Tree Tulips, Iggy, & Alice Munro

Tis the beginning of tree tulip season.

I tromped seven miles yesterday in the rain to see as many of them as I could.

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Meanwhile, I was all set to launch a new TikTok-cum-Instagram-Story feature: Housing Patrizia: Can a Curmudgeonly Boomer Find Relevance and a New Home? when an email bore fruit:

Hi Patrizia,
Thanks for the detailed note. I wish everyone would go into this level of detail! Please feel free to text me at [my easily guessed contact info is probably on the Dark Web already] to discuss further. You sound like you could be a great fit!
Iggy

Iggy!

Who would not want to live in a household with someone named Iggy??

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Other than that, I Remunerated (reluctantly) and read Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.

The last story in this collection, The Bear Went Over the Mountain, may be Munro’s most famous. It got made into a well-received film called Away From Her. Kind of the anti-The Letter (Nicolas Sparks) as it, too, details a relationship between a wife with dementia and the husband who loves her. But, you know—it ain’t sappy.

It’s a powerful story. All the stories in this collection are powerful. But with the knowledge that 12 years after this collection was published, Alice Munro herself succumbed to dementia, this story carries special poignance. Was Munro already tracking the subtle, selective changes in her own memory? Had she begun fixing yellow Post-its to the flatware drawers?

Hard to know.

Many of Munro’s stories have a strong autobiographical element.

But not all.

In this same collection, there is an absolutely breathtaking piece called Floating Bridge about a woman with cancer who finds herself taken on a kind of joyride by a slightly sinister teenage boy. The setup reminded me a bit of Joyce Carol Oates’s fabulous Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

I steeled myself for a macabre resolution.

But the story ends on an unexpectedly sweet note.

And you realize quite literally that the story is about a woman who is feeling the ground she is standing upon shift from under her.

The brilliance of that actualized metaphor!

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(Munro herself was a cancer patient.

But not until eight years after this story was published.)