- After E.B. White’s “A Week in April” from the collection One Man’s Meat, a series of essays published in Harper's Magazine between 1938 and 1943. -
We are what we read, we know what we learn, and the melding of our experiences marks our lives, glitters on the surface of our creations, like the first dusting of snow in the wee hours of the morning, usually missed, most of us sleeping. I’ve borrowed E.B. White’s collection from the Florence Public Library and have been reading it slowly, savoring every sentence. It’s a third edition, the forward dated 1944 and the pages are yellow and delicate, dropping thin shavings of rough tea-colored paper each time I close it. What will become of this treasure?
Monday
It's the birthday of Herman Melville, who, after mixed reviews and fan disloyalty for Moby Dick, his third novel, went to work as a customs officer in New York City, writing only a little poetry on the side. Not until the 1920’s, a good thirty years after his death, did the world learn to appreciate the narrative. I read it in high school under mandated instruction. Call me Ishmael.
I have written nothing bestselling, or much selling for that matter, and my wide-eyed dreams of supporting myself on my writing alone, which is to say, only what I want to write, are taking a new form, maturing into something more spiritual, less absolute. It is not a pass/fail endeavor. I spent the afternoon working on my resume. But still, I will write.
Tim and I went for frozen yogurt this evening, sat in the heat and celebrated the first of August. They are promising temperatures of 100 plus all week. It’s a good time to take cover, read a book, the risk of instantaneous combustion is too great. There is something incredibly comforting about warm nights and ice-cream, it soothes and indulges.
Tuesday
In the kitchen there hangs a small chalkboard in the shape of a girl, like the symbol found on elementary school bathroom doors. From her right hand hangs a small rope with a Scotty dog shaped eraser and a broken piece of blue chalk. The board reads:
Let us approach the future with patience, trust and optimism.
Change is afoot. The resume is out.
I try explaining to the dogs that we can not go outside midday, the possibility of fur going up like kindling is very high and their feet pads might burn off. They stare at me, little bits of pink tongues hanging out, tails happily twitching. I turn my back, walk away. If I can’t see them, they aren’t there. Later, when I ask them for comfort they will give only the minimal affection and throw slant-eyed glances as if to say, feed us already, it’s what you’re good for.
In the garden the tomato plants, the only production we’ve seen all summer eaten by squirrels before they ever ripened, have been pulled up. Once the hornworms moved in I surrendered my Tomato Farmer title. Good riddance. The eggplants are hanging in there, small fruits with several bee-occupied blooms are visible. If the squirrels don’t get those first we may have another harvest. I’ve been harvesting cucumbers by the wagon load this summer, sweet tender little things we’ve eaten with nearly every meal. I promised some to a neighbor today, but when I went to harvest, they had dried up, the leaves brown and crumbling, the fruit tiny and twisted. I thought I would have cucumbers forever, and now they’ve stopped.
Wednesday 
I received in the mail today an Agfa Click-I camera from my friends Keely and Mordecai in Raleigh. I studied photography in college with Mordecai and English Lit with Keely, and we all lived in New York for a time after. I had forgotten about the Click, but when they came across it Mordecai knew immediately it was mine. What a homecoming! I don’t think I ever figured out how to use it to much effect, which is why it ended up in their hands, I’m sure.
My father gave me my first camera, a Canon AE-I, when I announced an interest in studying photography. It had been his camera and he no longer had need of it. It’s one of the few things he had ever given me and I no longer have it, sold it just before moving to New York. By then I had a very fancy Nikon N-90. Even that camera has been traded for the new technology: Nikon D-80 and an iPhone, my point-and-shoot backup for those Hipstamatic images, which imitate the funky, light leaking photos we were after with our Agfa Clicks and Clacks and Dianas and Land Cameras and Square Shooters ten years ago. When I bought the iPhone I selected a plastic protective case made to look like black leather. “It reminds me of a 1970’s 35mm camera,” I told the sales girl. She laughed, possibly at me.
Thursday
Last night two raging storms passed over the house. The weather man missed this one. No one expected it. At 2:30 successive lightening, like a strobe, flashed the sky, crashing thunder between each short interval. I awoke fearful. Mother slept through it. Patches, the cat, and I huddled at the top of the stairs listening and watching, Mom’s snores a mellow undertone to the larger show. At 6:15 another storm came through. I woke and went back to sleep. The earth needed this rain.
Friday
I’m thinking about the photography exhibit I saw at Rivertown Coffee yesterday. Abraham Rowe’s work, a collection titled “Balance” - always a welcome, appropriate subject - hangs on the walls. The images have a playful quality, stacks of small stones towering between mammoth tree roots, a fence made of straw and twigs laced with dried leaves, a floating leaf carrying an acorn. The images are black and white, crisp and tonally pleasing, balanced.
I remain fascinated with nature. There is order beneath the often seeming disorder. The animals, the insects, the plants have it figured out. They know their purpose; their motivations are simple and straightforward and uncomplicated by emotion and ego and desire, the trifecta that throws us too-smart, not-smart-enough humans out of balance over and over and over.
Saturday
Today was art class. I’ve taken up a new medium, gouache. It’s the preferred medium of illustrators, for the reproduction and print qualities, I understand. I've used it to illustrate this column. At a quarter before noon, just as we were breaking for lunch, I received a phone call. My father died. He was 89 and unable to climb from bed or walk down the hall. His capacity to read, an activity he’d always loved, had begun to decline a while back. He went without pain, without physical suffering, I understand.
I hiked down to the creek this afternoon. There’s a new trail with stone steps winding down around the drop, which I used to half hike, half slide down, until the earth flattens, ivy covered and serene and canopied with Cypress and Persimmon trees. A flat stone dug into the bank’s side serves as the perfect sitting place. It is my zen spot. The water rushed by, still opaque and slightly orange from all the rain. A turtle swam to the surface, poked its head through, then disappeared. I rolled my anxieties and anger and blame into a ball, tossed them in and let the creek carry them away. In return, the creek gives me a moment of peace, a spot of calm I can come back to when I need it, a memory of a good place even when I can’t physically reach it.
On the trip back to the house I paused to catch my breath, raised my head and caught the eye of a young 
fawn, skinny and sweet and covered in heavenly white spots. He was maybe fifty feet ahead. I froze. He froze. I smiled. I put out all the calm and love I had just gathered and watched this sweet creature try to figure me out. He stepped off the trail, into the woods, turned around, and came slowly toward me, one gentle step at a time. With his hind legs slightly wide and bent at the knee, he seemed to want to play. I think he wanted me to chase him. He stepped closer, thirty feet between us. Why is he alone in the woods? Where is his mother? He stepped closer, snacked on privet. I smiled and said, “come.” My legs began to shake and I dropped carefully to my haunches, sat on a fallen log positioned to mark the trail. He stepped closer, then stepped back. For twenty minutes we played this game. He’d take four of five steps toward me with the confidence of a domestic pet. Then he’d take two steps back. By the time he left, teasingly, waiting for me to follow, I had memorized his spots, read his mind and made a friend.
Dad would have loved this. This brush with the natural world, the beauty, the innocent crossing, was a thing he knew how to show gratitude for, the subject that would get his attention every time.
Sunday
How do you get clear to write when the emotions and unknowns hover above you, a blanket of humidity so thick you choke it back on the inhale, with moistened skin on a glistening night? We are under water.
White began his “Week in April” with Saturday and a heavy moon the dogs howled against throughout the night. His neighbor C. had died that afternoon. The loss set the tone for his week. Our loss has finished ours.
My father was not the affectionate type. He was not practiced in saying, Thank You, or praising one’s accomplishments. He was cynical and distant, emotionally remote and mostly absent. He carried a lifelong chip on the shoulder. I visited him in late June. We talked about gardening and nature and my writing. He was so grateful for my company. He was grateful for the good women in the home who took care of him. He told me he loved me. He was just a man. And now he is at peace.
