Composed by Dr. G on Nov 11
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Alone
My father is gone. Though he was eccentric and prone to colorful rages against the academic world and smelled mildly of fungi, he provided my sister and I with room for imagination, encouragement of free thought, and made fine sausages – in short I will miss him greatly. The dawn broke to reveal his bed an empty nest of knotted sheets. The flash alarm had worked, but my sister and I must have been so overwhelmed with fatigue the flash penetrated our eyelids only to be engulfed into our fitful dreams. Now, we are left alone in the northern woods of New Hampshire, in a foreign house, in a cold room, surrounded by my fathers’ equipment and the heavy scent of maple syrup.Despite inquiries and exclamations of concern Molly seems coolly unconcerned by our lack of guardian, instead she insists that he embarked into the grey morning to walk off the fever of last night. My sister and I exchange a knowing glance – there is no chance that my father would voluntarily leave our room without his reading glasses, his silver twelve-chime lunar cycle pocket watch, his beloved leather-bound notebook – or his daughters. Molly skillfully avoided our piercing stares, and instead poked at the dieing embers in the Andes kitchen cook stove. She took great breaths and blew at the embers – but her eyes were focused somewhere else. Oddly absent from her usual corner was Molly’s mother – in her chair only a matted skein of moth-eaten grey wool.
Confusion and loneliness can be overwhelming emotions, but they are a poor excuse for bad manners. We ate our plates of pancakes, steaming into the cool kitchen air and set about silently devising the retrieval of our father.
Composed by Dr. G on Nov 11
flash
We slept fitfully last night. The house itself shook from a spring storm, bringing in a torrent of rain, lashing at the windows and erasing what was left of the spring snow. As the wind howled around us my fathers fever grew worse. Near 2:00 in the morning the storm passed, and the moonlight poured in, spotted and filtered by the clouds pushing past. My eyes sprung open – and there, in the night, I felt the sound of another’s presence in the darkness. Like a solitary gargoyle torn from its heights, there crouched a figure over my father in the night, its arm extended, its hand over his mouth.I was paralyzed by fear, my eyelids glued open, my mouth unable to open to scream. The figure turned its head to me, but in the darkness I could see nothing but a silhouette against the window. Clouds passed in front of the moon – and the gable room was plunged, once again into darkness. When the moonlight streamed in again the figure was gone. My Father’s labored breath was left accompanied by Lenore’s. I swallowed hard and held my breath to silence the pace of my own breath and listen intently in the silence of the room, and could hear only the settling sounds of the old house.
I wanted to sleep, but could not allow myself. I prodded my sister awake, and together manufactured an alarm. We tied a string to the old Bennington doorknob, and, through a series of pulleys to my father’s metal tray of magnesium flash power where it connected to a flint wheel. If anyone tried to get into the room – the entire room would be awakened by a blinding flash.
Composed by Dr. G on Oct 17
Poultice
I have taken over my father’s journal, perhaps I will not prove as erudite, or as sapient as he, but with my sister Lucia’a help, and my father’s wishes in mind I take it on. The cut which marred my father’s hand only a few days ago has festered, a brilliant red spiraled our from the wound in my father’s palm and a fever took him in the night, not sleeping, but tossing and turning until the bed itself seemed to rock like a boat on turbulent waters. This morning he had grown quite still, and his side quite rigid, black infection spidered up his forearm. Throughout the day Mrs. Crunkshank has patted in and out of the room, clucking her tongue and slowly shaking her head. We are anxious, my sister and I, concerned with the medical techniques of this women – On the iron stove in the kitchen she built poultice, and I left my father’s side to note its formulation: water, clay, Anise Seed Oil, a heavy dollop of lavender honey, mothballs, cabbage and spoonfuls of what appeared to be dried and ground chicken mushrooms. She stirred this for some time before ladling it into a bowl.I turned and rejoined my sister where she read from the Hoard’s Dairyman at my father’s side. She was just finishing an article on the proper horizontal alignment of the Jersey’s ears, and how it could be achieved through cedar ear splints, when Mrs. Crunkshank entered the room. With a large wooden spoon she scooped up a heap of the concoction and threw a wad of it down onto my father’s forearm. She smeared the brown, foul smelling stuff into the arm, then ripped off leaves from a bundle of spring burdocks and made a poultice of the leaves and mixture, finally securing the entirety with a rope of old rags.
As the evening draws close my sister and I pour over my fathers notebooks, and intend to find and implement a cure of our own.
Composed by Dr. G on Oct 17
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Composed by Dr. G on Jun 09
Developing
In the field things had been discouraging. We arrive each morning to check our equipment, and several mornings the sight of tripped shutters filled us with a powerful anticipation. Hours have been spent arched over developer waters, swooning with the heady fumes of the darkroom. Murky images developed, revealing only two startled chipmunks, a squirrel, a rabbit, two bats, a martin and a badger; all with an apparent taste for blueberry jam. Though this may have given others a cause for despair, I was heartened. If this foray into the world of photographing the Others is a failure, I am optimistic for an alternate career in photographing wildlife.Then came this morning. Once again we made our way out to the pasture through the early hours of the spring day, which are, in my opinion, the most heartening of all the season’s mornings. The coolness of the passing night wafts up in searching tendrils from the frozen earth, it permeates your woolies and seeps down into your bones. Then the sunlight rises over the hills and pierces the grey, warming the back of your neck and smoothing away the cold from your reddened knuckles. This morning was such a morning. My optimism was increased when the girls ran off before me to yell back that one of the shutters had been tripped. Lucia and Lenore (the L’s) have become quite capable with the photographic equipment now and so removed the negative holder before I had even arrived into the clearing. Sometimes their talents and skills are so great that I forget that they are still little girls – but not this morning. As they ran toward me they quarreled over the plate holder, a tug of war resulted in the plate holder flying through the air and knocking with a crack on the trunk of a near by maple. The girls were suddenly quiet – heads cast downward.
My darkroom is a makeshift affair – a boarded off section of the cellar, with an old pantry table, enameled pans of chemicals – and a pane of red glass squeezed over a small basement window. The negative was placed into a tin frame and immersed, like a wick in tallow, in the developer. The problem was, however, that this negative had a sizeable crack in it – having suffered a collision with the maple tree – so the negative had to be forcibly squeezed into two holders with enough tension to hold the truncated glass, but in doing so my hands, slick with chemicals, slipped – and the jagged edge of the glass was pushed deep into my palm. I ignored the slice, but noticed dark crimson blooms erupting in developer, blood dripping off my index finger. I wrapped a rag of muslin around my hand, and continued on with the development. But these are far from ideal darkroom conditions. Moldy spiders, long dead, remained suspended from their webs in their basement catacomb. When I felt a scurry in my hair my natural reaction was to shoo away the offending beastie, but the action resulted in my muslin bandage knocking against the red glass. A shock of daylight lit the room – and, sadly, solarized my negative. The offending creature, a harmless moth, fluttered to the tray and swam in circlets through the developer – sending ripples against the edge of the pan. I removed the moth, transferred the plates to the fixative, and surveyed the results.
There was something there, despite my bungling, there was something there.
Composed by Dr. G on Jun 09
Composed by Dr. G on May 19
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juvenile raccoons
It has been so long since I have written, sadly so, as so much has taken place in the days that have passed and I have had little opportunity or means by which to write them down. On our third evening on the farm the girls and I were taken as a treat into the village to the Winterbottom Grange talent show. I was astonished to see the variety of talents this small village offered. We laughed and cheered along with the town’s citizenry as we watched Leonard McHaffy sculpt a life-size bust of Queen Elizabeth with her pet ermine out of a maple log with nothing put a sharp axe. Violet Languid gave a vocally superb rendition of Pretty Peggy of Derby, accompanied by one of our very own 1853 models of the Galubrious’ “Italian Queen” accordion (with the famous micro mosaic buttons). But beyond a doubt, the triumph of the night was The Widow Cookfair’s trained chickens and their presentation of Pacini’s Carlo di Borgogna. When, in the opera’s second act, Leonora and Estella, played by two elegant barred rocks, finished their duet, tears were welling up in my eyes, and the girls were sobbing on my shoulder. I was of the mind that poultry lacked the depth of character to accurately portray the complex emotions required for anything but Russian opera, but I was proven profoundly wrong.We came in from the spring frost and into our dormered room to find all of our equipment smashed, our record books torn apart, and our ink bottles spilled. My precious Simmons silver stemmed pen twisted into a bow, and the nib snapped, fractured into pieces. And so, in the evening hours of these past few spring days I have been manufacturing a new pen, from the bleached thighbone of a discarded pheasant carcass and the pounded tines of orphaned cutlery. Ink was developed by the gathering of lamp black, and ground chimney creosote made viscous with the addition of half-boiled maple syrup, so readily available here. The result is a fine substitute that I keep in a bitters jar under my pillow, along with my pen and the paper I have made with the pounded husks of last years corn.
There is far more disruption here than meets the eye – and I feel there are stories and relationships long established burrowing like a mole under the smiling surface of this small family. The ravaging of our small room was blamed on juvenile raccoons, but the absurdity of this notion nearly lead me to turn my back on our endeavor. Indeed I would have done so if not for my dedication to the scientific arts. The girls too, were ready to leave, as they had spent a cold morning staring at the remaining shards of the instruments, and the ink-soaked watercolor pads.
Without our equipment, we are left to rely solely on Lenore’s intuitive “whim”, my makeshift notes, and Lucia’s ability to combine parts of the broken instruments with pieces of old farm equipment, luckily we are living in a modern age – one in which a hardware store is rarely more than a couple hours walk away and orders can be made and received by train in less than a fortnight. We were also fortunate to find all of our photographic equipment in the field left untouched and so our research continues.
It was in that fateful morning of destruction that I came downstairs to find Mrs. Crunkshaft washing the threshold. I though very little of it at the time, but I now notice that the thresholds of this rambling house are all daily washed, and a vibrant sheen combined with a distinctive scent clues me to the presence of lavender oil.
As for the old woman, she continues to sit in her darkened corner. The sudden outburst of the evening past seems to have left her tired. Her rocking chair squeaks more slowly of late, the moth-eaten ball of wool in her lap nods lazily, yarn trailing ever so steadily to her hands and the nondescript threaded mass that hangs lazily off her needles. At her current rate of production, I presume the three inches of knitting has likely taken her five years to accomplish. When her head is not slumped in sleep against her chest her eyes continue to follow us coolly as we pass through the room.
Composed by Dr. G on May 19
Blue
“Lies, its all lies!!” the old woman stirred in the corner, a crazed look entered her eyes and a trail of spittle ran down her chin. A thin, small hand lurched out from under the stained blankets and a wizened finger pointed at me. “You, you come here to expose us, to cast the light of the world into our corner. Well, you should expose the broken promises and forgotten treaties! I see you, I’ve seen your kind before - you and those little girls – your no relatives of mine!!! I’ve watched generations come and go – pink babies born, grow, and pass out of this life frail and forgetful. But I remember, and I have never seen the soul of your eyes before. And you, little girl…” the old woman’s age spotted finger curved around to point at Lenore, “you think you’re so pretty, with your golden locks and bows of silk, but believe you what I say, that I was once far more beautiful than you, but generations in the New England forest turn even the most well chosen mortal body wrinkled and grey.” The old woman erupted into a series of wet hacking coughs, prompting Molly to rush over with a handkerchief and cover the old woman’s mouth.“Perhaps this has all been a little too much excitement for the poor dear” Molly said, The aged aunt coughed and spat behind the handkerchief - “feeling better now?” the old woman’s words were muffled, but became clear for a moment “…not stupid you know, you can’t…” another eruption of coughs echoed through the room and the handkerchief was placed back over her mouth.
“Well,” Molly continued – “I suppose it’s time we all said goodnight, we all have plenty to do in the morning. “ Molly let out a yelp as the old aunt’s remaining two teeth sank deep into her index finger. “Goodnight…. Goodnight everyone”
The girl’s did not have to be prompted again – they grabbed a candle and pulled me along up the stairs to the second floor. The moon had grown even fuller – the cold rays were vivid and harsh, illuminating the planks of the floor with a crisp edged light. In the light of the window the girls needed no candle at all – but slipped into their night things bathed in the moon’s light. I moved to the glass and watched the cold disk of light slip in and out of the wispy clouds, snow was melting fast – patches were left isolated the fields below me, the icicles had let go their hold on the edges of the house. I noticed, staring out the window, little white balls on the outside on the window sill, glowing in the moonlight, almost luminous, forming a little line along the edge of the window. I tried to force the window open, but it was either nailed or painted shut. We crawled under the sheets, but the night was restless, the floorboards expanded sending creaks through the room – the girls once again abandoned their bed for mine, and I found myself staring at the cracks in the ceiling waiting for sleep to find me as Lucia kicked of the covers.
I drifted in and out of sleep, but slowly woke to a light tapping on the old glass of the window. Unnerved, I slowly made my way to the sill – the night’s cool light was shining in and I expected see some specter, some apparition’s finger imploring me into the night, or pleading to come in. But as I made my way across the floor I found the tapping was made by the bull headed persistence of a grey sphinx moth knocking against the glass with a rhythm as regular as a pendulum – drawn, seemingly. to the light of the moon beyond. I cupped the creature in my hand, and watched closely as it slowly unfurled its spiraled proboscis. In college I had read Darwin’s study of the sphinx moth of Madagascar and how he presumed the existence of a long necked orchid to be pollinated by twelve inch length of the moth’s galea. This specimen’s protuberance seemed equally impressive, for as it sat cupped in my hand it searched with its appendage the furthest reaches of my forearm. I wanted to show the moth to the girls, so I placed the creature in an overturned cobalt drinking glass on the nightstand. I fell asleep watching the moth flutter toward the light- rising and falling inside the blue glass. My dreams were filled the images of a body struggling for air in the icy blue depths of the winter river.
When I woke I found that the girls were already up – Lenore was leaning into the window sill – making a watercolor sketch of the spring landscape outside, Lucia sat in the corner – reading an article out of the Hoard’s Dairyman praising the Alderney breed of dairy cattle for its dainty form and high butterfat content. Glancing at the table I found that my nighttime quarry had vanished. The water glass lay broken on the floor, shards of blue mixed with small drops of red, the moth had escaped somewhere into the morning.
Composed by Dr. G on May 01
Composed by Dr. G on Apr 16