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By Root 370 0

opens and we smell yeast, herbs, wet dog fur, the sweet smell of friends. The sun and moon are both big, one going down, the other rising higher and higher. In the trees around the house, Japanese lanterns, the real kind, lit with candles. Nothing in your life before has prepared you for such happiness. Nothing can shield you from this happiness, which is why no one before has ever dared to give it to you. There is also a faint bad smell in the house of rack and ruin, the legacy of the former owners. Wally wrinkles his nose. His nose and the wrinkling of it and the faint bad smell and the smell of Arden’s wet fur and the smell of Mark’s basil and sausage-stuffed bread and the smell of the pines and the smell of Lois’s cigarette smoke and the smell of the candle wax and all of a sudden we can see the scantily clad body of the woman who used to wander out into the gorse behind the house fifty years ago to excite the loggers, their faces pressed against the windows of the little train taking them back to camp. Chiffon and feathers, can’t you just see it, Wally says. His delighted eyes and the lights of the train and the Japanese lanterns and the match flaring and Mark’s bright smile and even though it would be so easy to judge the woman or revile the world for sending lust-driven men into her back yard while she dances there in her feathers and chiffon while her house goes to rack and ruin, even through we might pass judgement, being a forward-thinking group composed of a lesbian couple, a gay couple and a heterosexual couple, we don’t.

We are here in this house. We are here and the woman is alive and Mark and Wally have made this happen because they are what makes life happen, yeast and chiffon and the bread in your mouth and the train whistle now.

You cannot leave us. Sun and moon in the sky. I don’t even know which is which.

Only the weight of grief, which is equal in measure to happiness. We drank port and the world grew dark. It isn’t as if we weren’t prepared. We are always in that house and here. It isn’t as if you didn’t prepare us, just that we want to revile the world. The lanterns shining in the trees, Arden snoring on the floor, Mark’s arm over your shoulders, can’t you just see it?

That autumn and winter the camp was my dream, something out of Chekhov. Arden and I would go at least once a week, even in the deepest snow, and build a fire in the stove in the unbelievably icy uninsulated main room, and walk in the snow, and study the marsh and the mountain. On warmer days we’d stay and I’d write letters, or read in the field guides to trees and fungi I’d bought. One winter day there was a sudden, enormous crash; ice falling from the roof? Too loud, too shockingly reverberant through the woods. A fallen tree? After Arden came out from his hiding place, the shelter of the wicker sofa, we walked down the road toward the marsh, our breath steaming in locomotive clouds. The barn had fallen, all at once, into a huge pick-up-sticks heap of gray boards and beams. The bull stood up the hill from it, entirely unruffled, chewing on a mouthful of straw.

Hunters shot the deer on our weather vane, so slap-happy for blood that a metal deer would do. Someone—a camper? one of the people who lived in those tiny blue trailers down the mountain road?—stole half our woodpile. How much I wanted to protect that little house—perhaps not so much from these superficial sorts of insults as on some deeper level. There was—how to say it—a particular kind of presence about the place, an atmosphere of particular density. It had about it the distilled resonance of home, yes, but also an otherness, a spirited presence, as if it were so fully inhabited by its history that we were simply another part of the continuous dream-life of the house, two more of its passing occupants. One lived in the camp on its terms; it imposed its personality upon you, and even your clothes would come to smell of its aura of gone summers, old oil lamps, whiskey, and mice. There is a space in my memory which the camp occupies which finally has not to do with