Porch Sweet Porch

It is summer in earnest. Past solstice, morning light still filters through the curtains at five, and afternoons linger before folding into evening. I find myself moving slower too; effort is an atonal note in a long stretch of leisurely melody.

Summer seems the season closest to childhood and its rhythms, following the light wherever it took us: to the shade beneath a maple tree, to hot gravel roads under our bike tires, to the stony shores of a sparkling lake, to twilight back yards and games of hide & seek with fireflies caught in our hair.

In July or August, I am fortunate to find my way home to home, the little town in western New York where memories surface like fish in a pond. I am also fortunate to have three splendid sisters, one of whom is the creator of this porch. Aside from the fact that she can see the quirky comeliness in all sorts of rag-tag things, she is an artist with an eye for placement, contrast, juxtaposition. To sit on one of her porches (she has two, plus a patio) is to know the true sweetness and comfort of summer and home.

In early morning when the air is fragrant with grass and the warblers are fluttering by, we sit on the porch and hold big cups of strong creamy coffee and talk about our plans for the day, our dreams for our lives. We process, dissemble, reassemble, compare and contrast, examine and put away. Our talk is a comfort and an essential balm, settling each of us in the moment. And all the while, morning circles round the porch, and the sun warms our bare arms and toes.

This July, that sun was bold and merciless, bending the fragile dill in half, shriveling the basil, baking the roses. Memories surfaced again: the waves of relentless heat that rose from the corn and wheat fields like an oven door left open by mistake; the humidity that stuck to the skin, a thin layer of glue; the still, breathless nights when we slept at the foot of our twin beds near the single window and woke confused, bewildered by tangled dreams.

The beautiful rooms of my sister and brother-in-law’s house are cooled by air conditioning, but the porch stays connected to summer and its moods. It seems to me that all houses should have porches open to street, sidewalk, road, and weather. The porch keeps us aware of the billowing clouds threatening rain, aware of the lighting up and cooling down of the day, aware of each other. I have a friend who recently moved to a smaller home that has no front porch, only a small back patio. She says it’s hard to meet people when your orientation doesn’t include them.

Porches, with their eye to all the goings-on, can be quiet or convivial, screened or unscreened, grand or minuscule. To lean back in an old rocking chair and look out at summer in bloom, to smell the rain and the grateful earth, to hear the roses sigh at twilight, the jubilant cries of children on bikes is to have the best seat in the house.

Aiken-Rhett House

During the second tumultuous nor’easter, I was fortunate to escape toppling trees, power outages, and heavy snow that tested the mettle of all New Englanders. Charleston, South Carolina beckoned, and I gratefully followed. Far from the rigors of winter, I walked miles on the cobblestones and uneven sidewalks of a city steeped in history, permeated with warmth and charm.

The architecture, shaded gardens, watery smells off the Battery were memorable, delightful even to my senses numbed by wind and cold. But it wasn’t until I stepped over the stained marble threshold of the Aiken-Rhett house that Charleston really came alive.

The house, built in 1820 on Elizabeth Street by Governor William Aiken, Jr., has remained untouched by restorers in a “preserved as found” approach to its conservation. The whole estate with its kitchens, stables, carriage house, privy, and small, bare rooms for slaves has managed to survive mostly intact, save for the effects of time, for almost 200 years.

The Aiken family managed to live in and hang on to this mansion for 142 of those years, through the Civil War that destroyed an economy depending on slave labor, the upheaval of Reconstruction, and years aplenty after that. Maybe that continuous ownership is part of the reason this house, where little has been disturbed, is a gathering place for spirits and memories, a wellspring for the imagination. The other historical houses in the city that have been painstakingly restored to their original grandeur are, to me, elegant, but strangely lacking in soul and story.

Not so this magical place, where voices thick with honeyed accents resound off the cracked, peeling walls. Floors creak. Tattered chairs wait in dark corners. Dust motes whirl in the soft afternoon light. In this ballroom, I hear the rustle of taffeta, of laughter melodious as crystal prisms, of music saturated with hope and longing. Each of the many high-ceilinged rooms is a complete stage, always waiting for the play to take up where it left off.

All I wanted to do was pull up a wobbly chair, sit for hours, listen. And after that, walk slowly through the house at least three times, in different light, on different days and try to capture a remnant of its mystery and the emotions that mystery evokes. A poem might do that, but I find I am at a loss for words to describe the evanescent feelings of this house with its eloquent patina left by the lives lived in these once rich rooms and the still poor ones out back.

Lives lived. Real lives. Not distanced by centuries of history but with the intense immediacy of days lived, days gone. On every worn floorboard of this amazing house, real footsteps are heard. Just listen.

Plain as Oatmeal

I could live in a building like this: square and upright, plain as oatmeal, root vegetables, black dresses, and the month of March. A building that speaks in simple, declarative sentences and looks you straight in the eye. An honest building that hides very little, except for a ghost or two and perhaps a wee brown mouse.

If I lived in such a building, I would furnish it with threadbare rugs and chairs with a bit of stuffing showing. Old, weathered doors of pale greens and grays would adorn the bare walls and on top of the doors, ancestral portraits or tattered dresses pinned with poems. It would be rumored that Ravinia, a crown princess of the ancient Corvidae family, occasionally drops handwritten poems and crinkled love notes down the drafty chimney.

The kitchen would be full of cast iron frying pans, heavy, white plates and platters crisscrossed with blue veins, cracker tins, and mixing bowls from long-ago Aunties. Atop the pine table, rescued from a handyman’s cellar, would be seasonal bouquets of ferns, daffodils, brooding roses, evergreens, and fallen sticks from the last windstorm.

Of course, there would be a clawfoot tub upstairs and iron beds and dressers redolent with sunbaked sheets and scattered droppings of lavender buds and rosemary sprigs. Unadorned windows under sloping ceilings let in the sun and stars. Dreams in this building would be only a little scary, mostly entertaining, and occasionally prescient.

I would invite all my odd friends to four o’clock tea served in delicate porcelain cups. We would pull the slightly distressed chairs up to the fire and draw a word out of a robin’s nest for further discussion. Words like sesquipedalian, propinquity, lacustrine, apologia, plangent, irenic. If you didn’t know the meaning, you could invent one that made sense to you, and we would run with it all the same.

But sooner or later, we would put our heads together and think of one small thing we could do tomorrow to show our love for this world: pick up crushed nip bottles, adopt a kitten, pray for peace, compliment the check-out girl, write a letter to the editor when something needs saying, let someone speak and listen when we will never agree, smile and make space for the car ahead of us to merge, help out at the library book sale.

Living in such a building would encourage one of the goals of the original Odd Fellows themselves: “to relieve the darkness of despair.” I look around my little house and think it’s quirky enough to begin the practical work of goodness. But this building, this Odd Fellows Hall, will forever hold my heart, inspire me to be odd in earnest.

Door on Stairwell

I haven’t figured out what it is about old doors that makes me so happy. I want to hang them on walls, from ceilings, lay them flat as tables and desks, prop them up anywhere they can be propped. I found this tall, narrow one leaning against a barn at a yard sale and felt that instant connection I’ve come to trust and rely on with both people and objects. I can’t remember how I got it home but those are the details, the mechanics, we forget in any love affair.

At first it wanted to be hung horizontally on the big wall over the little sofa but that meant making decisions about several pictures, mirrors, paper wreaths, and shutters currently claiming that space. It also meant painting the living room, not only to cover scatterings of holes, but because the door insisted on a different color. So the door looked around and decided the stair landing would do. I was relieved, though some day, it may get restless and command a different perspective.

When we make connections with objects, they tell us a lot about their histories, character, preferences. In no time, this door said that it used to open on a supply closet in a doorbell factory. When the factory closed, the door was salvaged and ended up in a garden shed next to a broken window where it suffered the elements for years. Now it’s in vogue; it knows  it; and it wants what it wants: namely, to be admired, cared for, adorned, and positioned for viewing.

I am only too happy to oblige.

It’s mid-May and spring is here in earnest. Like the brisk green wind tossed with cherry blossoms, I too am restless. Since there is no visit to Paris or Venice in the immediate future, I have to make do with enjoying my new old door and moving furniture around in the living room, a completely satisfying activity.

Henri Matisse believed that objects commune in “sympathy” with each other. Respecting that sympathy is essential, so when I move a chair or angle the loveseat to face a different direction, my eye looks and my heart listens. The Miss Havisham chair relishes its new home by the fireplace; the platform rocker is delighted to look at the dining table. And everyone enjoys each other’s company.

It all started with the door, but spring may be the real impetus behind this dance of chairs and curtains and tables yearning for fresh perspectives. Sometimes this season lets us know that things have stayed too long in one place, and it’s time for a shake-up. “As within, so without,” the saying goes. Everything in me pronounces, “Yes. Indeed.”

Easter Eggs From Far Away

When I think about Easter, I think about eggs and daffodils and chocolate and new shoes. Sometimes I remember having to go to Sunday School the week before Easter and coming home with a couple of palm fronds that my sister and I always tucked behind the top of the old, drop-front, oak desk behind the front door. The palm fronds stayed there for months until they collected dust, and my mother threw them away.

I never understood the significance of the palms (certainly an incongruous element in the old house on Main Street), but they were different, and there for the taking, and it was something, at least, that I got from Sunday School.

Easter also meant a big chocolate rabbit from Uncle Barney and baskets fluffed with neon pink, green, or yellow Easter “grass” and filled with jellybeans, a chocolate egg or two, and a few marshmallow baby chicks. The night before Easter, we would dip hard-boiled eggs in old cups spilling over with boiling water and a vinegar/tablet combination that magically turned the shells a washy blue or pink or yellow.

Easter morning, we donned our new saddle shoes and perhaps a new coat and went back again to Sunday School, and that afternoon, to Aunt Florence’s for dinner. Her house was always sparkling clean and fresh and smelled good…like baked ham and paper and refinement and roses and order. Our house smelled like bacon fat and old, chipped woodwork and linoleum and pipe tobacco and a smidgen of hardship.

At Aunt Florence’s, we wore our new shoes and sat up straight and didn’t say much. We were quietly transported, reading the poetry and looking at the gleaming photographs of spring flowers in her Ideals magazine, which had a strong religious bent, though we focused on the daffodils and forsythia and tulips. And at dinner with fresh flowers in the middle of the table and heavy silverware and candles in the daylight and blue and white plates from Denmark, I felt as if I was in another country, a country of elegance and sophistication and education and mannerly deportment.

I knew at Aunt Florence’s on Easter Sunday a way of life that got all mixed up with new shoes and a glossy magazine and the fragrance of baked ham and the heft of sterling flatware. When we got home that night, my sister and I wrangled over who was going to bite the head off Uncle Barney’s rabbit. It was a school night and everything was ordinary and weary and plain again. I put Aunt Florence and her house in an exquisite egg wrapped in the tissue of memory and sealed with a handwritten, foreign address.

Visual Poem. Beckoning Chair.

Every now and then, a miracle happens. Sometimes a cardinal splashes down in the birdbath; sometimes I walk for a mile and my knee doesn’t hurt; sometimes the words just come for a Story Picture; sometimes I run into a friend on a city street; sometimes the checkbook balances; sometimes the pansies take root in the clay pot; and sometimes I get to spend a day or two in a place so magical, I am transported.

This is a chair in a room in a very old house, owned and created by an inspiring and wildly talented artist. When an old house is a visual poem, a chair is not just a chair, a cup not just a cup. Stepping over its worn threshold, I can see the way light pours through watery glass and plays on the fibers of a threadbare carpet; see the underpinnings of a chair, the way it’s tufted and tacked and flounced and fringed; see the imprint of countless, long-ago footsteps on the steep, narrow stairs; see the glorious color of a withered bunch of daffodils long past their prime over a once-smoking fireplace.

It is a sensual arriving, this house. When I listen, I hear the wind whistling off the ocean just across the street. I hear the gale pushing through the cracks of the front door with a stormy cacophony of howls and whooshes and clatters, and in response, I hear the old house creak and whisper its warnings. In the morning, after the storm, I hear the spring chives growing and the alley cats skittering up the rough fences and the songs of last night’s black stars.

And I smell Ireland: stone, clover, thatch, potatoes, linen, Guinness, and the Book of Kells. I smell muddy wellies, marmalade, wool, clotheslines, fog, tobacco, and bread rising. I smell crooked chimneys and moss. I smell my grandmother’s scoldings. My grandfather’s late hours.

When morning comes around in this poem of a house, there are plushy geraniums climbing the watery windows and eggs sunny-side-up on the slightly burned toast. There are line-dried sheets caught in the now-sweet wind; there is strong coffee in French cups. And in this house, I stand in my thick-soled shoes and swirly skirts and discover light again in my bones, flowers in my lungs, and I sing…if not quite an aria…certainly a heartswelling chorus of thanks.

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.

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.

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.

Newport Window

A friend and I went to Newport a week or so ago to celebrate the first sunny day we’d had in over a week and the decidedly unofficial first day of spring. What a wonder it is to take off your coat and cast it into the back seat. To jam your gloves into the weary coat’s pockets. To feel like you’ve lost a few years, a few pounds, regained something flirtatious, fickle, alive…even if you’re wearing a sweater over a top and a skirt over jeans and walking shoes.

Newport smiled back at us and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue, but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets, and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor, and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.