Ink Maker

It is the first grey day of fall and I'm thinking about color. Pinks and reds are kissing the tips of the maple out front. The sun has shifted to a low enough orbit that it sneaks in under the clouds at an angle, burnished gold, as it sets.

In photography if you want deeper, richer colors in your picture you underexpose the image just a little. A little less light to make the colors deeper. That is what today is. Underexposed.

My fingernails at the keyboard are stained brown with the color of fall. Black walnuts from the next street over.

I've been making ink.

When I started getting interested in fountain pens two years ago I swore I'd draw the line at making my own ink. I've got too many things to do. I don't need another rabbit hole. Yet here I sit, sepia fingered, eyeballing the buckthorn fumbling purple berries onto my drive.

Making ink feels like collecting the spirit of a place. I can sample the color of a space in time and store it in a bottle. Like a sorcerer drawing forth the essence of a place for spellwork.

The buckthorn yields two cups of berries with a few minutes of effort. Boiled down in a pot they make a thick purple syrup heavy with sediment. Mixed with water steeped in wood ash, for there is color hiding there as well, the purple blossoms to blue then green then yellow. Alchemy.

I delight in the process. So much of my creativity gets diverted to my work. To income. This ink is profitless. It is a living color. In time it will change and fade. It's lack of stability means it will never be a product I can sell.

It feels rebellious, this ink. I don't even have the right kind of pen to use it with yet I sit here thinking of the art I will make. Grey taken from the acorn caps collected on the way home from dropping off my youngest at kindergarten, made into a wash of ink on watercolor paper, and hung on a wall where in time it will slowly fade. Bittersweet. A memory of a time in my life that too will fade, slipping through my fingers as I watch it depart.

Maybe that is what I am really doing here. Trying to hold on just a little longer to the autumn in which I watched my daughter first walk through the doors of her elementary school, then disappear around the corner. Bottling a time beautiful and painful in it's impermanence.

It starts out grey and wet. A fall morning in what should be winter. As the day sloughs off its hours the air becomes visible. It is forty five degrees out, but it's that wet cold that gets into your bones which is somehow colder than the dry air of winter.

The day is a Wednesday, but it doesn't really matter. We are in that border time between Christmas and New Year's when the kids are home, the morning is slept past, and things get done in their own time.

The fog has become a presence outside the window. The kind that makes you want to go outside and stand in it just to feel what it's like when it touches your skin. I decide it's time for a walk so we bundle into several layers of not too warm clothes. Enough to keep the wet out but let the air in.

The woods we walk in are old but manmade. A nod to the nature that stood here once. Yet the trees are tall and wet, making their own rain in big fat drops that plunk down on duff below.

The three of us together are all in our own worlds. I'm ambling along listening to the air, the closeness of a train going by, my eyes scanning the tree branches for a hawk or an eagle to impress the kids with. Drinking in the empty space that is so often occupied by the motion and noise of parenting. My daughter, the youngest, is running ahead. Loud and animated, she wants to show us all the spots she explored during her summer camp here. For once to be the one with experience and secret knowledge. My son walks between the two of us. Shifting back and forth between the child he still is and the adult he will become. Sometimes he runs ahead with his sister, joining in the commotion. Sometimes he lags behind, thoughtful and observing. Serious for someone just days past his ninth birthday. As I look at him I can see hints of the man he will become. Fascinated by the world around him. I hope he remembers days like this. To buoy him when the world gets heavy. If I can give him anything it is these moments.

It's hard to keep them in this world. My daughter's legs begin to tire with her emotions. Soon we aren't going fast enough, or too slow, or not looking at the right things, or her brother is too far ahead and not waiting for her. I stop and ask her what she can smell right now. Then what she can feel touching her skin. With that I've brought her back in among the trees.

As we walk my attention is split. I'm watching for wet rocks and issuing warnings about leaning too far over to look at the running water. I'm also thinking about this border time between holidays when not much gets done. I'm well acquainted with the space between times. The expanse of responsibilities required in parenting is populated by long stretches of time where you can't do whatever you want but you have to do something. Time spent between being who you want to be and who you need to be.

Like the undefining fog we walk in, this place in time is unfocused. We walk until we feel done. When our hands become wet and cold we head back into the dry warmth of home.

In its lack of definition the fog has given rise to a quiet magic. A place where the trees foreboding loom, headlights glow in fuzzy yellow orbs, and the calls of excited children get mixed in with the cries of birds. In this undefined time we get a chance to shed our outlines and be just a little bit of nothing at all. It is here in this place that I leave memories for my children to find when they are lost on their way to defining who they will become. A quiet magic, made on an indistinct Wednesday that could have not mattered that much at all.