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.

Plain as Oatmeal

I could live in a building like this: square and upright, plain as oatmeal, root vegetables, black dresses, and the month of March. A building that speaks in simple, declarative sentences and looks you straight in the eye. An honest building that hides very little, except for a ghost or two and perhaps a wee brown mouse.

If I lived in such a building, I would furnish it with threadbare rugs and chairs with a bit of stuffing showing. Old, weathered doors of pale greens and grays would adorn the bare walls and on top of the doors, ancestral portraits or tattered dresses pinned with poems. It would be rumored that Ravinia, a crown princess of the ancient Corvidae family, occasionally drops handwritten poems and crinkled love notes down the drafty chimney.

The kitchen would be full of cast iron frying pans, heavy, white plates and platters crisscrossed with blue veins, cracker tins, and mixing bowls from long-ago Aunties. Atop the pine table, rescued from a handyman’s cellar, would be seasonal bouquets of ferns, daffodils, brooding roses, evergreens, and fallen sticks from the last windstorm.

Of course, there would be a clawfoot tub upstairs and iron beds and dressers redolent with sunbaked sheets and scattered droppings of lavender buds and rosemary sprigs. Unadorned windows under sloping ceilings let in the sun and stars. Dreams in this building would be only a little scary, mostly entertaining, and occasionally prescient.

I would invite all my odd friends to four o’clock tea served in delicate porcelain cups. We would pull the slightly distressed chairs up to the fire and draw a word out of a robin’s nest for further discussion. Words like sesquipedalian, propinquity, lacustrine, apologia, plangent, irenic. If you didn’t know the meaning, you could invent one that made sense to you, and we would run with it all the same.

But sooner or later, we would put our heads together and think of one small thing we could do tomorrow to show our love for this world: pick up crushed nip bottles, adopt a kitten, pray for peace, compliment the check-out girl, write a letter to the editor when something needs saying, let someone speak and listen when we will never agree, smile and make space for the car ahead of us to merge, help out at the library book sale.

Living in such a building would encourage one of the goals of the original Odd Fellows themselves: “to relieve the darkness of despair.” I look around my little house and think it’s quirky enough to begin the practical work of goodness. But this building, this Odd Fellows Hall, will forever hold my heart, inspire me to be odd in earnest.

Come Right In!

The idea of a Dress Shoppe (spelled just like this) has captivated me this afternoon, and the building too has taken hold of my imagination. I took this picture in a sleepy little town in upstate New York, one of those countless Main Street villages displaced by malls and expressways, now given over to moribund antique shops, For Rent signs, empty sidewalks.

Some wayward, stubborn part of me believes these towns can revitalize, can rise from the dust of neglect and the trammelings of “progress,” believes that the stately brick and iron buildings with their poetic transoms, signboards, cornices, and columns can be reclaimed. They are just too beautiful, too original, to remain obscure, unused, uncared for in our increasingly uniform box store/Internet world.

When I saw the Dress Shoppe door in this lost town, I thought about a magical place where dresses would spin and twirl from the tin ceiling or hook with rusty, twisted hangers from faggots of sticks, or adorn turn-of-the-century mannequins with bedsprings for heads and feathery crows perched on their shoulders. I thought of snippets of poetry clinging to hems and surprising fortunes under large round stones.

There would be autumn leaves on the floor. Birds’ nests on the shelves. Shutters, old doors, cloudy and corroded mirrors on the walls.

The dresses would be mostly black and netty with tulle and starched underskirts. Many would be recycled, made fresh again with fripperie and frou-frou, or simply plain as a single curved line down a white page. There would be shoes too, my kind of shoes: thick soled, thick wedged, balanced…no ballerina flats here, nothing so vacuous or insubstantial. Socks, the only color allowed. Socks woven in slices of citrus or honeybee stripes. Socks patterned with witch brooms or bearing tercets of poetry, images of subway cars, freight trains, farmhouses.

At the Dress Shoppe, we would hold morning coffee meetings to discuss impossible French verbs and ingredients for secret charms. Someone might come in and teach us how to make soap or write an irresistible love letter. At the slightest provocation, we might break into song or do a little dance. Cats and dogs always welcome.

The old building would sing too, and then, the building next to us would pick up the refrain with a hot cross bun shoppe and across the street, the library would hold evening soirees among the biographies. And building by building, the town forgotten for the past forty or fifty years would wake up, shake off its lethargy, make itself known to a world so acutely in need.

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.

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.”

Cottages & Kings

There are houses that haunt me, that linger in the back rooms of my heart. I saw this cottage last weekend at a sale: the estate included a grand house facing the water, this guest house, and a barn with two apartments upstairs. The property had sold for a few millions, and it was rumored that everything would be demolished and replaced with the sort of house now seen along the water: huge, pristine, and empty most of the year.

Intrigued by the small size and the house’s scrappy garden, I went into this dank, neglected cottage with its galley kitchen, rectangular living room, bedroom, tiny bathroom. One step over the worn threshold, the dream began in earnest. In this fantasy, I have whittled down my possessions to those things that are either useful or beloved. Every chair, table, plate, picture, book, fork, and spoon is essential to the happiness of daily life. One tiny closet holds all my clothes: winter and summer.

This is an illusion of grand proportions, since I live in a more spacious house that doubles as my factory/studio and is artfully chock-a-block with orphaned chairs, estate sale detritus, innumerable black dresses, paint-chipped shutters and doors, as well as all the tricks of a collage scrapper’s trade. Mixed in with this cool stuff is the near and dear: a portrait of my mother as a baby, grandma’s ledgers, friends’ art, and boxes of family photographs.

When I think about downsizing, I immediately head for the bag of corn chips, the jar of dark chocolates, or the door. A task of such Herculean proportions seems as overwhelming as making croissants, repairing the roof, writing a novel. I read the little book about taking each object in hand and asking, “Does this bring me joy?” Often it’s hard to say…joy, no joy? On this old door doubling as a work table, there are lots of things that don’t exude joy but they’re used: stapler, pens, scissors, a calendar, notepads, printer, and computer. Admittedly, along with these are a number of things that please my eye. Joy, maybe not, but delight, yes.

I love the minimalist fantasy though. It’s simple. I live alone. I have a cat. I wear black dresses and Doc boots. I read good books. I eat kale and beet greens. I write poetry. I sleep well at night. I am understated and self-reliant. I stay mostly in the moment. I walk every day. My house is spare and spacious in spite of its small size. Nothing is extraneous; everything is essential.

Joy or no?

Angel in Pointy Shoes

To all my dear Readers,

I am taking a break from writing for a bit after a long month of enduring a virus that just won’t quit and has me by the throat.

In these tumultuous times, there is so much to say, so little to say. I return again and again to the present moment and to ordinary things: toast, shoes, books, the sky, apples, paper, wing chairs, water, snow, the wind, friends.

Thank you for your kindness, your patience, your faith.

Be well. I am with you always in spirit.

“Bread for You.”

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said, “is what we chiefly need: Pepper and vinegar besides are very good indeed.”  Lewis Carroll

The mornings are brisk now in mid-October, and on the days when the sky is massed with clouds, it seems particularly chilly-willy here at the computer, my hands covered in David Copperfield gloves, cold fingers moving slowly over the white keyboard.

Autumn, for all its beauty, is a wistful time, as the sun sinks ever lower, leaves fall, summer takes its place in memory. But it is the cold, seeping through the cracks and old windows of this house, that makes me skittery, unable to focus. It is the cold that inches toward the heart.

I look to the furnace, the faltering sun, layers of cotton and wool for comfort, forgetting that warmth can also come from unexpected places. When the knock on the door came, I was working on a poem, and it was a slow-go, words coming, as my grandmother used to say, “Like molasses in January.”

When I opened the door, a friend stood there with a paper grocery bag in his hands. “Here,” he said. “Bread for you.” In the brown bag was a large, still warm, golden round of bread: fragrant, crusty, delectable. My friend told me about the process of measuring, stirring, kneading, and waiting for simple ingredients: flour, water, a bit of sugar, and yeast to transform into the miracle of bread. He talked about going by the feel of it now, knowing the process so instinctively by touch after much practice. He added, “It’s a mess, at first.”

That last line resounded like a clatter in an empty hallway. I know that the beginning of the creative process is pretty much a mess: paint, paper, spatters, threads, flour, clay, stone, scraps, paste clutter the worktable, but even more, emotionally: blank pages, empty canvases, solid black screens give rise to trepidation, and questions float to the surface like dead leaves: Will something come? Will it be good enough? Is there anything left for me to say?

Another friend, who is now making award-winning, experimental films that really push boundaries, said to me, “You just have to start somewhere. Jump in.” It can be bread, a poem, an aria, a book, a film, a painting, a dress, a sculpture, a garden, a trip to Venice. Doesn’t matter. We hesitate, pace round the periphery until the jump-in moment impels, and we have to work with whatever we get. Believe in it too.

Otherwise, the cold wins.

Tucked in Keyholes

There are dreams all over the place in my house…caught in forgotten corners specked with tiny spiders, hidden under the cellar steps, blending into the wallpaper, stuck in keyholes, drifting in the flour bin, sleeping under the eaves. Dreams lodged in cinnamon-stained cookbooks, tucked deep in the round toes of winter boots, woven into the bicycle basket, asleep in decades-old love letters in the attic.

When I happen upon a dream, I think it’s best to pretend I don’t see it, the way I used to try not to see my skittery cat, Carlie, seemingly asleep in the wing chair. One direct look and Carlie would vanish in a poof of hair and dust. Dreams are like that, preferring to be regarded obliquely, their mystery honored, kept intact.

If, let’s say, there is a dream written in ancient script on yellowed paper and snagged in torn lace at the window, pay it no mind until spring when May breezes billow the curtain to life. If, perchance, the dream is written in charcoal on the back bricks of the fireplace, wait until the logs smolder and the night falls deep, wait until the black letters and the black night are one and the same.

It’s also a good idea to wear socks or flannel skirts around a dream, so as not to startle it. If it wants to, if it recognizes your tenderness, the fragility of your heart, it will release itself into your nimble fingers. Once in your hands, it’s recommended that you sit by the fire and hold it like a wisp of milkweed, for at any moment, the dream can fly right out the window or settle itself forever under a loose floorboard.

With this tip-toe approach, I’ve come to know that my house is dreaming of staying warm this winter, of its regard for the house next door, of being mushroom gray instead of stark white, of trading its worn clapboards for weathered shingles, of looking out on a green lake instead of scraggly rhododendrons and a dusty Main Street.

I know that my car dreams of more pickup (and a pickup across town), of a day at the spa, of a road trip to Maine, of a radio that only plays music that makes its little engine soar, of a sparkly dashboard ornament.

I dream of perfect hearing and strong knees, of writing poems that illuminate the inner places, of making beautiful omelets, of speaking French, learning to swim.

Dreams are all over the place, full of quirks and capriciousness. It will take some doing, but if you’re patient and kind and remember to avert your eyes, they will bloom right in your hand.

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.