Mirrored Transoms

Our neighbor has been renovating her condo for almost a year. Just cosmetic changes, she said, but the place has been gutted, the hundred-year-old chair rails and trim are gone. Now there are all sorts of soft gray built-ins, floors stained fashionably dark, wallpaper, and so on. I know because we live next door and I poke my head in from time to time to fret over what the workmen are doing.

It took me weeks to see what’s been done to the high transom windows (our ceilings are eleven feet high) over the doors and the front entry-way. I kept thinking there were lights on in there, but one day I just stood and looked. I got a flashlight and shone it on the windows. The light bounced back at me. She’d had them covered with mirrors! What I’d been seeing was the lit hallway.

If I stood on a ladder, I’d be seeing myself.

I can’t help looking up every day as I pass, harboring a vague sense of being shut out. A general sense of a soft glimmer at the junction of what I can and can’t know. I wish I had words for this feeling.

Not exactly glimmer. More like a thought that travels past the boundary, past the gravitational field, and thins outward until some distant source sends it back to you. More like the way you see a creek running under grasses when the sun hits it. Oh, there it is! Like when I head out for a walk behind our historic buildings, along the warren of trails up on the hill. I’m exploring, in a sense, another world: this summer a peace sign woven of vines hung from one of the trees. Who put it there? Who took it down? The flat old water tank in the woods is decorated with amazingly skillful graffiti, overlaid so thick on the old graffiti, the whole is a blast of cartoon-fat signatures and designs from the secret world of teenagers, of gentle insurrectionists.

The path is soggy these days, leaves making the slopes, especially the rocks, slippery. Where the trail dips down into the cedars, the broken-down organic matter is black as tar and clings to my shoes. It is secret and dark in here. Now I am “in here.” Wherever else my thoughts have gone, when I reach this stretch, I am entirely here. Alien and muddy, at the lowest spot.

There is something crucial about this: wandering to the low point, as if I have to feed on it. There are no words there, but that’s probably the point. I have to stare into that, and later, the words are never right, but I have to try. There was my cancer, then the words for it, then words for me (fear, sorrow), and then the wordlessness beneath the words.

The same feeling from high up instead of low, when Jerry and I were standing on the Cliffs of Moher—cocooned up there, same as cocooned down there, for a few minutes, a strange and looser attachment to the mundane earth. The whipping wind—and my mind then turns to our condo, on the third floor. When the wind blows—as it does particularly hard off Grand Traverse Bay a few blocks away—the sound is eerie, otherworldly. Our huge building used to be the Northern Michigan State Asylum. I can imagine the mental patients living here long ago, hearing the sound of wild, uncontrollable spirits, trying to eat, dress, bathe, with the spirits raging in their ears.

Everything I write eventually bumps into that mirror. When I can’t see any farther, there goes my mind, taking on the problem. When I was a child, at our lake there was Old Dave, who lived in a little house not a quarter mile up what’s now called Woody Knoll Road. We walked all the way to the top picking wild blackberries for Old Dave, we said, wanting an altruistic reason for the picking. When our buckets were full, we...