23 Jan 25

After days of it the fog finally broke and everything looked crystalline or coated in confectioners’ sugar, flocked. Before bed I read Anne Lamott’s memoir, the scene of her with her dad that day at the beach exploring the tide pools before they learned he had brain cancer. In just a page or two she traced the arc of his decline, his last two years, how it began when they got the CAT scan results that afternoon. I could picture me with our kids on the rocky Washington coast, those same shallow pools, how everything is more vivid on a day like that. How something so painful and personal for her became a thing of beauty in her treatment of it.

Each day I took the Himmelsleiter to the ridge with fruit tree farms and vineyards and small stone huts for as far as you could see, then curled back along the small roads to the adjacent town, almost a two-hour loop. The snow/frost clung thick to the power lines high above me and broke off in bits that floated to the ground. The visual effect of the frost on the lines was like a pipe cleaner, the symmetrical way the little frost spindles branched out on either side. I dodged some and listened for the soft poof sound it made when they hit the ground.

Somewhere a dog or chicken crowing against the hum of the power lines, the swoosh of traffic, sometimes church bells. I was so far away. Every day I took the same walk and every day when mom’s lodger Laszlo came home he’d pause in the doorway by our sitting room and ask so what did you do today, nothing? And there was very little to report. But on my walks it was a whole world of exploration, a micro world, like a scene inside a snow globe or one of those shallow tide pools like Anne Lamott described. I didn’t have any responsibilities to speak of and for a time could just drift and dream. Being in a foreign country that was so familiar was strange: I toggled between feeling at home and feeling removed.

I kept going between the past and present. Sitting in the dark in the morning by the electric candle arch waiting for the neighbor to turn on theirs. Jotting down notes on my phone as I walked along the farms. Memory-making compels you to live in the present so you know what to remember. The past takes everything else.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, Travelogues

Tags: Anne Lamott, Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, prose