MindSpinner

In my bedroom, beneath the gable, an arched window admits stars, sometimes the moon, white clouds dry-brushed on blue sky, inky washes of storm clouds, and the blended pastels of morning. Blinds obscure my view of the neighbors’ house below during the day and the neighbors’ view of me slipping out of clothes at bedtime, but the half circle at the top of the window remains uncovered to frame an arc of sky, a succinct heaven. I’ve long rejected the notion of concocting window treatments, the window being the point.

Beneath the top of that arch, a tiny spider wove unseen a month or two ago a radiating web not larger than the spread of my small hand. It has gathered dust now until it is a proper cobweb. One or two of its delicate threads have been torn by tiny wings, but it is still near perfect. The artist in me has overruled the fussy Victorian housekeeper who would swat the web down with a broom lest visitors glance up to see it. I feel too much affinity for the spider and the web to sweep the work away.

I think in webs that span void, circumference and even contradiction. It seems to me that there is nothing that is not connected to something else and even to its own opposite. There is no strength that is not connected to weakness, no virtue that is not connected to flaw, no ending that is not connected to beginning, no beginning that is not connected to an end, no gain that is not connected to loss, no gift given that is not also received in the giving, no selfish choice that does not incur loss as well as gain. Reality and consequence and perception are always webs, as interconnected as the forces that generate the trajectory of the ripple that rides the wave there and back again, in a foam of physics calculations the nimblest mind cannot follow. The web also represents connections felt across spans of distance, forged in conversation yet not absent in silence or difference or even death, rope bridges spanning roaring chasms between souls, precarious, yet sturdy enough for white-knuckled crossings.

The spider web at the apex of the arched window that greets morning, midday, and night, is mute. It only reverberates a little with currents of air and clings to the anchors that suspend it two inches from that plane where the world within meets the world without. I look to it daily from my chosen spot on the side of the bed nearest to the light and nearest to the dark.

So ends my apologetic for lapses in dusting .

Last night I found myself at a Meijer’s store across the river, about an hour from home. I had some time on my hands, about four hours of it. I had ducked into the store to buy some fine-point pens and to use the restroom. I had no idea where the office supply section was, so I wandered the store for a little while and found myself in the sewing aisle. I looked wistfully at the sewing machines - mine has ceased working after many years’ use - but saw nothing to covet. I know the machine I actually do covet: it’s a professional mechanical Singer sewing machine with metal parts instead of plastic, no fancy electronics, just a sturdy basic machine. It’s not that I plan to do any sewing this summer. If I had money for fabric, I’d make slipcovers for the living room couch and love seat, but that project will have to wait.

Still, I was itching to make something, and when a pretty ball of cotton yarn caught my eye, I wanted the simple repetitiveness of crocheting. I haven’t crocheted anything since I was in college. I don’t know how to knit at all, though I suspect I will try to learn sometime. And I wanted the pretty balls of yarn. I settled on a project depicted on the label - a string bag. Instructions were promised on the reverse side of the label. I don’t need a string bag, to be honest about the matter, and I did not need four little balls of yarn and a needle. But sometimes it is good to make a thing, to do it instead of buy it, partly for the satisfaction in the doing, partly for the ritual, and partly just to remember how such things are done. Everything comes to us so easily in this culture. We hold out a piece of plastic and the thing we want is ours. We acquire things thoughtlessly, own things thoughtlessly, and dispose of them thoughtlessly. We are impoverished because we are no longer connected to the making.

Everything we own has a story. Everything we eat has a story. Sometimes the stories are stories we don’t want to hear, like the story of how the pallid egg came to rest on the breakfast plate, or how handiwork acquired at a desirable price represents hardship. Sometimes the stories are uninspiring, like the story of the plastic mixing bowl on the shelf at Wal-Mart or Target. I find myself less oblivious to the stories of things than I used to be. I feel the need to make a cotton string bag and use it for a very long time, until it falls apart. On impulse, I buy a small handmade bowl from a potter to mix my bread dough in, not a plastic bowl from a big box store. I plant a seed to grow food for the table. I want less, but the things I have - their nature and their origin and their impact - matter more.

So today, needle in and needle out, pattern ignored (who needs all that tiny cryptic print anyway), a string bag grows row by row, all purple, teal, lavender, and maroon, in the quiet of the empty house on a Saturday evening, while the cat sleeps nearby at the foot of the bed.

Why there have to be six wooden swords in the living room every afternoon when I come home, crafted from wood I meant for bean towers, I don’t know. They come out every morning after I leave for school as if reveille were sounded as soon as my back tires roll out of the driveway and onto the street. The couch sulks askew, its broad green back to the front door, its pillows disheveled, oblivious to everything except the TV that squats atop my grandmother’s cherry lowboy like a boxy household gargoyle.

How dirty dishes in the kitchen sprout faster than mushrooms after a week of rain, I do not know. How I have as much laundry to fold tonight as Rapunzel has straw to weave into gold, I’m not sure. I only took my eyes off the house long enough to wade into the paper pile. It’s not my fault I fell into its paperclipped stacks for a whole day, like an Alice swimming about in her pool of tears. It was deep.

But when this evening softened into long lavender light on soft greens, I scooped the white rabbit out of his cage in the house, nestled him into the crook of my arm, and took him outside to meet grass and clover and sky. We sat together until papers, kitchens and unfolded jeans faded like dreams you wake from, and there was only the new world, and wonder.

“Nice site and fine colors,” says a spam comment caught in moderation. Wonder which color suits so well, the black or the white?

I’m cheating blog-wise today, adapting an email for a blog post to atone for my blog slothfulness of late. Midweek inspiration was thwarted because my MacBook Pro was misbehaving. The trackpad button couldn’t muster a respectable click, as if it were stuck down. The cursor consequently highlighted things, moved them, opened them, and replaced the last three words I’d written with the next letter I typed, over and over. Writing anything was a struggle at best, and I gave up entirely when a spontaneous shutdown ate a one-paragraph post. Diagnostics indicated no problem with the hard drive, but I noted that when I pushed up on the battery beneath the trackpad, the cursor changed. Googling trackpads and batteries identified the source of the problem. It turns out that Macbook Pro batteries produced during a certain time period have sometimes begun to swell - that’s right, swell, and when they swell, they muck around with the functionality of the trackpad and cause shutdowns, etc. I ran my finger over the bottom of the battery. Sure enough, there was a bulge. Fortunately, there’s an Apple recall/battery exchange program, and my new battery is on the way. In the meantime, I can use the laptop with the AC adapter and no battery installed.

Last night I photographed two boys’ basketball games, a project that always turns out to be fun. (I’ll catch the girls in a couple of weeks.) I like watching a high school basketball game. I know the kids; the gym is small so everybody is close to the action (sometimes the photographer is very close indeed, and a player who leaps out of bounds may find himself headed through the cafeteria doors into the salad bar on one end of the gym or making an emergency leap onto the stage at the other); the game seems more sporting somehow when the players aren’t seven feet tall.

Yesterday I finally figured out how to get a hand-operated grain mill screwed down onto the rock-hard maple butcher block top of a small kitchen cart. (I mastered drilling holes with my cordless drill. Huzzah, huzzah.) Last night I used the mill to grind flour from wheat. I find that I have made not only an investment in a grain mill, but an investment in a nifty piece of exercise equipment designed to ensure that I will never have flabby arms. That explains the price, right? So today I’ve milled a bit of wheat into flour, and I have bread dough rising.

Outside the sky is gray, and rain pelts the roof and the windows. Winter rain always makes me think of beaches by way of an antidote. This is called beach fantasy therapy, and it proves an excellent way to fritter away an hour on a Sunday morning. I google pictures of beaches. I consider decorating with a travel poster or two. I contemplate snagging beachy screensavers. I note that prepping for a possible pandemic has indeed netted me everything I need to go back to that little campground on Ocracoke island and pitch a tent between the dunes under the Milky Way. I could bike around the island and undertake photographic expeditions. Then I think of Kiawah Island and its 30 miles of trails and 10 miles of beach. No campgrounds there, though. Wonder if the resort lets day visitors loose on their trails. Likely not.

Still, what would it hurt to plan an expedition? An Amazon search turns up a likely resource: The Best in Tent Camping: The Carolinas: A Guide for Car Campers Who Hate RV’s, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos. A lone reviewer writes,

Johnny Molloy had a dream assignment; to explore the campgrounds of North and South Carolina with his tent, vehicle and laptop. He came back with 55 campgrounds and created “a guide for car campers who hate RVs, concrete slabs, and loud portable stereos.” The author writes with such enthusiasm and asks, “Have you ever been to the Outer Banks in fall, with a cool breeze and ward golden light spilling onto its sands?” He briefly discusses the area’s history. Each campground is rated for beauty, noise, privacy, security, spaciousness, and cleanliness. He also talks about the active outdoor possibilities such as hiking, biking, canoeing or fishing in or close to the campground.

I perk up. This is the travel writer for me. I even have a solar charger for the laptop and the camera. Possibilities are unlimited, and I am empowered. Never mind the cost of gas, the logistics and expense of pet care, the problem of what to do with a spare teenager or two, mosquitoes zinging around in my tent, and the possibility of rain. This is a fantasy, and in a winter’s morning beach fantasy, gas doesn’t cost money; one or more teenagers come over from their dad’s house twice a day to feed the pets and never forget to lock the door when they leave; there are no mosquitoes; my back never aches from sleeping on the ground; rain falls only when I’m hot come mid-afternoon (for fifteen minutes, max), and the tent never leaks. No doubt the campground has WI-FI, too.

I’d fantasize about the Kiawah Island vacation instead, but my fantasies always require a pinch of verisimilitude, and the camping scenario falls into the realm of “I might be able to pull this off sometime.” Even over-reaching can be negotiated - I’ll take a pad for my sleeping bag and a bottle of Aleve just in case; I can stop in somewhere for Internet access; a little rain never hurt anybody and who says it’s going to rain anyway; surely I can depend on Dark-Haired Daughter for pet care - if I pay her $10/day. (She doesn’t like dogs much.)

Anyway, happy Sunday to all from a sunny little dune on Ocracoke Island. It’s sun up, and I’m off to take pictures on the beach. No doubt the morning light will be exquisite, and I’ll find an interesting shell. I’ll be off on the bike later, hoping to sight a few of the island ponies. (OK, in real life, I’m cleaning up in the kitchen, but that’s beside the point.)

Here’s to conjuring beaches in winter .

If you are very quiet, and you hold a bunny very close, you can hear his nose wiggle.