Red Efts

Beginning paragraphs of a work in progress:
It was about the time the newts started to arrive in the back garden—angling with shiny, thin skins around the stones and mosses—that Leonard left. We found dozens of them every day for weeks and weeks, their bright spotted bodies pulling through the grass blades with fine amphibian toes, dotting the whole space with striking orange. They came after the first big rain of September, perhaps a few days after Leonard had taken the last of his things. My daughter Thea found the first one, plucked it up from the damp foliage and carried it between thumb and pointer to the back door of the kitchen so I could see what she had discovered. She held the bright wriggling thing up to me where I sat at the breakfast table, so close I could see each braille-spot speckled along its skin and the bulbous damp of its eyeball.

She had dreams of keeping it in a terrarium on her bedside table (“I’ll feed it and play with it every single day!” she promised), but in the end we agreed it was best to return it to the wild of the mud and the leaves and the rain, where it belonged. So she carried it back to the garden and set it in the patch of wet fallen leaves where she had found it; from the kitchen window I watched her squat down, dress hem just brushing the muddy ground, waiting patiently in her yellow rain boots as it ambled away through the maze of debris fallen from the birches that edged our lawn.

We began to name the newts after a while, recognizing them by their spotting patterns and preferred places of rest around the garden. If they stuck around long enough, they got a name. Favorites were Pablo, Terrance, Mildred, Snatch, Tupper, Ricky, Juliet, Hancock, Ernest and Ladybird. With the names came elaborate personalities and, eventually, grand collective histories and shared interactions within the newt community that had, for one reason or another, sprung up just outside our home. Most were of Thea’s invention; she spent afternoons after school studying their habits and activities, scratching down her findings in a notebook. But the incorporation of their imagined stories into our daily lives was, in the end, probably as much my doing as it was hers. The house had fallen into a grey sort of quiet when Leonard moved out, and I suppose we filled the hushed absence with those newts that simply happened to arrive at the right time.

Photo.

We hold our carton and collect up life's praise and petty accomplishments like smooth white eggs to place in each small nesting cardboard compartment, count our little egg-box as we doze or speak. But see how easily they crack, they fall to the floor and the thin shell flakes apart and bleeds with viscous yellow across the tiles of the floor. We clutch them too hard between our palms, drop them to the floor with clumsy drifting, watch as the man sits upon the carton whole (we have left it upon the seat he often takes.)

Photo.

Knitting together the varying coincidences of our lives gives them a glistening, netted beauty that is perhaps lost entirely when we let all the moments fall to fragmentary pieces in our minds. I don't see it as making something fictitious out of life, but rather I see it as lending a sort of lovely structure to it that only the human imagination can provide.















Photo.

Lantern Light (Work in Progress)

Through the birches in the backyard they strung white paper lanterns for the party they threw in late August, and when dusk came in and the dark began to settle, the effect was sort of thrilling in its own simple way, the white warm orbs a reflection of the netted stars above, perhaps. Steady and unblinking, they hung amongst the rustling leaves, the edges blurred and beautiful—everyone who stood on the back deck with a beer in hand looked at them and paused for a moment to stare and gaze and comment. “How nice they look,” “how positively magical." And of course there was Clara Gibson in pale yellow, the dress scooped low in the back, the waist tied fast with a bow; she walked across the deck, the paper lanterns aglow in the dark behind her as she twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck, the way she often did. Her arms were thin and too long, but that seemed almost a part of her appeal, that uncertain length and litheness of her bones. Even so, that appeal wasn’t so much charm as much as you felt if you were patient, she might begin to unfold—a petal would fall loose first here and then there, finally offering up a narrow glimpse to the center.

Peter felt glad she had come, felt a little warm from the beer and because here was Clara striding across his back deck in the muggy August air and she would, at one moment or another, perhaps stand close to the hydrangea bed with her face lit by the nearest lantern. It had been years since, as children, they pedaled plastic boats at the cottage house their families once rented together; years since he pushed her into the cold lake for telling everyone he had got them lost along some weedy shoreline one morning; since he saw her kiss his cousin behind the tool shed with quick, closed lips. They bumped into one another in hallways now, chatted outside the cafeteria with friendly faces tipped with that look of knowing one another since childhood, but little else. Still, he was glad she had come.

Photo.

I. Dreamscape

For the contemporary memoir class I took this past semester, we were told to write a ten page memoir as our final paper assignment. The opening passage from mine:


"The only recurring dream I have ever had was painted in soft hazy strokes, much like a dark-hued painting you might find on the tall walls of a museum. Throngs of people traveled together in brown cloaks and coarse fabrics, hauling baskets of food and belongings. There were always chickens pecking at scattered grain with pointed beaks, clucking along with the crowd as it traveled through an enormous metal tunnel; a great exodus of bodies and lives. I never knew the destination, or the starting point, for that matter—just the humming clang of talk and movement along the journey."

Kingdom Come

What I learned in the springtime was that monarchs are the only butterfly species that, like the birds, make the full migration from north to south, and back again. They fly south in August, great papery hoards of them flittering across a hot summer sky on a path to Mexico; a bold and patterned mass bending and diving and floating together as one. It is not for themselves, but for their children, for the progeny that will burst forth from soft-clinging eggs laid along the way. For such a voyage requires the fortitude of generations to succeed, each leg fought by the next round of freshly emerged paper-winged kings. Again and again they are born to fly ever-closer to a space (a hot and mystical grove) where offspring generations down the line will alight on the bark of giants and huddle close, safe from the bitter cold of northern winters. This great pattern of flight, I was told, is woven between the fibers of their flesh, into the very core (whatever that may be) of their being and as that third or fourth generation of wanderers lands, they rest for months as though the entirety of their ancestral struggle lies heavy upon the ringed and bonded compounds of their crushable casements. It was then that I learned, also, that up above in the leafy treetops, birds sometimes look down with small, dark eyes, hungry beaks slightly agape in the forest heat.

Collaboration

With the arrival of another summer comes more free time to adventure and, most importantly, write! Busy with papers and projects and winter hibernation, I didn't write nearly as much as I had hoped to over this past school year, though I did start in on a few things. Hopefully in the next little bit I'll polish them up and post them, but in the meantime, I've embarked on something very new. Kelsey and I, upon our summertime reunion here in Ojai, have started in on a collaborative project--a bit magical realism, a bit autobiography, and a bit graphic novel, it's a strange and fun jumble right now. Pens and watercolors are the medium of choice for the illustrations, and the story is just beginning. Kelsey and I basically trade-off writing and drawing (though Kelsey is infinitely better at the illustration part than I am--mine are pretty sketchy and have zero perspective) and our writing styles have woven together quite nicely thus-far. The above photo documents the very beginning of our collaboration, and the inspiration for the setting of our tale (courtesy of dear friend Doug)! Oh, and if you're interested, you can see Kelsey's kooky talents here.