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.

Halibut Point

Otherworldly places are good for the soul. This is a picture I took in early April at Halibut Point off the coast of Cape Ann, north of Boston. Looking at this photo, I think I might have been in Scotland or Iceland or Ireland…some lost, forsaken land. It’s hard to believe that this magical place is only a few hours from my tame little domicile on another Cape.

It was late in the afternoon when my friend David and I stumbled into this wildness, a bone-chilling silver day with gray winds that tore straight through the wool of our coats and turned my pale fingers chalk-white. We had warmed ourselves with crispy fried clams and a turn through a few dusty Essex antique stores beforehand, but when we pointed the car toward Gloucester, we had no idea we would be blown here.

The well-worn path beckoned innocently enough with splashes of thin sunshine and a few gentle curves, but like any journey into a dream, mysteries emerged breath after breath. The gnarled trees twisted and tangled into each other; briars were flung skyward; and the sunlight disappeared. A white hawk flared across the path, landed in one of the lofty snares, and looked down at us as if to say, “Are you ready?”

We followed the trail until we came to a great, deep dark granite quarry with menacing cliffs, and that’s where we met the beginning of the wind. Sweeping off the Atlantic, its gusts told the stories of shipwrecks in water cold as slate, water the color of shale. We pulled our hats down over our ears and tightened mufflers and pressed on into that wind, knowing it would end here at the edge of the continent, knowing we were destined for enchantment.

Bracing ourselves, we made ourselves brave, though every fiber of my hobbit being was protesting, wanting only a snug armchair and a smoky fire. The path was gone, replaced by slabs of granite and tossed boulders and wild heather. We were like the herring swimming upstream, and perhaps it was the same instinctual drive that pushed us headlong to the sea, the roar of it carried on the bracing wind like an otherworldly fugue.

And when we got there, we stood on one of the highest rocks and raised our numb hands to the clouds and filled our lungs with salt air and shouted, “Yes!” Celebrating grace on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, we were blessed with Yes…indeed.

Manhattan Birds

Every now and then when the days begin to lengthen, I’m fortunate enough to leave my Cape Cod village and zoom down to Manhattan with my very cool sister and very very cool niece. Even if we only stay one night, we live it well, shopping the thrift stores and consignment shops, eating things like fig and olive salads, taking note of street fashion, wondering at what the Whitney considers art, marveling always at the heights, the bustle, the pace.

Several things about New York astound me. One, that every person I see on the crowded streets and even more crowded subways has a life. Two, where does all the trash go? Three, just imagine what’s under Manhattan! Four, what would it be like to be a child growing up in the city and living on the 45th floor?

Five, how does all the food get here because people in New York are always eating. Six, how can you live here without oodles and oodles of money because something is always enticing you to buy it, eat it, try it, own it, rent it, experience it. Seven, where do you go for quiet and solitude? Eight, do people in New York ever use their kitchens? Nine, what is life like without a car? Ten, can you hear the birds singing in the morning?

Passing these two pigeons caught in conversation along Madison Avenue down in the 30’s, I asked several of these questions. They looked quite nonplussed, as if I had come from another planet. “Such silly questions,” one replied. “Just because you can’t hear the tree falling doesn’t mean it hasn’t come crashing down.” Now I look confused. “Listen,” said the bird’s colleague. “You’re in Manhattan. Nobody really knows how it works…it’s a Universe…it just does.”

Barn in Early March

It is a raw and windy day with four o’clock snow that isn’t sure if it’s snow or if it’s rain. Still I ventured out for a walk down Main Street past the houses all shuttered and silent, past the old weathered barns, the outbuildings, the side yards with the covered boats, down to the sea that today is the color of gull feathers and buried dreams.

March has entered with a roar.

Wearing a black wool coat, dark red muffler, sturdy boots, two pairs of gloves, and a wool hat that pulls down over my eyes, I decided to pretend I was in New York and opened a leopard-print umbrella to keep off the rain/snow mix.

It’s a stretch of the imagination to pretend to be in New York when I’m walking down the empty street that leads to the water. There is only the sound of the gusting wind and the sight of the pewter-gray ocean, only the snow falling in circles into the black puddles, only the crows cawing their late afternoon sojourn to the fading day. I try to picture the city with its bright windows and flashing cabs, its sounds of horns and subways, its crowded sidewalks, the lights coming on in the Empire State Building.

It’s a stretch all right.

But I’m happy to be walking here in silence, looking out under the leopard-print umbrella at the three colors of lichen on the ancient oaks, at the snow dripping from the delicate tips of the bare spirea hedges, at the shingled houses turned inward to ponder their empty state, at the way the wind has shaped the cedars.

Today, the four o’clocks are resting in peace.