Work

I seem to have gone a bit passive in these, my first Inverness days. There's nothing to do here but slow down, I tell friends, as though this explains much of anything. The truth is that I've not felt terribly social. People have been a welcome accompaniment, and I'm glad my holiday house is spacious and comfortable for others. For me, comfort depends on the kindness of others. Only part of the house is wheelchair accessible, and the bedrooms and bathroom have their perils.

Take the master suite. There is a Grimm fairytale quality to the bed. Who's been sleeping in my...? The mattresses are piled high enough to accommodate the princess and her pea. I can neither get into the bed or sit upon its edge to dress, alone. The shower is cavernous. It rounds a right angle, presents a windowed view of the garden outside, then succumbs to conventionality in the form of a faucet and a shower head. The tiles are green and glassy, fired to a high ceramic slickness. There's nothing like a railing to break the lines. There's nothing like a femur to break in a shower like this one. No, I'm not exactly independent here in Inverness.

But with loving people around, who cares? I do have the great luxury of setting the schedule. My own, that is. I am hospitable but not a host. I am there when I want to be, absent when I don't. Nothing to do but slow down. This is only a ruse, and I know it. The absence of radio, television, even newspapers, this creates an emptiness into which something else can take root. Roots being a persistent theme in these parts. A tangle of them shot down through the scorched earth twenty years ago, laughing at destruction, sucking it up. The burned trees, tanned and rotting, show almost no charcoal, except on close inspection, here and there about the edges.

Do I have a right to a life? Since Marlou lost her own...what now? And do I have a right to my own 'now?' Where do such questions come from? Guilt, a genuine respect for the dead, where? I vaguely recall people asking me decades ago if I minded while they went hiking or jogging or strolling. Would I feel bad? Would Marlou feel bad? The thoughts are preposterous and worthwhile. Look at the life that emerges from destruction. Inverness Ridge.

It's not even dusk when a stage moon rises, full and smiling, from the hills behind Point Reyes Station. There's plenty of glowing light on the tops of the young trees, plenty of sunset to follow. But maybe not. Maybe this is the time to wander out on the deck, gaze at the west which improbably lies to the north, and not miss anything. The beauty of the dying day. There are only so many, and each dies only once. And there is a future. It will arise from discontent. Which is not the sense that things aren't happening, but the call of work. There is something to be done. And the way to find it is here, in a rented house, studiously doing nothing.