I Do Not Know

As noted then in these pages, my brother, Kirk, died two years ago today — an interval which seems much more like one expansive, all-encompassing breath.

I see, meanwhile, that it’s been almost a month since I last wrote. During that time, I’ve felt neither the urge nor the need. And I don’t feel it now. What I do feel is the arrival of spring. Why, then, am I writing? The simplest, truest answer is, I do not know — a phrase with which I’ve become more and more comfortable as I witness, in and around me, the cycle of the changing seasons. Seasons, too, are friends. Maybe I’m writing to them. Their letters are abundant, more so even than those exchanged by my mother and her sisters in their later years, when each would repeat what they’d already written before but forgotten. We have drawers full of them. To read one is to read them all. The sisters wrote because writing letters is what they did. And so maybe I’m writing because writing is what I do, or used to do, for there seems to be a great distance now between myself as one who writes, and as one who simply lives. I love what I’ve written, every word. I love that I’ve written it. And I love that I need write no more, for a month, a year, or even forever.

Letters, of course, can serve other purposes. They don’t have to be written for the benefit of the writer. They don’t have to be written for anyone’s benefit at all. A letter can be written as a simple expression of love. What better use for words can there be? Ask a jubilant robin, a drifting cloud, a glistening pine tree. Then listen.

[ 1942 ]