Merwin and Merwin

We Went to Sicily...Then Stuff Happened

Thursday, January 25, 2024

Before I can recap our trip to Sicily in late September/early October, I feel the need to add some context. You see, we returned from two magical weeks in Italy on the night of Friday, October 6. My dad died hours later in the early morning of Saturday, October 7. We got to Syracuse and my mom by 8pm that night. Simon tested positive for Covid on Sunday. I tested positive for Covid on Wednesday. Simon recovered then got a rebound infection the next Sunday.

I think that might be why I haven't really processed the trip much less documented it here. Honestly, I'm not sure I remember it with that re-entry being the absolute shock it was. There's a lot to unpack there and a lot of detail - emotional, quarantined, grief-riddled detail - between each of those above sentences, but that's how it happened. Naturally I abandoned all thoughts and memories of Italia in the interest of pure old fashioned survival.

I live to tell the tale, but I now live as a different person. Grief is a funny thing - your entire context, your entire world has changed yet the groceries still look the same on the shelves, the car engine still turns, the same trees still stand in the yard, and the soil is still in the garden, rich with years' worth of plantings. Yet those things all scream to be different. I want the groceries to be spilling from the shelves with their contents spewing about in anger - flour ravaging the air and pasta careening down aisles. How can the car just turn on without even a grinding, cranky revolt at the absurdity of that expectation? How can those trees he planted so long ago just stand there, dropping their leaves into crispy little piles like any one of the other 45 times they've done it? And how does the garden dirt, the dirt that fed humans, fueled a soul-defining drive to nurture, and provided a place to be alone - to be with the pain, to be with the memories, to be with the sun, to be with the trauma - how does that dirt just sit there, empty of its purpose, for the first time in half a century?

How do any of us just sit here?

At Summer's End

Thursday, September 7, 2023

Remembering Summer

W.S. Merwin

Being too warm the old lady said to me
is better than being too cold I think now
in between is the best because you never
give it a thought but it goes by too fast
I remember the winter how cold it got
I could never get warm wherever I was
but I don't remember the summer heat like that
only the long days the breathing of the trees
the evenings with the hens still talking in the lane
and the light getting longer in the valley
the sound of a bell from down there somewhere
I can sit here now still listening to it.

I can't begin to describe how I feel reading this poem, how I felt when I first read this poem, how it seemed to appear out of nowhere in this moment, the winding down of summer, when I so desperately sought to describe (and remember) how this feels, how summer felt. Wham, there it is this poem, this Merwin poem nonetheless - one I've never seen before and didn't know I so desperately needed.

"The breathing of the trees" just gets me every time. Actually all of that description toward the end of the poem which seems to just perfectly encapsulate summer afternoons - the ease, the light unlike any other time, the vague sounds that seem to arrive dreamily, the nostalgia attached to it all.

I'm going to need this poem come February. I need it now. I love it.

Getting Unstuck

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

For years (12!!!), I've loved writing in this blog, capturing the seemingly unconnected connections between Merwin the dog and Merwin the poet, musing on this or that, posting Merry Merwins and now Jolly Ollies, sharing poems that resonated in one way or another, and using this practice as a method of creating something, a feeling I have always craved.

In early 2022, I bought a new laptop, and posting on the blog became much trickier. Spacing was off, formatting was complicated and sticky, and all the procedures I had gotten down so well over the years seemed broken. Most difficult, posts kept defaulting to double spacing, which was incredibly prohibitive, especially when posting poems. It was a huge obstacle that I spent hours trying to solve. Alas, the complications just became too icky for me to navigate. I stopped writing.

I thought about how much I missed it every now and then and even came back to the site a few times to give it another go. But the formatting challenges were just too frustrating for this Type A selective perfectionist.

Now, literally years later, I realized one simple reason why everything was funky. One itty bitty thing that caused it all to go awry and led me to abandon this practice and place I had really loved.

For some reason, in a few different programs and on some websites, this Mac's "return" key forces double spacing. It was driving me batty yesterday when working on a client project and something made me try holding down the shift key while tapping return.

Lo and behold. Single spacing. It took me a good 12 hours to connect this discovery back to the blog's issues. All those years, all that agony, all those tiny little seeds of ideas for posts that are now nothingness, all those moments I could've found joy in crafting posts, rediscovering poems, savoring that feeling of making something, however small or insignificant. Gone.

In a time of my life where I have increasingly felt "stuck," whether stuck in inactivity as body part after body part seems to cooperate less and less often or stuck in a cyclical maelstrom of varying emotions and mental well-being, being so stuck with the blog for such an asinine reason just feels....wild.

On the flip side, I am grateful that even though it took an age and a lot was lost, it's resolved. Forward we go into more Jolly Ollies and soap box tirades. Of course, now blogs are likely relics like rotary phones, but I'm glad to have this space back, whatever ridiculousness it took to get here.

There's likely a lesson here about "being stuck." A lesson about shifting a small thing to get unstuck, a lesson in just trying something to create that inertia to change. Maybe it's about realizing that just because you made your bed, you actually don't have to sleep in it the way it is. You can get new sheets, add a mattress topper, invest in a great pillow if that means getting you one step closer to a place you love.

Or not. It could just be a lesson in learning how to use your damn laptop correctly.

Creating

Monday, January 24, 2022

I've always loved the feeling of making something. The something has evolved over the years - composing a poem, choreographing a dance team routine, refinishing an antique wooden chair, or even crafting a blog post for Brightspot. Doing all of those things, as varied as they are, has always inspired satisfaction, joy, and well, really almost a soft thrill that is hard to describe.

When Simon and I shifted from the lake back to Portsmouth we did a huge apartment clean-out. I came across an ancient sketchbook/journal from high school. Inside were some really cool charcoal drawings - a couple self-portraits, a sketch of Pete, some pointe shoes, a few other little renderings. I was intrigued, so I added a sketchbook and drawing set to my Christmas list.

A couple weeks ago, I pulled the sketchbook out of my desk drawer, removed the top of the pencil set and...stared at the blank page. This happened no less than five times. Finally, last week, I repeated this process, but actually landed on something to draw and gave it a whirl.

It felt amazing. That old familiar sense of crafting, creating, making was back. I loved it. I'm trying to avoid deciding whether the products of either of my sketching sessions are "good" or "bad." That's another topic, but I do find it interesting that so much of my life has been dedicated to the arts, which don't have the "right or wrong" and "black or white" I have always craved.

Alas, whatever it is, I don't care. I just love the process and the feeling I get through it. It feels good. It's good to feel good these days.