Beyond the Shade

In early winter with its dreariness and still, cloudy days, it can seem as if everything is frozen in sleep, buried in the hard-packed earth. I like this season, especially the days when there is only quiet sans wind, snow, sun, and rain. There is a nothingness, a lack of drama and color and activity that is deeply soothing. A gray flannel blanket of afternoons, if you will.

This apparent nothingness is an invitation to settle down and observe, realizing there are levels and layers to things that go unnoticed during a hustle-bustle day of appointments, to-do lists, urgencies. On the run, the scent of orange perfuming my fingers from the peeled clementine, the breathing of the furnace, the petal falling from the geranium in the bedroom window…all remain outside of awareness…and unobserved are unexperienced.

I have started to meditate, nothing fancy, nothing much to crow about really. Just five to ten minutes after coffee and morning reading. I close my eyes and breathe and breathe and then the tumult begins: images, concerns, wishes, memories, ideas…one piling upon the other like raked leaves, and then I breathe again and breathe again and something else immediately surfaces. It goes on like this, the gentle back-to-the breath patience after a flurry of thoughts.

The practice is teaching kindness. It is teaching detachment. It is teaching the wonder of quiet and how mostly, my being conspires against it. Why, I wonder? What is this restlessness, this resistance to simply sitting still and listening? Why is busy linked with productive? A full calendar with worth? A busy brain with intelligence?

The quiet takes me outside of myself for a few blessed moments and enter the insides of things that often make their way to a poem: the cold blue coffee cup in my hand; dust settling on the creased photo of my mother, father, aunties long gone; the smell of butter melting in the baking scones.

My eyes look around the little back room. I am struck by the pattern of bare dogwood branches beyond the brown shade and take a picture. Only when I look at the photo, do I see the face looking in at me. One more bit of wonder that would have gone unnoticed if quiet hadn’t intervened.

A Floor Like This

I like this floor because it has a face, and if I didn’t know it was a floor, I would think it was a painting. I could look at it for hours and be happy. There are stories in this floor, layers of them, limited only by my imagination. Workboots walked here, also bedroom slippers and ballet shoes, sturdy oxfords, sneakers, stilettos, galoshes, bare feet. Perhaps someone made love on this floor, danced on it, died on it.

With a floor like this, everything in the house behaves differently. Pictures feel free to swing on fraying cords. Chairs rearrange themselves in snug corners. Pots and pans fly out of airless cupboards and announce themselves to walls. Walls want to be in a state of gradual undress, a shred of wallpaper here, a glimpse of lathe there, plaster cracking in spidery patterns.

A floor like this permits a delicious abandon. You can track in mud or snow or have stones caught in your boot soles. You can spill vinegar, black coffee, spaghetti sauce. You can waltz all night in pointy shoes, pile the books. move the chairs, play the music loud. A floor like this thumbs its nose at vacuum cleaners and mops. It swallows up cat hair, dust bunnies, seed husks from the canary cage.

It is not coddled (no mandatory shoes at the door). It is not privileged and polished to within an inch of its life. It is not scary and perfect. It is, above all, humble, and it’s in this humility, this willingness to be of use, that we find its originality, depth, beauty.

My sisters say they want to be used up at the end of their lives. Wrinkles, grandchildren, hearts that have lived and lost and loved, bundles of memories, some sweet, some raw, the willingness to be helpful whenever they can, my sisters live this. I have a note here saying that if you have a gift or talent, don’t hoard it, spend it extravagantly. If you’re a poet, write. A painter, paint. A teacher, teach. A runner, run. If your gift is compassion, kindness, patience, tolerance, so much the better, since every day offers opportunities for its expression.

Your gift, like this floor, gets better, stronger, richer with use. And somehow, some way, the world does too.

Cottages & Kings

There are houses that haunt me, that linger in the back rooms of my heart. I saw this cottage last weekend at a sale: the estate included a grand house facing the water, this guest house, and a barn with two apartments upstairs. The property had sold for a few millions, and it was rumored that everything would be demolished and replaced with the sort of house now seen along the water: huge, pristine, and empty most of the year.

Intrigued by the small size and the house’s scrappy garden, I went into this dank, neglected cottage with its galley kitchen, rectangular living room, bedroom, tiny bathroom. One step over the worn threshold, the dream began in earnest. In this fantasy, I have whittled down my possessions to those things that are either useful or beloved. Every chair, table, plate, picture, book, fork, and spoon is essential to the happiness of daily life. One tiny closet holds all my clothes: winter and summer.

This is an illusion of grand proportions, since I live in a more spacious house that doubles as my factory/studio and is artfully chock-a-block with orphaned chairs, estate sale detritus, innumerable black dresses, paint-chipped shutters and doors, as well as all the tricks of a collage scrapper’s trade. Mixed in with this cool stuff is the near and dear: a portrait of my mother as a baby, grandma’s ledgers, friends’ art, and boxes of family photographs.

When I think about downsizing, I immediately head for the bag of corn chips, the jar of dark chocolates, or the door. A task of such Herculean proportions seems as overwhelming as making croissants, repairing the roof, writing a novel. I read the little book about taking each object in hand and asking, “Does this bring me joy?” Often it’s hard to say…joy, no joy? On this old door doubling as a work table, there are lots of things that don’t exude joy but they’re used: stapler, pens, scissors, a calendar, notepads, printer, and computer. Admittedly, along with these are a number of things that please my eye. Joy, maybe not, but delight, yes.

I love the minimalist fantasy though. It’s simple. I live alone. I have a cat. I wear black dresses and Doc boots. I read good books. I eat kale and beet greens. I write poetry. I sleep well at night. I am understated and self-reliant. I stay mostly in the moment. I walk every day. My house is spare and spacious in spite of its small size. Nothing is extraneous; everything is essential.

Joy or no?

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.

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.