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The earliest light lifts and filters through the crevices of the ridge and I massage my old fingers and run my hand over the page as if smoothing the notebook away from the present and back into the past. Noises, sleeping murmurs from the corner where little Henry and I camped in the great featherbed in the great attic as an adventure. An adventure with Poppa. Checked on by his mother Dominate, tucking us in like schoolboys and again the sound of her soft footsteps up the winding stairs in the middle of the night repeatedly and it was a mistake, giving in to everyone’s insistence that the stories be committed to paper. Reliving a life already lived that somehow alters the life being lived on any given day. But lives, their lives, everyone’s lives, are now lived with an ongoing daily account posted to the internet without the discipline or sovereignty of a life less examined. Less scrutinized. And how the very act of scrutiny itself impacts the authenticity of anyone’s life. Gradually over the past months I no longer make my way to the barnyard with the anticipation and optimism of what every single day brings, but rather with the baggage of recollections and reflections drawn from a past being put to words in what they insist is my contribution to the Pond Planting Logs.  A contribution, I’ll add, no longer concerned with a fixation on crop rotations, planting schematics, and weather. . . or worse, my father’s abbreviated and annotated gibberish studded with the algorithms of genetic mutations.  But, moreover, a narrative bumping between what I know and what I’ve imagined I know through those eighteen months so long ago when everything changed.   

Page 181

So the winter went on. That stretch of uncompromising months infused with the cruelty of unkindness. If unkindness is the right word. More like Inhumane. Merciless barbarity. Cold gray colorless days stacked one after another after another month after month. The relentless droopy canopy so thick it was impossible to remember the rejuvenating powers of an open sky. There were no crops, nor livestock, nor mutant spheres of otherworldly cantaloupe sprouting from the west field to amuse the senses. There was lonely Mr. Arthur who refused to go home, living in the Quarters. There was no hound inhabiting the heaths and heathery of our world for generations. There were no naked swan dives off the bridge, nor painted lead soldiers on the manure pile, nor singsonging octaves from Verity. There were no more Fallers across the road. There was no Ruby who spat with Diligence who spat with his wife Violet and once again Ruby deposed to the high unforgiving brick walls over to Anna and although Scooter was suspected of robbing the depot’s unlocked cash drawer and pilfering day-old perishables from the bins of Water’s grocery, the town quietly banked his porch with firewood and fresh edible provisions. There was also this painful awareness that some of us had experienced Florida. Visions of long white powdery-soft beaches, endless groves of palm trees, blue curling swells the temperature of bathwater.

            There were no distractions beyond one another, inhabiting the inclemency of winter by turning, naturally, toward one another. Battling personages. Bickering adversaries. Hurtful quips slung like poison arrows.

Page 250

Averill Harriman arrived on the ravaged post war continent with troves of American currency; the complexity of a hammered-out Marshal Plan; and, more immediately, ships whose hulls listed with the weighty containers of a magical hybrid grain intent on feeding a starving continent while Father, within the protective custody of Voodoo Valley, examined and reexamined his logs in search of drifting data. The inconclusive chemical drift.