ice

“It can’t be out of gas,” Bob told me, as he loaded a full gas container into the bike basket. I had just hiked back up the mountain road to home, after the truck ditched me down below while I was en route to Margaret’s house. Bob offered a couple further words about how I should stay away from mechanical things because I have some kind of force-field that makes them not work, and then he headed out on the bike.

Now I feel like I’m coming down with a virus, and my body isn’t working in top form either. So I’m here on the sofa with my notebook of lists beside me. Even if I can’t do the things right now, it makes me feel better to have them written down.

One of these things will be to make marmalade again, following Delia’s recipe. This time I have Seville oranges, bright round morsels of treasure that Bob brought back from Seattle before Christmas, so I’ll follow the recipe faithfully and won’t branch out into any pectin-sugar chemistry experiments on my own. I’ve gotten as far as poaching the oranges and lemons, and cooling them, but now I have to borrow or buy sugar — I don’t keep enough in the house, it turns out, since marmalade requires heaps and heaps of it.

Walking back up the road from where the truck abandoned me, I noticed the intense stillness in the woods. This is the kind of winter day where the sky is a solid blanket of grey, and it feels like there’s not one molecule moving in any direction. The air is as damp as the ground, everything paused, waiting for something to change. The broken ice in the photo has been in our front yard for days now. It was from rain that froze last week on the canvas folds of the big (yes, also broken) Costco tent that Bob spread out on the grass. The tent had been covering lumber, but got picked up by wind in November and thrown into the woods with all six of its feet in the air.

Bob just came back in the door and told me the truck has no spark, so he’s gathering tools together and biking back down there to try to resuscitate the thing. Typical wintertime; one starts to imagine the cold stillness flowing out from under the trees and quelling all sparks from wherever they still burn: generator, truck, body.