After all that I had to read Was, of course. I can see how it ruined "The Wizard of Oz" for my mother-in-law, although I hope that was only temporary. In his acknowledgments, which come at the end as they ought when they give away as much about a book as today's do, Geoff Ryman showed a bit of the man behind the curtain: not himself but his source material, searches, eliding over the unknown or inconvenient, how the unknown fell from the known (buried under Los Angeles freeway foundations, the last extant copy stolen).
Like my recent Confessions of Nat Turner, Ryman builds on the history that remains, though feels no need (nor ought to) to be faithful to it. I read the last chapter of Was as I did the last pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, that is, breathless in the current the author unleashes and sustains; this is not as high a compliment as the comparee (I made that up) would indicate because the whole book is not as fine as that. The whole book was good, but the last chapter, like the first and last of Underworld, was sublime.
With a swan rake I combed the grassesque, unsnagging bindweed, and then with a leaf rake I groomed it, pulling straight tendrils of bindweed in hopes that I could more easily find their root ends. I combed and groomed and unsnagged and pulled. I did this in back and forth and to and fro. I raked out the half of the south bed where nothing has successfully taken root and weeded around the blue-eyed grass, columbine, thyme, and that other thing I myself planted but now cannot identify. I snipped baby cherries and weedwhacked under the cherry tree and along the walk. After the grass recovered somewhat, I mowed it, to little avail. I churned the more cooked compost, pitching near-loam from the trapdoor at the bottom onto the top. Then I dug leaf loam out from under the leafpile and added it to the south bed--well, piled it there, to be thoroughly dug in later--and added other leaves to the two compost bins. Finally I raked up all the seed husks and added them to my expanding lasagne
During this work, I discovered cat shit in my grass (without quite stepping in it), and discovered more cat shit in the leaf pile (nearly picking it up and adding it to the compost), and had a mouse leap from the compost bin and scurry over my feet. It was not until I was scooping, with bare hands, husks riddled with disease and coated with guano into the wheelbarrow, and spotted a limp sparrow.
RDC came to the window. "Did you just scream?"
"Yep. Look what I'm picking up on the rake."
So this afternoon I felt fleeting disgust and pity. But it wasn't until later in the day that I recoiled in horror and dread. I had no expectation of an extended swim but I had not packed a book into my backpack. (After I swam a leisurely kilometer, I read someone's Denver Post until RDC was ready to go.)