Rabbit Rabbit #28: Small Rain, Big Love
Reading Garth Greenwell and being a niece in Asheville
Midway through Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, the narrator describes his office in the Iowa home he shares with his partner, L. “It was my studio,” he begins, “but L’s eye was everywhere, his gift for design, for making beautiful spaces, so that he was right, even when I was alone working I was surrounded by him, writing in a space he had made, that we had made together, as we had made the whole house together. It was happiness to live there with him, even our quarrels were happiness, I longed for all of it.” The narrator, an unnamed poet, is relaying these thoughts from an ICU bed, where he’s landed after falling ill with a rare cardiac condition at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Readers of Greenwell’s 2024 novel will know that these harrowing details, while crucial to the narrative, are not the tendrils of tragedy one might expect them to be upon skimming the synopsis. Rather, they serve as a contextual incubator for the slow hatching of the author’s deep and celebratory musings on life, love, and literature.
I read the above passage two weekends ago, in a bed that, much like the poet’s, was not my own. I was in Asheville, North Carolina, staying at my aunts’ house. I flew down on Thursday afternoon and left on Sunday. I read the passage on Friday night, in the middle of my time there––that sweet spot of a long-anticipated visit when you’re settled in enough to feel comfortable opening the kitchen cabinets without hesitating, but the looming threat of goodbye is cushioned by the promise of another day with things to do and new words to say. The passage elucidated the way I feel about my aunts’ house when I’m in it––or more exactly, how I imagine my aunts feel about their house. I, of course, do not know what it’s like to own a home, to buy or build one. It sounds like heaven and hell, which probably are beautiful to straddle with the person you love.
When I read the passage I looked all around me, at the ceiling fan and window blinds, at the wooden side tables sandwiching my big bed, at my aunt’s desk layered with documents and tricolored Post-Its. It all seemed so suddenly dear to me. I imagined the two of them sitting down to work, separated by a wall (how lovely, that elected partition), making calls and paying bills with the warm undercurrent of knowledge that they had built this. “Even when I was alone working I was surrounded by him,” Greenwell writes. Love abounded in the house on a molecular level. It warmed the basement floor with wall-to-wall carpet, it pulsed from the wires igniting the bedside light by which I read. I could have cried.
My attachment to Small Rain inflected the weekend. “You’re engrossed,” my aunt remarked on Saturday night with a bemused smile. I think I had just shifted positions, curling my body inward on the living room couch. In a sense she was right, I did want to know what would happen next. Would the poet need emergency surgery? When would he be released? But my incessant reading, I realized, took on a desperate quality. I found myself reading very slowly, drawing out the book, hoping it ––the words, the weekend; they were now inextricable, as reading and living are for me–– would last longer that way. My paperback copy became a kind of talisman. I reached for it in moments of quiet downtime, waiting for my morning tea to steep, during muted commercials between U.S. Open sets. Yes, the end of the book would signify the end of the trip. We were in a pact, Greenwell and me, with common goals: don’t let it be over if you can help it, and remember everything.
One of the reasons I came to Asheville was that a concert was happening. A singer-songwriter with a lush voice was playing an acoustic set at a small theater downtown. The crowd was small and at times irksome. I loved the music, enjoyed the healthy dinner of blistered shishitos and magenta beets and seared scallops we ate before ––thank you, I blurted when my aunt autographed the check in her perfect penmanship–– all of this was easy to catalogue. But it wasn’t enough. I craved hard data. I considered recording the hiss of eggs in the pan, the gurgle of the coffee machine for later playback. If I could just memorize the exact number of berries arrayed on the counter, I thought, or trap the march of steam willowing upwards from the glass Pyrex, maybe then. Maybe then. I took a mental snapshot of our breakfast spread, but then I’d missed a yellow-bellied bird out the window. I blinked and the binoculars were out. The birding app was opened. They couldn’t agree on a species. In two weeks they’d be in the Outer Banks, doing this all day. Things spill past us every minute.
It was my third solo visit to my aunts’ house. The other times I was eighteen and twenty-one, still nestled in the plush confines of liberal arts college. Now I’m twenty-five. I tried to calculate the ways it felt different. For one, I brought a small thank-you gift and thank-you card. Surely this was a sign of maturity. I washed my utensils right after using them, which is something you sort of just start doing one day because you saw someone else do it and thought, “Oh, duh.” I’ve grown into myself as a conversationalist; I can listen and ask questions better than before. We’re on a two-way street.
On Friday I took a morning shower and cracked the window, squeezing a dollop of lavender shampoo (could it be the same bottle?) into my hands. Spotify fed me Flock of Dimes’ “Long After Midnight,” which I played at full volume from my phone. In the shower on my second visit, the 21-year-old one, a line from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours drifted into my headspace, the one when Clarissa Vaughn reminisces about a summer evening of her youth on Cape Cod. “Now she knows,” the narrator interjects, “that was the moment, right then. There had been no other.” This time around, I thought of Othello: “If it were now to die, ‘twere now to be most happy.” Unnerving, and yet grounding, to stand in the same spot over the years, and observe the changes. Time had passed, and yet it hadn’t, not really. Part of me had always been there, breathing the steam, eager simply to get clean and race back upstairs. Part of me always will be.
On Saturday we drove to the farmer’s market, a village of vendors slinging organic stuff from eight to noon under white tents on the UNC Asheville campus. We wanted scones and hot peppers. A farmer who lost most of her crops in Hurricane Helene last year bagged the produce and asked how we were doing today.
The best ever of all time, I wanted to tell her.
I love being out in the world with my aunts. I love walking in a single-file line on narrow sidewalks. I love how they separate to browse in stores, two planets in orbit, finding one another again before checkout. Emerging from the fitting room of a vintage store, it was an epic game of heads or tails as to who I’d show off for first.
“Even our quarrels were happiness,” writes Greenwell. It’s strange to say, but I delighted in theirs––fragile and fleeting, never unkind. Always over some small question about the day, like which road to take, where to park, how long or what time or how long ’til. We’ll figure it out, one of them would chide. It never lasted long, smoothed over in seconds with a patient sigh or a glance out the window. I wondered if they restrained their annoyance for me when they found themselves toeing the edge of frustration, as is bound to happen, supposed to happen, with a beloved. I hoped not much at all. So rarely is there an audience for love.
It dawned on me on the way back from the farmer’s market that in my observing, I was learning how to take care of someone in a thousand tiny ways. Ask if she needs something while you’re up. Shake your head and say no thank you, resting your hand on her back just for a second before returning to your book. Ask if she meant to take her raincoat. Offer to go back inside for it. Keep tissues and wipes for dirty hands in the backseat. Say “look!” when you see something cool. It was an education.
–––
Mostly, we talked. I learned about their friends’ schoolteacher son in the Bronx, turtle migration patterns at the arboretum, a weekly pickleball group. They learned about the short film I made, my beloved friend Fiona, my boring internship. We debated the meaning of the word “ruminate,” whether it was productive. We talked about getting old.
“We don’t have kids,” my aunt stated matter-of-factly. This was during the getting-old discussion. It’s something they’re glad about, I know––a decision, fixed and freeing, reached decades ago on both practical and emotional levels. It’s right for them. I’m glad for them.
So what does it mean to be an aunt? What does it mean to have one? Your sibling’s kid, your parent’s sibling; both relations marked by gaps of unknowing, charged with inevitable privacy, at least when you live far from each other. They promise knowledge about occurrences you’ll only ever hear of secondhand, sometimes years and years later. Might it engender an intimacy deeper than that of a parent and child, at least sometimes?
It’s the particular degree of separation I think. Slightly off-kilter, it almost seems a riddle. Your dad I were three years and four grades apart. (I’m thinking of Cyd and Miranda in Stephen Cone’s 2017 film Princess Cyd, my all-time favorite depiction of an aunt and a niece.) To hear for the first time about a bottle of wine uncorked and drunk among the adults one night in 2005 when you were long asleep in the guest room. To imagine the illicit conversations that buzzed around your elementary head while you played in the pool. It invites an irrational twinge of jealousy, a yearning for some shade of the experience you missed due to circumstances out of your control. I remember being genuinely angered once by a photo of my dad kayaking with my older cousin a few years before I was born. In the universe of the photo, she is probably his favorite kid on earth. I was six or seven, and the thought bewildered me. I think I removed it from the album and hid it. I laugh now to think of my rage, silly and unsupported, but I still understand it completely. I’ve always felt tenderness for my unborn self, and myself as a child, untethered from reality, not hearing the words people spoke because I was not yet equipped with the capacity to comprehend them.
Perhaps the aunt-niece relationship must be the result of a deliberate choice, as if we finally sit down one day to shake hands, sign memos, and agree that yes, after all those years of getting-to-know-you in fragments, we will be friends. In the final scene of Princess Cyd, Miranda calls Cyd a few days after her two-week visit. “I miss you,” she chirps, as if deciding to say it in real time. “I love you,” she then adds, her voice breaking. Cyd is floored. “I love you too,” she discovers. The choosing of closeness, the closeness of choosing––strangely transactional, and yet so sacred, so delicate.
So my aunts and I are a chosen trio, one of many configurations, in a sprawling sea of a family. For so long we were sailing and sailing, as I took time to come of age, occasionally mooring to small buoys of connection––pictures emailed from all-girls’ summer camp or the Great Barrier Reef, laughs exchanged at holidays. The tide of our fascination was only ever rising, is rising still. It took twenty-five years, but now we have a whole island. It’s hard not to want to live on the island forever.
–––
On my last night, it misted outside and I made a grilled cheese.
“Do you need help?” my aunt asked.
“No, I’m fine!” I said. God forbid she take another step for me in the name of hospitality.
“If you’re going to live here,” she called, “you need to learn where the pans are!”
It was a joke we’d stumbled upon, pretending I was moving in for good. But something swelled inside my chest. I could do it, I really could ––I’d study the location of every dish, all the grains and seeds in the pantry, how to stack the yogurts on the top shelf of the fridge, the right brand of hot sauce to pick up when we ran out, when to take in the bird feeders; I suddenly couldn’t think of anything I’d rather do more–– until the house became a world whose terrain, rhythms, and seasons I had mastered. Population: three.
But that’s not how the story ends. I laughed and washed the pan after like a good guest.
On the ride to the airport, we listened to the singer-songwriter’s cover of “After the Gold Rush.” When she sang “flying mother nature’s silver seed / To a new home in the sun,” my eyes welled behind my sunglasses. I had thought, hoped even, that I might explode tearfully at the drop-off area –how could I ever leave?– and be soothed by more declarations of love. Instead, we pulled in and nothing happened. I was serene and grateful. We traded tight hugs and I-love-yous. And then I was gone, emptying my water bottle and lifting my arms for security, finding the gate and eyeing a subpar smoothie chain.
I’m learning that a big part of life is figuring out how to miss people. This can be comforting and not sad but you’re in charge of the difference. I finished Small Rain on my couch the next day. I rationed out the almond butter brownies my aunt painstakingly wrapped individually. One is still in my freezer. The copy of Swamplandia! I pocketed from their bookshelf is now on mine. I wash and wear the two shirts I bought every couple of days. The songs they played for me blast through my headphones while I run. I scroll through my camera roll and wonder what conversations they had about my visit. I wonder when we’ll see each other again. I wonder how can rain be small, and love so big.
