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.

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.

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.

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.

Empty Hammock

August is the fastest month. Three weeks feels like three days. It’s supposed to be a month that flows like honey and molasses and maple syrup; the hours are supposed to have that kind of texture and consistency. Languid. Warm. Unending. Listless, even.

Instead the whole month feels a bit like a ride on an old-fashioned Tilt-A-Whirl, swirling wildly round and round in a blur of red basket and dizzy with visitors, unread books, things left undone. And now there are crickets and tree frogs jammering away in the earlier twilights and there are tomatoes weighing heavy in the backyard gardens and pots of asters and mums lining the entrance to the supermarket and suddenly I want to wear heavy shoes and plaid skirts.

September looms with its fresh, blue mornings and brisk, starched attitudes. Indolence is frowned upon. Beach paperbacks lined with sand are left to yellow in faded canvas bags and though the rose of sharon blooms the maples wither. A leaf from a chestnut tree falls on Main Street. All too soon.

And that’s why next year, I plan on living August the way it’s meant to be lived. Sleeping late on sultry mornings and eating tomatoes in open fields and buttering up that ear of corn and reading on the porch until the stars come out. I’m going to swim more and take an outdoor shower now and then and let the tiny spiders spin away in the corners and go to fairs and concerts and maybe even to a spangly, tacky t-shirt store with the rest of the tourists who flock here, living summer consciously the way vacationers do.

There are still a few August days left, and where I live, September has lovely summer-feeling days. But the mood is not as lighthearted and shadows fall faster and darker on the lawns and one by one, the lights go out in the big summer houses. We are left with memories of traffic and parades, of weddings in side yards, the fragrance of fried clams and wilted roses, the longing for a time when summer stretched out like Dorothy’s yellow brick road all the way to the wild, blueberry moon and all the way back again.

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.

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.

Circle of Friends

It’s Thanksgiving Day. Outside the light is gray, the sky overcast, the air exuding that late autumn fragrance of dried leaves and cold, damp earth. I take deep breaths of it when I walk to the end of the driveway and pick up the newspaper bloated and heavy with ads and inserts for tomorrow’s big shopping day.

Past Thanksgivings float through my mind. When everyone I loved was alive, I didn’t think much about gratitude. I was young, and of course, they were there: a mother, father, grandmother, aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, friends. Of course, there was turkey and mashed potatoes, stuffing and gravy, pumpkin pie. Of course, the table was covered in a lace cloth and set with the good silverware and plates that collected dust most of the year in the china cupboard.

Now, so many years later, gratitude is edging closer to center stage. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been walking late in the afternoon around sunset. My path takes me down a hill to a tiny beach where I can rest on stone steps and look at the sky limned with charcoal and a blue pale as breath…watch the water turn from silver to rose to pewter to slate.

I think of our world so weary with war and strife, and our country so unsettled and fearful. I think of families divided by political differences. I think of how we’ve forgotten our shared humanity, our innumerable blessings. Back when everyone I loved was alive, it didn’t occur to me that someday there would be empty chairs around that table…that someday, the chairs, the table, the dining room, the whole house would be gone.

I have just had another birthday, and with each passing year, centering myself in the here and now becomes more than a daily practice; it becomes an essential way of being. Taking note of the goodness around me, realizing that each moment is exquisitely full is the antidote to loneliness and fear. There is always something to wake me up: a smile, a taste of homemade grape jam, birthday roses, a song on the car radio, a light in an evening window, November itself with bare trees, scorched sunsets, winds that unravel the scarf wound three times.

A single yellow leaf lets go, falls in silence. I whisper my thanks on this day marked especially for it.

Petals Falling

It is August. The sun has burned the grass crisp as toast. Fans are whirring. Curtains are pulled back. Down in the cellar, the dehumidifier collects buckets of water from the damp brick and concrete. At night, I lie in the still heat and remember childhood when my sister and I slept at the foot of our beds to catch a bit of breeze, and I would wake displaced by tangled dreams.

Dog days, they’re called, the twenty days before and after the rise and fall of Sirius, the Dog star. I think of Carson McCullers’s “…saucer of lavender sour milk.” I think of the way the flower petals fall in the midnight kitchen when the windows are closed, the fan at rest, and the jungle cacophonies in the darkness on the other side of the rusty screens. I think of the ocean water with its warm, murky depths, and the southwest wind sultry with bayous’ humidity.

I move listlessly through the rooms of my house, avoiding the ones shimmering in the hot, bright light where tiny spiders appear overnight in the corners. All earnest attempts at effort seem silly and futile. Words come hard at this pace; my mind seems sleepier at noon than at midnight.

August is the month of daydreams before September’s crisp call to learn, organize, engage. It is a time to watch one maple leaf stir as if everything depended on that whisper. It is a time to pick one tomato and eat it right there in the garden or field with the sun burning your shoulders. It is a time to smell scorched pine needles and funky low tide. A time to listen to the corn growing, the sighs of the nodding roses.

Like the yellowed curtain drifting behind me, my mind floats, seems prone to reverie, to memories of August days when the only cool spot was the dim little library or the shores of a dark green lake. When we ate dinner at 5:30 and the screen doors slammed up and down West Main. When the nights were alive with cicadas, crickets, thrilling games of hide and seek, and years later, the breathlessness of first love. When September loomed on the horizon with a foreboding we tried to ignore.

It is August. Sirius has completed its rise and fall, but the Dog days continue. I have little to say. Much to dream.