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.

Marblehead Window

As I write this, it is mid-morning, mid-December, and the pale sun is doing nothing to temper 11 degrees of smarting, searing cold. Even last night’s full moon that turned the bare trees to windblown shadows rose somber and aloof. These are, indeed, the shortest days of the year when the four o’clocks hit hard.

I light the little green candle on the stove, nudge up the thermostat, add another layer of sweater and fingerless gloves, pour a cup of ginger tea, and look at this photo I took last week of a shop window in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a captivating place that long ago ran off with my heart.

Up there on the edge of Boston’s North Shore, Marblehead is an old seafaring town. Its crooked houses painted in witchy colors have uneven sidewalks for front yards with tiny scrappy gardens in back. Narrow streets loop up and around and end, of course, in the water that encircles and defines this place. In Marblehead, gray cats wander in the colonial cemetery up on the hill overlooking the even grayer sea. It is a town I love most in winter.

I considered moving here back when Book II of my life began, but the thoughts that surfaced were by turn appealing and then unsettling. Remoteness was the true Siren’s call; the fact that once you’re here, you’re pretty much here. I could see myself wearing long black skirts and eccentric hats and wandering the dusky streets alone except for a cat or two. I might be conjugating French verbs or reciting an incantation or the last lines of an impenetrable poem. Somehow I knew that I might clank shut if I lived here, becoming a person too inward, too cloistered, locked away in Wonderland.

Still, when I visit in December, the town is persuasive and alluring, almost talking me into staying. Since we see what we are looking for, I’m blind to the money, the yacht clubs, the understated, expensive cars. I see only the rich patina of age and time and all the lives lived in the crook-jawed houses that have weathered and sheltered and heard the stories, absorbed generations of joys and sorrows. There is eloquence in all this telling, simple and substantial.

In the window box, it’s the artfully designed tangle of things found mostly underfoot, the harmony of vine, pine cones, sticks, moss, driftwood, and a few lights that sings to me. Marblehead is a soulful place. When I trudge up to the cemetery with its tilting, mossy stones carved with heads of angels, when I look out over the water, have a good talk with a wizened, bemused cat, I know I am close to home.

Lonestar Cow

I have been to Texas. I have fed cows, seen the Hill Country in moonlight, dined outside at ten, heard shots from the roof, driven through the Guadalupe river in a venerable pick-up, been followed down a dusty road by a little blue-eyed cat, eaten wild pig and axis deer, picked rosemary from bushes big as New England yews.

Now I know what space means because Texas is about space, miles and miles of it. It’s space that shapes the accent: slow, easy, broad “A’s” and breaks words down into two syllables, sings the sounds. Space that shapes the character: steady, open, blunt, earthy, and can-do. Space that frees the imagination to roam the land, get lost in the sky, breathe in the air redolent with cedar, dung, the bones of ancient oaks.

I went with friends and stayed with their friends who live in a grand old limestone house on a 400-acre ranch. The original walls are thick and quiet, built by two German brothers in the late 1800s. There are fireplaces big enough to camp in, 20-foot ceilings, concrete chandeliers that look like gnarled branches, stone floors polished by years of workboots, deer hides slung over big leather sofas.

Up on the third floor, my room caught in the mossy treetops, I dreamed of my father singing love songs to my mother as she fried eggs in the iron pan. I dreamed of my little Main Street house becoming decidedly less well mannered. I dreamed of deer in flight and the canines of wild boar, and I dreamed of sunrises as far as I could see.

My friends’ friends were warm, gracious, generous…with hearts as big as the land in their care. They took us hither and yon, from a margarita-splashed San Antonio River Walk to a winery out on Rt. 290, where the owner himself told us that to make a great Texas wine, you have to think like a mother vine and act accordingly.

We went to Fredericksburg where I ate mustard, sausages, and sauerkraut and visited my design mecca: the Laboratoire de Design of Carol Hicks Bolton on Warehouse Road. I wanted to live in that vast space, settle into the jumble of rust, wood, tapestry, iron, and stone, study the warped French books, savor the Belgian linens, so crisp and thick, you could eat them like a sandwich.

Texas made my imagination bigger, open to wilder, freer possibilities. Since I’ve returned, I find myself saying “Yes” to more invitations, pushing the boundaries of the old, fixed comfort zones. If there’s a cowgirl in there, buried under years of habit, reserve, ennui, and obedience, I aim to find her, give her free rein.

Most-Alone Tree

When my mind wanders through the hills and vales of memory, I almost always end up in a place. It’s not so much the people I remember as the place…the way the August night smelled of dry grass and withered roses; the way the fog boiled and churned behind the hills; the spot the dust collected under the kitchen table; the sound the wind made in the willowy pine outside the bedroom window.

I think we can know a place better than a person. People dodge and defend, are mercurial and complicated, often confusing. Places mostly just want to be known and remembered.

Take this tree on a road called Boughton Hill in the countryside heading out of Honeoye Falls. The road rises, twists and turns through fields of corn and wheat and hay. Suddenly, you crest a hill and there it is: a lone tree in the middle of an empty field with nothing in the air but sky.

In the long-ago days, my father drove out Boughton Hill every morning very early when the rabbits sat under the soaked wildflowers and munched crabgrass, when the sun was thin and tentative, the air full of birdsong and mist. I wonder what he might have been thinking, listening to Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard sing about broken love, as he made his way to the hard job of making roads like Boughton Hill through the fields of other counties.

In the long-ago days, I kissed a boy in his pick-up truck, parked one summer night on a lonely road off Boughton Hill. I remember the fragrance of the earth cooling and the corn breathing and the night settling in. I remember the wild chorus of crickets down in the ditches, the sound of my heart in my ears.  But I didn’t know much about the boy except that I liked him and wonder now if he was wondering what he was doing there with me. Maybe he was thinking about his truck or his shop class or the tv show he was missing or how to get the kiss right.

And now, when we go back home to visit, we exit the Thruway and travel Boughton Hill again. There are more houses, often quite unattractive and glaringly new, standing cold and stark on an acre of rider-mower lawn. My eye looks away, searching for the old houses with their weathered clapboards or chipped shingles. Usually there is a protective cluster of trees around the back door, a falling-down barn just steps away, a bit of rusty detritus in the side yard. They have their own private poetry, these lived-in, fading places half returned to the earth.

The memories fly up to meet me as we make our way on Boughton Hill, back through the years to the little town that was once the world. And in some ways, still is…a town still beckoning, still breathing, still begging to be known. Quite a place.

Stone & Steel

In 1799, a stone carriage house was built on East 61st Street in Manhattan and 27 years later, was converted into a “day” hotel called the Mount Vernon Hotel. Because my sister likes to do her research before we journey places, she knew about this hidden treasure, a place certainly unbeknownst to many New Yorkers.

In the 1820s and 30s, the city only went as far north as 14th Street. It takes a real stretch of the imagination to picture most of the island of Manhattan as open fields with hills and trees and flowers and grazing cows, but wide open space it was. And those who could afford it would hop a steamboat or stagecoach and travel four miles up to the Mount Vernon for a summer day that might include a splash in the East River, followed by a luncheon of turtle soup…and for the ladies, embroidery and pianoforte in the upstairs parlors, and for the men, a flagon of beer, a game of cards, and a lively discussion in the tavern below.

You can hear these stories if you take a tour of the hotel, quiet now except for the voices of the guides and the visitors’ footsteps on the creaky plank floors, and no doubt, the swish of a ghost or two in the wee hours. Outside, the traffic courses up and down the avenues, horns blare, and the Roosevelt Island trams swing from the high wires crossing the river, and New York is the New York we know.

But then, there is this New York we don’t know. It’s good to venture into these long-ago places that jar us out of our present-day realities and conditioned ways of thinking. Places that have stories to tell about who came before us and the lives they lived and the circumstances of their lives. We can be eternally grateful that the Colonial Dames of America purchased the old stone building in 1924 from the Standard Gas Light Company (today’s Con Edison), extensively restored it, and opened it in 1939 for all of us to see.

I think about the old houses here in my village on Cape Cod, some of which have been lovingly and intelligently restored with their integrity intact and others that have been painfully made new or razed and carted away. Once gone or once “remodeled,” the stories go too and with the stories, our own deepening awareness of how we and our surroundings have been shaped by the happiness or unhappiness of those who came before us and what they believed was of value and what was not. We need those stories and the buildings that contain them and so eloquently, give them voice.

For more information on the Mount Vernon Hotel, visit www.mvhm.org.

Genius at Work

Sometimes you happen upon a place that makes your knees weak. You forget to breathe. Your pulse speeds up. Time stops. For some of us, it’s the Grand Canyon, or the twilight streets of Rome, or the cloud-swept view from 30,000 feet, or the ancient stones on the lonely Irish highlands.

But if you’re lucky, one day you stumble upon a place that mirrors the quirky interior of your own particular rag and bone shop of the heart. This happened to me last Sunday just outside a small town in upstate New York when my sisters and brother-in-law and I found the Hen House.

A crooked, makeshift trellis led into an overgrown garden scattered with rusty pots, Parisian park chairs with missing slats, little elfin houses hidden under silk flowers and thistles and Queen Anne’s Lace, iron trays and arched headboards, dog dishes and twisted wire planters and peeling window frames…everything etched with the traces of snow and rain and sun and neglect and time, lots of time.

Like Hansel and Gretel entering the forest, enchanted and spellbound, we called, “Hello. Hello!” No one answered except the buzzing flies and the hot afternoon breeze. There was no visible sign of commerce, no cash register, no counter, no desk, just a clutter of envelopes scratched with sums, just tumble, jumble, hittery-skittery piles of the most wildly romantic stuff rising to the rafters of the once-upon-a-time barn.

I don’t know why seemingly random heaps of tarnished silver, musty lace, dolls in bird cages, plaster busts, the insides of moribund clocks, wavery mirrors, Venetian chandeliers, tureens, candlesticks, yellowed paper, Victorian sewing machines, sooty lamps, and faded velvet opera capes can transport my heart to swoony places, but they do and in the Hen House, they surely did. I was quite sure there was a genius at work here. Only a madly deliberate intelligence could have created such glorious cacophonies and scatterings of oddities.

The juxtaposition of things was so unusual, so serendipitous, I thought about Miss Havisham and how she would have felt right at home here. I thought that perhaps I had been transported to a dusty backstreet shop in a sleepy corner of Paris. I thought how do you ever find magic like this in such a seen-better-days town.

Places like the Hen House stay with us. They charm our world-weary eyes. They color our pale imaginations rouge and saffron and lapis. They nourish our spirits hungry for evidence of an original talent at work. And they remind us again and again of what is possible in this impossible world.

If it were possible, I would visit every week and pick one corner, one tabletop, one towering clutter of what-not and stare and stare until I was filled to the brim, ready to go out and make a little wild magic of my own.

Prize Winner

This weekend, a friend and I stopped by the Truro Agricultural Fair, a lively small-town celebration of cackling chickens, banjo players, local farmers, and sunburned families. We oohed and aahed at the fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, onions, flowers, pies, and jars of honey. We used our dried fava beans to vote for the most handsome rooster, the most comely hen. We smelled the tangy salt air, redolent with hay and manure and chicken coop and oregano.

Then we wandered over to the tables displaying the prize winners: biggest pumpkin, most scrumptious pie, most original wildflower arrangement, strangest looking vegetable, and as pictured here: the best looking dozen eggs. I took this picture because if I opened these eggs in the stainless steel coolers of the supermarket, I would reject them on the spot, maybe even trot them up to the service desk.

But here they are at the Truro Aggie Fair winning first place. (I’m assuming, of course, that there were other entries, and these eggs really were the most stunning.) Look at them! Brown, white, peach, mottled, some dirty, some really funky looking…a far cry from the perfectly pristine eggs I’ve come to expect. And that makes me wonder what the egg sellers do to their eggs to make them so spotless, so uniform, such a far cry from the real McCoy, as seen here at the Aggie Fair.

I’m not a fanatic about freshness or organic-ness, but I do like food to look good. And now I wonder about that, wonder if maybe those good looks are deceiving, wonder if those perfectly plump tomatoes, those shaggy bouquets of bitter greens, those so so orangy carrots, those glimmering apples are given the veggie/fruit version of Botox.

Maybe I’ve forgotten what real looks like. Growing up in the farmy lands of upstate New York, I remember my father’s garden, and if I brush away the threads of memory, can recall tomatoes that looked like a snarling grimace, corn with a few icky borers burrowed in, zucchini that curved into itself, gnarled little apples. Pretty much everything had dirt on it. But it was all organic, all nature’s own presentation. No one fussed and mussed with what the good earth, under my father’s patient and kind hand, produced.

So I look at these eggs and then I look again, and I see that beauty, real beauty, the kind that wins first place is spotted and speckled and splotched and funky and decidedly, freshly original. Yes, decidedly that.

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.

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.