I Remember (Je me souviens)

Behind the clock face
is Paris. Beyond the ticking
away of ordinary moments
is a lamp-lit cafe with rain streaking
its windows, poetry spattering its walls.

Angels soaked in gray,
dilly and dally, linger in damp,
seedy corners, grin at gargoyles,
call each other by name: Francois,
Geraldine, Celeste, Guillaume.

Here at home, winter sets in. Beds unmade.
Floors unswept. Hearts undone. Party dresses
languish in closets. French spoken only
in memory when you je t’aime’d me
in clouds of sleep.

The angels extend their cold fingers
across oceans and fields, through snow
and wind to my outstretched, mittened
hands. I order an au lait at Starbucks, listen
to the cacophony of clatter and chatter,

feel the steam of hot milk on my face,
feel the bones of the angels’ fingers
in mine, know that Paris is just beyond
this moment, just beyond this unwashed
window raining tears.

Palma, NYC

It’s a chilly January night in New York with a snow/ice storm hovering around the edge of the weekend. We have come to the city for a stimulant to revive our spirits lulled and dulled with routine and familiar landscape. New York always does the trick, even in winter when almost everyone is wearing black puffs and the sky is slate gray and asphalt-scented air drifts up from subway grates.

In the library, we happened upon the work of Anna Atkins, who back in Victorian England was the first to print each page of her book: Photographs of British Algae, in cyanotype, a camera-less photographic process that became known as the blueprint. Atkins quietly brought focus and passion to the study of botany, presenting her findings with sensitive artistry and unwavering persistence. And it seems that only recently, many years after her death, is she recognized as a pioneer.

I’m guessing that being known didn’t mean much to her. The joy was in the work, in the process of effort and discovery, in the creation of something beautiful and worthy.

Which brings me to Palma, a restaurant on quirky little Cornelia Street. We didn’t meet Palma herself, the owner of this dreamy place, but like Anna Atkins, the joy she takes in her creation is palpable. Coming in from the chill and darkness, we stumble into a beautiful room with bouquets of roses, carnations, Queen Anne’s lace, and full-throated daisies in shades of peach and coral clustered in old bottles and vases of glass and tin.

The decor is a mix of campestral Italy and abandoned factory with battered metal chairs, thick oak tables, rustic baskets, and flickering votives everywhere. Plates are heavy and white, like the napkins, and the menu is folded into a vintage valentine. We order a homemade pasta flavored with truffles and mushrooms and infused with an earthy goodness that warms body and soul.

Palma has fashioned a world here: a sustaining mix of color, texture, fragrance, taste, and light. I think of Gilbran’s quote: “Work is love made visible.” It can come from anyone and did on this trip: the considerate plumber who worked for the hotel and fixed the leaky faucet; the cab driver from Queens who laughed and told stories in a thick accent of his three daughters; the cheerful porter who greeted everyone with a smile and a little bottle of water at the revolving door of the hotel.

There is a typewritten message inside Palma’s menu that reads: “May the love you give to the universe make this world a more beautiful place.” A rose in a bottle. A smile at the door. A bowl of scrumptious pasta. We opened our eyes.

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.

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.

Workroom Corner

January is the month of inner comfort. I listen closely to the quiet inside my house, inside me, as outside, the cold descends and winds gust and sometimes snow falls. Silence prevails as my house holds its breath between the furnace fan’s periodic whooshing. I hear nothing but the white noise in my deaf ear, which is akin to the sound you hear holding a conch shell to your ear.

Seeking inner comfort, I drift around my house and notice the places and things that please me: the snug Wyeth room with its warm stove, the view from the upstairs bathroom window in very early morning, the quirky Victorian chair by the fireplace, and this particular corner of my workroom that exhibits the controlled chaos I find reassuring. There is order to be sure but taken with a decided grain of salt.

It’s clear to me that certain things prefer the company of each other. Old books love to linger collectively with other old books. Textures of chipped paint, twigs, string, metal and muslin are family. Colors muted into charcoal, sepia, rust, damask, ledger green and violet recite poems in perfect rhyme. January light filters through two layers of curtains: one lace, one organdy, and the corner seems to breathe a contented happiness.

Contentment is something quite delicious and rare in our madcap, consumer culture. It implies enoughness, an awareness and appreciation of completeness in this moment, the opposite of restlessness, hunger, frustration, emptiness, expectancy. Contentment comes to me on a walk at dusk when January trees are black against a gray sky. Or sitting at a friend’s table in a warm kitchen, thoughtful words flowing back and forth between us. Or lying in bed on a Sunday morning watching pale winter light seep through the faded curtain.

When I was young, I used to be suspicious of contentment, believing it was more the province of cows and well-fed cats than intelligent, curious human beings. But I had mistaken it for lethargy and dullness, when it is, in fact, a feeling that wakes me up to the world with its beauty and wonder, its diverse enchantments.

It is contentment and its inner comfort that I feel these long winter days when my town’s population is cut in half, and I can walk down the middle of Main Street in twilight and breathe in the cold air that feels like breathing stars. It’s a happiness beyond happy. A gratitude beyond thank you. Richer than riches, this January contentment, deeper than silence. Peace beyond measure.

Grace Church. Manhattan.

As I write this, my little Cape Cod village is experiencing its first snow, and even after all these years, I marvel at the way it transforms the familiar, quickens the senses, jolts me awake. A brown, bare world turns itself inside out, and all I can do is stare.

This past weekend, I had occasion to visit Manhattan to celebrate my sister’s birthday. New York is at its most wondrous in December, its most generous. Windows at Bergdorf Goodman, windows at Sak’s, windows at Macy’s are bursts of splendor and imagination. Christmas trees sparkle with a fairy-tale radiance. The air is slightly acrid with roasted chestnuts mounded in foil-covered bowls on vendors’ carts. And everywhere, there are throngs of people inching along the sidewalks, jamming subway cars, clustering in front of those spectacular windows.

In this city, I am often overwhelmed to the point of shut-down. Sometimes all I can do is keep moving, my knee aching, my senses blurred with the enormity of it all, and the quantum leap I have taken from my quiet life in a town that boards itself up for a long winter’s nap, where the December silence is as deep as the ocean that surrounds it.

New York is like a police siren, electric as a hot wire twisting down a Main Street bereft of lights. I look for places of refuge in the midst of the cacophony: the third floor of the New York Public Library, the second floor of ABC Carpet & Home, the way-back stacks at the Strand bookshop. Places to reclaim my senses after constant assault, so that I can surge again into the mad carnival and let its over-the-top-ness make me bigger, stronger, more alive.

All day Saturday, the first snow drifted down on New York, adding another layer of enchantment. Walking up lower Broadway after dinner in a charming little Italian restaurant, I saw this church (appropriately named “Grace Church”) through the falling snow. There are moments that bring us up short, moments when the world turns itself inside out, moments where there is nothing but the moment. Sometimes it happens when I’m looking at a painting or into the eyes of someone I love or hearing a poem or listening to the wind in the dried oak leaves, sometimes just the smell of new snow will do it.

Grace Church, with its mystery and grandeur, its tangle of haunted forest, snow curving around the walkway to the gothic door took me to a place beyond even New York, to a place where there is only rejoicing and awe, wonder and magic, complete, sacred stillness. Grace can do that, dig itself deep, make its way right down to the soul. Turn us inside out.

Come Right In!

The idea of a Dress Shoppe (spelled just like this) has captivated me this afternoon, and the building too has taken hold of my imagination. I took this picture in a sleepy little town in upstate New York, one of those countless Main Street villages displaced by malls and expressways, now given over to moribund antique shops, For Rent signs, empty sidewalks.

Some wayward, stubborn part of me believes these towns can revitalize, can rise from the dust of neglect and the trammelings of “progress,” believes that the stately brick and iron buildings with their poetic transoms, signboards, cornices, and columns can be reclaimed. They are just too beautiful, too original, to remain obscure, unused, uncared for in our increasingly uniform box store/Internet world.

When I saw the Dress Shoppe door in this lost town, I thought about a magical place where dresses would spin and twirl from the tin ceiling or hook with rusty, twisted hangers from faggots of sticks, or adorn turn-of-the-century mannequins with bedsprings for heads and feathery crows perched on their shoulders. I thought of snippets of poetry clinging to hems and surprising fortunes under large round stones.

There would be autumn leaves on the floor. Birds’ nests on the shelves. Shutters, old doors, cloudy and corroded mirrors on the walls.

The dresses would be mostly black and netty with tulle and starched underskirts. Many would be recycled, made fresh again with fripperie and frou-frou, or simply plain as a single curved line down a white page. There would be shoes too, my kind of shoes: thick soled, thick wedged, balanced…no ballerina flats here, nothing so vacuous or insubstantial. Socks, the only color allowed. Socks woven in slices of citrus or honeybee stripes. Socks patterned with witch brooms or bearing tercets of poetry, images of subway cars, freight trains, farmhouses.

At the Dress Shoppe, we would hold morning coffee meetings to discuss impossible French verbs and ingredients for secret charms. Someone might come in and teach us how to make soap or write an irresistible love letter. At the slightest provocation, we might break into song or do a little dance. Cats and dogs always welcome.

The old building would sing too, and then, the building next to us would pick up the refrain with a hot cross bun shoppe and across the street, the library would hold evening soirees among the biographies. And building by building, the town forgotten for the past forty or fifty years would wake up, shake off its lethargy, make itself known to a world so acutely in need.

Under the Wilderness

From Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue: “I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day, you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.”

I have been a lot with my self and my sufferings this past spring, though I’m way old enough to be out where the rain rains and the sun shines. It’s like a tossed salad of sufferings: a leaky roof, an aching knee, numb fingers, a bit of pure adolescent heartbreak sprinkled on top like a bite of chive. Not big-time, major-league, macro sufferings, to be sure, but enough to satisfy me.

This is familiar territory. Quite comforting to kvetch with a friend about the trials and tribulations of keeping up an old house and yard: spiders, pollen, rotting boards, peeling paint, ticks, ice dams, stopped-up drains, wet cellars, ancient wiring. Quite comforting to swap notes about creaky joints, nanosecond attention spans, proper noun oblivion, necessary naps. Quite comforting to write a poem or two to drench the heart in further woe, slip on it like a mossy stone.

All of this worrisome stuff is weirdly satisfying, a dose of personal Schadenfreude. The greatest danger is that negative satisfaction might become habitual, a worn pleasure track in the brain. Since I have no intention of becoming one of those cranky, peevish old ladies besting each other in a match of misfortunes, I respect what Vreeland has to say here: “Then one day, you get out.” Out of so much with your self. Out under the open sky where the elements have their way with you. Out where some days take your breath away, others leave you limp as a wet towel.

I am blessed with friends and family who do brave things: travel to Europe alone; run Art Centers; read their poetry to an audience though their fingers tremble; drive a friend to chemo; work with special needs children and adults; listen with compassion to people battling addiction; pile flowers and birds’ nests in their hair; make art; make a commotion; or make a safe, peaceful place that welcomes every weary soul.

In the end, it all comes together, as Vreeland says. Once out in the fresh, wild, scary world where the snow snows and the sun shines, the cloistered dwelling of the self begins to feel like a hobbit cottage cluttered with teacups, crammed with knick-knacks. You hit your head on the beams. There is little room to breathe. So you step outside. See the moon coming up in the wilderness of sky. Flap your squeaky elbows. Do a creaky little dance. Trust in the raining rain.

April Stream

Our Town by Thornton Wilder has always been one of my favorite plays. When I need to be reminded of the gifts I’m overlooking, gifts often right in front of me, I read these lines from Emily Webb, who returns to life for one precious day, looks around in wonder, and says this:

“Good-by, Good-by world. Good-by Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Only after dying and returning to life for that day, does Emily wake up and realize what was always there, reminding us to take note of the gifts as they are being given: a cup of coffee, a book, a reading chair. And certainly, in New England, the whole blessed month of April when the brown days are bursting into yellow, and the air smells green. Shedding coats, hats, scarves, we leave the rooms we have built around ourselves in the dark, inward months.

In spring, I reconnect with something once easy, now more difficult: a complete immersion in the moment. Not a thinking moment but a being one. Sitting in the sun today on the back steps, feeling its warmth on my face and arms, no shoulds or yearnings are intruding on the moment. There is only sunlight, warmth, gratitude. Simple, good things.

Talking with a friend this morning, we wondered if we’re living up to our days, not wasting precious minutes with worry and want, recalling that in childhood, it was like breathing to climb a tree and be a pirate or make a home by an April stream. The moment provided all we needed; there was no disbelief to suspend. It’s a curious paradox that the older I get, the more the child wants to surface, rattle the pots and pans, eat the ice cream first, surprise a me that has forgotten how.

Perhaps that’s why we want to declutter, even move to smaller places. Somehow we think that in paring down our possessions, we’ll find that simpler life that holds so much appeal. And what is a simpler life really than a life lived in each moment. No need to move to another land or across town or even rearrange the furniture, unless the moment calls for it. Promises joy.