Wednesday, November 13th, 1974

AT LAST I am ready to start a journal again. I have lived here in York for a year and a half, dazzled by the beauty of this place, but I have not wanted to write about it until today. Perhaps something cracked open in Europe (I went over for a month in mid-October); for the first time I can play records, and poems are shooting up. For two years I have not been able to listen to music because opening that door had become too painful after the hell of the last two years in Nelson. But I have been happy in this place from the very first day. And every day since then I have woken at dawn to watch the sun rise.

I am living under a powerful spell, the spell of the sea. But in one way it is not as I imagined, for I had imagined that part of the spell would be the influence of the tides, rising and falling. But I do not see the rocks or the shoreline from my windows; I look out to the ocean over a long field, so I am not aware of the tides, after all, nor influenced by their rhythm; instead, I am bathed in the gentleness of this field-ocean landscape. Without tension, it has been the happiest year I can remember (and, after all, I did manage to write a short novel).

The refrigerator has pots of freesia and daffodil bulbs in it to stay cool for a month or two and then come out to the plant window, which is really like a small greenhouse. It is lovely now because of a white cyclamen and three Rieger begonia, one bright red, one greenish white, and one salmon pink. When the morning sun streams in, they glow in their transparencies.

For over a year I have had Scrabble here so that when Judy came to visit from her nursing home, she would find her old pussy to welcome her. She was one of two speckled sisters Judy and I shared before I moved to Nelson, and whom I had as summer guests after the move.

Scrabble has always been a strange difficult personality, often not to be found, secretive, remote, furious when picked up, yet longing for love. She had the deepest look in her golden eyes of any cat I have known. It was a look as from person to person. She has been a haunting presence in this house because she lived upstairs on the third floor in my study—she was terrified of Bramble and Tamas and they had learned never to go up there. So she was with me during work hours, but I knew she needed more love than I could give, needed to sleep on my bed where Tamas and Bramble sleep. So she had become a constant anxiety, a tug at the heart, more than I had realized.

Last Saturday I had her put to sleep. She had not eaten for days—a visit to the vet and medicines did no good—so I made the hard decision. I was not at all prepared for the volcanic eruption of woe when I left the vet’s. I was crying so much I forgot to pay the bill and had to go back, and all the way home I could hardly see to drive. I felt cracked in two.

In some ways the death of an animal is worse than the death of a person. I wonder why. Partly it is absolutely inward and private, the relation between oneself and an animal, and also there is total dependency. I kept thinking as I drove home, this is all inside me, this grief, and I can’t explain it, nor do I want to, to anyone. Now, six days later, I begin to feel the immense relief of no longer being woken at five by angry miaows, “Hurry up, where’s my breakfast?” from the top of the stairs, no longer having to throw away box after box of half-eaten food because she was so finicky, no longer trundling up three flights with clean kitty litter—but, above all, no longer carrying her, a leaden weight, in my heart. She was the ghost at the feast, here where everything else is so happy.

But, oh, my pussy, I wish for your rare purrs and for your sweet soft head butting gently against my arm to be caressed!

In these last two years I have had to witness too much decline, and in Europe also I was saying good-bye to friends in their eighties and nineties. Perhaps I cried so terribly because Scrabble had become the symbol of all this—of the breakup about which we are helpless, which we have to witness in others, and in ourselves, year by year. How does one deal with it?