White Chalk, and Other Winters
The internal rotation of autumn
Dear Friends,
In November I catch myself thinking it’s winter. The light rolls in like a morning fog, and in the evening the darkness arrives as if trying to catch the runaway train of afternoon. The clouds assume their shapes; different and the same every day, cottony tentacles reaching towards the ground and grazing the sparkling buildings. On my drive home from work I gaze at the Seattle skyline, lined with florescent cranes that blink red at their highest points.
I used to be scared of winter. As a Pacific Northwest child the seasons affected me, but I was also depressed— plagued by a gauzy sadness that I can now recognize as a product of isolation and neglect.
I can still slip on the gauze and live under that textural darkness, but it no longer scares me. I ran from it for most of my life; I clung to anything that would erase it, until I discovered nothing could.
Over the last eight to ten years I’ve slowly learned how to turn towards that sadness, and allowed myself to turn away when I need to.
This autumn, I find myself relishing the darkness, the miraculous lights that penetrate it, the falling leaves and overcast and grayscale and every-once-in-a-while holes in the sky which reveal the blue that always lives above us.
Every time I go outside I inhale deeply. I remember exploring all the half-wild places of the Seattle suburbs: a series of trails behind an apartment complex, the expanse of woods at the edge of my grandparent’s block in Kirkland, a backyard we shared with our upstairs landlords. The smell of autumn evokes it all. The leaves who fall flame-like and quickly turn brown and disintegrate, the ethereal nature of everything. The trees whose spindly branches are exposed past the second knuckle, their bottoms still fleetingly dressed.
My life right now is punctuated by the voices of the boys I nanny. Look Stacy, they exclaim to me, gesturing with their arms, pausing to inhale for a few more words. That tree is losing all its leaves. I tell them about how some trees go to sleep for the winter, and how in the spring they’ll grow new leaves who will eat the sunlight and help them get stronger.
Today on my drive home I heard a song on the radio that reminded me of another song. At a stoplight I surreptitiously pulled up Spotify to find White Chalk by PJ Harvey. It’s both an album and a song, and like many of Harvey’s albums it wasn’t appreciated for what it was, which is a dive into absolute darkness, with a shimmer of sheer white floating to the surface, like the dress she wears on the cover submerged into the lake of the night sky. I listened to it through my headphones on the way home. I remembered all the words and melodies, as I always do with Polly Jean.
Certain albums have meant so much to me that they represent worlds I’ve lived in— timespaces that rebuild themselves in my consciousness whenever I listen to them. This album comes with dry Denver snow, under-heated houses and whiskey soaked bike rides. My old Jeep Cherokee, its steering wheel frigid under my hands as I go to meet whoever I’m fucking. There were many. Getting fired from the local outdoor store for drinking too much.
The album itself always brought me back to my own solitude, which is still a constant, more significant to me than any significant other ever will be.
On the edges of my ten hour workdays I’m reading Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Maybe this has enhanced my dive into the darkness. I could live in the complexity and musicality of Vuong’s sentences, the unselfconscious sentimentality, the vulnerability of the book as a whole. I lay in my bathtub, soaking my aching knee and relishing my time alone, and read. I’ll be finished with it soon. It’s on my Kindle, a downloaded library book, but I long for a physical copy so I can underline and notate.
When I finish, I must read two books in quick succession or lose them to the library holds system. One is Homeland Elegies and the other is Writers & Lovers. The first is by Ayad Akhtar, a playwright whose NPR interview I very much enjoyed, and the latter is by Lily King, who wrote another novel titled Euphoria (which was recommended to me by author Kate Hope Day), which I adored.
It’s Wednesday, and I have one more ten hour day left to work this week before a holiday break (for which I will be paid!). I plan to write, rest, and lay on my spiky mat that really works. What will you be doing? You can always reply to this newsletter and say hello.
Cordially and with love,
Stacy
P.S. I almost forgot— don’t miss this beautiful piece on Joy Williams, one of the best short story writers in the world. She really loves Broncos, and that’s what we talked about while sitting at the bar in Syracuse. Yes, she wears her sunglasses inside.