CW113

I’m writing this Friday night. It was warmer today, and raining. But now the temperature has dropped. It’s one of the shortest days of the year and it’s a new moon. It’s 30° but it feels 21°. Windy night.

I learned a couple hours ago that Brattleboro lost someone really special this week: Libby.

It was uncanny because I was picturing last night that someone should check on her. I was worried that she had died.

Libby Howes’s house on South Main Street burned down on April 13th of this year. I know the exact date because I’ve just looked up the Brattleboro Reformer article about the fire, which I read at the time. She made a rope out of blankets to escape from the second floor.

I had known, ever since moving to Brattleboro in 2008, that Libby had a history in New York City as part of the Wooster Group, the experimental theater company. I’m not sure when she moved up here, but I learned from the Reformer article earlier this year that she moved into the house on South Main in 1996.

Libby and I were friendly. Sometimes we talked, sometimes she smiled at me on the street (that smile! 💕), and sometimes she was absorbed, talking to people I couldn’t see.

And this part is delicate. How do you sensitively talk about someone’s mental health issues, especially in public, if you don’t officially know their diagnosis?

If anything, I am probably too ready to romanticize those of us who fall outside the bounds of consensus reality, to assume these various states, at least some of them, are the inbreaking of spiritual insight.

I am certainly biased towards seeing my own issues as both a curse and a gift. I’d like to believe my weaknesses and strengths, even if it’s not true, are two sides of the same coin. The best argument against it is my motivation for wanting it to be true. But whatever I choose to think about myself, turning these suspect, fetishizing equations on others isn’t good. Sometimes people are just in trouble.

That said, Libby often seemed to beam equanimity, to be preternaturally balanced and happy. After the fire, I’d heard she was sleeping in a tent in her yard.* I saw her in the co-op café and went up to her to tell her how sorry I was about her house, that the whole town was thinking of her (we were). The tent might be okay in the coming summer, but what was she going to do when it got cold? She said she had friends offering to put her up in a hotel. But right now—and her energy was outright beatific—she was really enjoying the tent. She said it was incredibly beautiful to be outside, nearer to the trees, birds, animals (she had also just lost her cat in the fire), sky.

(I don’t know if there was ever an investigation, but Libby told me that day—and you will find this in the Reformer article—that she suspected the fire was arson. Worse actually: that the arsonist knew she was in the house. For someone (me) who completely freaks out over little bumps in the road, to be around someone who is this relaxed, whose perception has not at all shrunk down into a little tunnel from hell, after being pretty sure someone has attempted to kill them is utterly astonishing, a tremendous gift. I might not get there in this lifetime, but seeing the possibility up close definitely gives me something to aspire to. 💕)

*Libby’s yard, and it is still that way tonight, was always just a tiny path through what, to my eyes, looked like an ever-fluctuating, meticulously constructed, open-air art installation made of garbage and plant materials. All around town, Libby was often to be seen attending to fallen leaves, cradling a bundle of sticks, or organizing pine needles into beautiful little mounds. What no longer counted to the rest of us never stopped counting to her.

(The tent is still there too, and I was worried, until tonight, about her trying to sleep in it in this freezing weather. I was relieved to hear she died in the hospital from an illness and not from the cold. It’s sad no matter what, but that would have been too sad.)

When you spoke to Libby, sometimes she would make regular sense. But then, usually, she’d veer seamlessly into incredibly capacious imagery and language. She would make another kind of deeper sense. Sometimes she could start to sound paranoid, and you’d be worried about her feeling upset. But usually the vibe was high and light. And I’d be happy that there was a place both of us could be basically okay: the freak magnet that is Brattleboro, Vermont. Here we were in Mocha Joe’s, her climbing the staircase up onto the street in some spectacular multi-layered outfit, across the river from the beautiful mountain in the sun. 💕

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On 3/24/24 we were both in a crowded Mocha Joe’s in the daytime. Libby was talking to a friend when I overheard her say, “A windy night has brighter streetlights.” I was all jacked up on coffee and very struck. What does that mean? My own streetlight suddenly felt way brighter. I wrote down the line in my notebook—like many songwriters, overheard (or misheard) bits of speech often function as prompts for me—and the rest of the lyrics tumbled out in a quick rush.

And, in a way, the whole album came out of being zapped by that line. That was the first song on Lateral Twinkling, an album I would be done writing and recording by the same time the following week.

These lyrics are already up on my Bandcamp, but here they are today with the story of their inspiration. Brattleboro was ten times more brilliant when Libby Howes lived here. But it’s ten times more brilliant still because she did. 💕

“A Windy Night Has Brighter Streetlights”

A windy night has brighter streetlights
So a windy night has lights
The sensors read the tea leaves
And make it all alright

The variation of the air
Can make you shield your eyes
And when you feel protective
It’s like darkness, a disguise

And darkness makes it hard to see
Like an umbrella or a hood
Or a flicker pattern in the trees
It can make you feel so good

But the pleasure is confusing
It’s an intermittent storm
It gets hard to toe the bossman’s line
Staying tethered to a norm

The wind would make the snapping rope
Like a little snapping string
But a good adjustment of the streetlights
Clarifies most everything