The Tremors in the Heavens Created Weather

If I had not forgotten to buy the sausage, if I had not ran to the market—cutting across the park as the wind sneered and the luminaires cast twisting shadows of the London planetrees along the path—I probably would not have seen the package from Jane waiting in the vestibule of McGolrick Cottage until the following morning. I was in the middle of trying to make something from nothing: rough-chopping onions and garlic, skins and all; giving second life to the wilted celery stalks and drying carrots, the aging baby bellas, and the other bygones of the crisper drawer. Whole peppercorns skittering in hot oil; a deep, brown fond blossoming. If I had not forgotten to buy the sausage, I would not have remembered this as anything other than an ordinary evening of cancelled plans.

Back inside with the gift, I carefully unclose its splendid contents: three dotted-line notebooks bound in prune-colored leather from a French maker, a handwritten note on cardstock painted by one of my favorite artists (a three-year-old named Ada), and the late Fanny Howe’s Love and I with a dog-eared page. Jane writes, “What good are friends for, if not to spoil?” “For all your beautiful thoughts.” Oh! The tears that follow and salt the water. To be seen with purity and to be known without lead. My friend recognizes some great writer in me that I can’t yet, though I see her genius in every line. In every lifetime. The apartment fills with a bouquet of earth and I take a pen to the poetry book as I wait—thinking of love in motion and as a vocation, thinking of it as nourishment, and of my grandmother, Jeanne Asch; thinking of witches and cauldrons and wanting to write an honest fiction but not knowing how.

“One has perseverance but is full of fear

Another has no perseverance but is brave.

Which would you rather sit beside?”1

“Which am I?” I wondered.

Outside, the wind continued its lashing.