There have been requests for an update and thus please consider this that. In summation and from the getgo: we moved. Not like the earth does (nor like scorpions or rattlesnakes), but in an impossibly large and cherry-red truck. This was a few weeks ago now and pretty much as a result of J.'s mum being in what they call the active stage of dying because of the bone cancer which has spread about her bones which are themselves of course pretty much everywhere you might look in a person should you be Mister Cancer and thinking about a roadtrip now that the chemotherapy police have fucked off. And I do think of cancer as being masculine, and a nasty sonofabitch at that actually, and I hate military metaphors or language when talking about battling the disease, but in this case pass me the buckshot with a side of fresh bullets.
The reason the cancer came into the moving equation was that I wanted us settled as much as can be before my mother-in-law died. So once we'd sold the house in Lambertville, I pushed up the closing as much as I could . No-one needs to plan a move and a memorial service in the same week was my thinking. We paid some extra for the guys to come and box everything up and then we just said some goodbyes like we'd never see these people again which in many cases will be true, put the cat in a sack and headed north.
We live in Maine now, on a few gentle acres of the Permaquid peninsular and I feel I've used up most of my wishes getting us to here. It's a big old house with a barn attached as can be the local style. And in the barn, where I have set up shop, there are some offices and a separate apartment* which will make visitors stink less than dead fish. The Pemaquid is also a river and we have a few hundred feet of it running across the bottom of our garden. I go down there most days and watch the water flow by, almost baffled at the notion that the stones being smoothed on the river bed are for the purposes of legal designation owned by me.
I am very much looking forward to Winter. I am also very much looking forward to tomorrow, because on Labor Day the people with Summer houses or the people who rent houses for the Summer from people who own Summer houses, all go away. Many of the lobster shacks close up for the season, and the business of getting to really know this place can properly begin. Although this first year will be somewhat fragmented, as well as grievous, as we will be in Austin, Texas with J.'s mother for almost all of October which will likely see the end to this sad death watch. She is my age juxtaposed, her 64 and me 46. Those scant years between us bring home mortality's chill more closely than I've felt it before and my own weaknesses stalk me as though in perfect stride with my thoughts and fears.
I have been hoping for some celerity in my writing, but the rocks of the day are sewn into the hip pockets of a coat I can't seem to remove. For now I have an old small notebook, overstuffed like its owner, and in these fine early evenings walk down to the Well station beneath a maple the size of a small lighthouse and look back at this gray shingled house with its old black shutters and then across the field to the long-grounded lobster boat that my son now uses as his own personal play fleet, and I scribble away like Gibbon, albeit without his purpose. And then, with enough words done, however slowly, and as though a bell rung to release the children stuck inside of me, I open the day's first bottle and slowly feel far less. In every way.
* The apartment will comfortably house you for a night or two if you're this way and in need of lodging. Just send along a message. I cook reasonably also and will happily fill you up. DR.