Claire had a thing for gentle William, as I say — and then one evening, after one of the ironing-board cocktail parties, she asked me out on a date with her to walk to the cash machine. I said that a walk to the cash machine would be very nice. In those days she wore a thrift-store cashmere coat and soft Italian sweaters and, though her mother pleaded with her, no bra. And her lips were soft, too — much softer and somehow more intelligent than others I’d kissed, and though I hadn’t kissed that many lips I’d kissed some.
I went with her to the dentist when she had her wisdom teeth out. Afterward she slept curled for a long time, a small beautiful person; there on her desk in a glass of water were the two enormous teeth. They were like the femurs of brontosauri. How those giant teeth could have fit into her head I don’t know.
So this morning when I reached for my glasses, I remembered noticing in a hotel how my hand had gotten better at knowing just where the soap was in an alien shower. My lower mind would hold in its memory a three-dimensional plan of the shower that included the possible perches for the soap: the ledge, the indented built-in soap tray, the near corner, the far corner. I would wash my face, then put the soap down somewhere without thinking about it, then shampoo; and then, still blind from the shampoo, I’d want to wash my lower-down areas, and even though I’d been turning around and around in the shower, I was able to use the north star of the angle of the shower-flow to orient myself, so that without looking I could bend and find the bar of soap under my fingers, often without any groping.
7
Good morning, it’s 4:19 a.m., and I can’t get over how bright the moon is here. We’ve lived in Oldfield for over three years now and the brightness of the moon and stars is one of the most amazing things about the place. Even when there’s a big chunk taken out of it, as there is now, the moon’s light is powerful enough that you can sense, looking out the window, what direction it’s coming from. When you look anglingly up, there’s this thing high in the sky that you almost have to squint at. The small, high-up moons seem to be the brightest ones.
I fell asleep a little after ten reading a software manual, and now I’m up and waiting for the train whistle. The fire today is made partly of half-charred loggage from yesterday, but mostly from thin apple branches that I sawed up when I got home from work. I tried the ax first and had a heck of a time. But a handsaw will slide right through with wondrous ease, sprinkling handfuls of sawdust out of either side of the cut, like — like I can’t think what — like a sower sowing seeds, perhaps. Anyway the fire took to burning so readily that I’ve had to move my chair back a little so that my legs aren’t in pain through the flannel.
The thing that is so great about sitting here in the early morning is that it doesn’t matter what I did all yesterday: my mind only connects with fire-thoughts. I have an apple to eat if I want to eat it — picked in the fall and refrigerated in a state of semi-permanent crispness.
The whole dropping-of-the-leaves thing and the coming of winter is one of those gradual processes that becomes harder to believe each year it happens. All those leaves were up there firmly attached to the trees, and they’re gone. Now, incredibly, there are no leaves on the trees. And not only that, but it’s becoming impossible to conceive that there ever would have been leaves on the trees. It’s like death, which is also becoming harder and harder for me to understand. How could someone you know and remember so well be dead? My grandmother, for instance. I can’t believe that she is dead. I don’t mean that I believe in a hereafterly world, I don’t. But it does seem puzzling to me that she is now not living.
This year there was a particular moment of leaf-falling that I hadn’t encountered before. I went outside at sunrise to feed the duck — this was sometime in October. There was ice in her water when she jumped in: hard pieces of something that she thought might be good to eat but weren’t particularly when she tumbled and smacked them around with her beak. While I was waiting for my daughter Phoebe to come out, I began scraping off the thin ice layer on the windshield using my AAA card, and then I heard a leafy rustling a few hundred yards away. I looked in the direction of the sound, expecting to see a coon cat or a fox. What I saw, instead, was a middle-sized, yellow-leafed sugar maple tree. It was behaving oddly: all of its leaves were dropping off at the same time. It wasn’t the wind — there was no wind. I stood there for a while, watching the tree denude itself at this unusual pace, and I came up with a theory to explain the simultaneity of the unleaving The tree was not as tall as some of the other trees — that’s the first thing. And it was the first night-freeze of the year. So we can imagine all the twigs of the tree coated with the same thin but tenacious coat of ice that I was encountering on the windshield. Now the sun had risen enough to clear the dense hummock of forest across the creek, and thus sunlight was striking and warming the leaves on this particular tree for the first time since they’d frozen. The night-ice had sheathed the skin, holding the leaf in place, but the freeze had also caused the final rupture in the parenchymatous cells that attached the leaf-stem to its twig: as soon as the ice melted, the leaf fell. I had some confirmation of my theory when I noticed that the leaves on the sunward side of the tree were mainly the ones that were falling.
My son, who is eight, had a plan for the leaves this year. He filled six large kraft-paper bags with them, and saved them in the barn, so that when my brother and sister-in-law came to visit with their children he could make an enormous pile. His plan worked, which is not true of all of his plans. The pile was big and the leaves were dry, not soggy, and my sister-in-law and I took lots of pictures of smiling children leaping around piles of leaves and flinging them in the air, and I had that moment of slight fear when I knew the future. I knew that we would remember this moment better than other perhaps worthier or more representative moments because we were taking pictures of it. The duck hovered near the rake, hoping that we would get down to a slimy underlayer where the worms lived. But there wasn’t one.
I found out yesterday that one of the town elders has died. He sounded perfectly fine over the phone when I talked to him in November — gravelly-voiced but fine. When I was taking out the garbage yesterday, walking up the ramp that leads into the barn, I suddenly imagined this aged man turning from a living human being to skull and bones — and I was amazed in the same way that I’m amazed when the leaves fall and we’re left with skeletal trees every year. Really I’m glad my grandparents were cremated. I don’t like the idea that their skulls would be around somewhere. Better and more dignified for them to be completely parceled out.