Wednesday, October 13, 2010

In which I meet myself a year later, setting out


It was a year ago today that I started this almanac. Consider this a candle in a cupcake. Or in a pumpkin.

Interesting to create your own year of something. It turns out that the journey is the destination, but you need the circularity, too. If you close the circle, however briefly, you've got something. It's the wisdom of tree rings.

(Try telling this to French prisoners marching around and around in a dank cell. The wisdom of tree rings, mes amis!)

Anyway, as I pass by the depot of October 13, I see myself here last year, out of a job, nervously addressing the world as every blogger must the first time, presuming that I have something worth saying (let alone reading) in that first one, about how October had come into its own, and how my identity has long been bound up in this birth month of mine whose defining holiday carries my first name, and whose own name carries my last. Hal-loween Oct-Ober, get it? (The pumpkin on the front porch nods. Got it.)

Off you go, then, old Hatch.

As for my present-day October 13, I spent a good hour of it at the edge of Spy Pond, on a ledge of rock, admiring the clarity of light and sound. Speaking voices carried from the far shore as if a few yards away. Colors had an almost lacquered brilliance. "Extraordinary light," I wrote. Sometimes you have to take the time to write extraordinary.

The Arlington High Spy Ponders were visiting their namesake, as they do every autumn, gliding around in long sculls. "Follow me and Annabelle," instructed the coxswain. Then: "Annabelle, what are you doing?" Punctuation of a barking dog.

A big fish jumped. The sun, the one in the water, jumped around too, in nervous flashes. Elsewhere in the pond it shimmered in an inverted ziggurat.

So goes a year. Goodbye to something, I wrote in the pad. Hello to something else.

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