January Questions

January wind wooshes outside the cabin. I sit in an armchair covered in sage green wool velveteen -- the same fabric that once upholstered passenger train seats. The upholstery man who recovered the chair told me that, years ago now.

And just like that, in this exact spot in the text, I don’t know what to tell you next. Or what to ask.

The upholstery man was tall, lanky, cranky. It’s odd how frequently I think of him.

I’ve been sitting in this chair for thirty years. I’ve knitted in it, read, written, petted the cat, talked on the phone, daydreamed.

Before it was reupholstered, it was covered in the same kind of fabric, only in a dark salmon color, faded and worn in spots, quiet as a dusty rose.

It’s an old chair, an antique that spent its winters waiting for its people to return to a cabin near Lake Superior every summer. And then I became its people, and I lived here year around.

Here: beside a shallow inland lake on Lake Superior, up north in Michigan.

Life has seemed good to me here. It is both cozy and dramatic. Beautiful and lonely. Interesting and boring. Whenever I’m gone for more than a few days, I begin to yearn to come back.

All of the above: still true. And yet.... and yet. Through all the years I worked towards making it cozy, making it my little jewel-box-refuge home, I cradled some kind of expectation, some everyday habit of hope and anticipation, a leaning-forwardness that now seems to have turned on me, or if not turned on me, to have abandoned me. Or if not abandoned, ambled a few steps away, just far enough that I can’t see it or smell it anymore.

How is it that this attitude, this way of being, has flown? Where has it gone? And where has time gone?

Well, these become everyone’s questions, don’t they?

(And what if it isn’t flown and time isn’t gone? What if it’s all still here, or anyway, near? Just waiting to be rediscovered? What then? What would be my next move?)

And sitting tucked up in this chair in the front corner of the house, a corner which used to be a screened-in porch with a red-painted floor (I stripped and sanded these floors myself, many years ago; I bought the orange-scented stripper that even though ‘natural’ and ‘non-toxic’ (less toxic?), sent me bolting for the lake when I slopped some on my skin; I scraped and scraped at the layers of surely lead-based paint; I rented the floor sander from the hardware in Sault Ste. Marie a hundred miles away; I ordered the gym floor finish to put down at the end of all that), I want to answer the questions. Or anyway, I want to try.

(Suspicion: trying is the answer.)