What strange outbursts we writers have, what peculiar attachments! Is it worth it in the end all this scribbling into the void. Who is listening, who is watching these peculiar patterns I am making?
Peculiar: from the Latin pecu meaning ‘cattle’, and we are all that: strange sheep wandering around; lost lambs feeling little.
Pond Man knows where he goes, his routine, his peculiar way through life without bleating. Right now he is mending the fence along the side of his house. Hazel poking up to heaven. Soon he will go to bed and fold down the covers as his mother taught him. One crisp sheet. One woollen blanket. He will turn indoors when the light dims, and the light is dimming now.
But see, he has stopped, he has put down his tools, he is looking over the fence towards the harbour. He has seen something — the past — there over the horizon, she is beckoning him.
She is a lady beneath a tree. I do not need to say the tree is green because that is not the first thing you notice. Not all trees are green. And Pond Man will tell you the tree is a plum and she flowers in the spring. Late March or early April when the threat of frost still looms; before the apple tree. Perhaps she is braver, certainly she is hardier, and that is why the lady likes her because she dares to show her face when things are pretty inhospitable, nothing quite ready, and the lady shakes her head.
Pond Man climbs the stairs to bed. He carries a candle and it is not merely a symbol, and it is not only a light. He carries a candle because his forefathers did; and because candle light pleases him; and because the smell of melting wax sends him to sleep. He thinks of the Old Man and hears him blowing out the flame, a draught of breath crossing his face, before he proceeds into his mothy chamber. Pond Man stops at the top of the stairs and peers through the darkness. A small orb of light out at sea. A flickering flame climbing the wall. He bows his head and blows out the light and the Old Man ducks his head.
Small routines, finickity circuits, pestering points of contact with the earth. What is it this material life we find ourselves captured by, enraptured by, this embodied life. Pond Man sleeping in his bed, head tipped slightly starboard, seawards, listening to the drag of the tide running through his ear — a feathery echo — water running over rocks, over pebbles, over the shoreline, up over the beach, covering, covering him in sleep.