Circle of Friends

It’s Thanksgiving Day. Outside the light is gray, the sky overcast, the air exuding that late autumn fragrance of dried leaves and cold, damp earth. I take deep breaths of it when I walk to the end of the driveway and pick up the newspaper bloated and heavy with ads and inserts for tomorrow’s big shopping day.

Past Thanksgivings float through my mind. When everyone I loved was alive, I didn’t think much about gratitude. I was young, and of course, they were there: a mother, father, grandmother, aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, friends. Of course, there was turkey and mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy, pumpkin pie. Of course, the table was covered in a lace cloth and set with the good silverware and plates that collected dust most of the year in the china cupboard.

Now, so many years later, gratitude is edging closer to center stage. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been walking late in the afternoon around sunset. My path takes me down a hill to a tiny beach where I can rest on stone steps and look at the sky limned with charcoal and a blue pale as breath…watch the water turn from silver to rose to pewter to slate.

I think of our world so weary with war and strife, and our country so unsettled and fearful. I think of families divided by political differences. I think of how we’ve forgotten our shared humanity, our innumerable blessings. Back when everyone I loved was alive, it didn’t occur to me that someday there would be empty chairs around that table…that someday, the chairs, the table, the dining room, the whole house would be gone.

I have just had another birthday, and with each passing year, centering myself in the here and now becomes more than a daily practice; it becomes an essential way of being. Taking note of the goodness around me, realizing that each moment is exquisitely full is the antidote to loneliness and fear. There is always something to wake me up: a smile, a taste of homemade grape jam, birthday roses, a song on the car radio, a light in an evening window, November itself with bare trees, scorched sunsets, winds that unravel the scarf wound three times.

A single yellow leaf lets go, falls in silence. I whisper my thanks on this day marked especially for it.

“Bread for You.”

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, “is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides are very good indeed.”  Lewis Carroll

The mornings are brisk now in mid-October, and on the days when the sky is massed with clouds, it seems particularly chilly-willy here at the computer, my hands covered in David Copperfield gloves, cold fingers moving slowly over the white keyboard.

Autumn, for all its beauty, is a wistful time, as the sun sinks ever lower, leaves fall, summer takes its place in memory. But it is the cold, seeping through the cracks and old windows of this house, that makes me skittery, unable to focus. It is the cold that inches toward the heart.

I look to the furnace, the faltering sun, layers of cotton and wool for comfort, forgetting that warmth can also come from unexpected places. When the knock on the door came, I was working on a poem, and it was a slow-go, words coming, as my grandmother used to say, “Like molasses in January.”

When I opened the door, a friend stood there with a paper grocery bag in his hands. “Here,” he said. “Bread for you.” In the brown bag was a large, still warm, golden round of bread: fragrant, crusty, delectable. My friend told me about the process of measuring, stirring, kneading, and waiting for simple ingredients: flour, water, a bit of sugar, and yeast to transform into the miracle of bread. He talked about going by the feel of it now, knowing the process so instinctively by touch after much practice. He added, “It’s a mess, at first.”

That last line resounded like a clatter in an empty hallway. I know that the beginning of the creative process is pretty much a mess: paint, paper, spatters, threads, flour, clay, stone, scraps, paste clutter the worktable, but even more, emotionally: blank pages, empty canvases, solid black screens give rise to trepidation, and questions float to the surface like dead leaves: Will something come? Will it be good enough? Is there anything left for me to say?

Another friend, who is now making award-winning, experimental films that really push boundaries, said to me, “You just have to start somewhere. Jump in.” It can be bread, a poem, an aria, a book, a film, a painting, a dress, a sculpture, a garden, a trip to Venice. Doesn’t matter. We hesitate, pace round the periphery until the jump-in moment impels, and we have to work with whatever we get. Believe in it too.

Otherwise, the cold wins.

Tucked in Keyholes

There are dreams all over the place in my house…caught in forgotten corners specked with tiny spiders, hidden under the cellar steps, blending into the wallpaper, stuck in keyholes, drifting in the flour bin, sleeping under the eaves. Dreams lodged in cinnamon-stained cookbooks, tucked deep in the round toes of winter boots, woven into the bicycle basket, asleep in decades-old love letters in the attic.

When I happen upon a dream, I think it’s best to pretend I don’t see it, the way I used to try not to see my skittery cat, Carlie, seemingly asleep in the wing chair. One direct look and Carlie would vanish in a poof of hair and dust. Dreams are like that, preferring to be regarded obliquely, their mystery honored, kept intact.

If, let’s say, there is a dream written in ancient script on yellowed paper and snagged in torn lace at the window, pay it no mind until spring when May breezes billow the curtain to life. If, perchance, the dream is written in charcoal on the back bricks of the fireplace, wait until the logs smolder and the night falls deep, wait until the black letters and the black night are one and the same.

It’s also a good idea to wear socks or flannel skirts around a dream, so as not to startle it. If it wants to, if it recognizes your tenderness, the fragility of your heart, it will release itself into your nimble fingers. Once in your hands, it’s recommended that you sit by the fire and hold it like a wisp of milkweed, for at any moment, the dream can fly right out the window or settle itself forever under a loose floorboard.

With this tip-toe approach, I’ve come to know that my house is dreaming of staying warm this winter, of its regard for the house next door, of being mushroom gray instead of stark white, of trading its worn clapboards for weathered shingles, of looking out on a green lake instead of scraggly rhododendrons and a dusty Main Street.

I know that my car dreams of more pickup (and a pickup across town), of a day at the spa, of a road trip to Maine, of a radio that only plays music that makes its little engine soar, of a sparkly dashboard ornament.

I dream of perfect hearing and strong knees, of writing poems that illuminate the inner places, of making beautiful omelets, of speaking French, learning to swim.

Dreams are all over the place, full of quirks and capriciousness. It will take some doing, but if you’re patient and kind and remember to avert your eyes, they will bloom right in your hand.

Petals Falling

It is August. The sun has burned the grass crisp as toast. Fans are whirring. Curtains are pulled back. Down in the cellar, the dehumidifier collects buckets of water from the damp brick and concrete. At night, I lie in the still heat and remember childhood when my sister and I slept at the foot of our beds to catch a bit of breeze, and I would wake displaced by tangled dreams.

Dog days, they’re called, the twenty days before and after the rise and fall of Sirius, the Dog star. I think of Carson McCullers’s “…saucer of lavender sour milk.” I think of the way the flower petals fall in the midnight kitchen when the windows are closed, the fan at rest, and the jungle cacophonies in the darkness on the other side of the rusty screens. I think of the ocean water with its warm, murky depths, and the southwest wind sultry with bayous’ humidity.

I move listlessly through the rooms of my house, avoiding the ones shimmering in the hot, bright light where tiny spiders appear overnight in the corners. All earnest attempts at effort seem silly and futile. Words come hard at this pace; my mind seems sleepier at noon than at midnight.

August is the month of daydreams before September’s crisp call to learn, organize, engage. It is a time to watch one maple leaf stir as if everything depended on that whisper. It is a time to pick one tomato and eat it right there in the garden or field with the sun burning your shoulders. It is a time to smell scorched pine needles and funky low tide. A time to listen to the corn growing, the sighs of the nodding roses.

Like the yellowed curtain drifting behind me, my mind floats, seems prone to reverie, to memories of August days when the only cool spot was the dim little library or the shores of a dark green lake. When we ate dinner at 5:30 and the screen doors slammed up and down West Main. When the nights were alive with cicadas, crickets, thrilling games of hide and seek, and years later, the breathlessness of first love. When September loomed on the horizon with a foreboding we tried to ignore.

It is August. Sirius has completed its rise and fall, but the Dog days continue. I have little to say. Much to dream.

Work at Hand

High summer here in my little Cape village. The grass is a crisp brown, hydrangeas are masses of feisty blooms, the air is redolent with grill smoke and salt, heavy with humidity, festooned with spider webs, specked with fireflies. The harbors are jammed with boats, and baseball games are the excitement for the night. People are dining on front porches, beaches, in side yards, clam shacks, and boisterous restaurants with windows open to the blue air.

Usually, about this time, I begin to fret in earnest about a big August craft fair held in my town. For at least ten years, this event has indelibly stamped each mid-summer with apprehension and disquiet. For most of late June, July, and early August, I feel haunted, as if something is shadowing me, a nudging reminder that a deadline is looming.

Like most other vendors, I make everything I sell, which means a great deal of summer is lived in my little factory, seated at the old door and sawhorses I call my work table. The good thing is that the fair forces creative endeavor. I have artist friends who show in galleries every summer, and say this helps them, that without the pressure they would turn into indolent sloths, spending these golden, halcyon days in a hammock, reading faded paperbacks with sandy spines…and never rouse themselves to work.

The bad thing is that creative endeavor forced by a deadline exacts its pound of flesh.

This year, I have decided that the price in time and spirit is too high and will forgo the fair, and all it entails: the creation and production; the big tent and the anxious, sleepless nights; the display and the schlepping; the nice people and their stories; the camaraderie of the vendors; the swiping of the credit cards; the exhausted smiles; the uncertainty; the packing up and the taking down; the money count at the end.

Like all traditions, the fair has seemed immutable, as if it will always define my summer. Without it, I feel rudderless, adrift on a wide, glassy sea. I am reading those novels, riding my bike, swimming on occasion, talking with friends, making a few cards but nothing of any substance. I sit outside at nine o’clock and watch the fireflies, savor bouquets of peppery arugula from my brother-in-law’s garden, dream restless dreams on these hot, still nights.

For me, few things are relinquished without a sense of loss. There is nothing on the creative horizon but sky. I feel no inner calling. I feel no compulsion. I am bewildered and unsettled by this space, this quiet, this emptiness. And yet, I am adjusting to it, happy to hear the hydrangeas breathe in the dusk, happy to bite into a sizzling hot dog, happy to follow the peaceful meanderings of the day, happy, for now, to say nothing.

Writer’s Antique Chair

I never knew there was such a word as “chairness,” but there is, and its definition is straightforward: “The essence of what it means to be a chair; the qualities that make a chair what it is.”

Chairs are alive with personalities of their own, so much so that someone could aptly be described as a wing chair, a barcalounger, a folding chair, a director’s chair, a chaise, an Eames, a pew. Chairs receive us; put their arms around us; make us sit up straight or tempt us to lie down; cushion us; discomfort us; soothe us. And even when we’re gone, chairs hold on to our memory.

I think of my grandmother’s chair, the only one she could sit in because with her crippling arthritis, it was the only one she could get out of. She did this by holding on tight to the arms and rocking herself back and forth for momentum. The chair, an upholstered, semi-wing, stayed steady and supported her, as if it knew this was its job, its fate. Today, all refreshed, it sits by my sister’s fireplace, and has earned its retirement, though I wonder if it misses my grandmother and its importance to her.

I think of the scratchy chair with its big square arms at the Peace Hotel in Shanghai in January, 1980. Sitting in that chair, drinking black tea from a pale green thermos adorned with pink roses, I thought about being half a world away from home and yet, the scratchy fabric reminded me of a similar chair in our long-ago living room where I took refuge and read fairy tales when I needed other worlds.

My sister has a chair so powerful it has become a family symbol for sloth, passivity, indifference, torpidity, a chair so seductive, so comfortable, so close to the television that once you fall into it, good luck getting out. It’s called the green chair, and though it’s old and quite worn now, it shows no signs of leaving, no relinquishing of its power.

When I first saw the writer’s antique chair pictured here, I was so smitten, I thought my heart would burst and never dreamed that it could be in my life. When I sit in it, I feel the ghosts of those before me who struggled to put thoughts and feelings into words. Sometimes I just sit in the chair, close my eyes, and let myself be part of something bigger than me.

It’s all in the chairness.

Lilacs in Honeoye Falls

A lilac bush grew beside the cellar door of our old house on Main Street, and in May, my mother would pick a big bouquet and put it in a glass vase on the dining room table. The back door and the front door would both be open, and the spring air blew through the length of the house, picking up the fragrance of lilacs, grass, and dark earth. I remember thinking this is what miracles must smell like.

I have just returned from a trip home to Honeoye Falls where the lilacs are blooming like crazy in a spectrum of color from blushed lavender to smoky purple. My favorites are the ones that still remain by the thresholds of collapsing barns and stone steps of windswept farmhouses. Planted years ago by people long gone, the lilacs are willing to tell you their stories if you go alone in early morning or at dusk and stand very still and listen intently.

Upstate New York is full of these places from another time, full of ghosts, and my hometown is no exception. There are ghosts in the cracks of the sidewalks and the bark of the tall maples that line the streets. Ghosts in the birdsong, the empty fields, the night wind rattling the rusty screens. Ghosts in the potato salad and the ginger cookies and the baked beans. Ghosts in the cold streams and the dark lakes and the flowered wallpaper and the dim taverns and the gravel roads.

I still see people, places, things that used to be and are no longer: the elegant irises bedded by the side of the church; the grain mill; the baseball field; Miss Fairchild behind her desk in the little library used mostly for storage now; the concrete bandstand in the park; the Plymouth dealership out on the edge of town; the doorbell factory where Aunt Glady and Aunt Aggie worked. Sometimes I meet people I haven’t seen in years. We look at each other, say a surprised hello, and search for the young face that lies just under the years. And always when I leave and come back to my life here, I’m not sure for a few days what is real and what is imaginary.

The lilacs in my back yard are plentiful this year, perhaps because of the cool, damp spring. I pick a bouquet, put it in a glass vase on the dining table, open the back and front doors, let the spring air blow through my house, and know again for another year what a miracle smells like.

Lilacs are always one sure way home.

Lonestar Cow

I have been to Texas. I have fed cows, seen the Hill Country in moonlight, dined outside at ten, heard shots from the roof, driven through the Guadalupe river in a venerable pick-up, been followed down a dusty road by a little blue-eyed cat, eaten wild pig and axis deer, picked rosemary from bushes big as New England yews.

Now I know what space means because Texas is about space, miles and miles of it. It’s space that shapes the accent: slow, easy, broad “A’s” and breaks words down into two syllables, sings the sounds. Space that shapes the character: steady, open, blunt, earthy, and can-do. Space that frees the imagination to roam the land, get lost in the sky, breathe in the air redolent with cedar, dung, the bones of ancient oaks.

I went with friends and stayed with their friends who live in a grand old limestone house on a 400-acre ranch. The original walls are thick and quiet, built by two German brothers in the late 1800s. There are fireplaces big enough to camp in, 20-foot ceilings, concrete chandeliers that look like gnarled branches, stone floors polished by years of workboots, deer hides slung over big leather sofas.

Up on the third floor, my room caught in the mossy treetops, I dreamed of my father singing love songs to my mother as she fried eggs in the iron pan. I dreamed of my little Main Street house becoming decidedly less well mannered. I dreamed of deer in flight and the canines of wild boar, and I dreamed of sunrises as far as I could see.

My friends’ friends were warm, gracious, generous…with hearts as big as the land in their care. They took us hither and yon, from a margarita-splashed San Antonio River Walk to a winery out on Rt. 290, where the owner himself told us that to make a great Texas wine, you have to think like a mother vine and act accordingly.

We went to Fredericksburg where I ate mustard, sausages, and sauerkraut and visited my design mecca: the Laboratoire de Design of Carol Hicks Bolton on Warehouse Road. I wanted to live in that vast space, settle into the jumble of rust, wood, tapestry, iron, and stone, study the warped French books, savor the Belgian linens, so crisp and thick, you could eat them like a sandwich.

Texas made my imagination bigger, open to wilder, freer possibilities. Since I’ve returned, I find myself saying “Yes” to more invitations, pushing the boundaries of the old, fixed comfort zones. If there’s a cowgirl in there, buried under years of habit, reserve, ennui, and obedience, I aim to find her, give her free rein.

Hyacinth in Window

Spring is like this hyacinth: it comes out of the darkness. After days and days of cold bare branches and brown earth and stillness as far as the eye can see, one purple flower in a Providence window says otherwise, says the season has turned, says that March, the waking-up month has arrived.

Winter is a long sleep in New England. Mostly we are indoors, in front of our computers, our necks bowed to the text we’ve just received, our hands reaching for the remote and the allure of escape into a mystery, a period drama, even a tawdry reality show. We are wrapped in sweaters, gloves, hats. We are eating hot, heavy food: soup, stew, chili, roasts. The short dark days lull us into waking dreams. We move as if we are underground.

Who knows how it happens, but spring is a miracle every year.  There are clues, of course, night shadows give way gently to the gray morning light; a robin sings lead in a chorus of twittering sparrows; tiny green buds light up the tips of the old lilac bush, though the grass is still snow-scarred and yellow and the rain is cold and my little town looks sooty, weary, forlorn.

Winter has had its way with us. The snowplow has dug furrows in the front yard and heaped driveway stone into the myrtle; fences are battered; chunks of sidewalk break into puzzle pieces; branches and fallen tree limbs and pine cones litter the yards; and the remnants of last summer’s hydrangeas are blown like tumbleweed down the empty streets. The houses nearest the water are still turned inward, windows shaded and shuttered.

And then a day comes in March, a day when the wind still nips but the sun soaks through thick coats and wool sweaters, reaching down into our pale winter bones. And just like the earth, something in us stirs. Something in us sniffs the air and remembers peaches and bicycles and beaches and sultry afternoons when the porch door bangs and the cats stretch and the light is like custard and summer sits by our side.

Spring comes out of the darkness. In March, the light finds us. We open our eyes.

Reading Lamp

It is mid-February, and all of Cape Cod is drifting in waves and waves of snow. Since seven this morning, the northeast wind has been picking up great dervishes of it, plastering windows, sealing doors, bending the old pines, creating a silence deep in its roar.

In one of those chance pre-blizzard encounters at the supermarket, I talked with a woman who said she hated winter and wished she lived in the Pacific Northwest, specifically southern Oregon, where the weather was temperate, the towns were small, and it seemed like paradise to her.

Almost everyone has an opinion about the perfect place to live. A friend loves France, my niece favors California, my sister would like a city (Boston or New York), other friends prefer Italy, Ireland, Canada, Florida, Maine, New Mexico. Climate seems to be a big factor, but there are others: cultural vitality, natural beauty, diversity, values, the rhythms of a place.

When I visit a city or another part of the country or a road-trip destination, I dream about living there: morning coffee in a sunny courtyard; market day in the village square; a little crooked house in an old literary town; a scrappy garden overlooking the sea; the sound of palm trees in the humid breeze; sidewalk cafes in the early evening; lectures and concerts; walks through bewitching forests. My imagination takes over, and daily life glows without dust, monthly bills, the routine of measured ways.

I look around my house with its reading lamps, wing chairs, funky kitchen, cluttered workroom, little stove, no longer sure if I inhabit this house or this house inhabits me, it is all so familiar, the boundaries so long gone. I hear the blizzard whistling around the corners, cracking the maples, and know that tomorrow there will be shoveling, icicles, cancellations, possible roof dams, inconveniences, perhaps hardship.

And yet, I choose to live here in this place of sea and seasons, of responsibilities, of daily patterns and habits. A paradise that includes the mundane and the measured. Opening my eyes only to the faraway and its charms, while remaining blind to the nearby and its imminent wonders, seems like a great waste.

Magic is here too…right before my eyes as I look out at the snow rendering the landscape strange and unknown. The awareness is up to me.