Oh but that is your voluntary death, insists Mary Lamb. Entirely up to you—& off she goes again to the madhouse to be wrapped in forgetfulness. Not her own forgetfulness. The madwoman does not forget. The world around her is the forgetful substance. She, on the other hand, is mad because she remembers.
Are you not angry? Mary Lamb asks me.
—& this is the question with which she leaves me, steeping in what she has named my unacknowledged rage. This, says Mary Lamb, is the poison causing your paralysis of the limbs, your agony in the bowel.
—& off she flies, light as a fairy, into her sanctuary.
I love Rydal when the sun slips onto the water at morning—even if the distant sound of the hammer begins & rings incessant through the mist—Sun & mist whiten the water. You cannot really see the mist. It’s only sufficient to diffuse the light so the lake looks as if it is made of…crystal…milk…Sometimes there’s a little bit of ice at the edge, just a little bit of ice & a few flakes floating white…
The sounds that infiltrate are getting worse & worse. The smells that infiltrate are getting worse & worse, stench & racket from industry & progress. But our sycamore with its serious beauty—it’s not a nonchalant kind of tree, it’s a—hear that echo, hear that hammer—the sycamore moves in the very slight breeze, its dry leaves uttering a whisper that—can it not remain on the—just on the—hopeful side of sombre?
The Terrace saves me. Sounds roar beyond it. Horrible buildings loom outside it. The new road snakes around it. Inside the Terrace sighs the influence of the trees, much like the influence of the stars in that book I hardly read—Who can bind the sweet influences of Pleiades?—Scripture can be beautiful but I admit I just don’t have a taste for it when the air itself inside the Terrace is pregnant & alive—
& no, I have never been pregnant, but I have been alive, even now when the branches are nearly bare, winter a thing nobody loves enough. The architecture. Skeletons. Bones of the trees, & the air clinging & dancing all around & hanging there grey & white, white & rain-coloured. Those are the colours of the living air in winter. Those are the colours of the Wordsworth siblings. The living air inside the terrace is like a mind. It is my mind teeming, slumbering, dreaming—flying, floating, hanging, moving in wind-riven play—
I must beg James to drag me out onto the Terrace again.
But the wind!
The wind had scattered willow leaves on the moss & the moss caught them in perfect formation where they fell & clung. So that as Dixon dragged me by it in the cart, I saw the image of the willow tree on the moss, created by its cast-down leaves. There was something violent about them, yet each leaf retained its perfect oval beauty with its graceful elongation & points at each end. It was as if somebody had shed…their work. Someone had created work beautiful & alive, & had, in a fit, cast it on the ground—
& when I looked up at the naked willow, blackened leaves shivered on a single branch, the rest denuded.
The tree was aghast, its bark down below incised deeply.
At that moment it flung a few last leaves down—
& when a mere handful of leaves—dry & rattling in the storm—is cast upon your face with that much force, it stings like a rain of nails—
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank my family, friends and colleagues, without whose help and support the research and writing of this book would not have happened. With special thanks to the following: Jean Dandenault and the Dandenault family, Helen Humphreys, Jeff Cowton and The Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Dr. Polly Atkin, Dr. Will Smith, Dr. Shelley Snow, Char Davies and the Reverie Foundation, Quebec Writers’ Federation, Lynn Verge and the Atwater Library, Syd and Maureen Boulton, Barbara Muir Wight, Elizabeth Dillon, Brenda Keesal, Meredith Fowke, Elise Moser, Mini Carleton Group, Tiny House Farm, Michael Winter, T.L. Winter, Paul Winter, Christine Pountney, Margaret Spooner, Daniel Karrasch, Rebecca Krinke, Enid Stevenson, Arthur Griffin, Art Andrews, Anne Hardy, Ernest de Sélincourt, Susan Levin, James Dixon, Esther Wade and Juliette Dandenault. I thank my agent Shaun Bradley, assistant editor Rick Meier, copy editor Melanie Little, and designer Jennifer Griffiths. Very special thanks to my editor Lynn Henry, and to the land and living entities upon it that have nurtured and inspired Dorothy Wordsworth and all of us, especially trees, rock, water and plants. I thank Sufi my rescue dog, who has rescued me. And thank you, Dear Reader.
kathleen winter’s novel Annabel was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Orange Prize, and numerous other awards. It was also a Globe and Mail “Best Book,” a New York Times “Notable” book, a Quill & Quire “Book of the Year” and #1 bestseller in Canada. It has been published and translated worldwide. Her Arctic memoir Boundless (2014) was shortlisted for Canada’s Weston and Taylor non-fiction prizes, and her most recent novel Lost in September (2017) was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award. Born in the UK, Winter now lives in Montreal.
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