Sometimes we met in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee, just slap ass and not even speak.
Donald Hall lived with his wife Jane Kenyon, whose presence I still felt in his house fifteen years after she died. In talking about what it was like to share both his domestic and writing space with his wife and former student, Hall said, “About twice a year I’d knock on her door. Sometimes we met in the kitchen to have a cup of coffee, just slap ass and not even speak. Then we did speak, but people didn’t come to our house for dinner parties, we didn’t have them. Occasionally we’d have visitors from Ann Arbor or New York, but largely it was a solitude and silence that was so rich! I still have the solitude, but it’s not double . . . Of course one’s energy diminishes with age. I work an hour a day on poems. When Jane died, I tried going back to children’s books, but I haven’t been able to . . . I have no conviction that God exists or that there is an afterlife, yet I still go to this church. I love the community of it and the old people. I was still skeptical with Jane, but I was further toward belief at that time, and was a devoted churchgoer.”