Umbrella Aftermath

Sometimes you just have to take it as it comes. We were in New York City, my sister, niece, and I, on our annual (or if we’re lucky, biannual) excursion to Manhattan. This is not something we take lightly; we plan, we consider, we process, and we research because New York is, hands down, our favorite city to explore (with the exception of Paris, which is mostly dream anyway).

We breathe in the warm, tar-scented air in the catacombs of Grand Central, join the throngs surging up the ramp, and emerge into that golden palace under the glittering constellations. This is my definition of being born again, especially after a long, gray, Cape Cod winter.

And even though it’s April and it’s cloudy and cool, we have always had good luck with New York weather, which is a good thing because we walk miles and miles for the two and a half days we’re there, enough to completely erode new taps on my boots and add another layer of rust to my creaky knee.

We see gorgeous Morgane Le Fay dresses spinning in mid-air on Wooster Street and weary black skirts jammed on circular rounders at the Arthritis Thrift Store up in the seventies on Third. We see little fingerling potatoes in baskets at the Union Square Market and green grasses atop the High Line walkway. We see tea shops with portraits of the Queen on Greenwich and fanciful French chocolates on Watt.

So that Saturday afternoon, sitting in a tiny restaurant called Moon Cake, we saw the rain begin and thought, “Oh well, it’s just rain…we’ll manage it.” And we did, for an hour or two, until the wind picked up, and we held our black umbrellas like shields against the force of it. But it really wasn’t until evening that we felt the true force of a New York spring gale. The minute I stepped out of our hotel to leave for dinner, the wind bit into my umbrella and snapped a tiny plastic ring that held all the vital parts together. The umbrella collapsed on my head like a witch’s version of a dunce cap.

Coming out of the restaurant a couple of hours later, I was swept across the street by the driving wind and rain to a Duane Reade, where I hoped to buy another umbrella…a notion if there ever was one. My remarkable, intrepid niece somehow got us a cab, and that night I listened to the rain beat on the air conditioner and the winds whip up and down Irving Place.

The next morning dawned fresh and cold and bright and still, the streets littered with cherry blossoms and the skeletons of umbrellas. Some splayed out in the middle of the avenues like black pinwheels, some clinging to the edges of trash bins, others like the one pictured here surrendering to the elements and letting itself be blown clear across the sea, perhaps to an Irish headland, or the Tower of London, or a cafe on the tiny Rue St-Hyacinthe.

Smoke and Ashes

When the air is fresh and cold; when the snow is gone; when the first snowdrops appear in the sunny corner by my elderly neighbor’s shed; when the brighter light is falling longer on the days, then Burn Day is here. It’s usually in late March or early April that this momentous event takes place; an event that is thrilling, gratifying, sustaining, and harrowing.

It all starts with daily treks around the yard and the Way-Back (an area I’ve been trying to clean up and civilize for years), picking up the tree limbs that have blown to the ground in the winter wind or collapsed under the weight of snow and ice. This year, there was also a dead pine that toppled over and a very long-gone maple that had been taken down in September. There is raking involved too and a few choice words while tearing up a nasty underground vine that will be back again with a vengeance by May.

When I’m in pioneer mode, I always think of my father, who would admire the grit and gumption necessary to get this property cleaned up. Granted, there is no sartorial favor in baggy jeans and wellies and an old brown fleece coat, but I doubt if the women crossing the Rockies in covered wagons gave much thought to the cut of their skirts.

Every year, there is enough wood and brush and vines to make a fire lick its chops for hours. And when we lit the newspaper at the base of the burn pile, my brother-in-law and I (I never burn alone…feel pale and shaky even at the thought of it) brace ourselves with steel rakes and a silent prayer that the wind won’t pick up. And I say a prayer to my Dad, to keep us safe from soaring embers, to keep the woodshed safe, and all the trees in the neighborhood too.

In those few moments before the fire coils into a furious blaze, I have all I can do not to turn the hose on it, because once it takes hold, it is all primal, whooshing like a black cyclone and swirling thick acrid smoke and specks of fire into the air like a million hell-bent fireflies. I stand back, hose in hand, humble and awed, wondering what in the world I’ve done.

And when it is over, hours later, the ash is two feet thick, and we are spun round and round with wood smoke, bone weary with the hurling and sawing, bending and attending. There is lunch, to be sure, outside on a big round tray, and that is spirit lifting, but by early evening, there is only smoldering ash and exhaustion. I look around the land, ready now for daffodils and flowering quince and forsythia, and feel my father’s smile. “It’s good work,” I hear him say, as he pops open an ice-cold beer and looks at the gray pile and the sky and the cleared ground.

Burn Day. Good work. Spring begins.

Crow in Bare Tree

I have a puppet crow named Ravinia that perches on the spindle of an old platform rocker in my workroom. There are also crows on the mantel: one with real feathers from Friendship, Maine; one little woolly one that’s wearing a shawl; and two small ones in a nest that I found at a yard sale. I often ask for their opinions on such things as remodeling and matters of the heart, and they always give sound advice.

Ravinia is also the patron saint of my writing workshops, where she lands on a candlestick in the middle of the table, in the middle of the papers and the pens, the beating hearts, the minds boiling over. It sends her…all this energy…to a sort of corvine Elysian Fields where there are shiny things, secrets, wing chairs, and much to crow about. I like to think that the writers are transported there too.

Most of my friends know that the crow is my favorite bird, and they often accuse me of dressing like one (it is true that my closet is a melange of black, and it is true that my maternal grandmother looked quite crow-ish). They are the most marvelous of birds: they take care of each other; they’re resourceful; they’re great at clean-up; they’re majestically beautiful walking across snow; they can perch at the very top of a pine with grace and aplomb; they’re smart enough to gather when the four o’clocks descend and collaborate about a nice, safe, warm place to sleep.

It’s true that the crow can practice a bit of thievery now and then, and apparently the Greeks thought the crow a bit gossipy. There’s other dark stuff, of course, but most of those rumors were spread in the Middle Ages, when darkness prevailed. For the most part, the crow is sacred, a guide and a protector. I know that when I look up and see a smattering of them hanging out together in neighboring trees, chatting away about the weather and the best spot for lunch, I feel deeply reassured.

All’s well. Just caws for delight.

Bicycles in January

One of the best things about winter is that it dramatically changes things. One perfectly ordinary day, a bike is just a bike leaning against a fence. And then that night, the blustery northeast winds whistle round the corners of the house, rattle the windows, spur Boris (the dark cellar furnace) to work even harder. In the early morning, before I have opened my eyes, I can see the ghostly light behind the thick lace curtains and hear the deep silence of snow. There is no sound: no wind, no cars, no birds, no trucks, no voices, only the pounding of my heart in my ears.

Growing up in a small town in western New York, I have known this phenomenon all my life; except out there, the winds blow across the flat cornfields of Indiana and Illinois, pick up steam over the Great Lakes, and drop snow with a ferocity both chilling and awe-inspiring. Even here, living 450 miles away on a gentler, more temperate (for the most part) Cape Cod, I find this overnight transformation still breathtakingly wondrous.

One of my dear friends, Julie Levesque, is a talented sculptor who has used salt to cover ordinary objects like vases and books and forks and spoons to surprise our eyes, making the homey and familiar startling and magical. When I pull aside the curtain and look out at the back yard, I think a wizard has worked all night to alter maples and cedars and lilac bushes and garden chairs and rooftops and clotheslines and windows and doors and birdbaths and grills and woodpiles and outdoor showers. Altered everything to such an extent that my mind is shaken out of its lethargy, its old familiar ways of recognizing and naming things.

Nothing is as it was. Everything is new.

In one night, winter can do that. So I pull on boots, a coat, a hat, a scarf, and mittens and push my weight against the back door to open it so that I can reach outside for the old bent snow shovel. I do my own sculpting…a path down the driveway to the mailbox…and deep in that white world, I hear only my heart and the last whisperings of the northeast wind, up in Maine by now.

Bookstore Light

I like to think of London as a city of old bookstores like the beautiful one in the film “84 Charing Cross Road” with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Dim, musty little places with floor to ceiling bookshelves, threadbare Persian carpets, and piles of yellowing papers, presided over by an all-knowing, tweedy man with myopic spectacles and uneven teeth, a perfectly clipped British accent.

The London bookstore is chilly, postwar, little heat save for the steam that rises from the electric kettle and the sputtering radiator. The people who work here wear fingerless gloves, vests, sensible shoes, jackets, and artfully tied mufflers. The bookstore has a name like Twickenhams or Tweedletons, and outside it is always snowing drifty flakes over the four o’clock streets. There is a bell that jingles over the door, and when the erudite man in the myopic spectacles closes up for the night, the bell jings and jangles and wakes up all of the writers sleeping between their covers, tucked in their pages, snug beneath their sentences.

Midnight. If you listen closely, you can hear them all: a cacophony of glorious voices, British-tinged like tea, like biscuits, like heavy-duty wellies, and bumpershoots, like England herself all bejeweled in emeralds and opals, rushing pell-mell to the sea.

In this bookstore, anything can happen: a journey to a far-off land, a poem, a plot, a revolutionary idea, even a love affair. Hang onto your wooly hat.

Old Inn. Ancient Poetry.

What is it about an old inn that makes me want to stay awhile, put my feet up, fold my nightgown into a woodsy dresser drawer, and take up residence with the lingering ghosts. The towels may be a bit thin and worn, the mattress devoid of pillow-top, the shower a little rickety and tinny, but when it comes to romance, to mystery, to nourishment for the soul, an old inn is five-star.

When I’m fortunate enough to stay a few nights in one of these enduring places, I bring a tattered notebook, a felt-tip pen, a camera, a bottle of lavender, and a book of poems. Never would I wear jeans, only long black skirts and engineer boots. The inn responds in kind, seems to recognize me, creak its approval, suggests I keep my eyes slightly blurred, my ears silent and open.

In early winter, when the fireplace in the tavern is blazing and the bare trees scratch the iced windows, I might sit in a well-worn wing chair, sip a late afternoon sherry, inhale the dusk, and smell the woodsmoke of a century of fires. I might settle my boots on the pine floor, knowing that others before me have worn the ridges and hollows and that others too have heard the shivering gusts outside and felt warm and safe under these low ceilings, within these ochre walls.

Later, I lie in the narrow bed and listen to the inn’s rustles and whispers, as it bobs like a ship in the wind, settles a bit more into the earth. I’ll try in the darkness to translate the ancient poetry, the arcane language of all the travelers who like me have found comfort here from the wears and tears of the world and who are grateful for the respite.

And when I leave (always reluctantly), my voice will thread through the narrow halls and up the steep steps, joining the others in an encomium for this endearing place, this old inn.

Farm Stand on the Way Home

As I write this, there’s a tropical wind full of Gulf Coast moisture, soaking into the brown dogwood leaves outside my window. It’s late September, so hot and steamy that the fire alarm went off at 6:20 this morning, and a metal picture released its tenuous grip on the bathroom wall and clattered to the tile floor.

I’m overdressed in long-sleeved top and short skirt and baggy pants, stompy shoes and socks. Almost-October should look and feel like this photo I took along Boughton Hill Road last week headed for a short visit to my hometown of Honeoye Falls, New York.

It should call for light sweaters and jackets, at least a couple of layers, definitely real shoes and not sandals or flip-flops. I should be hungry for butternut squash and wild mushroom soup, baked potatoes, black walnuts, and anything made of apples. The white lace curtains should come tumbling down. Ditto for the screen doors. It should be getting along to fireplace weather, and I should be done once and for all with mowing the grass.

And while it’s true that the impatiens are spindling and the petunias look somewhat introspective, late September here on the Cape is remarkably summery. I know it’s fall though because the grocery store has pots of violet and golden mums by the entrance, and the drug stores are full of candy and costumes, but if I never ventured out of my village, I’d think it was late summer with evening crickets and a quieter Main Street.

Upstate New York is another story. The seasons there are more defined, more intense, highly colored. Weather there is Weather: winter is cold and biting with snow upon snow; summer is hot and relentless, punctuated by thunder storms that heat up over the land and crack your ears open; and autumn is this picture: brisk and chilly with watercolor gray clouds over endless fields of rustling corn and big tangled rolls of hay.

I grew up there. It’s almost October. I want my jacket and a pair of old motorcycle boots, a long flannel skirt. I want meatloaf for dinner. Poetry by the fire. Smoke in the trees. A bare wind circling my knees. Fall.

Yard-Sale Table

This weekend, my sister and I had a yard sale, so we were up before sunrise on Saturday morning to greet the early birds, who were there at dawn. Even though the sale didn’t officially start until eight o’clock, everyone who has ever held a yard sale knows that time means nothing to people on the hunt.

And fervent they were, hungry as rabbits in an arugula patch. Looking for stuffstuffstuff and stuffstuffstuff was what we had. I wondered as I wandered around my house last week how I have ever managed to accumulate so much and took a merciless, grim-faced joy in tossing things into boxes and shopping bags to take to my sister’s yard and hopefully, never see again.

But I must admit that when one of the hunters stood across the card table from me with a handful of quarters and tight-fisted dollars, ready to buy the fireplace screen from my long past married chapter or a book I bought in England thirty years ago about herbs or the long-legged fabric angel I won in a Yankee Swap or the wooden Jamaican vase that’s collected dust in the cabinet for ages or the Mexican tiles from an 80’s trip to Puerto Vallarta and never used, I felt a twinge in my heart, a last-second misgiving, and wanted to snatch the item back and say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. There’s a mistake here. You can’t have it!”

And that night, I woke up around two o’clock, the ghosts of apartments and houses and all their furnishings, all their rooms swirling in my mind, the memories piling up like the empty cardboard boxes tumbled under the day’s tables. There is space now in the attic, the cellar, the bookshelves, the closets, and that’s good, I know that’s good, but there is an emptiness in my heart when I wonder where that long-legged Yankee Swap angel is now or the Martha Stewart hors d’oeuvres cookbook inscribed by a friend long gone, or the tennis racket that can tell a whole love story…but only to me.

Maybe that’s why stuff matters, maybe that’s why we’re all, in varying degrees, hunters and hoarders alike.

Graduation Day

In late June, my sister Sashie and I traveled back to our hometown deep in the farmy lands of upstate New York for our nephew’s high school graduation. When the daisy arches were lifted over the heads of the Seniors in their caps and gowns and the band played Pomp and Circumstance, I was aware again how much our traditions and rituals ground us.

It has been years since my high school graduation and yet, that day, it seemed as if, in my heart at least, very little time had passed. I felt the thrill of it: the long white robe, the crazy hat that flattened the already fragile poof in my hair, the wild, daisy-festooned arches over my head, the stirring notes of the processional, and the sense that something hugely important was taking place in my heretofore, quiet life.

I was seventeen that afternoon in June, had never seen an ocean or Paris, never seriously kissed a boy, never knew that I would come to love the arrangement of words on a page, had never cooked with real garlic, didn’t even have my license yet. But I knew, sitting up there on the stage, that a strange new landscape was taking form, and all that was comfortable and familiar was fading the way my vision had blurred in sixth grade and nothing was ever quite the same.

Mostly I was apprehensive about the beginnings, sad about the endings, homesick already for those seventeen growing-up years, for my friends, my house, my street, my town, my family. I always joked with my sister that just as I was getting the hang of it in high school, it was over. And that has been a recurrent theme: getting the hang of a job or a house or a city or a marriage, and then sometimes long before I was ready, it was over.

So when the Senior Class tossed their mortarboards up into the air and the applause swept them to their feet, a beginning and an ending merged in one moment. We all bore witness to it. We all remembered.

Dream Dress Dreaming

Dream dresses look like this. I think this is a Vera Wang dress in her shop window on Manhattan’s upper East Side, but I can’t remember. All I know is that this dress is a web, a weaving of dreams. To wear it, you would have to be tall, beautiful (but in a jolie-laid sort of way), accomplished (violin? poetry? venture capital? architecture? ballet?), well travelled, at least bi-lingual, financially secure, and probably vegetarian.

In short, perfect.

Most likely, this dress is a wedding dress to be worn once in an emerald garden or on the glittering rooftop of a sumptuous hotel or the porch of the family’s old shingled summer home. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hung forever-in-state in an upstairs guest room closet (all clean and sacheted, of course).

I look at the dream dress, and I sense that it wishes otherwise…wants a different kind of future. Maybe something like this: to be worn on fresh Monday mornings while hanging out the sheets; or dancing in front of the fireplace on a mid-January night as the snow blankets the world; or apron-layered and rolling out a real pie crust; or driving in a perfectly ordinary car with the windows all down, headed west on a black October night; or making out in the front seat of that perfectly ordinary car by a dark green lake, the night fragrant with earth and iron and cornfields.

Maybe this dream dress makes its way to Port Clyde, Maine or Honeoye Falls, New York or Quebec City or even Dublin or Venice or Paris or Tokyo. Or maybe it just stays put in its own back yard, happy there with the ordinary: the maples and cedars, the petunias, clover, and dandelions, the robins, the stray cats, the humming mowers and rusty swing-sets, the crooked snowmen and the barking dogs, the ordinary people dreaming in front of the square white windows showing dresses such as this…dreams all spun and webbed in the living room’s corners of the heart.