Before we get into it here’s a poem by my friend Heather Christle that has cropped up in my life in various ways this week. I have only met Heather once, in Kew Gardens, but it was exactly the perfect way to meet a poet. And now I think we are friends across the sea and I have read her new book and it’s so, so good. This poem gave itself to me three times this week, in three separate contexts, which feels like a sign it wants to be read. And so now I give it to you, even though I don’t know why it should be this poem, or that it gets read right now. I only know that it is this poem and that here it is.
You have to live where the house lands on you. It’s something, no? It’s the kind of sentence you say to yourself like a mantra and then the rest of the poem rises up behind you like a warning or a dream. You have to live where the house lands on you! The whole thing is the hard part. Equally, though, the whole thing is the good part. You get to live. The house has landed on you, and now you get to live.
There is a kid in the park outside screaming “Mate! Mate! It’s ok! We’re ok!” And sometimes you do have to scream that. We’re ok! It’s ok! Mate! He is playing football in the park outside the library where I volunteer; and the sun is out and the sky is very soft and the grass is very green. The other day I was walking through the cemetery and I couldn’t figure out why it felt different and why I felt like I was somewhere new. And then I realised all the leaves had come out on the trees almost overnight. Green underwater feeling, like breathing chlorophyll instead of air. I myself feel like I’m breathing out. It was such a long winter, and while I liked lots of it I am so pleased it’s summer. I love to have my ankles out. I love to abandon my coat. I am still toting a jumper around with me, but surely it can’t be much longer.
For the past three (four?) summers I have been gently picturing myself in a black broderie anglaise maxi dress. This dress! I can see it very clearly: all the way to the ground, whimsical and practical, good for sitting cross-legged on the grass, good for summer parties, good for meetings, an everything dress. It needs to be cotton or linen, no polyester, floaty, with floaty sleeves. I would like to wear it with flat black sandals and enormous sunglasses, and ideally with this hat I did not buy from a charity shop in 2019.
When I say I think about this hat every day between May and October every year, I am not joking. It was a perfect hat. It was a stupid hat. It was the biggest straw hat I have ever seen. It was a black straw hat with a huge floppy brim and it could have been mine for £3 and I let it go from me because I felt I could not pull it off successfully and when I tell you it is my sole regret in life I really really mean it.
I said this to my friend— last summer, when I was committing to my annual Lack Of The Hat— and my friend said: your sole regret? Are you serious?
And I was, and I am.
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