Time Erasures

Is it possible to write meaningfully without trespassing into melancholy, into a sense of things lost, or never seized? Time passing too quickly, time leaving time behind, time and the erasures that are time? When I think of the books I love—READING IN THE DARK, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY, SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW, ZOLI—I think of almost. Nearly. Once.

This morning, reading OBJECT LESSONS by Eavan Boland, a gift of a book sent by the deep and dear Ivy Goodman, I find these words, and I know them to be true. They make me want to write again, to try to wrestle the past from the past, to enter into once.

"This is the way we make the past. This is the way I will make it here. Listening for hooves. Glimpsing the red hat which was never there in the first place. Giving eyesight and evidence to a woman we never knew and cannot now recover. And for all our violations, the past waits for us."

And on another note altogether (but maybe not really), good morning, Katrina Kenison. I'm privileged to share this early dark writerly space with you.