The last thing I did before the first stay-at-home orders were issued last spring was to take a road trip with my spouse from our home in California through the southwest, stopping to see a number of people along the way in Arizona and New Mexico, including Drew and Richard in Tucson, with whom we stood around the Spork table feeling something about the table and its relationship to us. 

 

The months since have been horrific, and somehow, the feeling of that table has not quite left these elbows I leaned upon it, and I keep thinking about how one thing remembers itself through me while the other inscribes itself upon or into me. What are prepositions now? Inside this long year outside-of-space-and-time, I’m planning a table I’m going to build out of a pile of old redwood that was until recently part of my house. It will live out back, one head of it in the shade of a peach tree, and in the future I hope to ask those who come over to carve their favorite lines in the top of it.

 

One of the details I’ve held onto from my compulsory education: the notes we left for each other on every surface that we could scratch.