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Thad is still gone and it is raining and I feel a bit lonely. Today is a day for curling up with a fat book, a warm blanket, tea, and a placid cuddler. I am making do with Fabian, who is adept at the placid cuddle, but he's a bit small and I can't get the fire to burn properly. Hence the loneliness. Perhaps if I broke out the chocolate. So much for enjoying my hermitude. 

I suppose there is discrepancy in this whole situation, or at least there appears to be. We have come out here for our indefinite period to live in seclusion and sort out the good from the clutter life was imposing on us. And I complain that I am too alone, now, when I haven't seen family or a movie or a mall for months and months without, until this moment,  feeling the slightest crumb of deprivation. (Maybe there have been crumbs occasionally. But very few.) But it makes sense, doesn't it? One is so much more than nothing than any other quantity can be to one. I don't need society when I have the society of one companionable soul. I know I am indulging self pity. That is what rainy days are for. If only I could say it more clearly.

As to secluding ourselves and leaving it all to find whatever it is we left it all to find: there isn't much news on this front. It's been how many months? But we didn't leave blindly, idealistically, the way I imagine people dream when they say they want to get away from It All. We knew that It was as much inside us as out, and we'd be taking whatever is inside along with us in our one giant, decrepit green car. And it was much less of running away and much more chasing after. We haven't caught up yet, but I feel like we are closer and don't get winded so quickly as we used to. This is all terribly vague, isn't it? The clouds have entered my brain. But here is proof. We can sit still now. That is the great one. There are others, but the kettle is whistling, so you'll just have to wait.

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Most of the time I think of us, humanity, as being properly sized, neither too big or too small, and then every once in a while, (as I hope most people do,) I think of us in comparison to the world we live in. Aren't we tiny? It isn't such a problem that we are around 1/5280th or whatever of the height of the sky (I can't remember the exact numbers anymore), or that we forget how small we are, but how hopelessly lateral we are. At least, that's what bothers me. We make great expansion all over the surface of the earth, and goodly expansion, too, and move all around at great speeds. But our whole existence is parallel to the ground, and we have no concept, or very little, of the perpendicular. We go up in airplanes, but only to move parallel at a greater distance from the surface. Even our loftiest, most impressive sky scraping feats of architecture are about as close to scraping as dipping your finger into a full jar of peanut butter for a quick taste is scraping. You step back from a city renowned for it's tall buildings and view the horizon and receive a reinforced impression of how flat our lives are. I'm not sure this is a bad thing, but I do think we should be more aware of the vertical and take breaks from our headlong horizontal dashings to look up at the clouds. (The ones here aren't much today, but I can see beauty in monotony quite easily, if I take the time.)

Thad is away for several days, so I have been enjoying complete solitary confinement, although it hasn't felt like it because of Fabian the cat and because the birds are back on speaking terms with me. It is the height of luxury, I think, to wake up and hear birds singing every morning. I want to make these days alone count, because it seems so much easier to accomplish things when I am by myself, but so far I have succumbed to all the little chores and things, and have gotten no where near my great tasks. Great they are indeed, being to bake bread in bakery proportions to take to our distant neighbors, to reread Emma, to explore the muddy woods, and to finish piecing a quilt top I have had sitting in a cupboard for too long.

Is it tacky to tell you that writing to you was one of my little chores? I'm crossing it off now, and you may take what moral you like from it. I shall be reading Emma.

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Isn't music strange? I don't know how to fathom it, and possessing as much as the next the human weakness of being unable to handle what they do not understand, sometimes I am frightened by it. Only when I think about it. The rest of the time I am drawn by it and enveloped in its beauty and quite happy until I try to figure it out. It is everything. And nothing. It can be anything, any emotion, and move you more dramatically than anything else. And yet it isn't anything in particular. Unless you put words to it, it doesn't mean anything you can say. It is distilled emotion. Or is it different to other people? I often wonder, because I don't understand it. And it is too decidedly present tense, which muddles me even more. I don't know what to do with the progression of time. Music makes it more obvious. But here I am thinking about it too much. Thad is reading over my shoulder and telling me I am indeed thinking too much, and we ought to dance instead. So he's changing the music from whatever contemplative piece he has going right now (I can never remember piece names) to infectious dance music. 

So long. I must dance. I will tell you more of what we are doing soon. For now, it is just going to be dancing.

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I don't remember much what I was like when I was very small. I think if I were to be a child now (and my present self being a child could be quite a different person from my real child self), I should be the one to always be saying, "Do it again," and to have the same books read to me every night. I am desperately fond of tradition, habit, routine. I feel like our culture is on a perpetual quest for novelty. It isn't in love with novelty, it just follows after it very hard. We all desire the good and know we don't have it right now, so surely it will be in this new thing, this different way of doing things, this dramatic experience. I wonder how long, if ever, before we figure that out?

I have to tell you about our grocery store. You would go into spasms of joy over it. It's even smaller than you are imagining, in this log cabin down town, with Elijah the Wooden Indian guarding the front door. It stocks only the basics recognized by the 1950s and frosted animal crackers (so no healthy organic options or experimenting with culinary rarities for us). However, I am quite happy, because that includes my cooking and eating necessities nicely: milk, cream, butter, eggs, and cheese. It is run by a family who have all the exactly same faces and wardrobes that consist only of rubber boots, yellow rain coats, and plaid. You'd think they were trying to appeal to a tourist population, but there is no tourist population, so maybe they haven't noticed what charm they possess, or have rustic illusions of grandeur. Their faces are all the same, but they each have distinct voices, so Thad tries to get them to talk so we can tell which is which. (He exaggerates, of course, because they are all different ages and sizes, so we can tell them apart that way.) My favorite is the teenage daughter, who has this throaty gray voice which is what smoke would sound like if it could. Woodsmoke from a nice campfire.

You might want to ignore my Pretending to Be Deep bits of yesterday. You know I write to help myself think, don't you? So lots of times I'll say things that are only half true or the shadow of what I mean or second cousin to the thoughts I am trying to find out. I'm writing to find out, so don't be up in arms. Instead, use your arms to give me a nice little hug and say very softly, in a mothering voice, that what I said isn't exactly how it is. Part of the way I think is saying things that aren't true out loud so other people can tell me the other side that I can't see on my own.

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I am very pleased with today. The sky is the same color as the rather sad snow under the trees in the woods. It is warm enough to take long walks without mittens, so that is what we have been doing.

What are you reading these days? You always used to have something fascinating tucked in your bag, something just ahead of me. I always aspired to be you, although I am quite convinced that if I had ever gotten two books ahead, you would have been the one aspiring to be me. I am reading several books at once, as usual. (I have had some revelations on this matter, which I have presently tucked into an unseen corner of my mind. I will bring them out presently and show them off to you, but not today.)

Aspects of the Novel, by E.M.Forster, is taking up most of my attention. It's very exciting to read a set of lectures and understand everything he is talking about and know about all (or almost all) the subject matter as a matter of course. Topped off by stretching all of the edges of my thoughts and organizing my lifetime of reading into sensible themes. I am very grateful to him. Thad can attest to it. I have been giggling over nearly every paragraph. 

I am in the section about people right now. He says life for humanity is divided pretty much into five categories: Birth, Food, Sleep, Love, and Death. Which seems pretty accurate to me. It is exciting for me to see it so laid out, because I am greatly enthralled with the first four, and I expect my interest in Death is growing, too.  His points were of course in context of novels as much as human experience. Birth and Death are pretty much mysteries, novels don't care much at all about Food and Sleep, and so are mainly taken up with Love. Where real people, he claims, can spend possibly no more than two hours a day on Love (or so?), while we dedicate as much to Food, and about eight to Sleep. (For me it is nine.) So let us think about that for a while. Everyone knows I love food almost as much as I love Thad.

I think Forster was thinking mainly of romantic love, although he acknowledged it's little roots slinking into every bit of life and all the motivations for everything. So I let my mind run off on the tangents he wisely chose to ignore. I am choosing to redefine it as all love, especially familial, and to prove how we may perhaps spend less than two hours a day dedicated to it, or the desire to be loved, it is the cause of all we do. Work and careers and all that, being too vague and unnecessary (behold, how many books are written about the rich!) to be one of the Main Facets, takes up at least as much time as sleep for most people, but the motivation for it, at least beyond maintaining existence, is out of love for the people in their care or the desire to be loved and valued by others. Isn't it? Or am I romanticizing humanity again?

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Don't you wish you could see all of the patterns in life? I know they are everywhere, but I'm so caught up in the thick of living that I only catch glimpses of them out of the corner of my eye, or when I look up suddenly. I believe strongly that they are in all of the aspects. You hear about them in history. I have been seeing them in people's interactions. We really have no idea that we are doing carefully planned steps in a dance, but I swear we are. I want to choreograph ballets or make those weird, beautiful art films, because I want to capture those dances and say, "Here! Look! This is happening! This is magnificent!"
 
There is a circle of people around a man telling a joke. They lean in, slowly, closer and closer, so that you can see the progression of the story he tells. Closer, closer, slowly, slowly, and then burst! Fling back the shoulders, tip back the head, laugh loud and bright, like a flower blooming. 

Hungry, shopping for groceries. Push a heavy cart down a dull isle of frozen food. Stand long in front of the glass, surveying the too many choices, too hungry to decide. Chicken in front, pizza behind. Here comes another, from the other end, pushing the dull cart through the heavy isle. Stops for the pizza, too hungry to decide quickly. Back to back, bored and starving. Open the door with the little blop sound. Pick something with dissatisfaction. The door behind opens with a blop. Slow decision with the waft of too cold air. Blop, blop, the doors close. With squeak of shoe and wheels in need of oiling, the carts roll apart, heavy, pushed, evenly and opposite.

It's a dance. We can't see it for the punch line and the growling stomach, but we are dancing through our lives, graceful and ignorant.

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I don't claim to think any particularly original thoughts, but I do claim your unfailing interest in hearing all of my second-hand thoughts. I have been cogitating a great deal, but not succinctly enough to write them all down for you. Maybe someday soon they will be ripened sufficiently.

I hope someone cleverer than I has done some figuring out about eye contact and catching people's eyes and all that. There is something definitely prescient or whatever the proper word is about it. It's such a split second job, catching a stranger's eye, because you look away right away. But how do you both look at the same moment with such magnetism? Most of the time, at least for me, it isn't two scanning beams of radar crossing. It's both looking up from your coffee and book across a room at the very same second and immediately glancing far away because, heavens, one doesn't stare at strangers in polite company. Or again, that sense that someone is looking at you, and then you look up and they are. How can you feel it? I think you really do have eyes all over your body, observing and absorbing and aware, and only a little bit of it gets through to your conscious mind.

I saw three deer, a sun dog, and a cloud of birds today. They all seemed glad to grace my day.

Occasionally I will think I ought to write less about the weather, because it's socially agreed upon as something dull. But honestly, it isn't. It's brilliant and fascinating and makes up so much of my life and my thoughts that I jolly well am going to write to you about every drop of rain trembling on the fern fronds when I take walks in the woods this summer and you're going to hear all about the extra sunny sun and the very blue sky. Just like I used to think how nice it would be if there were more movies and books without any girls or without any boys. Nonsense. They aren't refreshing: they are decidedly dull and unclever. Quite parallel to the weather. Without it I should certainly be dull.

Wishing you the reverse of dull, and very much Weather indeed.

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All along I have been discovering all these necessities of life which are apparently great secrets, since no one ever talks about them. I don't think many people know. This week I have been trying to collaborate a list of them, because properly organizing makes everything sure.
 
One of them is stillness. Sunshine. Great windows that show you birds and clouds and leaves bouncing in the winds. Hammocks. Taking walks barefoot. Taking walks at all. Breakfast, of course. Having a pond to swim in. 

I don't even know how to swim, but that was the great bit of last summer. There's this pond a six minute walk to the East through the woods when there isn't any snow, and during most of summer it was just a shade on this side of Too Chilly to Be Borne, but it is always surprisingly clear, unless there's someone kicking up the mud. We'd go and float about or stand in it until we were just too cold, and then sit on the one rock, which isn't really big enough for drying off. We discovered certain exquisite shafts of sunlight and two quarrelsome squirrels and one kindly one. We often combined our dips in the pond with picnics, on our own Box Hill. We call it that, because it looks a bit like it, although it's entirely pleasant and never unbearably hot. Fresh bread, pounds of butter, a nice bit of crumbly cheese, iced water, and you have the best bit of life you ever will. Especially if you can manage to bring some just right peaches. 

There is much, much more to go on the list of Obvious, Unknown Necessities, but for now, I can only think of about every kind of food and milk glass. Sometimes I confuse my love for life and my love for milk glass. They are easily mixed up, both being so strong, the objects both  magnificent. And then there is Time. I think there are others, but time is what makes them all lovely. Oh, and books! Everything is something I missed before we came out here, or if I had it, I didn't have the time or the heart or the eyes to take delight in it. But here we live slowly, with grace, with joy, with deep love and always expecting to land upon some new island of beauty.

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These months have opened my eyes to what a charming custom breakfast is. I'm never hungry for the first several hours after I wake, so I never really ate it and never missed it. But ever since we got married, it has become a Great Thing Without Which We Cannot Do. So we often skip lunch. Or, I do. A really good breakfast takes a bit of time to make, so it isn't eating as soon as you get up, which solves most of my objections against it. (My objections were all practical and flimsy and unemotional and therefore backed hardly at all.) There are a few which take no time, and of these we accept half. Toasted muffins, cheese, pears, and tea, and variations thereof, are swift. I think I like them best, too, though Thad prefers the ones that take time and flipping of pancakes and frying of bacon just so and slicing potatoes and all that.

We love food more than anyone else we have ever met, so everything about it is magical and splendid.  There is the morning light, which is shy and still. There is the sitting across from each other, still a bit bleary eyed, not saying anything. There is the marmalade and the warm tea and the slouchy socks and informality and delight of being alive. I haven't words for it, as I seem to be in most places these days, but I have acres and acres and acres of feelings. I am feeling more intensely. I attribute this to the fresh air.

We linger about breakfast. Linger making it, linger setting the table or getting out the dishes or carrying the tray to the bedroom, (slowly, so as not to spill the little pitcher full to the top with milk) in the eating and the tasting and the sipping, and in the washing up afterward. I think breakfast may be the clearest way to say “I love you,” both to a person and to life.

I don't think a person should ever eat breakfast unless they are going to go about it slowly, with love. Never in haste, never with a crabby spirit. Well, I admit I am often crabby in the morning, especially if Thad makes me breakfast in bed (which is just tea and fruit and toast which I don't eat because he doesn't put enough butter on, no matter what I say), but it's never crabbiness against food or Thad or even really morning. Morning is the very best.

You know how I used to loathe mornings? I'd hate them, or think I did, because I hated everything I clapped eyes on, especially the people who were so cheerful. But here there is such stillness and not a hint of bustle, and morning blossoms in her shyness and touches me with such love. It helps that we have so many windows and the only other person within about four miles is Thad. He is sufficiently standoffish to keep me happy.