Howard Norman - I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

My sentinels on the veranda are shooed away — be gone! — and sitting at the round, glass-topped table, in bare feet in the sun now, I am daydreaming the peacefulness of my farmhouse in Vermont, its gently curving road up to my neighbors’ mailboxes, mountains visible in the distance. I think of the wetlands near Port Medway, Nova Scotia, with thunderstorms and fishing trawlers on the horizon. What to look forward to today? Well, for one thing, I will not leave this house. Let the world arrive as it may; I will read all of The Apple Trees of Olema, by Robert Hass, who lives just up the road, a lifetime of poems containing such indispensable human sadness and joy, and which are as sanely associative as the finest of Cezanne’s paintings, and strike the deepest chords. There is a cleansing light over Tomales Bay after a nightlong rain. The death of a boy named Jehan nearly ten years ago was not the fault of poetry. I close my eyes. There’s the oystercatcher, arriving at the same archipelago of rocks as always. It flies off, it returns. It flies off, and after a long time, during which I worry over its fate, it returns.

Two of HOWARD NORMAN’s novels, The Northern Lights (1987) and The Bird Artist (1994), were nominated for the National Book Award. His other novels include The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, Devotion, and What is Left the Daughter. His books have been translated into twelve languages. Norman is the recipient of a Lannan Award in fiction, and he teaches at the University of Maryland.