Susyn Reeve in Silence (Coz)

Dear Coz,

° So you are flipping through the world atlas in search of The Village of Bally Shangri L'Hai.

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° Sometimes I notice that I no longer live on Via Mario de' Fiori, sometimes I parrot Lady Carla Mae Carlisle's, "Why did I ever leave Paris?" Sometimes I mentally juggle Spring arrivi e Fall partenze on the QEII. Sometimes I just long for the ratty apartment my friends escaped to senior year at University, and I calculate the exact annual cost of my own escape to happiness.

° But not this time.

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° What an operatic weather change, her daddy couldn't've stabbed Gilda against a more thrilling backdrop! High winds without rain, tailwinds from somebody's hurricane, was it the Gulf or the Atlantic? Dog Days temperatures dropping all afternoon and clear through the night. Crisp October sleeping, the windows up, the covers drawn tight to the neck, the cat between the legs.

° I was awakened just after dawn by the honking of several dozens of chevron'd geese. Most mornings a pair or trio fly over from one lake to another, from my valley to your hollow, but the weather must've triggered an endofseason clotting in the whole tribe.

° Played ball with Asia, drank Mexican milkcoffee, sang Cantico, walked out into the still chilly morning. On the porch a slightly torn spiderweb, one wedge iridescing a ladder in the Sun. On the paths no webs at all, was the wind too high for weaving, was it too cold for the hunt? The mixed sugary perfumes of nicotiana, of crepe myrtle, of autumn clematis, of bull bay. Blue dayflower intermingling white spiderflower. Cerise mirabilis, frank yellow sylphium. In the Ellipse the first of the Heavenly Blue morningglories, undirtied by chillinduced violet, on the only vine that survived the foraging of the rabbits. A single Blue Star, so delicately etched with powder blue it seemed a moonflower that a child had set in coloured water at the instance of some Mr. Science or other to demonstrate "Capillary Action in Plants." A bluebird--our native one, with the redbreast, not the splendid metallicblue interloper that's immigrated into these parts.

° A grassgreenbacked hummingbird testing the salmon sage.

° Sundaymorning quiet. A distant murmur from the bypass masked by birdsong and birdchallenge. The electric drone of bumblebees working the buckbushes. A hoarse spitty curse and visual hoofthunder from one of Bamber's shier kin.

° Steam on the breath. And then--

° --and then near the Bell a globule of ruddy brown not quite concealed by figleaves, the first ripe fruit of the second crop, the first one the birds hadn't already gutted. Not syrupy yet, but intact, sticky white blood oozing from the snapped stem, sweet and strangely fleshlike interior, moist and warm to the eye, redolent of Paestum, of Corcyra, of the whole throbbing World I sometimes think I've left.

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° It wasn't just the fig, or the colours, or the steamy breath.

° It was Susyn Reeve ((just click on this convenient mauve link, okay, no link. You explained it all to me, Coz, you wrote out the code, you took me step by step through the linking process twice. And it went in one ear and out the other, and met no resistance on the way)), interviewed on Alternative Radio last week, repeating a lesson that no one used to need to learn.

° "Start the day in silence." I thought of Aunt Ocia rising at dawn to write letters while the oats were gloppily simmering, before it was time even to work the lard into flour crumbs for the breakfast biscuits.

° "Learn to draw yourself into the Present, learn to leave out the Story." The jab of the corn on my left sole, the sapour of the fig, both draw me into the Present.

° I'll forget the lesson pretty soon; I'll again imagine that there was a Past that led to the Present morning, that there will be a Future that proceeds from it, that my Stories are not just artifacts of memory, fantastic, apelike avoidances.

° But you, gentle Coz, in your darkened room, doors closed, cat at hand, you know already what you didn't have to learn . . . .

° Your cousin, Giac