Napjerks between naps, this sabbatical is some but not all resting pose. A privilege and a luxury of course, I’m profoundly grateful!, the sabbatical is the first for me since winter 2016, a decade ago. This time is clockfaced with transition and red-inked bleedingly with fascistic bombardments on all sides of the U.S. news. Moving is manageable and not felt to be a remarkable upheaval, at least not yet, midwinter, but awful, abhorrent stuff, the latter. I write each day, finding or losing rhythm, but sitting and making words into lines, usually in the mornings. January was a blur and has passed. Groundhog saw its shadow today so who can say how long February will last.

I’m in Chapter Four (of Five), plugging away, thirty-seven ephemeralist episodes drafted and four to go. I left the more personal set for last, mistakenly imagining them to be clearer to me. They haven’t been. It’s merely drafting, which must come with small doses of self forgiveness. I draw in the evenings. Twenty-six drawings so far. Twenty-four to go. Soft goals are ~50k words and 50 original illustrations. Earlier today a few words on hand entanglement, carrot peeling, and continuous soups reached 400-some words; enough for now. But it pulled me down the mirror hall of half-memories of Tillie and Fred’s (my grandparents’) house in West Branch, which real estate websites pin to a lazy timeline as being built in 1900 along Dam Road, a couple of miles out of town, dirt road. I guess they were only there until I was 9 or 10, since by that time Fred had died (in August 1979) and Tillie had moved to the apartment, Winchester Towers. Tillie died in September (maybe August?) 1984. I don’t remember ever going back to Dam Road after Tillie died, after her funeral, only that the division of assets was fraught, adults fighting. You’d best go outside and play, which of course I did.

A few different real estate websites host undated photos of the place, though I guess most of the photos are from the last 15 years. I recognize a few things. The brick planter box next to the front door. The sliding glass door leading into the kitchen. I know the floor plan well, the smaller bedrooms, the utility room at the back, the kitchen. I wonder what remains of the early 1980s features in the yard, the trees, or the rhubarb patch. I only remember climbing the one weeping willow and white pine near the road. The willow was always being climbed by older cousins; it felt more dangerous because big kids were waiting in line or had already climbed ahead of you, all of the right setups for being shoved out of the best perching places. The pine by contrast was not in demand because every branch was covered in sap blisters. Had to be careful not to let clothing touch the sap because it was impossible to wash out. None of this is in the book manuscript other than a passing mention of the willow and the pine.

I read again over the weekend in Caitlin DeSilvey’s Curated Decay and have been thinking appreciatively about how she framed her methods for writing about a sea and storm wracked pier. Many histories are keyed to events, and keying to events spotlights the constitutive and the formidable, leaning toward progress, rebuilding from loss, and repair. Given this, how might one write from the obverse, the inevitabilities of decline and recession? How, in this, can we carry out an ephemeralist practice observant of gone-going yet not presumed to be sparring with, or against the Modernist grain of a more commonplace historiography stitched from this-then-this-then-this eventfulness? DeSilvey described storying in service of analysis, but the vignettes accept and humbly call attention to their assured incompleteness, their unfinishability. Nothing turns out. We don’t know what happened next because next hasn’t happened yet. It follows, then, that one approach to decay curation unfolds through incomplete stories, making method through scraps and fragments whose accumulation cannot add up to a complete picture but instead accepts slivering, impermanence, and loss. Ends never-ending. The epigrammatic. Vignettes ending in ellipses, em-dashes, question marks. Writer and reader shrugging in tandem, so, what then? Is that it? I want my money time back. Why didn’t anyone bother with a new roof? We used to eat whole stalks dredged in white sugar, so who exactly abandoned the rhubarb patch to overgrowth and rewilding? What fungus is growing from the split portion of the willow chipped and scattered a couple of inches deep along the fence line? Then what happened.