My breast and lymph–node scar are healing well enough to have started to itch already. How quickly one goes from fear to blasé! One minute it’s a life and death matter—will I survive another cancer?—to will I get in another swim before the cold sets in? I’m not allowed to swim until this weekend. On Friday I have a string of doctor’s appointments--surgeon, oncology physician, radiation oncologist—to talk about what’s next. Then Saturday is my book launch at Brilliant Books! The world goes on, swimming in its events, or, maybe, the events are taking the strokes.
An interesting clump of mushrooms just outside our door.
This morning there’s fog on the windows of the little insulated cottage, where we stay—it’s 55 outside. Our minds are starting to turn toward packing up, closing up the cottages, and heading home. We’re only an hour away, but I pretend we’re as many miles away as we were when I was a child, all the way from northern Michigan to Arkansas. I try to avoid going back to our condo until we move back. It’s a head-break. From a lovely, New York-style third floor condo to dirt, mushrooms, leaves, and critters. I saw a fox dash across the field yesterday. A loon cries (no kidding) overhead just now. I would stay here forever, but somehow eventually I feel like cleaning up, getting a haircut, going to the gym.
It is shocking the way things move on. The residuals are there, of course. I am still a bit shaky from the abruptness of the news that I had a breast cancer! Then the surgery, and then the stunningly good report that it had not traveled to the lymph nodes, that it was entirely removed, that it was very small. My first cancer, 8 years ago, was exactly the opposite. I thought it would be nothing much, but it turned out to be life-threatening.
This, growing on the side of a stump. I remember it as a huge birch tree. Now look. All moss and mushroom.
You think you won’t get over things, but you do. The world is so malleable. The brain is malleable. You aren’t the same person—blah, blah, blah, you know all that. Makes you wonder, the complex mechanism of thoughts and memories that convince you you’re a stable being.
You’d think writing would feel like an anchor, a little bit. You write your memories and they solidify into words. You can look back and say, oh yes, that’s what happened. But no. You look back and say, oh yes, that’s what I thought then. There are subtle shifts. You aren’t the same. You’d think writing would describe how it was, but you can feel the loose ends wriggling out every minute.
When it came time to put the essays in Mortality, with Friends, written over a ten-year period, together into a book, how could I figure out how to make the shifts work together? That’s a long time. What I finally did is put dates on the ones that need dates to make sense of my evolving understanding. That turned out to be, most of the time, the ones that deal with my father’s decline and death.
Does the book feel like an anchor in time for me? I’d say more like those little place markers on your navigation screen, if you have a fancy car like ours. Reminders. I can navigate back there in this essay. That’s exactly how it felt then. I was re-reading the one on smoking, and although the thought of smoking again almost makes me ill, the words bring me back to its pleasures as if I were this minute slowly exhaling a charmingly creative stream of smoke.
I think the reasons people write essays is in some ways more complex than what leads us into a poem. There is the “making sense of my life” aspect, but that’s a puny reason, it seems to me. More likely it’s about picking up the threads of memory and weaving them into the larger tapestry of the past and present so that “sense” itself dissolves, the “I,” in a sense dissolves, into a kind of musical piece. What is the “sense” of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, pray tell?
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Please, please join me this Saturday, Sept. 11, at 6:00 virtually or in person, at Brilliant Books in Traverse City. If virtual, you’ll need to register:
https://www.brilliant-books.net/event/book-launch-event-fleda-brown
If you’re local, please wear a mask and join me in the store. I know it’s easier to just watch from your screen, but you wouldn’t want to leave me reading to an empty room, would you?