Read Online Extra Innings by Doris Grumbach - Free Book Online Page A

possessed of what in Hebrew folklore is called a gilgul . The soul of the mayfly seems to have entered into me, and I can think of nothing but the ephemera of time and the permanence of death, of bright life and then the dark, like the blackout at the end of a skit in an inconsequential revue.
    Today we planted more bulbs, and accompanied them with mothballs, one ball to a bulb. It may be that the odor will discourage the avaricious squirrels. The ground is cold but very dry. I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line: ‘Mine, O thou lord of life / Send my roots rain.’
    I am rereading parts of Hermione Lee’s excellent life of Willa Cather. It is full of original, useful insights, so good that I despair of ever going back to my notes to do the book I once planned. Perhaps it is as well. In the ten or more years that I have been thinking about Cather, I seem to have taken on some of her personal characteristics. Lee remarks upon her ‘grumpy repudiation of the modern world.’ The adjective has now grown familiar: Helen Yglesias, my good novelist friend who lives a few miles away from us in Brooklin and who provides me with much of the literary talk I sometimes crave, calls me ‘grumpy’ in her Women’s Review of Books piece, and I must be, because readers and reviewers detect something of that tone in my book.
    Hard as it is to do, I take up End Zone and review my stated dislikes. Now, three years later, the edges of my discontents seem to have softened, perhaps because I am protected against the noise, pollution, crowds. I go, with reluctance, into the world and then come back, full of relief that this place is still here.
    Sometimes I worry that I rely too much on this place for my salvation. Have I made a fetish of it, am I obsessed with it? Yet when I am here, I am content, protected, free, less grumpy, I think.…
    And then, this morning, as I wrote these last words, there was a knock on the door. A lady who owns the house on the edge of the Point, within sight of the front of our house and across the Cove, asks if Wayward Books will be open today. I tell her Sybil has gone to look at books in Surry and should be back soon. I invite her in to wait.
    She tells me that she and her husband occupy the grey house close to the edge of the Reach. They are there a few weekends in the fall and spring, and in the summer. We talk about closing houses for the winter and then she tells me that their house was vandalized last winter. Some young boys from the area (one from Deer Isle) broke in, for some reason decided to trash all the photographs on the wall, broke things but stole nothing, and left. The photographs were old, valuable ones of the Cove, the Point, the Reach, nineteenth-century views of Sargentville and Sedgwick.
    So. I have been deluded. There is no absolute safety, even here. Twice trashed in the District of Columbia, we came to the Cove to escape the threat of the destructive city, only to have our neighbor’s house on the Point damaged. I should keep in mind what I once knew but seem to have wanted to forget, that Shakespeare’s Henry VI told his soldiers: ‘In ourselves our safety lies.’
    Looking through a reprint of an old book, Divine Poems by Francis Quarles, I am reminded that faith offers another security, echoed in Martin Luther’s hymn:
    Great God! there is no safety here below;
    Thou art my fortress, thou that seem’st my foe.
    Resolved to be more cheerful (and not to fall back into the desolation and despair of my seventieth winter), I read my mail. There is a letter from a woman with whom I went to summer camp when we both were teenagers. Helen Mandelbaum has an incredible memory and recalls that I thought up charades for her ‘bunk.’ A camper appears with dirt smeared on her forehead: Soily Temple. And a girl named Ann stands crying. The rest of the bunk touches her slightly as they pass her by: Presbyterian (press by teary Ann). How