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.

Door on Stairwell

I haven’t figured out what it is about old doors that makes me so happy. I want to hang them on walls, from ceilings, lay them flat as tables and desks, prop them up anywhere they can be propped. I found this tall, narrow one leaning against a barn at a yard sale and felt that instant connection I’ve come to trust and rely on with both people and objects. I can’t remember how I got it home but those are the details, the mechanics, we forget in any love affair.

At first it wanted to be hung horizontally on the big wall over the little sofa but that meant making decisions about several pictures, mirrors, paper wreaths, and shutters currently claiming that space. It also meant painting the living room, not only to cover scatterings of holes, but because the door insisted on a different color. So the door looked around and decided the stair landing would do. I was relieved, though some day, it may get restless and command a different perspective.

When we make connections with objects, they tell us a lot about their histories, character, preferences. In no time, this door said that it used to open on a supply closet in a doorbell factory. When the factory closed, the door was salvaged and ended up in a garden shed next to a broken window where it suffered the elements for years. Now it’s in vogue; it knows  it; and it wants what it wants: namely, to be admired, cared for, adorned, and positioned for viewing.

I am only too happy to oblige.

It’s mid-May and spring is here in earnest. Like the brisk green wind tossed with cherry blossoms, I too am restless. Since there is no visit to Paris or Venice in the immediate future, I have to make do with enjoying my new old door and moving furniture around in the living room, a completely satisfying activity.

Henri Matisse believed that objects commune in “sympathy” with each other. Respecting that sympathy is essential, so when I move a chair or angle the loveseat to face a different direction, my eye looks and my heart listens. The Miss Havisham chair relishes its new home by the fireplace; the platform rocker is delighted to look at the dining table. And everyone enjoys each other’s company.

It all started with the door, but spring may be the real impetus behind this dance of chairs and curtains and tables yearning for fresh perspectives. Sometimes this season lets us know that things have stayed too long in one place, and it’s time for a shake-up. “As within, so without,” the saying goes. Everything in me pronounces, “Yes. Indeed.”

A Floor Like This

I like this floor because it has a face, and if I didn’t know it was a floor, I would think it was a painting. I could look at it for hours and be happy. There are stories in this floor, layers of them, limited only by my imagination. Workboots walked here, also bedroom slippers and ballet shoes, sturdy oxfords, sneakers, stilettos, galoshes, bare feet. Perhaps someone made love on this floor, danced on it, died on it.

With a floor like this, everything in the house behaves differently. Pictures feel free to swing on fraying cords. Chairs rearrange themselves in snug corners. Pots and pans fly out of airless cupboards and announce themselves to walls. Walls want to be in a state of gradual undress, a shred of wallpaper here, a glimpse of lathe there, plaster cracking in spidery patterns.

A floor like this permits a delicious abandon. You can track in mud or snow or have stones caught in your boot soles. You can spill vinegar, black coffee, spaghetti sauce. You can waltz all night in pointy shoes, pile the books. move the chairs, play the music loud. A floor like this thumbs its nose at vacuum cleaners and mops. It swallows up cat hair, dust bunnies, seed husks from the canary cage.

It is not coddled (no mandatory shoes at the door). It is not privileged and polished to within an inch of its life. It is not scary and perfect. It is, above all, humble, and it’s in this humility, this willingness to be of use, that we find its originality, depth, beauty.

My sisters say they want to be used up at the end of their lives. Wrinkles, grandchildren, hearts that have lived and lost and loved, bundles of memories, some sweet, some raw, the willingness to be helpful whenever they can, my sisters live this. I have a note here saying that if you have a gift or talent, don’t hoard it, spend it extravagantly. If you’re a poet, write. A painter, paint. A teacher, teach. A runner, run. If your gift is compassion, kindness, patience, tolerance, so much the better, since every day offers opportunities for its expression.

Your gift, like this floor, gets better, stronger, richer with use. And somehow, some way, the world does too.

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.

Scullery Sink

This is a photo I took of the scullery sink down in the nether regions of Edith Wharton’s famous home “The Mount” in Lenox, Massachusetts. Upstairs there were ceilings with wedding cake moldings and elegant silk settees and Belgian tapestries and French marble mantels, but it was the floor below that captured my imagination. The places the restorers hadn’t gotten to yet.

That’s where the real poetry was.

I loved this sink and wished I could transport it to my own funky 50’s knotty-pine kitchen and replace the stainless steel one that’s there now. I would put old faucets on this beauty and scrub it and pile the dishes in it and let the soapy splashes fly on that zinc surround, and I would wear black aprons over my white summer dresses and dream upstairs/downstairs dreams. Old things can do that to you.

The wall behind this sink is beautiful too with its resurrected collage of plaster, lathe, and stone, no doubt hidden since the house was completed in 1902. It is as mysterious and arresting as a work of art hung in a museum or gallery. I would transport that too and rather than look out a window at a yard, I would look into a deep eloquent past and wonder whose hands built that wall of Berkshire stone. What did he eat for breakfast that morning? Was he singing when he layered it with mortar or was his mind beset with thoughts of paychecks and rents and mouths to feed?

There’s an old house down the street from mine that was recently purchased and redone for the purpose of resale. Now with its spacious tiled showers and chrome appliances and new windows and polished floors and freshly painted walls and opened floor plan, it is, in the eyes of many, quite perfect…expensive and perfect. Wandering through it at an Open House, I found myself instinctively drawn out of the French doors to a small old barn and tiny potting shed in the back yard. Both are cheerfully askew with worn shingles and wooden shutters faded by sun and rain. Both have settled nicely into the landscape with its white hydrangea bushes and wild honeysuckle. Both, I sense, have stories to tell, while out in front, the new old perfect house is strangely mute.

There is, I know, a balance between ruin and upkeep, between neglect and care, between old and new, but for me, the time-worn imperfect things and the long-ago places sing the melodious and pale-tinged music of the heart. My kind of tune.

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.