Victorian Wedding Boots

Sometimes in places like flea markets, thrift stores, and museums, I discover things that are so full of story, I want to stand still, barely breathe, and let my heart do the hearing. Such was the case with these soft, lace-tangled boots with linings the color of sea shells.

Other things beckoned that day in the hushed little museum: jet beaded collars that trailed over bone-thin shoulders; an old book open to a love-lost poem; the steep ladder-like stairs that twisted to the crooked landing above; a Victorian hair wreath tangled around delicate wire and housed in a golden shadowbox.

But that afternoon, it was these boots.

I listened. They told me they were worn only once on a wedding day in mid-April when the forsythia had just blossomed and the daffodils were tossed in the gray winds off the leaden sea. An afternoon parlor wedding with the piercing eyes of the bride’s grandparents looking on from their oval picture frames and quite possibly wondering what in the world their granddaughter was doing, marrying a sailor! Handsome, yes. Young, yes. But what were his prospects?

He owned no land, no house, nothing really, but his wild sense of adventure and the scope of imagination that went with it. Rather their granddaughter, wearing these soft boots and her best dress, be wed to the widower farmer who lived nearby and often brought the family apples and bushels of corn, fresh eggs, and bottles of sour dandelion wine.

The beautiful boots were a gift from the bride’s elderly aunt, who never married but believed in love all the same. And her young niece wore them that chilly spring day and looked at her handsome husband, knowing he was leaving for a long voyage on the dangerous and yearning seas, leaving in three days. Looked at him and saw only his vitality, his comeliness, his grace.

Year later, gently folding back the yellowed muslin, she unwrapped these boots and it all came back: the faded parlor, the slate skies and the fierce wind, the forsythia through the watery windows. His face. Her heart. The boots, holding the story, keeping it still and close.

Summer Chairs

I could have taken a picture of the soot-specked, stick-encrusted snow-ice rammed into place at the end of the driveway by the pugnacious snow plow. I could have taken a picture of the massive pine bough across the front yard. Or the clothesline draped in ice. The bent snow shovel. The snow itself half way up the back door. The line-up of sturdy wellies in the kitchen.

But everyone, almost everywhere it seems, knows it has been a very long, intense winter. With more snow expected, I thought it might be a relief to dream into this summer photograph of a back yard in Sandwich, Massachusetts even though this image with its grass and flowers, its sundial, and humid, shimmering light seems as far away as the moon…or at least Paris…as distant as a 40 year-old memory.

I try to recall summer and its ease, its sweetness. Try to remember corn on the cob and iced tea and potato salad and arugula straight from the garden. The freedom of bare legs, sandals, and cotton skirts. And sweat, the sticky dampness on sun-soaked skin. The sultry nights with fireflies flickering in the hydrangeas and the night air heavy with salt.

I imagine sitting in these summer chairs enjoying a big white cup of creamy coffee and watching the morning breeze ripple across the water, listening to the rustle of leaves. In this picture, I imagine a yellow cat and a battered rowboat, a good friend to talk to, or a favorite pen scratching across rough, brown paper. I feel like Eliza Doolittle…wouldn’t it be loverly.

But it’s important and necessary to keep the faith. This beautiful earth is turning; the sun is higher in the sky, and when I open the porch door, bright light spills onto the floorboards. There are snowdrops buried somewhere. The fluffed-out robins sing in the hedges under the dark cottage windows. And even though the wind blows a chilly gray off the water, there is hot soup on the stove and hunks of warm bread; there is a trusty furnace; there are good books and down comforters and sturdy boots and lively friends.

Winter is a challenge to body and spirit. It is weary and wearing, but in the end, it’s no match for dreams. Come sit with me in summer chairs. Let’s speak of our hearts’ desires. Let’s wrap our sweaters tighter and and wait in our summer chairs for rainbows, for one more golden chance.

A Book…Industrial Style

Art does funny things to your brain. A while ago, my sister, niece, and I went to the Open Studios at Fort Point across the channel from the financial district in Boston. The studios are mostly in old brick warehouses used a long time ago for the wool trade and now home to an eclectic group of artists.

It’s a fun way to spend a Sunday, wandering in and out of artists’ studios looking at paintings, photography, jewelry, sculpture, handmade books, and mixed media collage. I also like seeing the way people live when the line between home and workplace is practically nonexistent.

Decor and lifestyle aside, what I’m really thinking about is how after I’ve spent time looking at art in a museum, gallery, studio, or artist’s home, something seems to shift in my brain, and I start to see things, if not artistically, at least more vividly.

The parking lot from a third-floor window suddenly becomes a grid of white lines and a checkerboard of curved car roofs; trees shimmer and make music; etched pine floors tell a story that could be hung on a wall. Textures like concrete, brick, rust, and old stone absorb my glance. The world seems to come into focus the way it did when I put on my first pair of glasses in sixth grade.

What is this altered state and why does looking intently at artistic expression trigger it? The Inuit believe that all objects and living things…a chair, a book, a stone, a rusty tin can, a gray cat…have a spirit that animates them. In the Inuit’s world, everything is shimmering with energy and presence. Perhaps it’s that capricious and mysterious presence that artists hope to recognize, explore, and present to us. And when we see it, we wake up, and something in our brain wakes up too.

So when the world is too much with us (or not enough with us), it’s a good thing to wander around a museum or a gallery or really look at that pinhole photograph of an abandoned factory that hangs in the back hall, mostly unnoticed now in our hustle-bustle haste.

Just imagine if everything were alive. And imagine, like an artist, living in that awareness. Even the walls have ears. And all the stones have a story to tell.

Paperwhites on Charles Street

There’s nothing quite like Boston’s Charles Street to take you back in time, especially in these so-short days of early winter. Charles Street operates on a human scale: the shops are small and warmly lit and quirky, and often it is the equally quirky shop owner who greets you. Making its way up Beacon Hill, Charles Street is dotted with corner cafes, bakeries, gift and antique shops, a hardware store, a green grocer, and a small hotel or two tucked into brick townhouses.

Charles Street and Beacon Hill on a December early evening with the snow falling hard and the wind picking up is the stuff of fairy tale and poetry. To trudge up Pinckney Street, just off Charles, in the six o’clock darkness with all that white silence drifting down and to see the golden lights spilling from the old windows is to know wonder.

Every December, my sister and one of our dearest childhood friends take the “T” into town to see the lights and the Newbury windows, to indulge in a hefty sandwich at the Parish Cafe, and to laugh and remember those long ago days when we lived for snow, tumbled in it, slid down it, shaped it into forts and into horses we could ride on. Growing up together on West Main Street in Honeoye Falls, New York meant being outside a lot in every season.

So that day when the snow was like the swirling flurry in those old-fashioned glass globes, we were undeterred and pulled on hats and tugged up collars and set forth. By the time we made it down Arlington to Beacon to Charles, we were pretty much unrecognizable. The snow drifted round our shoulders and into the folds of our hats, sifted down our necks, and made its way into our pockets.

All of this felt quite familiar, as if the years too had been silenced by the snow, and the three of us were seven or eight again. We knew, in spite of the discomfort, there was magic about, and no one turns her back on magic…ever. When I started to complain about my damp shoulders, my friend, Dine, gave me a look from under her snow-caked hood, and I understood that complaining was breaking the code.

And that night, standing at the iron gates of Louisburg Square, in a blur of whiteness and wind, I saw in one window, a single candle. It flickered in the darkness as the snow whirled down, and I thought of home and making one’s way there after a day at work or a season of heartbreak or a lifetime of adventures. I thought of Charles Street and its human proportions, and I thought that all it really takes to guide each of us home is a single candle, a single kind word, one smile. Powerful magic indeed.

Geranium in Window

A couple of days ago, the evening forecast was for lows of 31 degrees under a clear sky of stars. So November is here, though only the dogwood is completely bare of its russet leaves, the yellow ones from the maples are swirling down in the gray afternoons like golden dervishes, and the oaks’ still cling…the last to go.

The storm doors are up, the storm windows are down, lace is doubled at the old rattling windows, wood is stacked at the back door, the woolies have escaped from closet garment bags, and the geraniums have come back in. Every window that gets a glimmer of daylight sports an eager little geranium or two, craning their curious faces to see what’s going on outside.

When I come home from a late afternoon bike ride, fingers numb, ears tingling, I see them at the windows, scarlet splotches of cheer under the leaden November skies. I’m not sure how they feel about coming in…they seemed quite happy in their clay pots by the clothesline and in the schoolhouse windowboxes. I notice that for a few weeks, they look a little addled, as if they’ve just moved to another country with different light, time, language, customs.

But they adjust and settle in. I think they like the smell of potatoes baking and soup simmering, the smoke from the occasional fire, the sound of book pages turning, the click of the keyboard. And in January, when the snow drifts round the windows and the glass turns to ice, the geraniums take it all in stride. They’re hardy souls. They’re not fussy, which is a good thing, because delicate, demanding plants don’t last long around here.

My father was a gardener who understood growing things. Roses tumbled in waterfalls down his weathered trellises, and in summer, the kitchen table was piled with corn, beans, peas, radishes, and carrots. In winter, the root cellar was full of beets, potatoes, and turnips.

Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit his gift, and so for plants, it’s pretty much survival of the fittest. The geraniums don’t seem to mind benign neglect at all. Sometimes I forget to water them for a few weeks and often forget to say hello, and they keep right on blooming.

I’m grateful for their warmth, their generous spirits, their happy natures. Sometimes you don’t have to look too far to find love. It’s there in the window. Looking right back at you.

Turning Away from the Sun

It doesn’t happen that often but sometimes the clouds part and the sky opens and you have a chance to expresss what is in you to express. Thanks to my friend Michelle Law, a talented artist and fellow girl of the farmy lands, I recently got to do just that in the Chequaquet Gallery at the Centerville Historical Museum here on Cape Cod.

“Go ahead,” Michelle said to me last January. “Do whatever you’d like.”

All I knew was that I loved layers of netty flounce; crows; rust; tears & tatters; words; moody images; handmade books; stained, coarse linen; and stories. But it wasn’t until later in the winter when I was having coffee with my friend David Ellis, another very talented and inspirational artist, that Miss Havisham came to mind. We were talking about the things nobody wants anymore, the neglected and the unseen, the weary and the worn, and the joy of seeing these things from a fresh perspective and perhaps putting them to use again.

And somehow Miss Havisham, star of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, came to mind and so did the recognition of poetry in the cast-offs and the left-overs. “Miz Havisham Revisited: The Poetics of Romantic Decay” took root that morning over strong coffee with a like-minded friend.

I learned a lot from doing this installation. I learned that if an idea silences your mind, thrums your heart, and wobbles your knees, you are definitely going to be okay if you give voice to it. It takes trust to believe that if you just notice and heed the clues, you will be shown how.

I found rusty tableware and hinges, oak frames with no glass, tin ceiling panels, battered shutters, tattered bed lamps in a haunted seaside mansion, starched underskirts, and a boudoir chair with a broken leg. I learned how to make stuffed crows on sticks and how to burn organdy into dark, brooding roses.

I learned how to stain linen and paper too and wrote and illustrated a story about sister crows on paper that smelled like instant coffee, then stretched the little accordion book for three feet on an old mantel hung on an eggplant-colored wall. I learned again and again to trust instinct, trust the vision that has hold of your psyche and your heart and shakes them and won’t let them go.

It wasn’t easy for me. I like control. I like knowing where I’m going. I’m not (try as I might) a big fan of surprises. But when I think about it, every time I put word to paper, I don’t know what’s coming next. I have learned to listen. I have learned to take note. But when it comes to trust, I have a way to go. One word at a time.

Shoes Heavy as Stones

September makes me think of saddle shoes. It also makes me think of polished corridors and early mornings and the smell of pencil lead and chocolate milk and peanut-butter-white-bread sandwiches in waxed paper. But mostly, it’s saddle shoes.

All I ever wanted was a pair of shiny brown loafers with a penny tucked in each one because I was sure that loafers were the answer to my strong yearning to disappear at the beginning of each school year. And I was equally sure that those saddle shoes, heavy as stones on my narrow feet, were part of the reason why disappearing seemed my best option.

Marking the end of summer, September couldn’t help but be a hard month. Summer in Honeoye Falls meant sun and heat and fireflies and sweet corn and tree climbing and long bike rides out into the farmy lands. It was two months of glorious freedom, pulling on shorts and little tops and worn sneakers and seeing what adventures the day would bring.

We were feral creatures with skinned knees and dirty fingernails, messy hair, and furiously pounding hearts. We fended for ourselves in summer, and no one ever managed to make us feel small.

But then, September, and the long walk through town to the big brick school and the classrooms full of popular girls wearing loafers and popular boys wearing loafers and incomprehensible arithmetic problems and stern teachers and the ugly saddle shoes. My father insisted that my sister and I wear them so that our arches would not fall. I may have tried to make him understand the correlation between the shoes and invisibility, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t get his mind around that.

So every September, I taught myself to disappear. Here’s how you do it: first, imagine yourself far away, riding the very top branches of a maple tree or lying in a green rowboat on a deep, even greener lake; two, hide your hands in your desk so no one can see them and they’re safe; three, never ever raise your hand; four, never say anything unless you have to; and five, pretend your feet in those shoes were never born.

For the most part, this worked pretty well, and now a lifetime later, the saddle shoes have left their mark. I love to wear shoes like Doc Martens or policewoman shoes or thick-soled boots, all heavy and sturdy and decidedly there. They make me feel grounded and sure and safe and quite, quite visible. So the saddle-shoe suffering showed me this: I like stones on my feet.

Empty, Tipsy Birdhouse

It is August and the baby birds have flown, leaving the little birdhouse tossed and askew, empty save for straw and feathers, twigs, and memories. Back in June when the light filtered in the windows at 4:30, it was the birds as much as the light that announced the beginning of the day. Calling to each other, declaring their territories, recounting the to-do list for the hours ahead.

And then the solstice came and the spring ended and summer officially began. The little birds took it all in stride, mating for the season, feeding their insatiable young, teaching them how to soar high and fend for themselves, and scaring off the jays and the starlings with raucous spurts of bird profanity. Big words from little birds.

It is August now, and the baby birds have flown. The rose of sharon is in full bloom, opening gradually to the afternoon and turning inward by dusk. The crickets are rubbing their arms together in the dusty twilights, and the light falters by eight. August, it seems to me, is more complicated than July…that month of glare and sweat, of hot sun and brazen light, of few hiding places.

I like August. The baseball games are winding down, the beaches are sprinkled with a few umbrellas, the nights are a bit cooler and longer. September, with its crisp clear air is yet to come. August can still get doggy and limp, and the tiny spiders spin their corner webs in the sultry darkness. Dreams are restless and tossed, peopled with ancient lovers and lost cities. At noon, on the little brick patio, I eat garden cucumbers and the first of the explosive tomatoes and long for the days when August went on and on like a story I never wanted to end.

So I look at the stars behind the cedars, listen to the jingling crickets and the ribbet-ribbet-ribbet of the tree frogs, smell the sweet corn and the grill smoke. The baby birds have flown. I journey miles in my daydreams; the nights take care of themselves.

Curious Curios

There are magical places we return to again and again, and if we’re lucky, 1) they’re a store; 2) they’re relatively close by so we can drop in when we choose; and 3) they’re owned by a person we both like and admire.

I’ve written about one such store: my friend Joanne Rossman’s eponymous shop on Birch Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. Today, I feel compelled to write about another called simply Nesting. Located in Concord (one of my all-time favorite Massachusetts towns where the ghosts rule), Nesting is up a steep, weather-beaten staircase on the second floor of a tipsy brick building.

The owner of Nesting, Wendy Snider, seems part angel, part sprite, and maybe like Joanne, there’s a little witch thrown in for good measure. All I can say is that her store makes me so happy I could believe in almost anything. There is such vivid imagination at work here that fires up my imagination, and the result is a conviction that anything I truly want and believe in is possible.

The magic is like most magic…hard to pin down. It may be Wendy’s sweet dog, Willow, at the door; it may be the old stuff like typewriters and paper and rusty birds and tiny chunks of soap and haunted photographs and all sorts of quirky what-not. It may be the climb up those stairs and the old, crooked building, the way the floor slopes and slants, the warren of drifty rooms. It may be the fragrance of yellowed paper and lavender bundles and old books and even older walls.

I only know that when I step gingerly around Willow and over the threshold, I am transported. Maybe we all feel that way when we come face to face with beauty and freshness and the power of originality. It could be anywhere: the produce arrangement at a farm stand; the bustling kitchen of a favorite restaurant; the rickety, listing foyer of a friend’s old house by the sea.

But here, at Nesting, it’s the colors, mostly muted and earthy; it’s the displays of bare branches and birds’ nests and linen and inkwells and threadbare lampshades; it’s the old building; it’s Concord where the past is as real as the present. But fundamentally, it’s another prime example of an inspired imagination at work. All I can do is hold my fragrant lavender bunch and whisper, “Thank you.”

Halibut Point

Otherworldly places are good for the soul. This is a picture I took in early April at Halibut Point off the coast of Cape Ann, north of Boston. Looking at this photo, I think I might have been in Scotland or Iceland or Ireland…some lost, forsaken land. It’s hard to believe that this magical place is only a few hours from my tame little domicile on another Cape.

It was late in the afternoon when my friend David and I stumbled into this wildness, a bone-chilling silver day with gray winds that tore straight through the wool of our coats and turned my pale fingers chalk-white. We had warmed ourselves with crispy fried clams and a turn through a few dusty Essex antique stores beforehand, but when we pointed the car toward Gloucester, we had no idea we would be blown here.

The well-worn path beckoned innocently enough with splashes of thin sunshine and a few gentle curves, but like any journey into a dream, mysteries emerged breath after breath. The gnarled trees twisted and tangled into each other; briars were flung skyward; and the sunlight disappeared. A white hawk flared across the path, landed in one of the lofty snares, and looked down at us as if to say, “Are you ready?”

We followed the trail until we came to a great, deep dark granite quarry with menacing cliffs, and that’s where we met the beginning of the wind. Sweeping off the Atlantic, its gusts told the stories of shipwrecks in water cold as slate, water the color of shale. We pulled our hats down over our ears and tightened mufflers and pressed on into that wind, knowing it would end here at the edge of the continent, knowing we were destined for enchantment.

Bracing ourselves, we made ourselves brave, though every fiber of my hobbit being was protesting, wanting only a snug armchair and a smoky fire. The path was gone, replaced by slabs of granite and tossed boulders and wild heather. We were like the herring swimming upstream, and perhaps it was the same instinctual drive that pushed us headlong to the sea, the roar of it carried on the bracing wind like an otherworldly fugue.

And when we got there, we stood on one of the highest rocks and raised our numb hands to the clouds and filled our lungs with salt air and shouted, “Yes!” Celebrating grace on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, we were blessed with Yes…indeed.