Indira Ganesan, Stumptown Roasters’ Beans Grinding, Seattle, WA

There’s a term I’ve learned out here on the Cape called “hiding.”  I first heard it used when a young barista said, “Where have you been?  Have you been hiding?”  True, I had not been a frequent visitor lately, making coffee at home, using the internet at home, breakfasting at home.  Four months later, I find myself using the term, as an apology for not being around, for not being in the community eye.  The community eye is different from the public eye, for all the apparent reasons.  The community eye is the one that cares, notices, is concerned, however momentarily.  It is the eye, perhaps, that draws us out of hiding, helps relinquish ties to the solitary pleasures of reading, working, television to look up,reconnect.

It is easy for a year-rounder to hide in a resort town; one wants quiet.  But these are the days of quiet, the February of the mildest of winters.  It is easy to lose track of time, if not thoughts.

It is easy to lose sight of my studio.  I have a separate studio space, 95 square feet, a tiny house all of its own, if it were outfitted with plumbing.  It is full of art made by friends, postcards, as well as the ephemera of a writing life’s accumulation.  To get another cup of coffee, I must walk back home, not a far distance.  So perhaps a coffee machine, water, a mug is in order.  At MacDowell, picnic baskets containing lunch are left outside a writer’s studio.  I can’t remember if there were hotpots.

In any case,  it’s easy enough to cover the short distance, enter the studio and write.  I nearly wrote “work.”  After all this time, there is still in me a sense of  superfluousness about the verb, “write.”  Yet there is nothing superfluous about books, reading, other writers’ work.  But writing is work; chosing whether or not to begin a sentence with the word “but” is work.  Nice work, though.

Image: markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

From where I sit, I can see horses.  What a privilege to write such a sentence.  Yes, I must first look past the fire escape-styled terrace (nicer than the fire escape in the apartment I lived in as a child, but for all purposes a fire escape), then the bare wintering trees, and yes, I can see all the neighboring condos and huge houses, but there is a red stable, and when I don’t expect it, there passes the slender figure of a horse, startling me out of reverie. I think at first it is a deer I see, but in an instant, I see the horse I’ve come to regard as a friend.

My immediate neighbors are two artists, a musician, a poet, and a toddler, and if that isn’t romantic, then what is?  And, and,  in my view. are horses.  My dear college professor, Mr. Gifford, uses italics to impart humor, I remember now, remembering too the letters I mean to write.  A friend in San Diego lives in a condo that faces the sea, and she has a wall of windows that let her see every day the crash of waves.  Here, I hardly go to the sea, content with this view of trees, stable, horse. It’s not permanent, of course. And maybe it’s distracting.  I havent mentioned the birds that flit.  Fly.

close up of teapot by David Miller/dreamtime

Up until mid-week, it was all coffee and paper, comparison and contrast, puzzling over a sentence.  Then off went the electronic draft, followed by a solid hefty manuscript in the mail.  I made this delectable pancake for a breakfast celebration, substituting some main ingredients with what I had on hand, but it was nevertheless a royal treat.  I had gone to Mysore practice before as well–funny how things always taste better after yoga.  Later, with the oven still hot, feeling industrious,I baked an acorn squash, and then decided I needed a nap.

Today, I had the very odd underwater sensation of now, what?  What comes next?  I skipped yoga, never a wise move. I put in a load of laundry.  I began to read Tender by Nigel Slater in which he recounts the beginnings of his fruitful,splendid patch of land, and I tried to imagine what a garden, my garden, my garden of least effort, might look like.  A garden of least effort would require lots of leafing through catalogs, drinking many cups of tea, plotting in a notebook.  It would be a garden of winter leisure dreaming. I still don’t have an armchair.  Doesn’t every garden dreamer’s winter need one?  Overstuffed, taking too much room, piles of books and cups underneath?  Maybe I’ll just throw a coverlet over my slender couch and pretend it’s an armchair.  I’m already pretending I’ll have a garden.