tyniepixels

Since the bridge collapsed we haven’t been able to travel, and repair is impossible unless the rain stops. These very same wicked pelter-skelters, accompanied by winds that liquefied the atmosphere, birthed rivers of mud and brought down the hillside last month, along with the pylons. No one can visit us here on the farm, and we don’t know when we’ll see the village again.

Bon Iver and I are crazy about each other, and we’ve often squirreled up here together for cozy long weekends. We’ve felt it’s important to banish the outside world and create together, side by side, planned additions to the intricate spiderweb of our love.

We’re perfect company. And yet… weeks into our isolation, there are so many reasons to yearn for town, and the world, and other people!

I miss my funny friends, Delilah and Ro, who are so close to me it’s as though we were tripled in the same womb, clinging together like orange segments and whispering through the membranes in our own language. I miss their affection and cresting laughter and flowery scents. I miss helping them. I miss rolling my eyes when they are caricatures of themselves. I miss their physical touch, so ordinary and fond and so forgettable until I’m miles away and unable to have it.

I dream of the little alley market. It’s where Bon Iver and I first met, and before we were stuck here, each Saturday we would visit the place where I operated my strawberry stand all those years ago, just to sneak a kiss—a kiss with special meaning, as we marked another week with you in my life.  

Oh, the market! I miss bustle, and brushing shoulders, and hot doughnuts, and egg sandwiches with slippery greens that slide out when I bite (to be tidied up with efficiency by the brown birds that wait at ground level for such gifts), and I miss the goosey wave from Dag in the tea shop every time I step down out of the truck, both of us overflowing to share the trivial joys and troubles of our weeks.

I crave the abundance of the market itself, so consoling during this endless fool’s spring when nothing can be planted in our hamlet for fear of frost. I would buy seeded breads, selected from a wall piled with bricklayer’s precision, wafting their fruity fresh-baked perfume. A few stems of delicate peonies, just peeking around the corner of the season, grown somehow in this deluge using unimaginable magic. (They’d wither in a day, killed by my thousand deep inhalations, but they would be worth it!) I wish I could fill my baskets with the pleasures of the sunnier counties: purple flowering broccoli, artichokes and lemons, anything fresh to spruce up our dinners of pickled vegetables and roasts from the deep freeze.

But wishes don’t fill bellies. So I must survey what we have here, and reach deep inside myself for the cleverness and resolve to make something new of our extended time together.

For all these comforts I must now turn to myself, and to Bon Iver. He’s getting extra nuzzles today. I know that he is missing his friends and haunts as well. He’s a creature of routine, Bon Iver, and he feels that a Saturday isn’t a Saturday without a visit to the dusty row of almanacs at the library and a stroll down the creek, spitting cherry pits or sunflower seeds, or tossing blackened chestnut shells, depending on the season. He feels anxious about his budding kinship with Rafnkelsson, the knifesmith, in whose shop Bon Iver has reliably lurked for a few hours each week this winter, asking questions, hoping to someday be invited to hold the tongs.  

But, like me, Bon Iver must turn his attention to what we can accomplish here at home. I spotted his handwritten list of projects to work on during the time we’re locked down here on the farm. He hopes to mend the north fence, pick up the nyckelharpa, and perfect the flip of a classic French omelette.

He’s been quiet awhile. I rise to look for him, feeling the pinpricks of my anxious heart. But right away I hear him bumbling into the mudroom, slick with rain, having committed himself to his favorite eternal chore: delighting me. He must have shined a torch around the corners of the winter storehouse, and he has come back with a prize! It’s the last of my spicy bread-and-butter pickles, labeled in the finicky calligraphy I felt was so important last August. (Funny how this shines a torch: on who I was then, a woman one winter younger, a woman who feels like a distant memory.)