GRAFTON — Winter has had its way with me. I've stopped leaping out of bed in the mornings and saying to the cat, “Hooray, it's a new day! Let's get on with it!”
No longer is each day a mystery. I know what it promises - more time on the tractor performing snow rearrangement and horse manure removal and less time writing.
Now, even the prospect of two uninterrupted hours at my desk doesn't excite me. My cat, who normally sleeps later than I do, has to stand on my chest and yowl to wake me up. I stagger to the kitchen muttering, “Coffee. I must have coffee.”
Once a week, I drive to the feed store in Chester for supplies, but what I really need is to see proprietor Mike Erskine's welcoming smile and hear him say, “Only 35 more days 'til the equinox.” He's been counting since the 1st of January.
The last time I visited, Mike said, “I've been thinking of crossing off the days on my calendar.” I told him I'd been thinking the same thing - each cold day marked off with a big red “X” - but it occurred to me that I'd be marking off one fewer day to live, and that seems like bad ju-ju. Mike agreed.
* * *
This morning, two hours before dawn, 31 days until the equinox, I climb the stairs to my writing room, mug of coffee in hand, and the cat follows.
“You have to change your attitude,” she mews, “because, frankly, you've become rather boorish.”
I know what ails me. It's the-lower-than-a-snake's-belly-can't-raise-my-eyes-from-the-underworld-too-bloody-cold blues. A Google search for that malady came up empty, and I wanted to rule out Mad Cow Disease so I typed in “Winter Blues.”
“Symptoms: Impatience, irritability, lethargy, sugar cravings and difficulty concentrating and processing information.”
I suffer from all of the above and a few that research hasn't yet revealed. Hypochondria. Melodramatic thoughts. Talking to myself. Talking to the cat. Swearing at inanimate objects, such as frozen doubled-end snaps on the horses' feed tubs and the water buckets. And the most pesky symptom - Computer Aversion Syndrome.
This morning, my hand refuses to lift the lid of my laptop. The cat has settled into her customary place beneath my desk.
“How about you write the column today?” I plead. “It will be more cogent.”
She shoots me a baleful look and covers her ears with her paws. Great - now I'm hallucinating, too.
* * *
I rummage in a desk drawer and find a yellow legal pad crumpled from disuse, and the vintage fountain pen given to me by a writer friend long ago.
A humble Wearever made in the 1930s, it was designed to be affordable and never had the cachet of more expensive, famous pens, such as Mont Blanc. The Wearever is beautiful nonetheless, marbled with rich browns and golds and patches of iridescent turquoise.
The corroded nib of the pen looks like a lonely relic discovered in an archeological dig. Waves of nostalgia and regret course through my heart.
I feel as though I've returned to an old lover - one I shouldn't have left - and I say to the pen, “Forgive me for forsaking you.” If it had legs, it would run out of the house in search of a more appreciative owner.
I settle for a dusty pencil and tentatively begin to move it across the paper. I'd almost forgotten the light, easy way it nestles between my fingers. The memory is contained in my hand, though, and after two shaky lines, the hand falls into a groove.
Outside, the wind rips through the pines, belting out a rambunctious tune like the ghost of Ethel Merman on steroids.
I write slowly and steadily, savoring the feel of the pencil moving across paper. The words transmit from my hand automatically, as if they've been waiting for the right medium to show up. The wind, still overamplified, has ceased to be a torment.
A curious sense of freedom envelopes me. Disconnected from the computer, I feel like I'm engaged in a furtive act: a Luddite uprising of one. It is my delicious little secret.
* * *
I remember my first writing teacher, Dr. Theodora West, telling our class on the short story, “the story you write on the keyboard will be different than the one you write by hand.” No one owned a computer.
On my desk at home, there was a Remington portable typewriter. Pencils and pens were crammed in an old mustard crock, and I let the story, the essay, or the poem tell me which implement to choose.
Poems always wanted to be written in pencil. Op-ed pieces, restaurant reviews, and interviews with rock bands called for the tapping of keys.
When I got my first computer, I was enamored of its sophistication, speed, and organizational skills. Subsequent computers were ever more efficient. Now the stories never get a vote. Every morning I simply open my computer and start typing. It's a reliable secretary but not a source of tactile pleasure.
“Writing is physical,” Natalie Goldberg wrote in her book Writing Down the Bones. There are moments when I fear I've been seduced by technology and it has deprived me of some physicality. Words materialize on the screen like magic, but they appear disembodied, without real weight. Maybe it's dark magic, keeping me from direct contact with words and one step removed from sensation.
When author and storyteller Donald Davis talks about writing, he says that “the book you can't see is the one you put down.” I would add that all the senses must be employed in certain genres - sight, sound, taste, touch, smell - ideally guided by a whisper of the sixth sense, a way of seeing and knowing deep beneath the words.
I don't believe that technology necessarily dulls our senses; luminous work is produced on computers every day. But stories don't spring solely from the intellect; they emerge from the body, too. They are stored in our blood, bones, and breath, often undisturbed by consciousness until something rouses them.
The catalyst might be the hand connecting with wood and paper, or the aroma of French roast brewing in the press, or February's Full Snow Moon illuminating the dusky path to the barn, or the low, melodious nicker of a horse calling for his morning feed.
We have a global slow-food movement. Maybe a slow-write movement would be a worthy experiment.
The pencil glides across the paper. I follow its lead. The cat purrs at my feet, and the day ahead is once more a mystery.