“In the shed, Mom kept glass bottles of every size filled with plum or wild-strawberry juice, which she made seasonally. Mom’s jars were filled to the brim with tiny fermented croakerlike fish or anchovy paste or fermented clams that she was planning to send to the family in the city.”
I remember when you said in an email that when you find a place for yourself in the world, it feels like music, and I thought of that, sitting over the table with Dale Woodson and talking about highway infrastructure. I guess I am a very boring sort of person, but to me highway infrastructure is a symphony.
Dear Felix, ...They all came filing out of the room chattering away and carrying little styrofoam cups of coffee and nobody noticed me. (This is the trouble with being only five foot one inch, and it has always been the trouble, but you know I am tall on the inside.)
I write slowly. A letter might take me an hour or more. I do not rush. I think through each sentence. My hand does not get tired. You must not rush.
The details slipped from my mind faster than the grass seeds that scattered as I walked, quicker than down blown from a dandelion clock.
She looked at one with the shades of the earth but glowed in her own colouring. The fur on her chest was the gold and russet of a hare at the height of summer.
There was so much about their behaviour that I still did not understand, perhaps underscoring the relative rareness of the opportunity to observe the same small group of hares, outside conditions of captivity, for a sustained period of time.
The male leveret had the shock of his life when he sprang up onto the ball early one morning, paddling furiously to stay aloft before its rotation deposited him unceremoniously on the carpet.
The house smelled faintly like digestive biscuits: the scent of hares.
It would sometimes rest just a few metres beyond the garden wall, watchful, inscrutable and self-contained, facing the house with its lights blazing during the winter twilight.
For a second, I thought about picking it up, but something in its posture and the setting made me hesitate. It belonged there. I returned inside and waited until nightfall. When the seeping darkness gradually erased the silhouette of the leveret, sealing it and the land from my view.
It endured all my clumsy efforts to work out the best way of feeding and caring for it. Every day brought fresh examples of its endearing behaviour, as well as its immaculateness and the utter regularity of its habits.
This is pure egotistical insanity and I'll not lie down for it. It's a garden club, for the love of the universe ...
