The house I grew up in was built in 1810 by a retired sea captain from Newburyport, Massachusetts. People were always surprised that a man who had spent his life at sea would retire to the dry hills of southern New Hampshire. Those people had never looked out at the south field on a windy day to see waves upon waves of tall grass rolling away toward the trees. They didn't know that at night the sky was dark and wide, as over a small sea.

We didn't know much about the captain or his family. But my brother and I found a tube of brittle, yellowing nautical charts in the attic one summer, and after that we imagined a lot about him and a lot about the sea. The charts were beautiful and complex, with tiny numbers and shapes like constellations drawn around them. I didn't know how to read the charts, but their usefulness didn't depend on my knowing; they were heavy with purpose in my hands. Sitting on the roof of a dilapidated chicken coop, my brother and I would imagine ourselves lost in some exotic sea with only a chart and compass to guide us. The thought of all that deep, watery mystery solved by the chart in our hands never got boring. We played that game for years after all the other games had stopped.

Eventually we left that house and left the charts with it. We moved to town and our parents built a new house. Once, in high school, I went back and asked the people living there for permission to walk the land. The chicken coop was still there, slumping a little more deeply into the ground. I walked through the south field and the woods at the edge of it to the old dump. Strewn over the rocky hillside were all kinds of rusted cans and mattress springs, broken chairs and bicycle wheels. That day I found a beautiful magnifying glass. The metal rim was rusted and the wooden handle split, but the glass was clear and miraculously intact. Instinctively, I brought the glass above my hand, examining the tiny lines. For the first time in a long time, I thought of the sea captain and wanted so much to see with his eyes. All the criss-crossing lines of me, stretching out in all directions, mapping out a life I could not see.

The Mythology of Bed

Our bloodlines go back much farther than we usually imagine. Most of us are thrilled to trace our lineage back three, four, five generations- days of migration, of doing without, of honest work. What we inherit is tangible: a homeland, a physiognomy, a name.

What has been passed down in my family has landed me in New England- a tall, lean body and hair that is prematurely graying. I have a large, fleshy nose and a taste for pungent foods. My sense of smell is acute, and I am a masterful sleeper.

Long ago, when my ancestors slept in trees, their busy bodies and watchful eyes would relax into sleep as they secured their places in high branches, large hands and feet gripping just enough. We need to sleep. In order to be alert enough to survive, we need to enter into states of complete release, controlled vulnerability. A bed makes us safe.

Our sleep deprivation is ancestral- mutates over time so that we are genetically predisposed toward bed. My ancestors were ever watchful. My ancestors were deeply tired. I sleep their thousand-year-old-sleep. I take a lot of naps.

He loved Iris

When Iris died

He wrote her a letter.

C.D. Wright

Iris appeared one night in August when there was heat-lightning along the horizon. The day had been so hot that the barn had begun releasing hundred year old scent. I'd spent the day processing firewood, a dissociative work of reason against nature. I didn't know that I was grieving, didn't know that grief can come without sadness. My grief was a cessation of my body's limits, felt free, felt like swimming underwater without needing breath. That summer I cut, hauled, split, and stacked sixteen cords of wood.

Sitting on the porch after dark, I thought that the house had always been lonely- not for people, but for the years that had filled it, aged it, and left it emptier. As a child, I'd wanted to step into the walls of smooth, undulating plaster, glide along the sloping floors into a time that seemed just out of reach. I would have said then that I wanted to travel back in time. Now I can say that I wanted to live the life of the house.

After my parents died, I felt a special kinship with the house, felt acutely the longing to be known as we can only be by those who have made us. I have lived in this house for most of my life, but there is so much yet that I don't see, because I don't know enough to see it. I am overwhelmed by losses I cannot quantify.

When Iris came, I was used to being alone with the company of a swinging door and a humming light. Iris startled me with movement and intimacy. And then she was gone.