Days in the Wake

Let's see what Dorothy and William are up to

In the days after the election, in the aftermath of our Great American Reckoning, I found myself being drawn to do things that might distract my attention. I did a lot of tidying, a lot of cleaning, a lot of going through old things. I was in the storage space off of my studio, an unfinished room with concrete floors and uninsulated wood walls, digging through a box of old stuff that, over ten years after our move, had not yet found a home. Stuff that is in permanent limbo. Occasionally I’ll peek into these mouse-invaded boxes and see if there isn’t something there that I’ve been missing. That day, the Monday after the election, I found a book I hadn’t thought about in a while: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals.

Dorothy was an English writer and poet; she was the sister of poet William Wordsworth. She was not published in her lifetime, but she was a constant companion to her brother and kept a meticulous journal of their time in Alfoxden and Grasmere in the late 18th century/early 19th. The entries are sweet and lyrical in their own way, sometimes simply describing the trappings of everyday life, sometimes diving into richer language to describe a landscape, a plant, a birdsong. Magical stuff. I picked up the book and leafed through it. Instinctively, I searched for the entry matching that day’s date in 2024, November 9th. This is what Dorothy wrote down:

[Monday 9th.] [Walked with Coleridge to Keswick.] ... the mountains for ever varying, now hid in the Clouds & now with their tops visible while perhaps they were half concealed below — Legberthwaite beautiful. We ate Bread & Cheese at John Stanleys & reached Keswick without fatigue just before Dark. We enjoyed ourselves in the study & were at home. Supped at Mr Jacksons. Mary & I sate in C's room a while.

Somehow, reading that entry was some consolation to my ailing mind. Just finding another moment in time that was not my own. A kind of realignment, a reminder that time is ongoing. No moment is permanent, no pain remains forever. Somewhere, in that grand continuum, I am standing parallel to Dorothy Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge eating bread and cheese on a walk in the Lake Country. That made me feel better.

I vowed to myself to make a ritual, each night, of reading that day’s entry in Dorothy’s journal. As with a lot of these sorts of things, I did not keep to it, but I do occasionally see the book sitting on my bedside table and I’ll pick it up and find the date to read. Sort of recalibrating my sense of time. I recommend it: it doesn’t have to be Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal, it can be any journal.

So today, as I was sitting down to work, I thought I’d share with you, O Holy Machine Shop Subscriber, today’s entry in Dorothy’s Grasmere journal:

Thursday 26th. Mr Olliff called before Wm was up to say that they would drink tea with us this afternoon. We walked into Easedale to gather mosses & to fetch cream. I went for the cream & they sate under a wall. It was piercing cold, & a hail Storm came on in the afternoon. The Olliffs arrived at 5 o clock—we played at Cards & passed a decent evening. It was a very still night but piercing cold when they went away at Il o clock—a shower came on.

That’s it! Do with that what you will. Have it inform your day — go fetch mosses and cream! Or just use it as I have, as a kind of temporal adjustment.

Onward!

Here’s a bonus photograph of a rainbow blessing the cargo of a ship in the Columbia River, as seen from the heavenly sitting room at Sleeper Coffee in Astoria, OR.