Years ago, when my mother passed away, I restored a dilapidated outbuilding and painted a sign for it that read: The Mary Jane Merritt School For Girls. I think my mother, Mary Jane Merritt Hanna, might have wondered at this, but since I’m the oldest of her beloved Honey Girls, she would have approved.

She might feel the same way about this book: flattered, curious, ambivalent.

Poetry was all over the place in that drafty old house on Main Street with its floral wallpaper, iced-over January windows, steam of Sunday afternoon pot roast. It was in our village too with the creek running through it and the train’s dark whistle out on those empty edges. I grew up with poetry but only knew it in a well-worn book of fairy tales.

Words have always been my way of knowing—writing—my way of giving voice. These poems cover many years, many loves, many stumbled-upon moments of grace. They are all together in this book. For better or for worse, they are here.

I began to understand that clothes are poetry when I was 9 or 10, and Aunt Glady took me to Canandaigua, NY to buy the petticoat I so fiercely wanted. I knew by the intensity of my desire for this frothy thing that something beyond simple wanting was at work.

Dreaming of petticoats, I doodled them over and over on the brown-bag covers of textbooks and envisioned myself as the radiantly beautiful, captivating girl I was really meant to be…in spite of obvious evidence to the contrary.

It was January. Snow was piled high outside the old store with its oiled wood floor and high tin ceiling. The petticoats were hung along the wall on a pipe rack like ballerinas at the barre. I choose the one I wanted, the one of my dreams, and Aunt Glady smiled and paid for it.

Magic was at work here. When my sister and I banked twenty-five cents a week (money from our grandmother), and even five cents for a bottle of chocolate milk was not to be taken lightly, and Aunt Glady worked on the assembly line at the doorbell factory and brown-bagged it every day, the advent of the petticoat into my life was about as likely as Chucky, the neighbors’ dog, growing a fourth leg to replace the one he lost under a car.

I wore that petticoat out. First the elastic went on the waist and then the various tiers began tearing away and threads drifted from the hem. But wearing it under my skirts, seeing them bloom like plaid roses and hearing the dry-maple-leaf rustle when I walked to school, I knew the ordinary day was anything but, and I knew that with the flouncing power of the petticoat, I was anything but shy, plain, invisible.

Now so many years later with a closet full of petticoats, I try to remember that each day is worthy of its own special sartorial presentation. Today might be the black, torn net with faded velvet flower, tomorrow…layers of violet tulle. And even on a petticoat-less day, there is poetry in Doc Martens and a silk skirt tied up with organdy ribbons.

Every day warrants its poem; the petticoat concurs and is only too happy to oblige.

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.

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.

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.

Golden Apple

It’s mid-September, and the dark falls by seven now. Mornings are chilly and soaked with dew. Mums and pumpkins vie for space outside the supermarket, and brown leaves from horse chestnut trees drift down Main Street. We are turning inward again, in spite of summer remnants: overflowing window boxes, warm waters, blue, blue sky, and yes, yes, yes tomatoes.

We wait through long, listless, humid days when fans whir, the newspaper folds into itself, and tiny spiders spin instant corner webs. We wait through traffic jams, parades, side-yard weddings, craft fairs, and general hoop-la until the day when the first red tomato hangs plump on the vine, a jewel of vast proportions.

In all their ripe, lucious, chin-dripping glory, tomatoes are spreading across kitchen counters, building on windowsills, spilling over farmstand bins. Brandywines, Big Boys, Early Girls, Cherry Drops, Bumble Bees, Mr. Stripeys, Grandma’s Pick. Tomatoes, infused with all that August sun, sit heavy and warm in your hand and smell like everything that is good and pure on this earth.

The French used to call the tomato la pomme d’amour or love apple, believing that this exotic fruit had aphrodisiac powers. Adding to its allure is the tomato’s rightful place in the nightshade family along with tobacco, eggplant, peppers, and the deadly mandrake. The Italians called them pomi d’oro or golden apples, the fruit of temptation in Greek mythology.

Their greatest temptation seems to be that few of us can eat only one. And once the tomatoes begin, eating them once, twice, three times a day is essential just to keep up. Tomatoes grow prolifically with ardor and heat. One plant can yield anywhere from eight to twenty pounds of love apples. In September, my friends with gardens are busy stewing and saucing, slicing and canning and distributing tomatoes all over the neighborhood.

The very best thing to do is pick that first tomato and eat it right there in the middle of the garden or open field. Let it drip, let it burst and splash and juice, let its tiny seeds fall on your shirt, let it fill you with warmth and well being and memories of another sweet summer. Golden apples. Love indeed.

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.

Kitchen Table Magic

The very best gifts come unbidden and take your breath away: a glorious sunset; a tiny shoot coming out of a very dead pot; the face of a long forgotten friend in a crowded shopping mall; flowers left on the doorstep. Thaumaturgy at work.

A week ago, I wouldn’t have known a word like that, let alone been able to use it. But a friend of mine turned into a thaumaturgist, or maker of magic and miracles, when he gave me my very own two-volume Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary complete with magnifying glass!

For years, I have coveted this weighty tome, longed to look up the whole story of a word without going to the library, but I hardly expected the OED to come to me one ordinary afternoon in December. Thaumaturgy is like that though: sudden and startling and out of the blue.

As with most love stories, I remember the time and place when it all began: the enchantment of words. For me, reading began early, and throughout childhood was a means not only of escape but of encounter with worlds I knew were there beyond and beneath the surface of things. My favorite was Volume I of The Young Junior Classics, a thick book with a red cover (that fell off with so much wear and tear) titled: “Fairy Tales & Fables.”

But the real awakening took place in a nondescript classroom at Sacramento State College in the middle of a blistering July afternoon. Taking a summer course in the Romantic Poets, the first literature class I had ever taken after high school, I was quite lost, young, looking for something but didn’t know what. There was no air- conditioning in the classroom, and as I looked out the open windows to the flat, scorched landscape, the gorgeous, bubbling words of John Keats in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” soaked into me like three days of rain. I knew that finding my way had something to do with words.

And now so many years later, the OED rests on the kitchen table, beckoning me to look up every word I’m not sure of or unfamiliar with, to take off my glasses and peer through the magnifying glass to read the tiny type that explains a word and its parentage and what it has become through the ages, all of this backed up by diverse quotes showing the word at work.

It’s all magic to me: the giving of the gift, the OED itself, the effort and happiness of using words to express what would otherwise lie silent, buried, unborn. Thaumaturgy, indeed.

Winter Cottage

February is the month we most need our angels.

I like to think that on these moonlit, 10-degree nights when ice festoons the windows and wind sweeps around the bare corners and snow turns blue that my house is full of company. A number of loving, eccentric spirits (most of whom I know but a few I do not) tumble down the chimney or drift under the back door and hang out for a bit while I am sleeping.

They sit in the wing chairs in front of the little stove or around the dining table or before the cold fireplace and tell each other stories of their long-ago loves, triumphs, sadnesses, their still unfufilled longings. Maybe they have a slow dance in the foyer or a cheese sandwich in the kitchen. I like to think they’re happy in this sweet house the way I am. I know they are surely welcome.

Winter is here in all its fierce, determined earnestness. Blizzards of blinding snow and wracking winds are followed by waist-high drifts and icicles long as sabers. And then a warming to 38 degrees and mushing through ankle-deep slush and driving through frigid lakes that swirl across once black roads. Then snow again, layer upon layer of snow and cold like a birthday cake in a dark fairy tale.

We walk in mincing steps on the slick back roads, those of us who crave the fresh, bracing air and a glimpse of the leaden or the stark blue sky. We visit the library to read the paper or thumb through an art book or make our way to a coffee shop or the post office or the grocery store, delighted just to be out and about and in the company of other hardy souls.

We make soups thick with black beans and onions and chowder to stand a spoon in. Tea is good with a sprinkle of cayenne, soda bread with bubbles of melted cheese. Socks are wooly; sheets are flannel; boots are serious. Summer is light years away. There is nothing on the beach but snow and an occasional crow, a sullen gull.

The spirits, known and unknown, sense our thinness, our weariness with the challenges of deep winter. In the pale mornings, you might find a love note on the refrigerator written in an elaborate, old-fashioned hand. Look for a tattered fortune or a torn secret under a chair cushion. There may also be a stone in the sink. Look around. We’re not alone. It’s February, the angels’ favorite month to visit.