Changing times

I know...that's the buzzword for these odd pandemically disordered days, but it's not what I have on my mind right now. 

Today is my mother's birthday.  She's been gone ten years now, though it hardly seems that long ago we were at the shore together, having started out on our annual journey there, and, in a matter of days, suffered her loss.  My aunt Sadie, her youngest sister, called just now to say she was remembering her, and we talked awhile about where everyone was, and how times change.

What zinged that phrase for me, though, was her beginning apology, "Oh, I just looked at the clock and didn't realize what time it was.  Are you in the middle of your Sunday dinner?  I could call you back later."  

The clock said 12:15 and in half an hour she was to get herself ready to go up to the communal dining room for her dinner.  So she had in mind that I, too, would be setting out a Sunday dinner for myself, right on time.

As it happens, I had just finished my lunch...tuna salad and almond bread...though usually I do have my largest meal (if one can bend the definition a bit) at noon. Unless, like tonight, the boys are coming for dinner.  Eating mid-day is better for health, but frankly my reason is that I'm mostly too lazy by evening to put together anything more serious than leftovers or a higgledy-piggledy snack.  It's partly living alone and partly my energy level that peaks by ten am and practically shuts down at four.  If I know a real evening dinner is nigh, I try to have it done mostly by mid-morning.

What keeps echoing at this moment, though, is my aunt's timeless assumption that midday Sunday dinner still holds true.  Once upon a time, that was our tradition.  Sunday dinner meant a full complement of a meal, no rush, an afternoon to settle it.  Somewhere, someone still does that, I am sure.  But lives change.  Times change. Meals change character.  We are elsewhere, doing otherwise, caught up in different patterns of a week.  Sometimes, one day is very much the same as another.

There must come a point at which, after decades of changing times, we, like my aunt, go back to seeing life reflected in earlier times.  I find myself doing the same.  Though I am long retired from school, both as student and as teacher, I still feel Friday as the week's end, and the weekend ahead as the breathing time.  Sunday night, I catch myself thinking, oh, if only it were only Saturday again.  Yet for my days, there is little change between M-F and the precious open hours of the weekend.

Today, for instance, Sunday, already I have felt time's hoofprints on my back.  Why?

There is something I must confess here...Time is my nemesis, and always has been.  Time, that invention of some frightfully left-brain person still running from the dinosaur era, runs counter to the rhythms I run on.  My body does not adjust easily to time, particularly in those spring-fall changes.  Its metric system is its own.  (Stories tell that my great-grandfather, an engineer, refused to go along with those seasonal manipulations.  I envy him.)

Though the calendar upsets it far less than the clock, I would be glad if one day ran into the next, if my daily to-do lists did not have to have a particular day stamped at the top, if Monday felt like Saturday, if the day I didn't feel like doing some art or attending an appointment or digging in bulbs (well, I used to) could be as easily shifted without fuss to another moment in time. I'm not talking about procrastination, but inclination...I'm likely as not to be early as late.  So why not give up, and live on my own time?

But that would be chaos, you, shocked, are thinking.  How would you organize your social interactions? Well, there could be compromise, I suppose.  After all, a little chaos never hurt anyone.  It's the way the world began, it's the beginning of any sort of creative endeavor.  It's the way we learn to swim.  So why not?

To all these whys I have no answer.  I think of a line in a movie (I can't think which) in which one of the characters asks another why he thinks he has the nerve to do some awful thing, and the other responds, Habit.

Even having done nothing horrendous except blindly follow out the 24-7-12 agenda, I answer the same.  Habit...the cage I live in. 

I am going for a walk now, not because of the time, but because the day is fair and I need to breathe.

As the year ends, the calendar shifting us once more, we all need some fresh air and a break, even if temporary, from the Habit of Time...

I wish it for each of you.

The poetry of cotton

 On the nowhere road between home and office, those 18 years I lived in the Eastern part of the state, this time of year the fields flatten and turn to short-haired flax, much like the farmers driving their loads along the highway next to me.   Along the road, the cotton workers go about their work, hatted and gloved, darker and more serious as they gather the seed-specked balls in combine-waves across the landscape.  Trip by trip, I must have absorbed that common scene until years later it has impressed itself indelibly in memory.

Cotton field, Eastern NC

But it is Laura Frankstone's Instagram photo of her painting, yesterday's "warm-up" (as she calls it), which brings that vision back to me.

Cotton, Laura Frankstone

I'm glad of it, not only for the spark of memory, but also for the inspiration to poetry again, something  I find suddenly re-surfacing over this past month.

This morning, her dancing cotton balls inspired not only the vision, but also a poem, not something I have been doing regularly, though occasions, like holiday cards and once in a while a commemorative birthday, will bring me to verse again.

Cotton, in its various envisionings, has been a sort of opening of the field, to borrow Robert Duncan's phrase. Laura has been writing about the slow work of getting back to art after a long time of personal trials and removals, and her days finally in her new studio,"warming up" again to the field of making.  Whether, like her, there is now a new, big bright space to work in, or like me at this small table before a window which looks out, just as brightly, to garden beauty, insights come from all the windows we look out of.

And now, the renewed impulse to poetry is here...flaxen, flat enough to invite words for themselves, in the patterns, sounds, rhythms, images and gyrations down the page toward meaning...mine, yours, anybody's.  And in ink.  Though these posts and some letters are written straight onto this laptop, more personal things, like poems and other letters, journals and art, come out from the nib of a pen. I've always done that, draft after draft until it begs to be put into print...if it ever does. 

This time, interestingly, so did the first drafting of this post, on the nearest paper and pen I could grab...a sketch pad I keep by the side of the sofa for Alexander and me.

Here's the poem, which, as you see, begins the way this post does.  The poetic line came first.

Bounty

On the nowhere road between home and town

the fields flatten and turn to flax...cotton, soy, and tobacco

succumbing to the fall reapers.

                                         

Cotton is the last crop in, being the less sensitive to chill.

Here, bent workers, hatted and gloved, still glean,

while combine harvesters lumber toward the field's

edge where, like sheep herded and branded, the white

brick giants await their transformation.  For now,

cotton is king and queen again; for now, from field to market, 

it reigns.

 

At home, I lay my gathered bolls to rest while I consider 

their meaning; there lies the path into their world. 

What they become, finally, out in the world, or in my

hands, they (and I) wait to discover.

If only, I think, we stopped to glean more leavings, how much

richer our visions, our understanding, our love.

                                                            r            12 .17 .2020

December, or how it comes to be

 The last holiday card has gone out, and now, facing a worktable without a brush or paper or glue in my hand, I'm feeling a little at odds.

That task, which this year began in early November and filled my mornings until the whole list of 108 family and friends was satisfied, gave me not only purpose but an illuminating beginning to each day.  Today I looked desperately through my address books for people I might have forgotten, but alas there's only one and he's moved without a forwarding address.

I could, of course, just continue to make more cards, for whatever occasions come up in the future, but I discovered something this year:  art seems more inspired if I have someone intended to receive it.  

And these days, the work served a more essential purpose...in relative isolation from what in other times would be a pretty busy set of celebratory months, art was a connector between me and the others I would have ordinarily enjoyed celebrating with.  

Over the summer months, what I called small art kept me busy, and some of those, with or without potential receivers, pleased me. (There is always my discard pile for the others, though historically,  someone happening upon it may have snatched up one or two and carried them home...)  I could go back to that.  There is a year full of birthdays to greet, as well, so I suppose I could begin a 2021 list and follow it out a few pieces at a time.  Birthdays are numerous in certain months...May, September, for example...and not many in others, like November and December (emptied by deaths and geographical desertions, both of them).  But there is no month with none, thankfully, and that keeps me going.

This year, though a few of those holidayers were watercolored, I found the most pleasure in collage.  Just as I was beginning in earnest, I discovered a new local source for handmade paper, a tiny gift shop opened this year in an old railroad station by some people who also own one of my favorite clothing stores nearby.  I  don't make paper myself (sorry, all you talented papermakers), the process being not to my aesthetic tolerance.  But I admire those whose work I can unroll, tear and cut, put together like a puzzle, often the pieces suggesting their own places on the stock.

Sometimes there are ornaments (the bookmakers have a word for it, but I can't remember now what it is) to be added, but mostly the paper seemed not to want accessorizing, though they would accept a stab of pencil or pen now and then.  (My white, gold and silver pens need replacing by now.)

The thing about paper is that no matter how precious (and costly) the sheet, little of it goes to waste, at least around here.   Under my worktable is a basket of large scraps torn from the rolls, and I scrounge around in it until what I want can't be found. 

 On the work surface itself are the very small scraps, which you would think were destined for the waste bin, but they come in too handy for that.  In fact, they have the most creative spirit of any size...there is always a tiny shape that fits perfectly to make a leaf or to fill in a gap of color or to edge a mountain or to become a sliver of lake.

Just like a jigsaw puzzle, as the shapes fit themselves together, so does the vision.  It doesn't take but an initial piece or two to realize the person it's meant for; the title, too,  The tools at hand, pretty much, do their own work, silent and unappreciated except by me.

The way all those papers worked, especially this year, also broadened my images...they didn't necessarily need to be stock holiday pictures, or even winter ones, for that matter.  They just made themselves whatever they wanted to be.

Often people will send me thanks for what they receive, and I appreciate that, but they needn't...the pleasure of the work is all mine, and I'm grateful to have someone to pass it along to.

I hope each of you has some holiday pleasure you can count on to lift your spirits these days.  

I'd love to know what it is.