It’s too bad that I wasn’t a columnist in my 20s and 30s, when I led a much more varied and unusual life; I’m a better writer now, possibly at my peak, in my 50s, but my adventures out in the world have winnowed and waned with each passing year. I used to fancy myself a personage of some derring-do, taking up flying, for instance, or moving to a foreign country with $350 in my pocket, but with motherhood and responsibility my world has become plainer and plainer. Some weeks, such as this week when Winter Storm Fern shut us all up indoors, neither the blank pages of my social datebook nor the caffeinated whirring of my brain produced even a single thought. Words almost never fail me, but ideas for columns on occasion do.
When — like the Darling children playing pirate in “Peter Pan” — I climb my imaginary mast and point my spyglass toward the stars on the far horizon, I see myself in coming years as a domesticated figure, soft around the mizzen, with thinning hair that won’t do what I want it to do, pottering and puttering around the house in cushy Cloud Socks. I spy myself doing boring stuff like making minestrone soup. I see this future and I am dissatisfied. I am disgruntled. In fact, it almost makes me angry. I would prefer to launch myself on further adventures, even if it requires more hefting and heaving of my bodily weight. Has anyone chartered a bus to Minnesota yet in the spirit of the Freedom Riders of 1961? Could I turn the half-acre plot beside my house into a for-profit dahlia farm?
My mother, who died last April, suffered from dementia for the last, oh, six or seven or eight years of her life. It became advanced during the pandemic, when she was living at Peconic Landing in her mid to late 80s, but before that she had kept it fairly well hidden for quite some time. The first sign of her mental decline that I noticed was her habit — revealed to me as the editor of her East Hampton Star column, “Connections,” but to no one else — of writing repeatedly on the same topic. The mundane (and even she would have admitted out loud that it was boring) subject matter she returned to with increasing frequency as the brain disease progressed went something like this, and I’m paraphrasing: “I wander around the house on Edwards Lane in my lilac-colored bathrobe and bedroom moccasins and the only point of interest in my warm but tedious morning is the bird feeder outside the sun porch window, upon which various birds feed themselves.”
That was it. She kept writing about the bird feeder. There might be some very small plot twist (“it was raining cats and dogs” or “I’ve lost my favorite spatula”) but she kept writing essentially that scintillating column, and, as the weeks and months and then years passed, I would edit and revise, and eventually rewrite, her “Connections” for her with increasing vigor until she retired officially in the Covid-19 spring of 2020. She had written “Connections” for 43 years. I counted for her, tallying 2,232 columns and approximately 892,000 words — two and a half times the length of “War and Peace.”
My lack of anything interesting to tell you this week makes me worried that I will soon be treating you to repeated columns about the bird feeder, myself. Should I take up winter bay-swimming? I think not; I have a heart condition.
Winter Storm Fern offered only very mild excitement. I filled the bathtub with water and stocked up on candles at the Bargain Box. Hoop-dee-doo! I made fried rice, pasta with chicken sausage, and cinnamon buns — preparations that were entirely unnecessary, storm-prep-wise, as I have a propane stove in my kitchen that lights with a match and could have continued cooking even if the power went out, which, boringly, it did not. I weathered the tempest at home alone, lying in bed with the dog at my feet and the cat curled up on my stomach (gently riding my breath, a mild Zen exercise, like puppy yoga or goat yoga, only more boring). The three of us watched two full seasons of “Mad Men.”
Even the cat seemed to suffer from the lack of diversions. He began to entertain himself by creating minor mayhem, intentionally knocking his food bowl off the counter onto the kitchen floor and lying in wait to swat and catch the sleeve of my sweater with his paw as I went past carrying my bowl of popcorn. The dog refused to be walked. She doesn’t like the cold and abominates snow and somehow stored up her pee inside some invisible, internal tank for three days.
I found other pretexts to have to go outside. I needed to see what the weather was doing, wearing a pair of black L.L. Bean snow boots that my son has outgrown. I needed to get documentary footage of the American winter. I stomped up and down the Main Street, pulling off my leather glove to take iPhone video footage with one freezing hand of the tattered American flag atop the flagpole on the green, which snapped violently in the whirlwind whiteout of snow, and of the stout American beech in front of the library that creaked and cracked loudly in the high wind and bitter cold. The beech cracked so loudly I thought it was about to come crashing down on my head, and I ran away as fast as I could in the shin-high drifts.