home and garden

During the day, she worked in the wood-shop, and in between the cutting and sawing and seasoning of wood-flesh, she would slip away from the humdust of her studio to face the great, leafy out-of-doors. She walked the few meters to her garden half in float and meanwhile kicking up the loose rocks that light had crumbled along the path behind her. The garden was an opening of freestyled plenty: it fanned from the threshold of a house of glass, a conservatory she kept warm and nourished and full of changelings to remember the winters of her childhood. Where she was now, there was no more winter. You could assume that everything living and growing had survived the transition. 

The woman had a friend, another woman who lived on a cliff by the sea. The friend was a version of her Self. This friend was friends with Sinead O'Connor, because she read somewhere that Sinead lived on a cliff by the sea by her self, she read that after sloughing off all the not-her that once was, Sinead had managed to attain a private life of sacred quietude, a life that was resolute in being unresolved, that could smile at the stillness in its teeming—a stillness that had first come-to-surface as "brutality". That's how the woman on the cliff aspired to live, but she also liked the mask of the brutal, it made her curious about the others, about what she could see over her own end, meaning in activity. Even if she were one with the strokes of the sea, she was interested in the port that lined its grassy edge, that drew up from the muckraked bile visitors and goods and, so she thought, answers: news from the unseen, absent else.

The woman would meet her friend at dawn, at an hour when it is tolerable to seek only those you can be with in silence. They went to stumble about the dunes, watching the periwinkle wink, the crawfingers of the sky lifting up the sun. Mornings often began like this, the woman would turn the lights on in the shop and say hello to the passionflowers, the overnight blooms, and then it would be time to search for her friend’s old else in sea and earth’s cleaving. The woman had water by the sea, earth in her garden, fire and wood in her studio—what more could she need. The only element she had forgotten in her picture was metal. It wasn't mentioned in the initial face reading or in any of the preparatory material, but it served, subliminally, as the infrastructure for all of this, because metal had given her a place to dream.