The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore

Author:Kathleen Dean Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2011-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

WHERE SHOULD I LIVE, AND WHAT SHOULD I LIVE FOR?

OUR LITTLE HOUSE SITS close by the university on a laurel-hedged lot that is fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long. Frank and I walk to work; the trip takes eight minutes. Day and night, I hear the pump on my neighbor’s artificial waterfall, drowning out even the sound of rain on my own roof. The neighbor’s bedroom window is ten feet from my own, and when she runs her clothes dryer, I breathe ClingFree fabric softener for hours. Sometimes I climb out the window to our rooftop porch, to sleep under the absence of stars in a pink glow that comes from the campus greenhouses—for some unimaginable, probably toxic, reason. When I look across the yard, I can count the pages as my neighbor reads under his spotted calfskin lamp.

I want to live in a house where I can watch coyotes out the window, a small glass and cedar house reflected in bright water that smells of juniper and melting snow. A place so remote I can’t see a light from any other house, and so near the stars that the constellations disappear in clouds of starlight. A place where pine siskins whisper me awake in the morning and chickadees land on my hand. During the working day, the place will sing in my ear and I will write down its words and wisdom, longhand. In the evenings, my family will come together to sit by a small fire, looking up with gentle smiles when our coyotes howl or migrating cranes fly overhead, bugling. I have dreamed all my life of living in this house.

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