Hello from Delaware County!
We actually did it. We packed our bags, climbed on a plane, and several masks later arrived not much worse for the wear in New York City, where we discovered that the East Village has become a frenetic shantytown of plywood terraces—the ugliest on our former East First Street block. I dared not take a photo for fear my phone would explode.
I had a lot of thoughts, including about returns and stepping in the same river twice, but can’t remember any of them. There was something about Americans and enthusiasm, and Americans and certainty. Hidden truths. All lost because shortly afterwards we came up here to the Catskills and that’s where I become a kind of amnesiac sitting on the tiny screened-in porch and staring at the trees and the creek, which sometimes murmurs, sometimes giggles, but after a night in which we got a couple inches of rain, has decided to roar.
My thoughts here tend towards Time and Entropy and the Thingness of Things and my utter irrelevance to them which I find a comfort. Tree is a tree is a tree 🌲. Whether I exist or not. That mossy boulder on the hillside has been here since the mountain-carving glacier shat it out or some enterprising or desperate farmer unwedged it from her field and tipped it over the mountain’s edge where it remains. Imagine that eternity and how brief your life and troubles and loves are. Do I sit here? Cast myself in the roaring flow of the creek? Water changes everything. Stone remains unless you’re a geologist and think in different time, know stone can as easily be a molten liquid and that lump on the hillside is a fake.
(Listen to an interview with my geologist pal Mathilde Cannat.)
All these are thoughts I had staring at the creek and typed with my thumb on my cellphone at the laundromat where there is a cell signal. Please forgive the brevity and typos.
Gruntledly yours,
Xoxo
Que Li