Photo Credit: The Multi-Talented Bike Riding Cookie Eating Hair Growing Evan Gross
A note from yesterday:
This morning we woke in what is likely to be the last of the snow, flurrying past the windows, distracting the cat who had previously meowed and meowed for breakfast. I stirred wood into coffee, sipped through steam, read the news. Jake folded the big woolen blanket, made tea. The light, clean and even on our faces, the weather in Huntingdon, 42 degrees, sunny.
We chopped fruits and gathered nuts into bags, left notes for our terrific, beardy cat-guardian, washed the last dishes, locked the windows. We set off into the snow, into the streets, Jake mentioned blindness, I noted my current fashion aesthetic, which is Cool Maine Mom in Ten Years. (Old sweaters, cuffed jeans, useful boots, carved stone necklaces.) The snow got into our eyes and the fringes of hair not contained by beloved wooly hats. We crossed streets without looking and trudged underground where we caught one train and then another until we were born again in New Jersey, in a startling railroad snowscape of abandoned marshes and factories, powerlines wrapped thick like licorice, and I felt at once like what I was and what I will be, but present for this moment in a way that I am not always.
We crossed bridges and passed bridges, skimmed dirty ice water, wild fields filling the margins between cities, lonely places never visited, only seen by the thousands and thousands who have looked up from their magazines to consider the view.
It fascinates: this morning we boarded a train in our current home and at 4:22 pm we will arrive squarely along the backbone of our former home. We will look up from that lonesome section of train track to examine our old windows, the ones gummy with grease marks from our noses and hands, fogging to watch the passengers disembark from the 4:22 pm train, to watch the faces familiar re-enter our town. The building is encased in ivy, its mortar old but living, growing still, catching the lights of trains all day and all night. Near to river, ridge.
A note from today:
The train was late, but my abundant happiness persists. I am sipping coffee in a small town in the center of Pennsylvania in a cafe full of HUNTINGDONIANS and it is maybe the first of the warm days. The air is filled with sun. And later I will see a delightful baby and a pug named Maggie May and a cat named Claudia, but for this moment I am sinking into this couch crying because of what Sarah sent, and it is this. Don’t read unless you want to access your FEELINGS.
(You are beautiful; we are all wonderful and beautiful.)
