The second week of April in a place which appears to be dismantling, the one steadying factor in which I personally need steadying factors is to see what’s right in front of me and hold on for a few minutes. Writing is helping. Painting is indefinite.

I began a story—is it an essay? A chronicle? Who cares what it is*, I began it in early March as a short thing, a looking at two pictures, one of my mother and one of my grandparents and now it has grown to something resembling a book. That is to say, it is becoming a book and I probably am jinxing it to say it.

I will only say that the past two months have involved a close kind of looking and questioning.

Popping out of NYC for a short birthday break from NYC in Cape Cod involved two geese nesting in the backyard by the big pond, mallards honking overhead and on one of the grey heavy rain days, two white swans flying side by side in the near but distant sky which I considered a figment of my imagination because how outlandish in my everyday life to see swans fly and because it felt coincidental since I have been obsessively painting black swans. A server at the restaurant where we ate birthday cake with two other Aries women with birthdays that weekend too who we’d just met, mentioned the swans that live around there and I took it as a sign I was on the right track if not some kind of track to stay with to keep writing what appears to be a book.

Because the things I’m writing that seem to be turning book are difficult things, Holocaust things, long memory things, short memory things, cautionary things, so when my friend, Melissa asked how we practice joy or cultivate it or just recognize it, I wrote a poem and I’ll leave it here along with these ducks and the beginning of a new lion and some photos of Cape Cod and a little dog for now.

Birthday

“What bird do you think that is?” We ask in the early morning bed.

“You hear how the tone descends?”

Cacoocacoooo coo coo caacooooo coo coooo.

And we repeat it, just like that, in our own not-bird voices:

Cacoocacoooo coo coo caacooooo coo coooo.

And keep trying. Now we understand them better and fall asleep again, part bird, all the dreams from there were violet into every brown of sparrow. Maybe they were sparrows.

I didn’t see you yesterday shoots and there you are flowers, I’m home now on the steps descending. The tree is there blooming.

I’ve been waiting you know, and we repeat this to each other.

The tree now pink and I think it’s proud of her to be so pink, we say to each other GO AHEAD AND BE PROUD and we laugh and we are.

“The apple blossoms didn’t freeze at all, you were right,” I say to my landlady and she answers “you were worried?” And I laugh because I was, I was, I was very very worried and wrong. I was very wrong and now I am jubilant with white blossoms.

I was so wrong and we get in the car, hang my head out the window, let my ears flap in the wind.

The tide was too high to walk in the morning so we sat and drew the two Canadian geese pecking in the marsh pond near the shore from inside the cottage. They’re called cottages up there. They’re called a gaggle when the geese are on the ground, a skein when they are flying, but now the geese are just pecking at the ground and we are drawing them.

I’m not much good at drawing I say to my husband, I’d rather just look and watch without having to think I’m trying to capture a thing. But sometimes its good I guess, sometimes its fun when the drawing interprets me. The geese don’t seem to mind what happens with the drawing. They have strong boundaries as the two begin to preen their feathers and cock and dig their necks into the nethers of themselves, we are delighted to have sat there long enough to learn anything at all.

The tide goes out, we sink our shoes in the grassy sand, the open shells of former clams, gulls and the cold looking wind and the old orange sun.

The dog comes out and rolls onto his back and we roll onto our backs and we all roll onto our backs, scritch, we scratch his belly, he loves the rub, our mouths, all of them stretching wide over the teeth, our know-nothing teeth all together, we count them in formation in the big smiles, maybe the biggest smile this year.

the pearl my husband found in a mussel and the house who inspired me last year.

*Read Lucy Sante’s substack today for the unpacking.