Fog this morning. I love the lake as we move toward fall. Fewer boats, calmer water, and water has a late-summer warmth. Swimming is better than ever for those of us who still actually do that. There’s a softness in the water and air, a glow.
We’re having the guest cottage and the porches on the big cottage painted. At the moment, there’s wild hammering as the painters remove the old wood box from the side of the guest cottage where we live. We’ve cleaned out most of the remnants of my father’s tenure: messy oil rags, funnels, and cans, old cotton sails, rotten ropes, and now the wood-box. There’s a poignancy here. The change of seasons, of administration (me, now), of what’s necessary to live the life we now lead. The old water buckets and tea kettles are on the upstairs shelf like museum objects, no longer used. But, I should mention, the outhouse is still available.
Since I’ve been coming to this cottage all my life, it’s easier here to actually see the passage of time. To see that I own nothing, that what’s here is always in transition, that all passes away. When my cancer and its wicked potential flashes upon my inward eye (as Wordsworth would have put it), for a few minutes, I feel pretty dark. Who would want to leave this world? But what is “this”? It’s been in motion forever. What am I? I’ve been in motion forever, my identity dependent forever upon everything around me.
I’m having a good time, now that I feel better. My gut is settling down a little all the time, although I don’t do well if I eat a large meal and have a sweet dessert late in the evening. I can go some days without a nap, as long as I don’t swim and walk in the same day.
Another view of transition: I ran out of reading material and rummaged around here among the books Jerry brought from his office when he retired. I picked up Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (Jerry specialized in the history of the novel, and especially early women novelists). Aside from the usual nineteenth century swoons, gasps, and weeping, this is a splendid book that closely examines the worker/employer tensions in the rising industrial north of England and the tension between that world and the genteel south. 
What’s lost when people focus intensely on gain, on achievement? What’s lost when people live more slowly, sit and talk and watch generation after generation pass with little change? Gaskell has characters speak for each side so convincingly that it’s hard to see the issue dogmatically. We’re left with only the thought that each “side” needs to get to know the other, to avoid destroying each other.
Feels like a contemporary issue to me. It’s far more complicated than who’s “right.” We could use a little of Keats’ Negative Capability: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
I’ll “always” have the uncertainty of whether cancer is still lurking in me or is all gone. Neither position, “Oh, I’m sure it’s gone,” or “Oh Lord, it could come back at any moment.” is verifiable or necessarily true. I have no idea. The mind may lean one way or the other, but basically, its job is to stay aware. Finally, we have to keep on keeping on, speak and act, even knowing that our words and acts are a distortion of a seamless and timeless reality.