She Always Took her Time About Things

She took her time about things: like reading, finishing her tea (she liked the last sip cold), like thinking carefully between her sentences when she spoke. 

She took her time about things: like trees, and talking to them, and watching out for birds, and long walks in the snow.  

 

They said she was strange and old, older even than the trees. The children regarded her as wonder. Some saw her as a timeworn crone. 

She tried to smile at them whenever she noticed them noticing her, but sometimes her thoughts got the better of her and she didn't notice them at all. 

She knew these things still, because she was a well practiced listener, even when she never talked once.

Indeed, some said she never talked at all. They said that she had lost her voice to excessive smoking (she didn't smoke), or traded it away in exchange for a husband that she had lost. 

If she had given her voice to anything it was the forest behind her house. 

It was then that she took time about her more than ever, like the blue coat she wore, wrapped close around her timeworn body. She remembered when there was forest around every side of the street on which she lived. Now the small patch in the north was all that was left, and even those trees were slowly dying. 

 

She walked there often. In fact, she walked there most days. And not just now that she was old and slow. She had walked here as a young girl once. 

She sometimes thought she recognized some of the trees from her youth, though she knew that in reality those had been lost long ago. 

But sometimes she liked to think the trees she once knew had wandered here late one night so that they could grow old near her. 

Now she could see them perfectly from her kitchen window. She could see them when they beckoned at her in the dark. She knows their shapes as she knows the veins in her wrists and the wrinkles around her eyes. She cannot remember any particular time in which she climbed them, but she feels it in her bones that she once did. Sometimes she almost convinces herself she still could.

Some well meaning folk worry about her long exertions. She knew that too. She was a very good watcher. She'd come back after hours of meandering through her small patch of forest, and she'd see the neighbor glancing anxiously from behind the curtains.

Secretly, she thought dying in that forest wouldn't be such a bad way to go. She'd lie down in the snow, and it would cover her like a blanket, and then she'd fall asleep, like a spell come to take her.

 

She had been a summer child once. Then, as a young woman, she had loved the spring. 

But now, in old age, winter was her lover. She cared little that it made her bones ache and froze her ancient joints. She knew the trees suffered the same way. She could hear it when the wind made them groan.

But she liked to think she had aged like the winter; she liked to think she had walked through this white world so long and so often that it had taken her once blonde hair and turned it the color of the snow; turned her skin to a white so fine and crystalline that you could see her veins course blue beneath, glowing like a winter evening. 

 

 

They said she was old and strange.

But that wasn't true. 

 

She was merely under an enchantment. She was convinced of it because, sometimes, in the space between wakefulness and sleeping, she was sure she was still young. She could feel it in her toes and the tips of her fingers as she wiggled them to wakefulness.

As for the strange part, she knew well that all silent things are regarded strange, and so, she tried not to blame them.

 

They also said she was lonely. She never heard them say it, but she knew that they did. She could see it in their eyes when they looked at her. 

But, that wasn't true either; not so long as the trees were older and wiser than she; not so long as she could still share the silence with them; not while there were birds to feed, and deer that knew her; so long as there were rabbits and owls that no one knew still lived there in that little patch of forest.

 

She was slow though. That much she admitted. 

But that, that was her choice. 

 

 

The Milk and Blood of Marriage

:And its Icky and Intimate Parts ad Portrayed in"The Time Traveler's Wife"

The time and place in which we read a book is hardly inconsequential to our perception of it. 

I first read The Time Traveler's Wife when I was a young girl. In many ways, I was too young to understand the novel. 

 

There is some perfect irony in this, I think. As I reread the novel for the second time, I realized things I had not before. I saw and understood the novel on a level that was far more personal. It was both more familiar and more disturbing than it was to the mind of my younger self. 

 

 

The novel's protagonist Clare experiences this same sensation within her own story. She meets her husband at the young age of 6 when he appears naked in the front yard of her house. Her husband Henry, a man who suffers from a disorder that helplessly displaces him in time (also causing him to leave anything material and otherwise behind, including his clothes), will not meet her until he is 28 and she is 20. 

 

Naturally, there are some things that Clare at the age of 6 did not understand about the strange time traveler who appeared for fragments in the meadow near her home. He is in many ways a perfect stranger with whom she slowly becomes perfectly familiar, first from the perspective of a child with an innocent crush, and then from that of a teenager who has other more sensational things on her mind. 

 

Rereading The Time Traveler's Wife now I realized that in reading this as a young imaginative girl I had dubbed it a mere romance. Thus, it lost both its strangeness and its ordinariness. Now I realize that this is not the story of two people who come together, bound by destiny and love. Neither is this a story of science fiction, the tale of a time traveler with a disorder made real in its fictional limits. 

This is the narrative of Henry and Clare who find themselves together from the start of the story, and though their lives are bound ever since that day when Clare was young and pink and innocent, they are constantly being separated, by time and space, and by each other. 

 

The imagery bestowed to the second part of the novel, titled a drop of blood in a bowl of milk, paints the perfect picture of how this novel makes one feel. There is both an ickyness and an intimacy to the image; for marriage, while beautiful and intimate, has its icky parts too. The bowl of milk in this portrait is something soft and pale and usually untouched, though nonetheless it is spoiled by a small drop of blood. In the same way, Henry and Clare's marriage is stained over time by grief, by frustration, and resentment, by an irritation with the things that keep them apart, and so an irritation with one-another. 

Love stories often forget how ugly marriage can be. It is lovely to dream of first kisses, of wedding days, and white dresses, and the perfect romance of two people finding each other in a chaotic world. But when stubbornness and dissatisfaction sears and scars a once white and perfect thing, it is easy to forget the purity it once held. 

In the end it is those images that linger; these are the details that make the novel memorable: the seared gaze of a grief stricken widower, eye whites shot and yellowed by excessive drinking; the red smudged lips of a woman discarded by love committing suicide alone in her apartment; glimpses of white bloodied sheets stained by miscarriage; blurry pictures of white crystal snow sullied with the blood of a deceased lover; all reinterpretations of that spoiled bowl of milk painted into its type-scripted pages.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a portrait of marriage, as raw and unflattering as it is idealized and filtered by fiction; and it is painted in milk and old spilled blood. It leaves neither out. Beginning with a perfect meadow and Clare in white knee socks, it shy's not from love's icky, messy, and gruesome parts by continually staining perfect white things with red and yellow blotches. 

 

 

It is a strange way to depict a marriage. Despite its elements of science fiction and literally disordered timeline, their marriage feels doggedly raw, at times as passionate as it is tedious and frustrating. But that is not the strange part: the strange part is that it is its un-ordinary details, its time travel and thus its disjointed and dislocated lives, that makes this marriage feel at all true and real.

 

After all, it is not only Henry's strange genetic disorder that keeps them apart. At times, it is their stubbornness. Sometimes, it is their own grief or personal lack, an internal dissatisfaction not even their supposedly perfect love can fulfill. 

Instead of locking himself in his study or going for a drive, Henry simply disappears entirely, escaping to some other time and space. Time travel is simply the medium, the perpetrator that makes an emotional separation literal in their marriage. In reality, such things are not necessary.

Clare, like myself, once thought that getting to Henry would be the end of it; the happily ever after, not in the sense that this is the end of their story, but in the sense that, in everything that comes after, they could be happy. 

This, of course, is not the case. Clare's deepest hurts and hardest times come after. She wept once about how lonely it was to wait for Henry. But this was before, when she still knew he would come and she still had the list he gave her telling her exactly when he would return. Later, she has only the unfilled clothing he leaves behind, and the empty time spent waiting and not knowing when he will return to her.

I myself used to think that being married meant that one never had to be lonely again. It wasn't that I actively believed this, but it was a coming disillusionment I sometimes faced snippets of. I remember a friend once telling me how lonely she was finding marriage to be. I tried not to think about it. Who wants to believe there is no perfect cure for loneliness, after all.

In this way, Clare doesn't learn what it is to be lonely until she is separated from he who is closest to her, not just by time and space, but by personal stubbornness, by internal struggles, and often trivial frustrations. 

Sometimes the space across one's bed feels further than time and space. Sometimes one feels as separated from their spouse as if they were a perfect stranger. 

But that is what marriage is about, is it not? Not that I've been married all too long, so perhaps simply take this as an insight about a book I recently reread. 

Marriage, according to this particular novel, is about time; about finding time; making time; losing time; savoring time; and yearning for more of it. It is about washing the blood out of your sheets; it is about not minding the yellowed time-stains on a once clean and perfect dress; marriage is about the messy bits more than the pretty ones, because, after the mess has been made, we only cling to each other that much harder.

 

At the end of the day, marriage is a constant losing of the other, for spaces and fragments, one or the other is gone for a day, sometimes for a week; not literally gone like Henry, but emotionally, mentally missing. 

 

Marriage is about finding your way to each other, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes it feels like there is never enough time, like there is always something in the way, keeping you from one another; always another red drop in each new bowl you pour.

 

But the world is never as still and perfect as when you find your way back; when the space between two people suddenly falls away and all the worries melt from your mind. 

 

 

 

 

I suppose the real truth is that I, like Clare, did not think that once I had him I would still spend so much time trying to find my way back to him again. I did not think that so many date nights would be canceled; that we would agree to do our own thing most nights. I did not think I would spend so much time waiting for him to come to bed. For us, neither of us needed to be a time traveler for time to keep us apart.

My, oh my, marriage can be complicated. But sometimes, every once in a while, it is the most simple thing in the world. 

It just takes a little washing and a little time.

But that's why you promise a lifetime, I guess. And him and I, we still have it all ahead of us. 

I for one will make the time to get back to him every day for the rest of my life.

The Grisly Giants Beneath the Earth

I recently read Roald Dahl's The BFG.  I was surprised by how lighthearted the tale was in comparison to other popular Dahl works.

The giants, though flesh eating and barbarically hideous, were not really enough to offer much fright to my imagination. Not even the more childish bits of my mind were spooked by the idea. The image of large hands groping in through my bedroom window and stuffing me head first into a large gaping mouth was not enough to writhe the dark parts of my fancy. 

 

I lay in bed the night I first began reading the book and I watched the branches of the tree outside my window as they bobbed closer and further, closer and further, and I thought to myself that, in the dark, it looked very much like a grapnel hand groping in the night, waiting for me to look away so it could break its mundane pattern and reach out to grab me.

 

I thought the hand was friendly enough though, and, if I'd have to imagine the giant at the other end of it, I'd say it was more than likely the fingers of the Big Friendly Giant I was looking at. 

The snow rested on its knuckles and wrists as if it had been standing there a good long while, waving at me to notice it so it would have no choice but to take me away and be my friend. 

It made the hand look old, pale, and wrinkled, and somehow lonely. 

 

It was enough to tickle my fancy, I admit, but I slept fine that night. I did not dream of giants and large hungry hands. I had no nightmares about a short lived life ended with one final speculation as one slides helplessly down a giant's dark throat. 

But then Roald Dahl did something else, something strange and I dare say frightening. He stuffed the giants beneath the earth, not as a tool of horror, but as a way to get rid of them. 

Now that, I thought, that was a way to scare me, to put my imagination out in the dark and let it go wild imagining the outcomes of such a story. 

As I fell asleep that second night having completed the book and thus having left those nine hungry giants in their deep dug pit, I could not help but think about how gloriously frightful that image was. 

 

I don't know why the giants once imprisoned were so much more frightful to me than when they lurked free in the streets, leaning on rooftops and looking into windows for children to devour. Maybe deep dark pits are simply easier to imagine than humongous humanoid hands grabbing me. 

Maybe everyone that was once a child knows the fear of deep dark spaces, basements and closets and such, and abysmal nightmares about falling into such pitch black holes.

I was reminded of a painting by Francisco Goya entitled Saturn Devouring His Son, a painting that would have been enough to frighten me as a child. 

That image is exactly what I imagined it would look like, I thought to myself, picturing an ignorant soul going on a walk late at night with a flash light only to come across a deep pit, too dark to see down. 

Some horrid sound would come out of it, like someone ravenously enjoying their dinner, and they, not knowing any better, would shine their beam of light into the pit. 

Look up the painting and maybe you will understand the deep bedded terror of this image, if you do not already.

Why did Dahl think that putting the giants beneath the earth would solve the problem, I wonder? 

Story-wise it does, at least. It actually gets rid of them quite neatly, with very little trouble along the way as the nine beastly creatures are deposited into their prison. 

He puts the giants out of sight and out of mind, or at least, he pretends to. 

 

Really though, Dahl embeds them effortlessly into the child's mind. Likely they will not mind them there, not until they ask the question of what happens after. 

Do the giants ever get out? What if there is an earth quake? Or, worse, what if someone falls in?

Thus, narratively Dahl creates a horror. Few things are more frightful than stories that let us do the imagining. Books can be sealed up once finished. But hooks like these, they linger in one's head, reshaping into frightful scenarios.

 

I wonder if Dahl intended it? Was a deep pit really the best thing he could think of when trying to tuck the giants away? Or did he mean for us to imagine the echoes of their hungry howls on quiet windless nights?

I wouldn't put it past him. 

 

How far is this pit from civilization? The book doesn't tell us. But it must be close enough, surely. After all, we are told about the so called single disaster to come out of it: the time three silly drunk men fell in and all that was hence heard of them was the crunching of their bones and the giants below as they howled in delight. 

I gulp to think that there are nine hungry giants in that pit and only three silly men to feed them. 

I wonder if Dahl considered that too. It would not surprise me.

The story tells us that a sign is put up after that, a sign reading "it is forbidden to feed the giants"; a fine way to make light of the situation; enough to make any child laugh at the idea of flesh eating giants tucked away beneath the earth, right?

Until you think twice about it, then it makes one shiver. 

I myself imagine that gaping black pit is itself like an open mouth leading directly to the colossal stomach of the hollowed out earth. I imagine at times you can hear nine enormous stomachs gurgle and growl and the giants as they wail out in horrid sounds of despair. 

It is no easier to think that the pit closed over eventually. In fact, it is almost worse. Crammed into their tightly collapsed holes, the giants would become utterly deformed; crooked from bowing; sightless from the lasting dark; left only with their tactual hands, always fingering and groping to see what's around them. The giants would mutter into the silence as the walls of the earth near in on them. Every so often the earth would tremor above as they shift, sleeping in its bowels. 

Soon, the people would forget there ever was such a thing as giants. 

And so, the grisly giants would sit, hunched forever beneath the earth, ingesting dirt and sucking the worms and centipedes out of the soil; always there, but never any less hungry. 

 

What We Found in the Woods

2019: We went for a walk in the woods, you, me, and your family. The sun was out, and the snow was glistening. The trees were bare, though I could feel that in the warm winter air they were beginning to awaken. As we whisked through the forest, waltzing amongst trees that stood like sculpted pillars around us, something mystical occurred. 

Maybe it was the way the sun was shining, like a romantic sort of photograph in which the sun ignites the world with a flare, with sun-specks or sun-spirals or sunny-streaks that shimmer in your hair. Maybe it was the way the forest floor was frosted over with snow, like a ballroom floor glimmers below crystal chandeliers. Something about the way the trees whispered of spring and the way the earth smelled of change gave me a breath of something that felt like certainty. 

We came to a river, frozen at the foot of a gorge. Your mom told me about your childhood, about picnics and the way the trees had since changed. You told me that a lot of your stories took place here. Maybe that is what made the place feel so nostalgic; even though I’d never been here before, there was memory here. There were little versions of you running through the trees. 

I too grew up in the woods, running through trees with dirty feet and feathers in my hair, searching for adventure like Peter Pan’s Lost Boys; storing secrets in tree-trunks and looking for the entrance to Narnia or other lost realms.   

Forests have a weird way of appearing timeless even as they change. We both grew up in forests of our own, forests that we mapped and memorized, forests filled with the trees we climbed and memories of us as bare footed summer children, our noses sprinkled with freckles and our heads crowned by the sun, fancying ourselves the kings and queens of our forest kingdom.

It wasn’t then, but at some point in time my forest and your forest aligned. It occurred to me then, that, as I prepare to leave my forest behind, I wouldn’t so much mind moving into yours.

 2021: We went for a walk through a different wood this rather warm winter day and I was reminded of this piece I wrote almost two years ago. Me and my husband were only just dating, and I went to visit him over the break. It was the first time I met his family, the first time we started talking about what our future would look like. 

I decided almost on a whim that I would move to his province that summer. Sometimes I wonder if we would still be married now if I hadn't.

But that is the way adventures go, is it not? Occasionally a whim strikes us, almost like a childish desire to run away to live in the woods, but much more serious. 

All I knew then was that I was restless without him, and that home was where he was.