A Prologue

I’ve been writing for the past few years about being haunted. This I supposed when I chose the title Sometimes a Ghost. Because sometimes it’s not a ghost that haunts me even if I think everything is a ghost anyway. I’m still learning this.

I’m learning this only from the doing of it. I think ghosts and the creative process and an imaginative practice and then more ghosts only take root in the doing. In the writing of it. In the painting of it. In the noticing and in the resting. The pain and the glory of it. The haunting comes only when called up this way. I care less about flow than I do about what invites the flow in.

There is, one could say, a kind of love to wanting to be haunted. The haunting has become the passion I guess. I have this notion in a beautiful wrapped bare root old English rosebush to give to my writing mentor and now friend, Sabrina Orah Mark and the community of writers she has gathered around herself. I’ve had this great fortune to write and read alongside these women for the past three years so the rootball of rose is a thanks for their generative and loving support.

The real rose was planted two days before my birthday as a way to keep a physical manifestation of the ghosts Sabrina and her, my, our groups are all conjuring and manifesting. The rose is our well cared-for futures as well. The truth is, I have been more haunted by their love than I know what to do with and that has given me depth. And so much strength.

The real rose is also for my husband who listens intently with love and understanding of this need of mine. He is my best ghost, my one and only heart. Truly.

The roots-bared rose is for all the friends who tenderly support what I’ve been attempting with this second life of mine with their cheers and hearts and likes and real hearts and real cheers and real likes which manifest in real toasts and laughter and real life love.

The rosebush, lastly for now, is also for one of my oldest of dear friends and believer in poetry and good writing and a sort of upstanding sense of how art moves the world if we are paying attention, Michael Judge, who invited my first bit of public writing out into the world. He sprung the first a leak in my private writing life. The leak is often made of Jamesons and tears and laughter and music and recitals and good food and his wife, my friend Masae and their son Max when we pass through Iowa City on our way East or on our way West. I suppose it needed to happen sometime so that I can see my own place in the world of how writing can haunt with love and although I am small I am still making a thing. Michael had said, “Oh my god it's incredible… send it to me and don’t edit it and fuck it up!” But I did edit it up a bit anyway even though I trust the man with my life, the trust only true friends have, the only truth I know. Truly.

And perhaps I should stop using the word haunt so often throughout. Margaux suggested that. It has connotations of something creepier than I mean but I like playing with how it has both flummoxed me and arrived finally at my feet like the little birds returning for Spring and taking a bath in the first hose-puddle under the lilac bush. They flitter and bathe and feed so close I can’t figure out why except to remind me, We’re all here!

In any event, today is my birthday which feels already busy with wishes. So I blew this dandelion into the world and I’m going to present some works in this small space to practice what I do in public and maybe offer a bit of thinking into process and being always a beginner, always finding my way out from the blur to figure out how to be haunted. Here we go.

The Aftermath and Its Flowers

The writings for a collection began just after my mother’s death two years ago in which she was locked down in a nursing home in the flow of the pandemic and that’s what I don’t feel like re-reading which is something you have to do when you are making a collection. I don’t want to re-read how my father-in-law lost his foot. Or how my family disappeared and in the end I guess it was me who disappeared them. Or how I keep losing and finding things when I write. Or what a relief it is to make space for myself by writing so that I don’t have to bore my friends with my inner workings which I probably do anyway. I’ve been writing these stories for the last three years but I can’t seem to read backwards in time or walk amongst the time of the writings again. I don’t know how a book is made without looking at the words. I don’t. I don’t seem to want to touch or read or feel any of it. I just paint flowers.

I walk around other books, I walk with them under my arm, I make nests of them, I make notes of new thoughts nearly each day, I wonder why I do this, I go to my 92 year old neighbors house and ask them questions because who else is there to ask questions and actually want to hear the answers(?), I bring them broccoli soup and some kind of simple bread I baked which never rose and Grace asks me to stay for lunch. She rolls out tortillas, she puts out little pots of chicos and corn, lentils with bits of pork, green chiles and sliced potatoes on burned hot pads.

Grace loves dessert. There is always dessert. She tells me about this apricot sauce that we are eating on this thawed banana bread. She saves brown bananas. She made the apricot sauce last summer she says and Lebeo says, “You know…no one we used to know is around anymore.”

His face is inching into something surprised. My face scrunches into something heavy. In the same way I don’t show them weakness, he also doesn’t show me and now we are showing each other something like a neighbor to classic weakness which is now called vulnerability. We are in a lit kitchen together and he is 92 and there is a rational tone to his voice, and he says this just before he puts his jacket on, pulls out his walking stick to walk around the plaza. Grace and I have just encouraged him to get outside in what feels like Spring for some sunshine, he smiles without teeth and adds, “if I make it one more month, I’ll be 93!”

When he leaves she shows me his ledger listing everyone who’s ever died in town beginning with his mother in 1979. In some of the rows he writes the year and in the next column is sometimes the word eulogy meaning he’s given the eulogy.

The book had pages filled in front and back and there was a pocket for all the mass cards and church programs and scraps of paper with names, dates, phone numbers. I cannot stop thinking about how many people are in that book. It’s like a portable living cemetery.

The last one he entered was our neighbor Thelma. Or maybe there is more I didn’t see. They are on watch, waiting for their very sick prima to die, their prima who is also a vecina, whose husband also has lost a lot of weight and who lives in cañoncito. Maybe that’s why the book is out.

I ask Grace what he does with the book and she says, “Well Mejita, sometimes he looks at it to remember people.”

Regarding hard dead things

A friend said maybe I cannot write presently because I’m writing about hard things. I’m too vulnerable right now. It’s exhausting, its true. I need naps and frequent baths and walks and considering things like painting with river water rather than reading all my work from the past year over again.

In the discussion I heard recently with Julie Otsuka about her spectacular book, The Swimmers, she said it took her five years to put it together but she never mentioned it was because the subject matter was so difficult. I wonder if that is why it took her five years? I wonder how long she left it, unable to read it, before picking it up again to know what to do?

Maybe Lebeo’s Death Ledger is to make worldly sense of death which is otherworldly.

Maybe the ledger is to make the deaths a book of facts about loss.

Maybe the ledger is to prevent the kind of  haunting I am experiencing.

Maybe the ledger is a pragmatic attempt to remember death is a pragmatic thing.

Maybe the ledger is the artifact I’ve been waiting for to begin again.

Maybe I am making a ledger of lies about death.

Maybe he is making a ledger in a book in ballpoint pen to keep something physical he can run his fingers over. That we can run our fingers over.

He shows me his hands sometimes and Grace says, “look how soft they are. Because he is lazy.” And he smiles and giggles and says, “Grace! Because it’s winter!”

Anyway, the collection of my writings haven’t really been collected because I’m scared and can’t find a sense of humor about it. These were pieces revised and revised again and again and sometimes brought back to their first self, their earliest iteration, but today, this week, this whole month which feels like a fucking year actually, I cannot read them. Because it’s winter Grace.

Excuses

The dead seem not to want to be bothered to haunt me right now is an excuse I could use although the dead seem to always want to haunt me right now.

The dead are haunting me through YouTube videos about gardening. They are haunting me through an easy cake recipe. They are showing up in sour milk, in sales tax, as a stray cat from New Hampshire (who lived for 6 months in the wild and stayed in our cabin next to the wood stove until her owner came back to unhaunt her!)

The dead come back as a series of gophers tunneling under our house.

The dead are goblins, my dog, flowers. Everything under a fresh blanket of haunting.

I will make sense of this later, and the ledger and these flowers after I paint some flowers.

Thanks for reading my first post. All writings and artwork are by me, Deborah J. Stein and cannot be used without prior permission.