Manhattan Birds

Every now and then when the days begin to lengthen, I’m fortunate enough to leave my Cape Cod village and zoom down to Manhattan with my very cool sister and very very cool niece. Even if we only stay one night, we live it well, shopping the thrift stores and consignment shops, eating things like fig and olive salads, taking note of street fashion, wondering at what the Whitney considers art, marveling always at the heights, the bustle, the pace.

Several things about New York astound me. One, that every person I see on the crowded streets and even more crowded subways has a life. Two, where does all the trash go? Three, just imagine what’s under Manhattan! Four, what would it be like to be a child growing up in the city and living on the 45th floor?

Five, how does all the food get here because people in New York are always eating. Six, how can you live here without oodles and oodles of money because something is always enticing you to buy it, eat it, try it, own it, rent it, experience it. Seven, where do you go for quiet and solitude? Eight, do people in New York ever use their kitchens? Nine, what is life like without a car? Ten, can you hear the birds singing in the morning?

Passing these two pigeons caught in conversation along Madison Avenue down in the 30’s, I asked several of these questions. They looked quite nonplussed, as if I had come from another planet. “Such silly questions,” one replied. “Just because you can’t hear the tree falling doesn’t mean it hasn’t come crashing down.” Now I look confused. “Listen,” said the bird’s colleague. “You’re in Manhattan. Nobody really knows how it works…it’s a Universe…it just does.”

Bike on Lane

I can still feel the heft of the old bulkhead door as my sister and I lifted it one long-ago day in early April, then scrambled down the cement steps into the dark stone cellar to drag our bicycles, all cobwebby and coal-dusted, up those steep, subterranean steps to the sun.

It was a primary ritual of spring, as essential to our well-being as stories and dreams.

In upstate New York, there could still be traces of snow in damp, shadowy places under porches and behind barns, but the unmistakable scent of spring was in the air: sweet, colored with longer light, tinged with the fragrance of yet unborn lilacs. A scent that awakened us, excited us, and made us wild.

We would drag up those blue bikes, dust them off, walk them up to the Dodge dealer at the end of West Main and give the tires bracing shots of air. And then, we were off, out past the muddy cornfields, past the barely budding maples, past the limits of town and winter’s edge. We rode hard and fast with the cold April wind in our ears, mad with joy.

And now, so many years later, I still ride my bike with the girl in me calling the shots. She loves the downhills, sets her heart racing with the uphills, is lost in the glorious moments of green wind and pale sun and lilacs and lilies yet to come. She is a lost girl finally found.

Robin. Twilight.

As I sit at my computer in this April twilight, the last of the day’s sun is caught in the wild yellow forsythia bush outside the window. And a robin is splashing in the copper birdbath, completing his evening toilette. The day is winding down, and I want it to linger longer…until at least eight. I’m not a great fan of darkness (though I have friends who love the night and work well into it); for me, darkness is a time of folding into oneself like the purple oxalis that closes its witchy wings and turns inward toward dreams.

Here is a poem about April, titled “The Angel of Pure Joy.”

When you smell spring in the silent stars
and taste the ginger of narcissus, the bite
of newborn chive; when the saffron forsythia
clings to your tongue like fairy dust; when you hear
the sweet voice of your wild bird threaded through still-
bare maples, caught in song; when your big, yellow cat
curves just so behind your knees and the smooth, cool
sheets are spun of fog, rosemary, salt and pine;
when there is no difference between dreams and the night,
then it is that the Angel of Pure Joy speaks your name out loud.

The Angel of Pure Joy. The last of the day’s sun. April.

Nothing B-Flat About It

At the consignment shop where I used to do the windows, we would say, “Oh, that’s a B-flat blouse, a B-flat jacket, a B-flat sweater,” meaning that garment was dated, nondescript, boring, maybe a little faded, a bit worn. B-flat. B-splat.

I look in my closet…what’s B-flat in here? Probably most of it…or none of it…since to me, something is B-flat only if it’s worn in a B-flat way. If I wear a plain black crew-neck sweater with ordinary black wool pants, well, that’s B-flat. But if the ordinary black wool sweater is worn with a red, square-dance petticoat over black, voluminous Charlie Chaplin silk pants…or that same sweater over a Hospital Thrift Shop short, knife-pleated black skirt over the ordinary pants…then maybe topped off with red Doc Martens and silver socks, it’s B-flat begone!

I wish I could always un-B-flat things: notice how colorful the cereal boxes are in the supermarket; notice the red flags on mailboxes; notice the abandoned sculptures of bedsprings and storm windows in the metal heap at the transfer station. Open my eyes to the way the rainbows fall into the blue coffee cup; the way the daffodils nod in the cold breeze; hear the click of the computer keys as the words sprinkle down the page; hear the sound of the ghost plane headed for Paris when the twilight is thick with clouds.

Today, this B-flat short skirt I’m wearing has an A+ verve over a slender Lilith long tube skirt with black socks that say “Joy” in big white letters. I’m about to bite into an organic Pink Lady apple, cold and crisp and fresh. Later, I’ll take a bike ride and see how the ocean looks this spring afternoon. I’ll think about England and Ireland and wonder what the people there are making for dinner. Today is an ordinary Tuesday…nothing B-flat about it.

Clothesline in March

On brisk, chilly March mornings when you could drink the air, one of the most glorious sights to behold is a clothesline in full use. I have loved clotheslines since I was a girl and my mother taught me how to hang the big white sheets (doubled, of course) and my father’s workshirts (upside down) and the pillowcases (open so the wind could billow through). We hung our little white cotton smalls in the middle lines, as unobtrusively as possible.

It was a splendid clothesline at 80 West Main Street with at least six or seven lines stretched far between two solid metal T’s. Way out in the back yard, it was flanked by the neighbor’s barn on one side and a gnarled apple tree and flowering quince on the other.

With her infinite practicality, my mother used to put the top sheet on the bottom of each bed and wash the bottom sheet and the pillowcases every week, rain or shine. Even in winter when the sheets froze on the line like great pieces of white cardboard, the clothesline was in use. It’s such a part of my memory, one of those things I rarely think about, unless I am clothesline-less.

When I finally got a clothesline here on Cape Cod after a hiatus of several years, I wondered how I had ever managed without the crisp fragrance of sun and wind caught in sheets, the scratchy towels, the crinkly lace curtains, the jeans that can stand up by themselves. It’s wonderful to thumb my nose at the dryer and its rapacious hunger for electricity. Wonderful to know that all’s right with the world when I look out the back window and see the sheets snapping in the March wind.

I am with clothesline again.

Newport Window

A friend and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat. To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.

Newport smiled back at us and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue, but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets, and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor, and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.

Barn in Early March

It is a raw and windy day with four o’clock snow that isn’t sure if it’s snow or if it’s rain. Still I ventured out for a walk down Main Street past the houses all shuttered and silent, past the old weathered barns, the outbuildings, the side yards with the covered boats, down to the sea that today is the color of gull feathers and buried dreams.

March has entered with a roar.

Wearing a black wool coat, dark red muffler, sturdy boots, two pairs of gloves, and a wool hat that pulls down over my eyes, I decided to pretend I was in New York and opened a leopard-print umbrella to keep off the rain/snow mix.

It’s a stretch of the imagination to pretend to be in New York when I’m walking down the empty street that leads to the water. There is only the sound of the gusting wind and the sight of the pewter-gray ocean, only the snow falling in circles into the black puddles, only the crows cawing their late afternoon sojourn to the fading day. I try to picture the city with its bright windows and flashing cabs, its sounds of horns and subways, its crowded sidewalks, the lights coming on in the Empire State Building.

It’s a stretch all right.

But I’m happy to be walking here in silence, looking out under the leopard-print umbrella at the three colors of lichen on the ancient oaks, at the snow dripping from the delicate tips of the bare spirea hedges, at the shingled houses turned inward to ponder their empty state, at the way the wind has shaped the cedars.

Today, the four o’clocks are resting in peace.

Ravinia at Work

Every writing workshop should be like this: held in Joanne Rossman’s magical store in Roslindale, Massachusetts; attended by spirited, quirky, open-minded writers; nourished by chocolates and macaroons; and presided over by Ravinia, whose literary contribution is Poe-ish indeed.

It is a grand two days, filled with words that often go right to the heart of the matter, with the sound of pens scratching across paper the old-fashioned way, with some tears, some laughter, with the age-old attempt to express what we feel about so many things: clotheslines, dogs, beach houses, ghosts, household hints, fathers, sons, daughters, mothers, husbands, great aunts, names, keys to rusted locks, lovers, high school, wallpaper.

At the end of it, I drive the long way home, my mind swirling with all the words and touched by the courageous efforts to push those words down the long blue lines and then say them out loud.

That’s one of my definitions of grace: to be part of that effort, to witness it, to know that as long as life continues to knock on our doors and whoosh its way in, there will be writers saying, “Welcome.”

Coat Rack. Party Dress.

Coat racks are good and necessary things; especially when you live in an old house with one (only one!) closet on the first floor, and that single closet doubles as 1) the shipping department for my business where all the bubble wrap is stashed, 2) the wine cellar; and 3) the place where the vacuum cleaner, ironing board, and tool box reside.

I’ve always lived with a coat rack in the corner by the front door and find that it’s one of those things in my house that is both essential and invisible like curtain rods and bookshelves and electrical outlets. Without thinking, season by season, I toss hats up top, hang coats and slickers and dusters on old, heavy wooden hangers from church rummage, and occasionally display a party dress that I’m not wearing (and perhaps will never wear) but want to look at just the same.

The dress pictured here came from a barn/antique shop in Maine. I thought it would change my life and imagined wearing it with a billowing underskirt around my workroom or on a late afternoon walk by the harbor with my sister or perhaps to the supermarket. (Strangely, a party never entered my mind.) So after taking the dress to a tailor, who lifted the hem and tucked in the shoulders, I had every intention of allowing it to work its magic.

I wore it once. Nothing was right: it was tight at the waist, big at the shoulders, and too bare around the neck. I tried a little shirt under it and shook my head…all wrong. I decided I liked two things about this dress: the sound it made when I walked and the way it looked on the coat rack.

So here it hangs. It has not changed my life, but every time I go upstairs, I see it and have a glimpse of the dream behind it: I am gloriously sweeping down the produce aisle, skirts rustling, eyes clear, intention in my step…headed for Venice that very afternoon.

Cellar Door

I try for a clean sweep down in the cellar of my house, but the broom is ancient and its bristles are worn to a sharp slant. So I end up sweeping with the stubby ends. Down in the dark, damp cellar there is much to sweep: dead leaves, live spiders, stone dust, earth, webs, bugs, rusty screws, nails, shatters of clay pots and clumps of potting soil.

I’ve always wanted a real basement in my house, but like a separate bathroom for guests and a mudroom, a clean, dry basement has eluded me. I look longingly at those subterranean family playgrounds with big-screen televisions, modular sofas and pool tables, or workshops with tools and saws and jars of nails, or even studios where the artist sits on a high stool under modern, squiggly lights with all the flotsam of her art meticulously arranged on shelves behind her.

These images are all dreams. Since childhood, life has given me cellars in the true sense of the word: always dark, always damp (often with dirt floors and empty coal bins), stone-walled, spider-flecked, web-spun…the kinds of cellars Freud believed dwell deep in the unconscious…where we are lost, alone, scared out of our wits, keeping company with pale ghosts and little brown mice.