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.