The Spectator Bird (2010)
The Spectator Bird
“The day that started hectic ends morose. I sit here grumbling to myself, while Ruth recuperates with a couple of aspirins and a heating pad. My impulse is to damn Césare, but he is not responsible, he was just being Césare. If I can’t handle the sort of challenge that Césare makes to my chosen life, I had better choose another life.
It has poured all day, if the word “poured” can be used to describe rain that is not vertical but horizontal, mixed with leaves, branches, power failures, and fears... for the windows. We awoke to the shaking and shuddering of the house. Ruth took one look outside and began to mourn. Going to the kitchen to make coffee, I discovered en route that the clerestory windows above the bookcase wall in the living room were leaking, and I spent half an hour on the stepladder taking down kachina dolls, papier-mâché Hindu gods, Hopi bowls, and other bric-a-brac from the drowned top shelf, sponging up a bowlful of water mixed with the cobwebs, dust, and dead flies that Minnie’s house cleaning had left up there, setting a row of breadpans to catch the continuing drip, and removing from the shelves and propping open to dry most of the lifework of Joyce Carol Oates, Edwin O‘Connor, Eugene O’Neill, and Katherine Anne Porter.MoreLess
It has poured all day, if the word “poured” can be used to describe rain that is not vertical but horizontal, mixed with leaves, branches, power failures, and fears... for the windows. We awoke to the shaking and shuddering of the house. Ruth took one look outside and began to mourn. Going to the kitchen to make coffee, I discovered en route that the clerestory windows above the bookcase wall in the living room were leaking, and I spent half an hour on the stepladder taking down kachina dolls, papier-mâché Hindu gods, Hopi bowls, and other bric-a-brac from the drowned top shelf, sponging up a bowlful of water mixed with the cobwebs, dust, and dead flies that Minnie’s house cleaning had left up there, setting a row of breadpans to catch the continuing drip, and removing from the shelves and propping open to dry most of the lifework of Joyce Carol Oates, Edwin O‘Connor, Eugene O’Neill, and Katherine Anne Porter.MoreLess
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