Waiting for a Sign

It has been a long, intense winter. A “Lady Macbeth Winter,” says a good friend. More snow is expected today on the first day of Spring, just a few inches to cover the forlorn, soot-covered drifts that line Main Street like the remnants of Armageddon. Enough though to wear through our threadbare patience, dash our incipient hopes.

I put my faith in the sun that has seared the ice near the roots of trees and the stones of cellars. The sun rising higher, hotter in the sky, heating up the storm door and soaking into my shoulders when I stand in the kitchen pool of it. A few days ago, while walking, I actually unzipped my coat and even saw a little chipmunk dart into a tunnel under a ledge of ice.

Still, it is hard to step into the cold air, breathe, relax. Hard to thaw the frozen knees. Hard to free the lively spirit that lies under the weight of the seemingly eternal snow. If you went to Florida or Arizona or your favorite Caribbean hideaway, you will not have to dig deep now to find your resolve. You will have missed this particular lesson.

There is something to be said for going through a New England winter. I think of the many acts of kindness: soup from my sister; waves from drivers passing by; plow-outs; lended roof rakes; ice dam repairs; and phone calls, just checking in. I think of random acts: an acquaintance gallantly shoveling out the end of the driveway where the monster plows hurl the snow and salted slush; the UPS driver drawing a smile on the face of every package; my neighbor standing on the icy doorstep, a yellow primrose in his hand.

I think of the sanctuary of libraries and the lights glowing in the windows along Main Street, the warmth of coffee shops, the steam from a baked potato, the comforts of a hot bath, flannel sheets, tea with cayenne, the little gas fireplace warming the breakfast room.

Say what you will about the hardships, there is a staunch camaraderie that emerges from the struggle with fierce blizzards and slick roads and frigid winds and mountains of snow and ice stacked a foot and a half above the gutters and water seeping through the ceiling. A relentless New England winter with a Lady Macbeth shadow affirms one thing we often forget in kinder days: we’re all in this together. Every one of us. No exceptions. None.

I’m putting my faith in that…and the sun.

Winter Cottage

February is the month we most need our angels.

I like to think that on these moonlit, 10-degree nights when ice festoons the windows and wind sweeps around the bare corners and snow turns blue that my house is full of company. A number of loving, eccentric spirits (most of whom I know but a few I do not) tumble down the chimney or drift under the back door and hang out for a bit while I am sleeping.

They sit in the wing chairs in front of the little stove or around the dining table or before the cold fireplace and tell each other stories of their long-ago loves, triumphs, sadnesses, their still unfufilled longings. Maybe they have a slow dance in the foyer or a cheese sandwich in the kitchen. I like to think they’re happy in this sweet house the way I am. I know they are surely welcome.

Winter is here in all its fierce, determined earnestness. Blizzards of blinding snow and wracking winds are followed by waist-high drifts and icicles long as sabers. And then a warming to 38 degrees and mushing through ankle-deep slush and driving through frigid lakes that swirl across once black roads. Then snow again, layer upon layer of snow and cold like a birthday cake in a dark fairy tale.

We walk in mincing steps on the slick back roads, those of us who crave the fresh, bracing air and a glimpse of the leaden or the stark blue sky. We visit the library to read the paper or thumb through an art book or make our way to a coffee shop or the post office or the grocery store, delighted just to be out and about and in the company of other hardy souls.

We make soups thick with black beans and onions and chowder to stand a spoon in. Tea is good with a sprinkle of cayenne, soda bread with bubbles of melted cheese. Socks are wooly; sheets are flannel; boots are serious. Summer is light years away. There is nothing on the beach but snow and an occasional crow, a sullen gull.

The spirits, known and unknown, sense our thinness, our weariness with the challenges of deep winter. In the pale mornings, you might find a love note on the refrigerator written in an elaborate, old-fashioned hand. Look for a tattered fortune or a torn secret under a chair cushion. There may also be a stone in the sink. Look around. We’re not alone. It’s February, the angels’ favorite month to visit.

Roses Dreaming

Finally, it is January. I breathe a big sigh of relief. Finally, the deep, beautiful, mostly empty month of bare trees and snow squalls and frozen earth and silence. After the rush-gush down the chute from the end of October to the end of December, January is like looking at a bare wall after absorption in a de Kooning…like the sudden hush of a library reading room off a cacophonous city street.

This is the month to take bundled-up walks around five o’clock when the ink-stained clouds and the blue dusk chill the fingers and thrill the soul. I wear hats and mufflers and gloves under wool mittens and breathe the cold air down to my knees and let my toes fend for themselves in thick socks.

I think of something I read once about the cold. The advice was good: not to hunch up or shudder or wrap your arms around yourself to ward it off but rather to breathe, to relax, to let go, to surrender.

This January seems to be a lesson in that, letting go of things no longer useful or beautiful like dresses that don’t delight; books read and forgotten; paper I thought would be used in my work but piles up now in plastic bins; plastic bins because they’re ugly; an angel food cake pan (really!); knicknacks and bric a brac (not charming); striped socks with mended toes; dried-up pens; threadbare potholders; wellies with split soles.

And deeper still…letting go of questions that no longer serve: Am I kind, lovely, smart, resourceful, creative, worthy? Is there enough to go around? Must love be earned? I am paying more attention this month to how I create my life, shape the days, spend the nights. How thoughts can restore well being or undermine it. Living the interesting question: in the end, what is left when you take away what is no longer useful or beautiful or nourishing to the work and to the heart?

January’s gift is the time and the stillness and the uneventfulness to go within and toss out, dust up, rearrange…to bustle about down in the dark cellar or up in the frigid attic. In this landscape of black trees, stark horizons, and crisp, white air, there is no place to hide. Best to show up. Best to surrender. Best to release. Best to listen to what the silence has to say. And pay heed.

Magic in the Back Yard

And so the dark December days are upon us and with the leaden skies and the chilly mists comes the sort of magic that only makes itself known in this short month.

It takes many forms, December magic: the fragrance of the evergreen wreaths outside the supermarket; the golden lights in the four o’clock windows of the inhabited homes up and down Main Street; the empty eyes of the big houses nearest the water; the covered boats asleep in the side yards; the bare trees tangled in wood smoke; the flurry of a snow squall eclipsing the sun; and that same sun disappearing by 4:30, all magenta and orange behind the bruised clouds.

On Christmas Eve, long, long ago, I looked out the dining room windows and up into the black sky and was sure I saw the glimmering Bethlehem star casting its otherworldly light over the shingled neighborhood rooftops. Magic, it seems, begets magic: there was a tree in our living room; stockings were hung on the mantel over the gas grate; there was oyster stew; and elderly aunts who stayed the night. I expected to see the star with all of that unusualness going on behind me, and see it I did.

So many years have passed and most of them I’ve forgotten to look out the window or stand under the midnight sky on Christmas Eve and find that star. I’ve been busy with the shopping, the gifts, the wrappings, the cookie swaps, the soirees, the general hoop-la, the personal angst. The real magic of December, of course, has little to do with all that. It’s in the solstice when day and night are equal; the first snow and the conversational caws of the crows; the slate-gray light of a Jane Austen afternoon; the aroma of homemade vegetable soup. It’s flannel sheets and cold fingers and scuffy boots and wood fires and deep breaths of clean, cold air; it’s buried deep in our hearts.

Whatever we’re looking for, we tend to find. In December, the wonder is right there in front of us in the dancing trees and the swirls of snow and the pale, ghostly moonlight. Or right there behind us in the memories of a warm house, a balsam-scented tree, elderly aunties, and exotic oyster stew. December speaks to the part of us that never gives up on miracles…asks us to bear witness.

Talking Turkey

Just in case we were lulled into sweet oblivion, fooled by balmy temps in the high 60s, the golden sun, the flowers in the little courtyard faded but decidedly there. Just in case we thought maybe this year we could keep the storm windows up a while, let the serious sweaters and gloves remain in the dark closets, the closed trunks. Just in case we forgot ourselves, nature gave us a comeuppance this first weekend in November.

Yesterday’s torrents of rain from the coastal Nor’easter tore flurries of leaves from the maples and dogwoods, splatting them on windows and doors and across the once green yards, the black roads. The wind blustered and roared all night, and this morning, the rain turned to snow, the kind of snow you see in March: wet, fat-flaked, fickle. And the temperatures fell, and Boris, the furnace, swooshed to life.

Last week, in the halcyon days of late October, I heard click-clacking sounds outside the open kitchen window and thought maybe one of the neighbors was working on his house. But this wasn’t the sound of home repair; it was a strangely living sound. So I looked out the back door and there was a whole family of wild turkeys just a few feet away staring back at me, as if to say, “Who the heck are you?” Or maybe, “What does a hungry turkey order for lunch around here?”

The wild turkeys are all over the little town where I live. I’ve seen rafters of them since spring when the little ones were trailing behind their mothers, and I’ve watched them grow into adolescents, gawky and reckless. Now they’re all big and quite comfortable living among us, crossing Main Street with a swagger and barely acknowledging me when I ride by on my bike. Lots of people don’t like them, but I do. They bring wildness into the everyday and wonder and a peculiar kind of grace. I stare at them and time stops, the day rearranges itself.

I read that they sleep in trees or even on rooftops, and I wonder where they’re sleeping this afternoon when the wet snow falls and the day closes an hour earlier. The interminable short day, I call it, when the clocks are turned back an hour, and the darkness sets in by 4:30 and the day is over but it’s not at all. On this particular day with the snow dripping and the grayness thick as a handknit muffler, the darkness began with the dusky light this morning that barely whispered through the lace curtain.

Just in case we’d forgotten, it is November. I wonder what the turkeys have to say about that.

Forgotten Combination

It was just a matter of breaking the code, I thought, all those years so long ago when I was in high school. If I could only get the combination right, the door would swing open to a world of perfect, poufy hair; a cheerleader’s uniform; straight A’s; lots of friends; and most importantly, lots of dates. Boys everywhere: handsome ones, smart ones, funny ones, athletic ones, even older ones all vying for my attention.

Perhaps if I got it right, there might even be a big class ring swaddling my left finger in grimy adhesive tape; a ride to school in, let’s say, an old maroon Mercury; maybe a way-too-big wool jacket with the orange letters, “HF” on the back; dances in the sweaty gym after the games; and certainly, an ensured date for the prom, for the ball.

I would say that by Senior Year, I had figured out two or three numbers of the code, not nearly enough to open the doors of my dreams. I had wonderful girlfriends and a few boys were at least saying hello to me in the halls, but no ring, no maroon Merc, no uniform or poufy hair, and a very long wait for an invitation to the Senior Ball.

But I was getting the hang of it, and given a couple more years, I just might have mastered the code. When we (all 85 of us) graduated that June evening, left the town we knew so well, slammed the door on those growing-up years, and scattered ourselves to the winds, we left each other and the farmy lands for good. I knew this, knew profoundly that something more important than dates was lost to me and was greatly saddened by it.

That’s when the dark allure of homesickness and the melancholy beauty of abandoned farms became poetry for me. As did the land of upstate New York with its hot-baked summers and ice-slicked winters; its vistas of corn and sky; its dark, fathomless lakes; its earth fertile, fragrant, full of secrets and promise.

And I write about this again and again to remember, to hold these things in place.

I went to my high school reunion a few weeks ago and saw many (but certainly not all) of my classmates. I realized in that weekend that age is the great equalizer…that there never was a code to break…just something I made up to cover my shyness and fear. After so many years, meeting again in the bar of the bowling alley, we looked right at each other, right into each other, understanding that no matter what our station in high school, we’re all in this together now.

Combination or no combination, we always were.

Dress in Prism Light

If I can figure out a way to make magical dresses, I will, and for a while at least, this is all I will do.

I will make these dresses out of wrinkled secrets and cobwebs and prism light and the crickets’ black songs, out of dark photographs of stonewashed streets after midnight. I will stitch them with threads the mourning doves drop by mistake. The little Husky Star sewing machine wll buzz and whirr into the wee hours with only the Pleiades for illumination. All of the cats who have left me: Dylan, Harvey, and Carlie will curl up on the rickety sewing table and tell me about heaven and what they are served there for breakfast and cocktail hour, what the chairs are like, also the saucers and the spoons.

Magical dresses journey to imaginary places far away from the grocery store and the mechanics’ garage, far away from the unmade bed and the dust under the dresser, from pots and pans, and the routine morning toilette. These dresses have a life of their own whether you wear them or not, making a ruckus in the closet, shimmering on a wall, turning a hall tree on its head, knocking over the bread basket.

You probably only want one because that’s all you need to captivate a handsome fellow and at the very least, compel him to declare his love forever.

In fact, each dress will come with a tag replete with caveats: never wear when the moon is full or when the wind picks up; never wash with water, only with blue ocean air; watch out for humming birds who may nest in your hair; tread gently in gardens or parking lots; wear with great caution on birthdays or the solstice; and above all, pay attention, don’t drift off into reverie or once-upon-a-time or heaven knows where you might end up, since these dresses are already inclined to wander.

When a dress is complete, I will take it out for a twirl in the backyard (keeping my wits about me, of course). And I will listen to what it has to say about itself and the whole wide Universe and the person it is looking for. Magic is indeed looking for us; I didn’t know this until the dresses informed me that magic is incomplete until it is shared…kind of like pancakes and pizza and love.

They’re out there, these dresses, and when you pull one over your head or step into it, you’ll look in the mirror and discover someone you barely recognize but know you’ve met once in another chapter, another country, another lifetime. One of these dresses will call your name in a strange language you’ve never heard before but manage to speak fluently. Magic is like this: a palm outstretched, holding a quite impossible world. Ours for the taking.

Most-Alone Tree

When my mind wanders through the hills and vales of memory, I almost always end up in a place. It’s not so much the people I remember as the place…the way the August night smelled of dry grass and withered roses; the way the fog boiled and churned behind the hills; the spot the dust collected under the kitchen table; the sound the wind made in the willowy pine outside the bedroom window.

I think we can know a place better than a person. People dodge and defend, are mercurial and complicated, often confusing. Places mostly just want to be known and remembered.

Take this tree on a road called Boughton Hill in the countryside heading out of Honeoye Falls. The road rises, twists and turns through fields of corn and wheat and hay. Suddenly, you crest a hill and there it is: a lone tree in the middle of an empty field with nothing in the air but sky.

In the long-ago days, my father drove out Boughton Hill every morning very early when the rabbits sat under the soaked wildflowers and munched crabgrass, when the sun was thin and tentative, the air full of birdsong and mist. I wonder what he might have been thinking, listening to Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard sing about broken love, as he made his way to the hard job of making roads like Boughton Hill through the fields of other counties.

In the long-ago days, I kissed a boy in his pick-up truck, parked one summer night on a lonely road off Boughton Hill. I remember the fragrance of the earth cooling and the corn breathing and the night settling in. I remember the wild chorus of crickets down in the ditches, the sound of my heart in my ears.  But I didn’t know much about the boy except that I liked him and wonder now if he was wondering what he was doing there with me. Maybe he was thinking about his truck or his shop class or the tv show he was missing or how to get the kiss right.

And now, when we go back home to visit, we exit the Thruway and travel Boughton Hill again. There are more houses, often quite unattractive and glaringly new, standing cold and stark on an acre of rider-mower lawn. My eye looks away, searching for the old houses with their weathered clapboards or chipped shingles. Usually there is a protective cluster of trees around the back door, a falling-down barn just steps away, a bit of rusty detritus in the side yard. They have their own private poetry, these lived-in, fading places half returned to the earth.

The memories fly up to meet me as we make our way on Boughton Hill, back through the years to the little town that was once the world. And in some ways, still is…a town still beckoning, still breathing, still begging to be known. Quite a place.

June Morning

Growing up in the farmy lands of Honeoye Falls, New York, I applied for a worker’s permit when I turned 16 because I knew that was the only way I could buy the plaid kilt and bucket purse at Sibley’s that I passionately coveted. That June, I went to work at Kimball’s Farm on the outskirts of town where the strawberry fields really did stretch on forever.

We started picking at 7:30 and worked all day and the pay was ten cents a quart. I remember pulling on shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers with holes in the toes…so sleepy, wanting only one more dream, wishing with all my heart there was an easier way to get that kilt. Possess that purse.

Taking the metal carrier with its ten empty quart baskets by the handle, I headed out into the fields. The air on a clear morning was sweet with the smell of plowed earth and ripe berries beginning to warm in the sun. The plants were drenched with dew, and the berries glowed like rubies hidden in a thick thrush of green.

At first, I would bend over to pick, slowly working my way down an everlasting row, searching for the reddest berries, plucking the stems, and piling the fruit in the little wooden baskets. Then so eager for water and a break, up to the stand with ten picked quarts and then back down to the field. Over and over until the blessed half hour for lunch up at the little white stand (a breezy oasis because it was cool and shady), and I relished the tiny packaged cherry pie in its foil tin that was the treat of the day.

After lunch, I picked sitting down, moving slower now down the row that seemed to end only where the earth curved into faraway, unknowable places like Paris, Manhattan, San Francisco. On someone’s transistor radio, Skeeter Davis was lamenting “The End of the World,” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” croonings caught in the maple leaves up by the stand, and the “Rhythm of the Rain” colored my weary daydreams.

And late in the afternoon, coming home covered with dirt and sweat and berry stains, every muscle bone-tired, I knew I didn’t have the stamina of a farm girl, knew I had to find a way out and far from those plowed fields. I ate a lot of strawberries; I bought the kilt; and I left my town at 17. Now when I pick a quart of strawberries, it all comes back: the girl, the earth, the dew, the yearnings, and those June mornings when the strawberries beckoned and their rows ended in unimaginable horizons.

Pale Ghosts. Buried Streams.

Every spring, when the snows melted in the farmy lands around Honeoye Falls, New York, my sister and I would open the heavy bulkhead door and drag our blue bikes up the steep cellar steps to the pale green air above. To us, this day was an extraordinary blooming, as we tugged and pulled the bicycles up and out from the underground darkness into the morning light.

What a wonder it was to ride those bikes again after a winter of trudgy boots and ice-crusted mittens, of dim afternoons, and snowdrifts thick with silence. We were ourselves again: light-hearted and eager, unafraid, free from inside, anxious rooms. Pushing the pedals hard, steering straight, we rode up to the end of York Street and our favorite spring place: the stream.

Run-off from the empty fields, the stream threaded its way through memories of corn and beans and gushed out under York Street into a smooth, sparkling ribbon of cold water with emerald banks, and then it melted into a mucky, marshy field beyond. The water was so clear, the stones beneath looked like polished jewels, and the green underground grass flowed like the tresses of a goddess.

On those banks, we set up house and made cookies out of mud, and pies too, and sometimes we brought our dolls and little flannel blankets, and we made chairs out of fallen walnut branches, and the dolls talked about how lovely it all was, delicious too, especially the cookies pebbled with chocolate chips and the pies sprinkled with snips of grass.

All day long we stayed at the stream until the faltering afternoon light chilled and the cookies were gone and the dolls were cranky, and we knew it was time to go back to the wallpapered rooms stained with cigarette smoke and worry and a number of lost or misplaced dreams. We rode home, quiet now, and put our bikes against the wall of the old, haunted barn with its smell of motor oil and gray dirt and rust and parched wood.

At night, the stream eased our dreams and our wild blue bikes made everything possible and riding hard out to the end of York Street was adventure enough. And we slept in our twin beds in the north-facing room and the dolls slept and the stream flowed and flowed and flowed all the way to the everlasting stars.