DEAR RENÉ

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writers’ musings:

‘To write, for me, is not necessary, as gunpowder needs to explode. I do this because I can, not because I have to.’

Kenneth Tynan

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Dear Rene,

Happy Valentines Day!

There’s nothing to worry about, as far as I’m concerned.  You can rest easy.  For one thing, I seem to be in good health aside from the asthma, which just requires management, and after my own bout with cancer and last year’s treatment (which was a bitch but it’s over with now.)

I’m in the house here in Anderson Valley, so so far from the agora.  I love living in the house we caused to come into being: all those trips here after we bought the property, the familiarizing, the encounters with this person and that, the choosing of the ones who would make this into a realization, the sessions, our vacillations, decisions, the check-writing, the endless check-writing.  Digging wells.  Moving earth.  Remember?  How amazing it was, really, to find that people quite knew what they were doing around here.  We sure didn’t. I love the valley.  It’s beautiful.  I have privacy, space, elbow room, and good air to breathe, as you know.  But I must say it outright: I may not remain here.  It’s just not the right fit, dear husband, dear husband.  We did it all those years ago, more than twenty-six, to be exact, for romantic reasons.  Now, though, the practicalities are staring me in the face.  I’ll be 80 in a rabbit twitch.  I ought to move while I still have the strength.

I think I’ve said this before:  if you’d told me when I was 22 that I would be living by myself on the side of a mountain in a rural valley as a widow, I would have thought that was a hilarious idea.  Yet here I am.  It’s so unlikely.  So I still marvel at it: me measured against me.

I won’t leave it for awhile.  It’s a taffy pull to think of leaving it.  There are things that are wonderful.  Of course I’ve gotten to know people here, little gregarian that I am, but I’m not embedded here.  I’m embedded in my own universe: my home, my desk, my books, my mind, my routine.

You know, since you left, the world has gotten weirder than ever.  The ground has shifted, perhaps inalterably.  The unquestioned abundance that we all relied upon has actually evaporated to a degree.  There was a pandemic that you just missed, and probably just as well.  A pandemic!  A microbe, a murderous virus, came along.  We were collectively a little wild with fear, with good reason, as people succumbed.  Our unquestioned lifestyle began to fray.  The society shut down for a while, believe it or not.  The government was inadequate.  But astonishingly, vaccines materialized in record time, and science saved the day.  There are crazies out there who don’t trust that, what idiots.  But society resumed and the massive machinery of the world started up again.  It proved a good thing that I hightailed it out of LA, Big Bad LA, and parked here in Boonville for the duration.  That pandemic was a guiding motivation for making that decision, actually.

The kids are just fine!! Worldly madness intensifies, though. The Middle East is more and more anxiety-provoking. Sovereign countries, people, tribes, believers, non-believers, just cannot seem to live with each other. Fascism has prominently re-surfaced. The politics of the US has gone mad (is the clear decline of our system now permanently distorted?) Ignorance, intensified racism, anti-semitism, DESPOTISM, are banging us over our collective heads.

Your time on this earth hit some of the zeniths of our era.  I am understanding that I’m getting closer now to falling off the edge of the earth myself - which will be okay.  The adaptations required to live in this ever-altering world are demanding.  We all get out of breath, you see.

I miss you so.

Your Wyf.

byline:  Judith Auberjonois written 7.19.22