Arboretum. Many of the items labeled for the visitor have either died or disappeared for autumn. Made me imagine a park that labels things long passed away but which may have stood once upon that spot: Cycad, short-faced bear, tyrannosaur. . . .Too many walkers to allow one a taste of wilderness, though I did take a side path that allowed me to hear the passing of Bent Creek two hundred feet below. Drove from there rather aimlessly, but found myself in Brevard, at the trout hatchery. Did their little nature trail, fed the fish, which looked huge to me. Stopped at a Chinese buffet on the way home and made myself sick with gluttony. Today, though I’d intended other things, the weather was so perfect I set out again, arriving at Walnut Gap. Took the path leading south from there, as I had taken the one leading north several days ago. The notable thing about that is that the south paths goes directly uphill, steep, long, something I would not even have attempted during the last five years of my life. Went slow, rested often, but made it to the top. The top is one of the wonder-places of the Parkway, a wide hill with a long path across it, traveling the roof of things for maybe half a mile. I remembered it from before as one of my magic places, as it was today. I lingered and lingered before I climbed down again. There at the world’s rim I uttered perhaps the purest prayer I have ever uttered in my life. I was a tiny, happy animal under a dome of gleaming blue, giving thanks for its life. When I came down I was not even exhausted; plus, I had learned me lesson about the Chinese buffet.   

Veterans' Day

 November 11, 2020

Veterans’ Day. There’s little record of service in my line. Dad was disabled by polio, and his dad was a coal miner and deemed necessary to the domestic war effort. Uncle Walt was a Seabee in Germany; Aunt Marian a Marine in I’m not sure where. Uncle Richard was, I think, infantry in Korea. That’s it, so far as I know, on either side. Danny tried to join the Navy but was sent home for some unspecified maladjustment. I hope we did what we could to keep the home fires burning.

Wachet auf

 

November 10, 2020

Wachet auf on CD

My front porch pumpkin had developed a fungus spot. Last night somebody delved through that and ate the inside of the pumpkin out. Not a bear, I think, for the pumpkin was hollowed but not moved. Maybe raccoons. 

Madison County

 November 9, 2020

Venetian coronation music. 

Drove to Mars Hill and Marshall, to take in small town to the north, and to alert people that my book is set in their town. Sat under a tree on the Mars Hill campus and wrote a little on my book. A few professors walked by, looking very tweedy and pleased with themselves. I don’t think I enjoyed the professor-y part of being a professor as much as I might have. No scarves, no tweed, no pipe, no memberships in quaint organizations. Ran, improbably, into Keith Green on Main Street in Marshall. He has an excellent, big dog. Skinny boys in dirty T-shirts running between stores and trucks. BB said “You are a Pagan of the Old school, like Schiller, Mozart, Beethoven.” I have seldom been placed in such exalted company. 

Iris

 

November 8, 2020

Planted a crate of forgotten-and-late-arriving iris. Even slightly after dawn it was warm enough to work without a coat. Last night I heard fireworks and the din of celebration from downtown. I knew I’d missed most of it, but I walked downtown this morning to soak up the remnants of the vibe. Went to Blue Spiral to see Julyan’s show. I figured the pieces would be out of my price range, but I’d failed to consider by how much.  Frustrated that my book does not appear on the Amazon site simply by typing in its name. You can find it, but with more effort than I’d expect from a casual reader. There’s always a glitch, pointless and wasteful. The gardening must have exhausted me into huge, satisfying afternoon naps. I must have been in a mood when I ordered, for most of the iris were black.

 

November 7, 2020

I hadn’t thought myself as open to agitation from the political world as the last week proved me to be. The hours when it looked like Trump might be re-elected were dark. I wondered how to live in a world like that. The remembrance that millions have, in various tyrannies and dictatorships, didn’t help. I’d not planned that for my life. I didn’t have the resources. Would I be a rebel? Would I take up arms? Would I hide? I’d thought America, whatever the swings of its political pendulum, immune, ultimately, to the end of its Democracy. No. The razor’s edge. Worse did not come to worst, but the election was close enough to be almost as dismaying as a loss. Nearly half the people in my country voted not only for a bad choice, but for the worst conceivable one. One time might excused because we didn’t know better. But now he is an abomination self-exposed every day as a greater abomination, and the excuse of ignorance, even of mischief, is gone. Sanity already seeps back a little. The offal-tossing gibbon is replaced by the grandfather. Even after a moment one breathes better. The game now is to sit back and see how much damage the Abomination can do before being pried from the Oval Office.

The official publication date of The One with the Beautiful Necklaces is, then, the same day Joe Biden is declared president-elect.

Hit “goal achieved” twice on my step-counter, largely from walking in the woods. Heading for Lake Powhatan– deflected because I’d have to pay to get in– I found the Hard Times trailhead. I didn’t know it existed. That the trail began somewhere did not enter my imagination, thinking of it as a kind of wooded infinity. Hadn’t walked long before I realized that my hiking and biking in days gone by had brought me to within 1/4 mile of the trailhead, had I just known in which direction to continue. The Bent Creek road and the Hard Times, coming off the mountain, meet at a bridge and a falls of Bent Creek, where I’d been a dozen times before. I oriented. The forest began coming together as a map in my head, after two decades’ neglect. Returned today with a new app on my phone, which identifies organisms you point the phone at. The app is kind of stupid– I started with things I knew but it apparently didn’t, a holly tree, a white pine– the closest it could come was “Vascular plant”-- but it has something to do, I think, with the way I was holding the camera, for it also gave me smooth alder and mountain doghobble, which were new to me, and which it knew pretty quickly. 

Daniel and Michaela came for dinner Thursday, a happy time. Made peanut butter pie for dessert, which, being both easy and delicious, may be the death of me. One minute it’s death by tyranny, the next death by dessert. It’s a perilous world!  They each do things for a living that are difficult to present in a sentence, or even a shapely paragraph. She is a sort of medical concierge; he. . .  does IT. . in some way related to sales. . . . I don’t know. I think a small evil lurks behind a job that cannot quite be put into words. Maybe they are both spies and didn’t want to tell me. David phoned while I was already high on the mountain this morning, so I will see him and Lara next time. 

 

November 3, 2020

Night. Victoria on CD. I’m usually not up in the study at night, but the TV downstairs is full of election reports, and I don’t feel I can watch until the end is known.  All stands at the crossroads, all hangs in the balance, and yet I have been merry through the day; perhaps that is a sign, either of good tidings or resilience in the face of bad tidings.

Cleaned the pump and filter and ladled several pounds of needles and leaves out of the pond. 

Began walking the MST at Beaver Dam Gap, heading north. It was not one of my usual haunts, so it took me a little while to remember it, to regain the rhythm of the land. I’d received disappointing news in emails, so I went up with the intention of a Grand Confrontation in the wilderness where only we two could witness it, but by the time I got in position, all the energy, all the rage had gone, faded into the silver wood and the silver air. I resented it a little, but I felt the Lord already knew what case I would and must present. I am right in this, but even the right thing needs not always to be said. The air forced itself into the lungs. It was a little too cool for how I was dressed, but this made me pick up the pace, and needing to pick up the pace signaled to me that I could. Hiking stopped when painting began. I have noted this before, mostly to add that I am happy to be hiking again. It is different now. I am different now, some great conflagration spent and guttered out. Before under the greenwood I was often boiling with rage. Now, not that at all, but a spirit passing, calm under the cool dome as a child. I stood beside the trail and blessed the wild and beautiful spirits of the mountain, and I felt they felt me blessing them. The last music on the radio before reception failed was Prokofiev’s Romeo & Juliet, so I walked through the woods to the beat of “The Dance of the Knights,” an odd but pleasing effect.

I painted for the same length of time as it would take to raise a child. Perhaps that was given to me instead of a child, to spend my time and energy and money upon. If so, it was a thankless child, who came pretty much to nothing. I suppose parents too shrug and say “let it be.” Why did I want it so bad? Why do parents want children so bad? Make something. Leave something behind. Continue after–.

Drove south until I came to Pisgah, where I walked one of the trails that leads from the Pisgah parking lot to the top on the Bull Gap tunnel. Great icicles gleamed from the north-facing cliffs. I plucked one and put it into my mouth. It was a new adventure in thirst-quenching, pure and cold and airy, with a delectable stony after-taste. Many people speaking Spanish in the parking lot. Met, one each on each trail I took, a woman in an orange jacket, each with a dog. A black dog and a red dog. We commended the excellent day to one another. On the slope of Pisgah I watched a vole–excellent in tininess-- scurry from one side of the path to the other. Each time in the woods–in this dispensation– I’ve seen an iridescent black beetle scurry among the fallen leaves. Different ones, I suppose. If the vole and the beetle are being presented as my spirit animals, I know I am in for a time of condensation, concealment, hidden ways. This is well.

All Souls

 

November 2, 2020

All Souls. Victoria Requiem on CD. 

Evensong lovely last night. Glad for my voice to be back in the saddle. Woke up sick from undistributed Halloween candy; freezing will not avail; it must be out of the house. 

All Saints

 November 1, 2020

All Saints.

Morning dream: I’m exploring an ancient Italian city. I get too close to a wall, which crumbles, and I fall into an electric aqua river. The river is barely chest level, and warm, and beautiful, and I know it flows past my digs, so I decide to walk in the river till I get home. I worry about my leather jacket, but even in the dream I figure that, it being a dream, all will be well. Everyone is there to congratulate me when I climb out of the river. 

Sang my first virtual service this morning. My fear that I was oversinging was not borne out by the videotape. Neither was my fear that I’d be caught digging at and readjusting my mask all the time. We men of the choir actually sounded pretty good. John’s sermon suggesting that the “blessed are”’s in the Beatitudes indicates “you are the apple of God’s eye because of this” was helpful. Cold, brilliant day. The anxiety in the pit of my stomach is, now that I plumb it, probably the election, not only the most consequential of my lifetime, but consequential in ways never before imagined. I’d always considered the contest between parties as a slight–sometimes less slight– disagreement about proper application of generally agreed-upon principles. Not this time. Democracy itself hangs in the balance, the rule of law, the simple survival of civility. Except for the mitigating truth that the bigger the gun the bigger the coward, there’s a real chance of armed insurrection. The Great Rat has allowed all the little rats to snivel out of the woodwork, where they had been held in check by real men. I know which side I’m on, but I’m not clear precisely how to make a difference at the vital moment. I suppose I could stand in the street and chant Morley or the Russian liturgy. Who knows what will avail in the end? 

 

October 31, 2020

Halloween. Was lit from room to room last night by a blazing blue moon. 

My watch sits ticking forlornly on the dresser, where it was laid down on March 13th and not picked up since.  

Feared something all evening without understanding what. Maybe it was just Halloween.