on vacation i learned that what i used to call "the part of my world with all the caves in it" is properly called
karstland. it is the best new word i have learned in some time.
anyway we drove through miles & miles of karstland, stopping all the time to take pictures of each other next to gorgeous tacky things: the twenty-foot-high knight-in-armor standing next to the pacific northwest totem pole (cruciform, to boot); the sign for the Little Hope Cemetery; the (!!!) closed-now-for-the-season golgotha fun park �
& we went to mammoth cave & walked around on the paved trails & i kept thinking of what i was walking over & i kept thrilling, seeing hills, listening to spiders running over the dry fallen leaves.
i am (unsurprisingly) afraid of caves but i swore up + down that the next time, the next time i will brave it. it's not the dark or the closeness of course, it's the crawled-upon feeling i get in my skin when i think about cave crickets, other cave creatures that never see the light of day & have no eyes by now anyway. next time, n ext time. i even swiped a national parks service map at mammoth cave so that i can look at the names of all the passages. ruins of karnak. great relief hall. mary's vineyard. rock of gibraltar. alice's grotto.
:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:there was this eerie moment on tuesday when bean + i were stopped at the ring road light & i suddenly lost my breath, thinking "we are here, this is the town i grew up in." later that night when we drove the last couple blocks down neil ave, i felt the same thing in my chest, so maybe it is just a feeling of homecoming.
:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:last night before dani came over for dinner i sank into the bath with candles resting on the rim of the tub & read the beginning of moominpappa at sea & let the cat lick my bathwatery toes which barely broke the surface.
They were always doing something. Quietly, without interruption, and with great concentration, they carried on with the hundred and one small things that made up their world. It was a world that was very private, and self-contained, and to which nothing could be added. Like a map where everything has been discovered, everywhere inhabited, and where there are no bare patches any longer.
� Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea
