a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Morning


I'm sitting very early this rainy morning listening to the silence, a rarity these days as students have flooded back.  There is only a single dedicated runner on the street, no traffic on the road, no houses visibly lit for morning ablutions and coffee.

In a new little corner in my front room, a space which my neighbor Laurie Thorp helped me find and set, the only sound is the pendulum ticking on the grandmother clock Mr. Eugene Bailey made.  I listen to each tick and think about...nothing, really.


This is a new laptop I'm working on, bought the other day from a young man who, over my several visits to Staples...first to identify the one most useful to me (without, I must add, changing the habits of a lifetime), then to buy it, then to help install my data, and finally to run back for the power cord, which he and I, chatting about life, liberties and the pursuit of happiness in his young and my old strange worlds, had forgotten to repack.  

The one I bought didn't have the best reviews, but it was on sale, and considering that said reviews were done by twenty- or thirty-somethings who play games, let three movies run at once, and insist it look snazzy, I wasn't worried.  It had what I needed...a place for words: some reaching out to readers like you; some doing once-a-month business; some helping others move on or up; some kept to myself.   


I liked my old laptop best, the one before the one before this one.  It lasted a dozen years until one day it just died.  That one, I mourn for to this day.  Its replacement refused to turn on suddenly last week after only a year and a half, though I'd made quite an investment of time and money in it.  I liked it all right...it worked...it fed and kept me in words adequately.  But it left me with a permanently blank screen way too soon. ("They don't make things right any more," noted the old soul in the young man, commiserating as he Socratically guided me through choices.  "Don't even get me started on cars."  Risking rudeness, I had to laugh across the 53-year distance between us.)

So here's hope for this new one, which I must say is comfortable, plain, clear, and so far easy.  

***************

By now, it's mid-morning.  After a few side trips...checking for unseen leaks around the almost empty house next door, grazing an almost empty grocery store, and putting gas in the almost empty car...I'm back to the place which from now on will be named Laurie's Corner.  The rain has stopped, and the sun is dappling over the moist yard.


It reminds me how little by little this house is still settling me in, with an insight here, an overlooked space there.  Friends help with eyes that can see past mine.  I think of Anne Harmon who came into my bedroom when I first bought the house eight years ago, and mentioned how much more balanced the room would be if the bed centered it.  I saw it immediately, and. like Laurie the other day, she had helped me move it into just the right place. 

Settling in at this point means arranging, re-arranging, unarranging, finding things, losing things.  Last week I lost four, including two sets of books I hope didn't disappear in the move back.  I noticed them gone last Sunday, and searched frantically, and since then I have woken up nights wondering about them and the power of losing.  (Have they disappeared with a purpose? theirs or mine?) And, not unreasonably, thinking of Elizabeth Bishop's poem about losing...

        Lose something every day.  Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./The art of losing isn't hard to master.     

Also, using what I have in new ways...that's the part most illuminating.  Witness the workroom, now situated in what used to be the guest room, with windows that look out to the front slope, a new perspective that brings on this strange turn:  I am beginning to draw again, really draw, as I first learned at the Botanical Gardens in San Antonio with Jean Rosow, and later in Chapel Hill with the spectacular painter Jane Filer.  


As I set up my space, I thought at first I'd be working on much larger pieces than usual; I'd brought home heftier canvases to try.  I thought I could focus on sectioning the whole into small pieces...I think I had Betsy Cook's encaustics and sewn images in mind, the way she works in discrete but connected  spaces...there are stories floating everywhere in her art.  Though I'm drawn to very large, narrative art, my eyes work only in small measure, and those manageable divisions could have been a solution.  [Betsy kindly lent me these images, so you'd maybe see what I mean...though art is not always about logical thinking...]

Betsy Cook, Cleaning House

Betsy Cook, Meditation on Abundance

Betsy Cook, Imperfection

Betsy Cook, Meditation on Spring

They do inspire me, but, instead, the other day I found myself drawing a flower (species unknown) with pencil on greeting-card sized paper, then filling in gently with watercolors that Cathy Burnham gave me from her glittery collection, and leaving it suspended on white, no background.  I was surprised at how linear my hand had become...nothing like the wavy, free-for-all my work has mostly been.  Precision not being my strong suit, suddenly I seem to be reaching for single, almost clear  images more than washed landscapes.  Drawings that can't be worked over or turned into snow scenes if they go awry.   It may not last, and may not improve, but at the moment, I am liking what I see.  Here are my first few, which show in sad gray in these photos, I'm afraid, but will do for a sample:




I'll leave you with those to ponder.  

Now it's time to settle into some lunch.

Later, I'll go back into Laurie's Corner and read.








Monday, August 2, 2021

A dry season

...Lord, send my roots rain. 

                                                G.M. Hopkins

This morning Elizabeth Matheson, writing from Hillsborough, our county seat just north of here, posted one of her perfect photos, a beautifully green summer lawn edged with crape myrtles, noting that she loved "these trees, even on a sodden Sunday."


Envy soaked me.  They had rain; I did not. Though each of the past days has warned of thunderstorms, they have been phantoms only.  In fact, it's been at least two weeks since any water fell on us.  Radar has shown storms approaching, but like tourists who suddenly decide on a more interesting detour, they skimmed around us to the north and the south, missing us by barely inches.  


My poor front slope, which Joseph worked so hard on for a year terracing and planting, must depend on my every-other-day hosing.  I'm generous and faithful at it, true...to witness, the water company's stern messages that I have doubled my use...but it's not the same as regular, good soaking rains.  


I am reminded each time I read those OWASA messages of an old and forgettable cowboy movie where, in a drought, the wife apologizes to her husband for washing the clothes, "But honey," the script has her whine, as if more than half the population wouldn't have agreed, "the clothes were dirty..."

This morning, however, is a weather of another order.  The heat and humidity we've plowed through for a while has given way to cooler and drier air...real breezes (which I could have used on last night's pea-soup walk) tease the trees even now, at the height of the day, so that I'm sitting on the porch writing this in perfect comfort.  (Earlier, I had begun the day with a pleasant coffee on a friend's cool porch.)


What this change in the air has brought me, if not rain, is energy.  After the coffee, I zipped over to Lowe's to find some wood framing for cabinet doors I want to make, the last task to finish my upstairs guest suite, painted and spruced up last week.  Though usually I approach carpentry the way I bake...with guesstimated measurements (I know, I know! not good in either arena)...this time I had a tape measure in hand and calculated to the half-inch how much framing I would need.  (I think I'm right.)  The five 96-inch pieces fit neatly crosswise in my car (you remember:  the one Alexander thought I'd had since I was a teenager).  Weather makes all sorts of difference to me.


What I need next is someone with a surer hand than mine to cut corners, so I can glue and nail the frames into place, and stain them.  I've already got some linen to put behind the frames, and a model to work toward.  Bring on the guests...

Unfortunately, we are back to wearing masks in closed spaces, and the Triangle Swing Dance Society, whose August dance I'd finally gotten enough backbone to sign up for, has had to cancel the indoor event.  It would be lovely if they found a huge field and some lights for us to swing around in the open air.  I'm in the mood to dance to some 'forties tunes...outdoors would give me much more room to stumble and catch my balance without falling. One can dream...



I'm also dreaming about Paris, and, knowing that travel won't be possible for me til at least spring or fall of next year, I've been practicing my language in entertaining ways...French films, where I learn colloquial pronunciation, and French-sprinkled books in English, where I learn odd vocabulary.  I now know how to say je rigole (I am joking), thanks to re-reading this week the comic chapters in Peter Mayle's old Toujour Provence (bei oui), which I found tucked into my little shared library out front.  I even have Alexander answering my au revoir! though he may not know which language he's hearing.  


What spices up each day is #thereal_emilyinparis, whose charming Instagram photographs of her market days and Paris walks with her infant and toddler not only take me there but serve as a geography lesson. (Plus, she lives in a superb appartement avec vue in an arrondisement to make one swoon.  Like me [but very much unlike ma maison ordinaire], she's at the end of her renovation, too.)  She says she won't mind if I reprint one or two of my favorites here.  It's out of love, I assure her. Comme ca, je peux imaginer les rues, la vie...



  

But to return to that sodden town north of us, I'd driven there the day before its lucky rain to see the new exhibit at the Hillsborough Gallery.  I especially admire Jude Lobe's wax paintings and ephemeral objets, and as she and Alice Levinson were two of the featured artists, I was looking forward to the inspiration.  And found it.  The third artist of the month, Susan Hope, whose work I hadn't known, hung beautiful long glass art stained in luminous colors to hope on, but the minute I saw Jude's new piece from her Shaman series, I took the tag to the counter.  (I'll acquire it officially at the end of the month when the exhibit is down.)  Wide-armed and blue-eyed, shaped from my favorite materials...copper, wood...its spirit lifted me.  And j'adore the hair.


Down the street at Purple Crow Books, I picked up Allan Gurganus' Uncollected Stories, along with one of Kazuo Ishiguro (as everyone knows, books can be travel, too). Then, as the heat ramped up, I took myself home from the rare treat.


So, the summer reaches its height.  I hope you, too, have found a dream or two to glide you along through drought.

Au revoir!