A “Vacation” Zuihitsu
Zwischenraum, m.
zwischen, between + Raum, space: the gap or interval separating two things.
German has given me a noun for where I seem to spend most of my day.
In between countries, houses, lives, rooms, identities—the list is endless.
My writing desk is new to me. Outside, the paths climb instead of flattening. German arrives on envelopes and road signs, in the washing-machine instructions, in words I recognize several seconds too late. The dogs have learned the landscape faster than I have.
For two weeks, an unseemly heat has held Western Europe. Houses here are built to keep warmth in. Fans sell out. Windows stay open all night. Bees have ceased to be insects and are now atmosphere.
//
6:00–7:00 a.m.
Planes drone overhead.
Dogs clamour for food and affection, in that order.
Zwischenraum.
The space between two things.
The space beneath the refrigerator where a blueberry
has become geology.
The half-second between hearing a German sentence and
misunderstanding it.
The Atlantic.
A border.
A blank field on a form.
A blinking cursor.
//
10:23 a.m.
My coffee has developed a skin.
Outside, heat presses its whole palm against the
glass.
The children have entered one of those brief, suspicious silences that generally precedes damage.
I write six lines. Delete four. Move one.
I crack open Paisley Rekdal's Imaginary Vessels for inspiration and immediately despair of ever writing anything even a fraction as evocative.
I read a poem twice. Then a third time—partly for pleasure, partly to investigate how she has done it.
There ought to be a German compound for this mixture of admiration, envy, and the desire to fling one's notebook into a ravine.
Instead, I underline another sentence.
Before lunch
Hang the washing.
The garden is loud with wings.
A bee lowers itself into a flower and emerges
yellow-kneed.
The shirts billow on the line, briefly acquiring bodies of their own.
I begin imagining Penelope working at a twenty-four-hour laundromat.
She wears a polyester uniform. Her name is embroidered above the pocket. She has traded the loom for a row of industrial washing machines, their circular windows filling with other people's clothes.
The suitors arrive with sacks of dirty clothes. She
tells them the machines are occupied.
Every night she empties the lint traps. Twenty years
of accumulated fibres. Enough, surely, to weave another shroud.
Between the rinse and spin cycles, the machines fall briefly silent. Penelope knows something about intervals. Twenty years between a ship's departure and its return. Twenty years of making and unmaking the same piece of cloth.
I wonder what she did in the hours between weaving and unweaving. Homer gives us the shroud, but not the coffee breaks.
Perhaps Odysseus returns and finds her behind the counter, reading a paperback while somebody's sheets spin themselves into a knot.
Perhaps she doesn't recognize him.
Perhaps she does and pretends not to.
A clothespin breaks in my hand.
I am delighted by the possibilities.
I forget to finish hanging the washing.
An earlier morning, which has wandered into this one
Shortly after we move in, our neighbours appear at the
door with bread and salt.
A traditional welcome, they explain.
The bread is beautiful, its crust flour-dusted and
split. I wonder whether the salt is meant to be eaten with it, or kept
indefinitely as a kind of domestic talisman.
I am reluctant to ask.
For several days, the salt sits on the kitchen counter beside an unfinished crossword and a packet of batteries.
//
12:00–2:00 p.m.
Lunch is whatever can be assembled without turning on the stove.
Tomatoes. Bread. Basil.
One dog waits beneath the table. The other has discovered that waiting beside my youngest child is more productive.
Someone wants more bread. Someone else has eaten the last of the mozzarella. Someone is screaming as a wasp investigates the rim of a glass.
I write a line on my phone while drying the dishes.
My hands smell of basil.
The line concerns Penelope, but I can't remember what it was supposed to accomplish.
I consider giving her a lover. Or a union grievance. Or a washing machine that devours coins. Or a 30-day policy on unclaimed items from the dryer.
A poem can go anywhere at this stage.
This is my favourite part— before it begins objecting to my decisions.
//
Sometime after two
The hillsides melt into the heat.
More forms to fill out. I can't remember how to write our address. Or my cellphone number.
The geography of my life is apparently easier to remember than a six-digit postal code.
I return to the poem.
Should Penelope be folding sheets or unfolding them?
Does she need Odysseus at all?
What if the suitors are simply men who keep returning to collect laundry that doesn't belong to them?
The washing machine announces the end of its cycle.
An irritatingly efficient little melody.
//
3:41 p.m.
Zwischenraum.
I look up the German word again.
Intermediate space. Gap. Interval.
I prefer interval. It has music in it. The brief silence between movements, when somebody inevitably coughs.
I think about the space between the houses here, the steep strips of garden, the hedges busy with sparrows.
And Penelope, who has kept an entire kingdom at bay with two letters: -un.
Perhaps I have been approaching the poem from the wrong end. All this time I have been imagining what happens when Odysseus returns, when perhaps the more interesting question is: what happens when he doesn't.
What does she do with the hours that are hers?
I give her a paperback, a paycheque, a peach eaten over the sink. A radio playing her favourite programme.
Then I wonder whether I'm being insufferable.
The dictionary is of no help.
The laundry is still in the machine.
Later
Walk the dogs. The path above the house is steep enough that I can pretend the walk counts as exercise.
Cowbells somewhere beyond the trees. A plane passes overhead, its belly catching the last light.
The dogs stop to examine something in the grass and then roll in it.
I start thinking: Penelope might not be waiting for Odysseus at all.
She might like her job. The soft thunder of dryers at three in the morning. The warm cotton gathered against her chest. The particular satisfaction of returning a stranger's shirt without a crease.
Between the last customer and the first commuter, she drinks bad coffee and watches white sheets lift and collapse behind glass.
Maybe she's tired of being a poster child for fidelity.
She just wants to know who keeps stealing the change from the vending machine.
By the time we reach the house, I have three possible endings and no beginning.
The dogs need water. Someone needs help finding a shoe.
I open the document again.
Penelope clocks in for the night shift.
Cara Waterfall is a Canadian poet and storyteller whose work explores language, migration, memory, and belonging. She is the author of Radiant Wound (Unsolicited Press, 2025) and The Lost Stations (Ink & Ribbon Press, November 2026). Her poetry has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, EVENT, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. A winner of the Coniston Prize and two of Room’s writing contests, she has also been shortlisted for the CBC and Alpine Poetry Prizes and named a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize.
