“wooden house for testing the effects of lightning”

I hoped I’d sleep the whole night through, but which night? Yesterday we woke just before 5 in Paris and at 6 we were walking to Les Halles from our little studio near le musée des Arts et Métiers, the streets dark, a few stragglers from Halloween parties heading home. We were heading home, first to the airport, then a long flight, a taxi ride to collect our car, the ferry, a stop on the way to pick up our cat Winter who’d been in residence at Catnip Cottage, and finally up our long driveway to our waiting house. So which day was it when we arrived home?

It’s been stormy on the Coast. We could tell not only by the flooded road signs along Highway 101 but by the rain falling, falling, as we drove home. It was that big full kind of rain and frogs were leaping on the wet road. I was in bed by 9 but what time was it really? It was already tomorrow in Paris.

I hoped I’d sleep the whole night through, the cat’s body warm against my back, but I woke at 2:20, coming downstairs to the familiar scent of woodsmoke. I went out to the woodshed for a few logs to put on the last coals. The rain has stopped, the sky is clear and starry, and I saw Orion spread out over the woodshed roof. I also saw Jupiter just by Mount Hallowell’s sleeping shoulder and then a shooting stars, one of the early Leonids, I think.

Under the stars, I stood for a few minutes in my nightdress in the absolute darkness. Something was rustling in the woods behind the garden. I didn’t wait to find out if it was a bear or maybe a bull elk full of himself in the late fall rut.

Yesterday, or no, the day before, at the musée des Arts et Métiers, I was very taken by the little model of a wooden house designed to test the effects of lightning. It was held together with wires and could collapse in the most ingenious way. I am thinking of my own house, wooden, on its hill below the stars, and how sometimes I see it as a series of cunning walls and rooftops, held together by our own labour. In the woodshed, whole trees felled and limbed and cut into lengths for the woodstove; the radiance of the heat they provide is a distillation of time I can understand. Overhead, Orion strides the sky, the bright stars of his belt radiant in the darkness. A shooting star fell to the north of Jupiter and I was too confused by the hour–is it tomorrow in Paris, or yesterday, or is it morning yet here?–to make a wish. Tomorrow, whatever that is and whenever it arrives, I have work to do. An essay about wild plants on the trail to Font-de-Gaume, a meditation on time in its own way, and another on labyrinths. Another on stars.