Lolly Willowes

I was reading Lolly Willowes up at the pond, tired after yesterday's akebia purge, level with Lolly Willowes in her early twentieth century search for a way out; I had to remind myself I was the one up at the pond thinking of going in for a swim.

Mr Fortune's Maggot, Sylvia Townsend Warner, up at the pond

The beginning has to be given. Sylvia Townsend Warner borrowed from a library a book about a missionary in the South Seas, she had a dream, and wrote a novel Mr Fortune's Maggot. She sends Mr Fortune to a South Sea Island with increasingly vain and ludicrous missionary intent, seduced by flowers and fruit and a young brown boy, Lueli, who loses his idol as Mr Fortune loses his God, his harmonium and his sewing machine, in an earthquake; and so tells her own tale up to and including the centre parting of her hair and her roundy glasses, her tall boyish poet girlfriend, the remoteness and the passion exotic as a south sea island, ordinary as bathing and eating together, picking flowers, carving your own idol.

Maggot has another meaning, of whimsical decision and its consequence. I was pleased to learn that. It sits well beside the irish habit of 'acting the maggot'.

I read about Mr Fortune's gradual absorption and release into a tropical island up at the pond on another hot day, between dips and lemna retrieval. Transferring lemna to the edges of the pond, making a zone where snails, skaters and beetles can go back to the water, and soft feet press new lemna moss. I admire the warmth and soft roots of the lemna system. Lemna, duckweed, will cover a pond in a week. Very small frogs find their new legs under the edges of the pond; we can all rest there. 

Andrea Bajani

I read a story by Andrea Bajani in the New Yorker, 'Constellation'. I read the New Yorker stories often and rarely do they register, but this one, this take on the limping family at a particular pace with acceptance and curiosity in consort stops me without stopping, in the Finnish way. 

Like so many episodes of household violence, that night came to seem like a hallucination, a lurid memory of something that wasn't connected to our life together and so would eventually, lacking any handhold, fade away.