Three books I read years ago but am thinking of often now, and together:
Derek Jarman’s MODERN NATURE, a diary of two years in his life at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Kent, working in solitude by the sea between intervals of life in London;
Iris Murdoch's THE SEA, THE SEA, in which a stage director renounces the theater and impulsively buys a house on the Lincolnshire coast to get away from it all, but naturally brings his faults and obsessions with him;
John Steinbeck's TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY, a memoir of a months-long cross-country drive in a camper top pickup with his aging dog, contemplating his own fate.
All three I read in Rockaway. I'd read Steinbeck in high school but I imagine it would have taken me longer to come to Murdoch or Jarman (both of whom I have read more deeply in) had I not also chosen to be by the sea.
That choice – and the undoing of it, and what has followed – has been my stuttering, incoherent day-to-day preoccupation for longer than I'd like to admit.
Steinbeck meanders to the West Coast and back (as I did twice in the past three years), wistfully assuming this time will be his last but with less to say about it than most Americans who have also done it assume they should (myself included). Murdoch ensures that, whatever humbling transformation her sometime bucolic maritime protagonist has undergone, he returns to London. Jarman dies.
So what business do I have living on a landlocked acre ten miles outside Ithaca, a place where I know virtually no one, in a house with quirks more aggravating than charming? Is survival a good enough reason? Was this the only path to get there? How would I find out otherwise?
In a drywall frenzy this past weekend, enclosing cavities between studs. A garter snake sashayed lugubriously from under the shower surround and into a gap in the floor that I had not yet identified. I briefly squealed which brought the dog running tail a-wag to the pantry to administer kisses, always happy to be part of the process.
No apparent entrants (reptile or rodent) even on a rainy day, now we test whether steel wool and gap filler are all it will take to keep them out.