A Bouquet of Potatoes

The best gifts are the ones like these: delivered this afternoon to the back doorstep by my friend and neighbor Richard. “Close your eyes and open your hands,” he said. And then he proceeded to empty his pockets, filling my cupped hands with beautiful little brown potatoes. “Organic,” he added.

The potatoes are a sort of bouquet, I think, a bouquet of humble, earthy things. I happen to be crazy about potatoes in every season, but now when the March winds blow cold off the ocean, there’s nothing better than chunking them up, tossing with a bit of olive oil and a sprinkle of dried thyme and roasting in a hot oven for 20 or 30 minutes. They’re best eaten right away out of a fat, round earthenware bowl with a dash of salt and pepper.

What could be better than this: fragrant roasted potatoes, a crackling wood fire, a glass of wine and the curtains shirred against the night. I think of the little hobbit with his armchair pulled up to the fire, smiling at the goodness of his life.

Goodness of life. Let me count the ways on this Tuesday in March. Cotton sheets flapping on the clothesline; the sun, thin at first, then taking hold by mid-day; the news from my sister that my second grandnephew, Rhys Douglas Campbell, saw that very sun for the first time at 9:20 this morning; a good work-out in the wilderness behind my house, vine yanking, raking, loping briars at their roots; the voices of four friends on the phone; reading Emily Dickinson’s “On a Columnar Self–How ample to rely…”; reworking the verse of a Story Picture; and now sitting here at Gracie, my computer, writing to you: all the friends I know and all the friends I don’t.

The goodness of this life. A bouquet of potatoes. A birth. A poem. A daunting effort to tame the wilderness. All on one seemingly ordinary Tuesday. And now, it’s time for dinner.

Just About the Extent of It

I’m unsettled about this winter that wasn’t. Aside from one snowstorm, the bit of ice on the welcome mat is about the extent of it. Snowdrops have been in full bloom in my neighbor’s yard since mid-January. Crocuses are popping up in mid-February. The palest sweep of red buds is just discernible if you squint and look hard.

The old battered snow shovel leans by the back door, used only once. My snow boots sleep by the stove. The landscapers look at their snowplows and shake their heads. The towns are pocketing the snow removal budgets. And a few of us born and brought up in a place where each season is clearly marked are nonplussed and a little uneasy.

Is it further evidence of global warming? Is it just an aberration? An annual reprieve? Is the jet stream taking a new course? People say, “There’s still March.” True. March can be a little iffy…one of those long months that often has a trick or two up its sleeve. But I say, “Where did winter go?” What happened to late November, December, January and now, February. What happened to the north wind rattling the windows? The snow piling up by the back door? The eternal quiet the morning after a blizzard? The unknown whiteness of the world? What happened to sledding and cross-country skiing and ice skating?

Daffodils blooming in late winter is just plain wrong.

Most of my friends would wholeheartedly disagree, I know. But I like the seasons here. I like each one to be fully realized. One defines the other: because of winter, I know spring; because of summer, I know autumn. But a winter like this is like too much water in a watercolor, and spring, though beautiful, will be a paler version this year. There’s also something satisfying in commiserating with your friends and neighbors about the perils and punishments of winter. It drives home the truth that we’re all in this together. We’ll all tough it out. We’ll look out for each other. We’ll make it.

Maybe it’s just old Yankee stuff or maybe it’s all those childhood years in upstate New York where winter was a serious affair and summer too…when the heat built up over the fields and the thunder rolled in and the lightning took your breath away. If we had had winter this year, I would feel a bit more at ease, balanced, without this twinge of worry nagging me. I would complain, yes, but even in the complaining, a part of me would say, “Well, it’s February. What do you expect?”

And spring, when it finally got here with its daffodils and forsythia, would have transformed the bare white landscape behind my eyes…the months of living with snow and cold forgotten. This year, there is nothing to forget. But I will remember those January snowdrops.

Witchy Shoes & Bare Trees

This is a photo taken by my friend David a while ago when we journeyed out to the Berkshires and stopped to see the selected works of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison at the Simon’s Rock Gallery in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. When I saw this sculpture, I stood transfixed, knowing I would be possessed by these shoes forever. Quite simply, because I love them.

They combine three of my favorite things: witchiness, shoes, and bare trees. But the thought of putting them all together could only come from artists with exquisite and edgy imaginations, which this couple has in abundance. You can see more of their work at www.parkeharrison.com.

I once wrote a poem about witchy shoes: shoes that have enticing eyes and are not afraid of thunder or dark alleys or stepping on toes. They can easily cast a spell on the innocent, like the unknowing man behind the seafood counter. Witchy shoes are always cool and haughty; they hunger for the night, for the stars, not salmon, not mackerel, not even scallops at $16.99 a pound!

Imagine having a pair of witchy shoes with bare trees sprouting out of their eyelets! I’m in a swoon, just sitting here, my chilly fingers in their fraying gloves racing across the keyboard, trying to consider what a day would be like wearing shoes with bare trees. It would be foggy, of course, and the wind would blow salt off the water, and the crows would be completely understandable, sharing their secrets about buried treasure down by Town Dock and who is currently courting whom.

Wearing such shoes, I would hear poetry recited everywhere, even the surly man at the Transfer Station would be spouting sonnets one after another and the dentist would be savoring the delicious words of Keats. My house would recount stories of all who who have lived here before me, their favorite windows and places to read, what they enjoyed for breakfast.

I would easily find my way in the fog, the shoes clickety-clacketing down the misty road’s pale yellow line all the way to the shoes’ ultimate destination. And once there, dangling above the clouds, I would hold my breath, carefully cross my ankles, and watch the stars tangle in those bare trees like a song.

Miss Rita Rose & Joanne Rossman

There are people in our lives who inspire us to bloom like wild-headed peonies, to wear the outrageous hat with the wires and feathers, to drop everything and head for Paris, to rent the red convertible, to give away the living room rug and replace it with a threadbare Persian, to put up our own cumin-spiced pickles.

If we’re really lucky, people like this become our friends. I’m really lucky. Joanne Rossman is my friend.

I met her years ago, when I donned my best dancing petticoat and Maytag shoes and stood on the doorstep of her store at #6 Birch Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. She  had sounded so nice on the phone, but I was nervous…I had a basket of Story Pictures to show her that no one (short of my sisters and a few friends) had seen. This was my first sales call and selling is not my forte. But the minute I saw the store window, I knew that sale or no sale, I had stumbled into Wonderland.

If you’ve not seen Joanne’s store, you might want to give your imagination a tonic and take a look at her website: www.joannerossman.com. This little shop is as captivating as it is quirky, as mysterious as it is playful…a wildly eccentric mix of Buddhas and ravens and cowgirls and old paintings and candles that smell like wood smoke. Ribbons and sticks and fountain pens and notebooks and stones and clay pots and fabrics from all over the world. Books you’ve never seen before and beautiful socks and tiny ancient ottomans. There is even a resident pug: Miss Rita Rose, who regally presides over this kingdom, has been rumored to occasionally sport a tutu, and often runs the ka-jinging old cash register.

And then, there is Joanne, who greets everyone with a smile and a heartfelt, “Hello, Darling!” Even if she has never seen you before, you’re still one of her darlings simply because you’re in her world now…and everything you see around you has been chosen by her, filtered through her splendid imagination, and original, marvelous sense of wonder.

We hunger for places like this in our on-line world, in our box store uniformity. Places that bring us back to childhood when the first snow took our breath away and Santa could make it down any chimney or up any fire escape or even let himself in the front door.

Joanne calls herself, “The purveyor of the unnecessary and the irresistible.” I agree with the irresistible part, but as for the unnecessary, I think that Joanne and the gift she gives us all is as necessary to our spirit as sunlight to our bones. A sparkling imagination at work, full force, nourishes us with reminders that each of us, in our own way, has the capacity to soar.

Stories to Tell

Shall I start with this black crepe dress I found hanging rumpled and discouraged from a bent hanger in the basement rummage of Barnstable’s Saint Mary’s Church?

Shall I start by wondering who chose it brand-new from a rack of store dresses long ago? In my imagination, she had long arms and was probably tall and had straight hair and wore reading glasses. She no doubt had a silver tea set and believed in long walks, fresh air, and good manners. She may have summered along the New England coast.

I am certain that beneath the patrician veneer, there was a mysterious, even otherworldly aspect  to the prior owner of this dress, though carefully guarded and only allowed out in dark, playful moments.

Shall I start by believing that she knew about the worlds beneath the senses, beneath her carefully ordered life? The worlds of clouds and deja vu, shadow, and memories of memories? There were spirits in her driveway; her cats had eyes like stars; the wind roused her heart; the broom twitched in the corner; the moon begged for her glance. Now and then, she woke up at first light and wondered if she had made it all up: the night, the wind, the moon, the pounding of her heart, the voices filled with songs of all she had been before the tea set, the beautifully set table. Before the church dinners, the library sales, the sensible shoes.

I put on the dress. It is October. The leaves are dry and raspy from September’s hurricane, and the air is full of golden smoke. The little neighborhood cat at the back door meows when she sees me, and I swear the broom by the fireplace quivered once or twice. I shall have a cup of tea by the fire. I shall listen for the clink of silver and the wind in the brittle leaves and the stories I know this dress can tell.

Prize Winner

This weekend, a friend and I stopped by the Truro Agricultural Fair, a lively small-town celebration of cackling chickens, banjo players, local farmers, and sunburned families. We oohed and aahed at the fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, onions, flowers, pies, and jars of honey. We used our dried fava beans to vote for the most handsome rooster, the most comely hen. We smelled the tangy salt air, redolent with hay and manure and chicken coop and oregano.

Then we wandered over to the tables displaying the prize winners: biggest pumpkin, most scrumptious pie, most original wildflower arrangement, strangest looking vegetable, and as pictured here: the best looking dozen eggs. I took this picture because if I opened these eggs in the stainless steel coolers of the supermarket, I would reject them on the spot, maybe even trot them up to the service desk.

But here they are at the Truro Aggie Fair winning first place. (I’m assuming, of course, that there were other entries, and these eggs really were the most stunning.) Look at them! Brown, white, peach, mottled, some dirty, some really funky looking…a far cry from the perfectly pristine eggs I’ve come to expect. And that makes me wonder what the egg sellers do to their eggs to make them so spotless, so uniform, such a far cry from the real McCoy, as seen here at the Aggie Fair.

I’m not a fanatic about freshness or organic-ness, but I do like food to look good. And now I wonder about that, wonder if maybe those good looks are deceiving, wonder if those perfectly plump tomatoes, those shaggy bouquets of bitter greens, those so so orangy carrots, those glimmering apples are given the veggie/fruit version of Botox.

Maybe I’ve forgotten what real looks like. Growing up in the farmy lands of upstate New York, I remember my father’s garden, and if I brush away the threads of memory, can recall tomatoes that looked like a snarling grimace, corn with a few icky borers burrowed in, zucchini that curved into itself, gnarled little apples. Pretty much everything had dirt on it. But it was all organic, all nature’s own presentation. No one fussed and mussed with what the good earth, under my father’s patient and kind hand, produced.

So I look at these eggs and then I look again, and I see that beauty, real beauty, the kind that wins first place is spotted and speckled and splotched and funky and decidedly, freshly original. Yes, decidedly that.

Dewey & Robin

This is a picture of my sister Trishie’s cat, Dewey, taking his early summer morning stretch & yawn on the front porch. If you look closely over to the right, near the top of the wisteria bush, you can see a robin sitting on its nest, warming its eggs, and paying no apparent attention to Dewey.

I love what’s going on here. There is a cat and there is a bird, and isn’t one supposed to be afraid of the other? Isn’t one supposed to be focused on having the other for breakfast? It makes me examine my foregone conclusions about cats and birds and all sorts of things.

I watched this scene for a while, and it stayed the way it is in the picture, there was no flapping about or stealthy stalking. My sister says the robins have returned for a few years now to the wisteria and each year build a new nest. But next summer, the picture and its contents will be completely altered.

Dewey passed away in July.

Now it is mid-August. Last night, after the rain, the air turned sharply cool and the crickets began to jingle. Even if I didn’t have a calendar, I would know that summer is fast fading. The once bridal-white hydrangeas are now a pale, wistful green and the once orange day lilies are skinny stalks with no head and the crabgrass is growing like mad. Morning comes later and evening earlier.

We have these seasons of summer now and then to color our lives, our days…brief honeymoons of golden warmth and achingly sweet bliss. Falling in love is summer. So is a vacation in the mountains. So is potato salad and arugula and melons. The season of summer can make itself known in the picnic on the stoney shores of a dark green lake or breakfast in a sunny little courtyard or a dinner of fried clams on the rough deck of a beach cottage. It can make itself known in the scent of wild roses or the fragrance of sweet corn. It can make itself known in a whirly sundress or a blue bike or scratchy sand on the kitchen floor.

It made itself known to me when I took this picture of Dewey and the robin enjoying the morning with nothing to do but sit and dream and let the season of summer be.

Scullery Sink

This is a photo I took of the scullery sink down in the nether regions of Edith Wharton’s famous home “The Mount” in Lenox, Massachusetts. Upstairs there were ceilings with wedding cake moldings and elegant silk settees and Belgian tapestries and French marble mantels, but it was the floor below that captured my imagination. The places the restorers hadn’t gotten to yet.

That’s where the real poetry was.

I loved this sink and wished I could transport it to my own funky 50’s knotty-pine kitchen and replace the stainless steel one that’s there now. I would put old faucets on this beauty and scrub it and pile the dishes in it and let the soapy splashes fly on that zinc surround, and I would wear black aprons over my white summer dresses and dream upstairs/downstairs dreams. Old things can do that to you.

The wall behind this sink is beautiful too with its resurrected collage of plaster, lathe, and stone, no doubt hidden since the house was completed in 1902. It is as mysterious and arresting as a work of art hung in a museum or gallery. I would transport that too and rather than look out a window at a yard, I would look into a deep eloquent past and wonder whose hands built that wall of Berkshire stone. What did he eat for breakfast that morning? Was he singing when he layered it with mortar or was his mind beset with thoughts of paychecks and rents and mouths to feed?

There’s an old house down the street from mine that was recently purchased and redone for the purpose of resale. Now with its spacious tiled showers and chrome appliances and new windows and polished floors and freshly painted walls and opened floor plan, it is, in the eyes of many, quite perfect…expensive and perfect. Wandering through it at an Open House, I found myself instinctively drawn out of the French doors to a small old barn and tiny potting shed in the back yard. Both are cheerfully askew with worn shingles and wooden shutters faded by sun and rain. Both have settled nicely into the landscape with its white hydrangea bushes and wild honeysuckle. Both, I sense, have stories to tell, while out in front, the new old perfect house is strangely mute.

There is, I know, a balance between ruin and upkeep, between neglect and care, between old and new, but for me, the time-worn imperfect things and the long-ago places sing the melodious and pale-tinged music of the heart. My kind of tune.

White Iris

A friend told me the other day that when you put your nose right down deep into the heart of an iris, you can smell Kool-Aid, which means of course, that you can get a good whiff of bygone days.

So I tried it, and sure enough, I could smell cherry Kool-Aid. And then I remembered how it came in paper packets, and all it took to mix it up was water and heaps and heaps of white sugar. It was about 10-cents a packet, and my mother stirred it with a wooden spoon in a glass pitcher adorned with cherries and oranges.

I was surprised that I had never smelled an iris before. Unlike a peony or a rose or a bunch of lilacs, an iris is more elegant and refined than it is approachable. I remember the great purple bearded ones that grew alongside the Presbyterian church in Honeoye Falls, where I grew up. Ever since, I marvel at the stately irises growing in gardens and along fences, but I admire from afar, never pick them and never bury my face in one.

Maybe because it’s June and the light lingers long into the soft, gray evenings, something in me is waking up too, wanting to savor more of the day and its exquisite, barely noticed moments. This morning, the light at 4:30 dawned behind my eyes, illuminating a dream, sweeping away the night. Layered cereal at breakfast was a glorious still life, topped with bananas, blueberries, peaches, and strawberries. And coffee in the big white cup even more delicious when I looked up from my reading and saw the three aging “Amigos” walking down Main Street in their baseball caps and white socks, a little brown dog trotting along ahead of them.

As I write this, I hear a plane droning far away in the mid-morning sky, and I remember when I was eight or nine and had never been on a plane before. I would bend back my head and stare at the silver light leaving its trail of longing against the vast sky and in that moment, there was only the airplane, me, and the kind of ache you feel when you’ve been away from home too long.

I want more moments like that, and I know they’re there if I give up some of the mindless rushing around, slow down, attend to the moment, stop and smell the iris. What better month than June to wake up.

Girls of the Epiphany

Every spring and fall, my sister and I participate in an epiphany of sorts at the Church of the Epiphany in Winchester, Massachusetts. We call our very down-to-earth epiphany a rummage sale. Like its kindred spirits the yard sale or the flea market, a rummage sale requires a keen, quick eye, an equally keen, quick hand, and the ability to appear quite nonchalant when in actuality, you’re on fire.

As far as this particular rummage sale goes, we’re part of an elite team that goes in the day before and sets up. Even better, at Epiphany, we’re creating  the “French Room,” a biannual phenomenon located in the brick and stone foyer of this lovely old church. The maroon choir robes are scrunched way at the end of one coat rack; the rest of those racks belong to us.

After the cheerful greetings and hugs, we set to work: one lean mean five-member team of the most astute shoppers this side of the Mississippi. Our mission is a serious one: in four hours, we’ve got to find, stock, price, and display our wares in such a way that tomorrow night’s shoppers know right away this is no ordinary collection of cast-offs.

It’s a daunting task but not for this team. In minutes, we’re out in the “big room” where everything we’re looking for is buried under heaps of jeans and double-knit ensembles, sweatpants, polyester blouses, skirts with stretched waistbands, t-shirts with corporate logos, sweaters with nearly invisible moth holes, and coats redolent with cedar.

Our team knows its cashmere, its pure wool and linen and cotton; it knows its labels from Gaultier to L.L. Bean; it knows good vintage; it knows that style in the French Room is a little quirky, a little offbeat, very affordable, and best worn with verve or at the very least, insouciant nonchalance.

The French Room is counting on us, Epiphany is counting on us, the madcap rummage-sale shopper is counting on us. And we set to work with a focus you’d have to witness to believe. We chat a bit (multi-tasking is second nature), but we rarely look up; our eyes never waver; our nimble fingers sort, flip, tug, yank, fold, and unfold. And the treasures surface like sprinklings of diamonds buried in the back garden.

Triumphantly, we layer the wool and the cashmere and the linen-so-delicious-you-could-eat-it over our arms and deliver our finds to the French Room, where everything is hung and priced and displayed for all the world as if Paris might indeed be watching.

Here’s my fantasy: a renowned photographer finds his way from Milan and Barcelona and New York to Winchester. He pushes open the heavy oak doors. His camera is on the hunt, hungry for style. He stumbles into the French Room. He sees the arresting Girls of the Epiphany displayed forthrightly on the old gray screen. His camera flashes like lightning. The photographer trembles. He is on fire too.