RACHEL HADAS
378
into a generosity of hours. This is a place of time past, for the
ghosts; for the living, it's more like the Wood Between the Worlds
in C. S. Lewis's
The Magician's Nephew-an
interlude, time out.
Even if one is too salted or stunned or befogged to feel
contemplative, the past will unfold, and because of the relative
emptiness of the foreground, will appear clearly.
Squirrel Island is a summer colony of one hundred-odd
houses; many families have been coming for generations. In the
resulting emphasis on kinship and blood ties, the place resembles a
Greek village more than any American counterpart I can think of.
In the Greek village I knew, one would ask a child not "What's your
name?" but "Whose are you?" Last summer on Squirrel, a girl of
five asked which cottage we lived in; another, a little younger,
seeing me without my son, issued this puzzled challenge: "Do you
have a kid?" Both these little girls were using formulaic questions
to place me on their island, that realm which the dream machine
presented one night to my husband as an immense and intricate
map carved up in pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. (I had my own dream
after I'd left Squirrel. The irrigation ditches I'd been reading
about in Stanley Crawford's
Mayordomo,
an account of farming in
New Mexico, were transplanted to the island. But it wasn't water
flowing through them, it was time.)
All social formulae are ways of fitting a person into a preex–
isting structure. They're wonderful for connecting us with an
unchosen, inherited past; less useful in terms of the chosen but
unshared present (compare it to a lover instead of a relative)
which consists of one's work. Vermont, a place where we do work,
is a lot weaker than Squirrel Island on strands of kinship, ritual
formulae, and ghosts.
Here in Vermont I write these lines undistracted by dream
machines, museum rooms. There's a crust of clutter, but most of
it
is functional-no best dishes, no elegant chairs. Whatever
ghosts walk here-l'm not saying there are none-are impatient
of the surface of things. I think they want, as do the living, to
work at a particular project and let the house go hang. And last
summer it seemed to me that the house, knowing it is no one's
priority, knowing it has been relegated to second place in every–
one's daily concerns, if not their affections, has grown stubborn
in return. Stripped of attention if of nothing else, it has retaliated
with
the usual dustballs, spiderwebs, bats, mice, but also perhaps
