Inside life

 

Today being gray, I stayed in bed a bit longer, watching the rain and ruing the loss of my early walk.  I don't mind walking in the rain, but the morning seemed built for other things...later, I thought, I will put on my raincoat and go collect Alexander for the afternoon.   Good thought:  immediately the rain and wind picked up, or rather shot down, bringing a torrent over the garden and terrace.

In bed, I made a list or two, one practical and one fantastic, checked my phone for messages, then read another story in a book I had bought through the Friends of the Library sale, just re-opened in a new Covid way.

I should explain that for months, the town library had been closed...in your towns, too, I am sure...until summer, when they'd found a way to have us order books online and pick them up outside safely.  It helped me a little, but really I am more of a browser, and so I didn't use the welcome service much.  Then, last week, the Friends of the Library sent a message saying that they had found a way to reinvent their store, semi-virtually, and sent pages of titles they had for sale...all very inexpensive and all supporting the library, of course.  Many were new or scarcely read; lots were interesting.  I scrolled through and picked out more than a few, including Margaret Drabble's stories, which have become my bedside reading.  When they notified me that my order was ready, I went to the back of the library, where a window in a glass wall had been installed, and at the mention of my name out came a bag with my books.  I was proud of them and of me for getting these next weeks' reads.

You will notice on top of the pile above a book which came from John May himself, upstairs, a history of his family which begins at the beginning of time, just about, and which I have been reading chapter by chapter each afternoon, absorbing the chronicle of not only his family odyssey, but everyone's.  It is a fascinating book, part history, part fiction...both well-told.  I am glad to read it slowly.

As it happens, about the time John's gift arrived, I'd also picked up Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice Toklas, which somehow I'd missed the whole of in college.  But my Paris obsession now required it.  I alternated his with hers, enjoying the juxtaposition of language, history and intention.  I was sorry to finish Gertrude and Alice as quickly as I did, so I turned to a biography of Stein done by a woman I sort of knew.  Like a balloon deflating, I plowed through a while, then put it down.  Having been lifted by the prose of the two before, the pedanticism of this one made me wonder why I had spent 40 years in academia reading such.  It was well-researched and informative...I will give it that...and someday wanting information in its drier format I might pick it up again.

Meanwhile I have my Friends' books to enjoy.

This morning's read was a Drabble story about a woman, an actress, I think, although her occuption  wasn't much part of the plot...wait, perhaps it was, now I think of it, the whole motive of the piece...hmm.  Anyway, she fell in love with a house, a Dower House attached to a titled family pile crumbling over the centuries, wasted by the unwieldy marriages of two lines of sort-of nobles who couldn't, frankly, get it together.  But that's not the story itself, which, as I said, is about a woman falling in love with an old house, disrepair and all.  She doesn't particularly want to fix it up; she likes the melancholy, as she admits, in which the house and lands enclose her.  In the end, she has had the illumination to marry one or the other of the men on whom it has been entailed; she isn't sure whether she wants to marry the men or marry the men for the place.

Yes, well.  I could understand that, even though I probably would not follow her example if put to the test.  A house inhabits one as much as one inhabits it.  I know that from long experience with the places I have lived.

A place can call to you, not only from outside, but from inside, its call a murmur as well as a haunting. The choice today to be an inside day was a call from place, weather notwithstanding.

After reading, I went into the kitchen to do the next best thing:  cooking.  Yesterday, I had gone to the New Hope Market, a little place along the back road to Hillsborough and places north that has breakfast, lunch and produce from local farms.  I meant to pick up eggs and butter and whatever roots would make a good soup, but on the glassed shelves I found lovely zucchini and tiny eggplants and grabbed them as well.  So soup began and the roasted finds with a little tomato from my neighbor Betsy's garden and some basil that has so far withstood bugs and cool nights; alas the parsley has not.  

                                            

From the stove and oven now come inside-warm aromas.  I think I have just enough time 

to make Alexander something chocolate for his afternoon treat.  

Or read another chapter of The Mays of  Alamann's Creek.

Out my window...

 The wind is shaking the crape myrtles from not one but several directions, though the weather vane seems stuck on S. My windows are open to catch the breeze...cool, not yet past 65 degrees late morning.  Fall is arriving, a bit early for these parts, but most welcome after the humidity and heat I've been plowing through on my walks each day.  On the terrace, wet leaves stick to the chairs, the bricks, clutter the grass, yellow and brown mostly though an occasional red-tinged one enlivens the mix.

Something in the blood responds with a welcome, too.  Soup for dinner, oatmeal for brunch, apples in a pile, weekly replenished as the months go on.  Last week my friend Anne sent me a huge packet of tea including my favorite...Tazo's Wild Sweet Orange...there is a cup next to me as I type.  

The other day Joseph and Alexander drove up with a pumpkin and carved it right in front of the door.  Engineers, both, they first made a careful drawing, deciding on the proper angles for the best scare-factor, and went to work.  Can I bury this seed in your garden, asked Alexander?  And did so...I'll expect a vine curling around the living room window next summer.  Maybe a pumpkin on it?

But this is fall.  There's also the sadness of the change in light...dark til nearly 7 and evening light disappearing only a little after 12 hours later.  My evening walks have gotten fewer, my morning walks later.  My hands work to a different tune, the left one less cooperative.  

Images twenty years old appear in the fitfully moving branches.

This year it will be just us for Rosh HaShanah.  Nonetheless, I'm feeling, this weekend of the new year, like doing a brisket for the men...a recipe from my early married days (maybe one or two substitutions are in order now?) with noodle pudding, braised carrots, and an apple crisp for dessert...hearty stuff whose aroma will fill the apartment with the new season after the lighter fare of summer. (How I will miss Alexandra's spectacular sweets, though.) 

You are invited...

There is a lot more to celebrate...Aunt Sadie's 98th birthday on Sunday; my niece Stephanie's baby shower a week later.  So:  new year, new inspirations, new chances for hope.  

Let Fall raise our spirits and bring us welcome change in the atmosphere.

The imaginary traveler

Here's what bothers me the most about these Covid-19 days, going on and on without resolution or salvation (or, in this city-state-country, sanity): the inability to grab a ride to the airport and head for somewhere interesting.  We have been holed up so long, keeping busy with the mundane work and make-work that fill the day, not to mention tiring, desperate negotiations of space when we do venture out for a bit of air.  Travel seems like a lost dream that haunts me.

It's not that I don't have plenty to do.  But these days Paris and Provence seem to have taken over the dream waves.  The romanticism of the place grows as farther I get from the possibility of return any time soon. I pick up articles and books on French life, fiction and non-, and download French movies, especially those with my favorite actors...Juliette Binoche, Patrick Bruel, Fannie Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, Sandrine Bonnaire, Gerard Depardieu.  I lean in, listening hard to their spoken French more than watching the translated words at the bottom of the screen, though I miss more than I catch.  In the air, French songs even Alexander will dance to.

On Prime, I found a teacher who laid out the verb faire (to make or do...the French think of them as the same verb) in idioms I could actually use, should I arrive on the Blvd. Raspail wanting to take a walk or do some shopping.  I've copied them down, each day memorizing another of the two-page list.  Tu fais la tete a moi?  Je le regard...

Pathetically, I leave my Paris guide book on the table so as a book or film flashes a scene at me, I can open the map and pinpoint it exactly, perhaps even remembering when I, too, walked over that very pont.  Yesterday, the latest issue of France Today tauted a neighborhood in the 19th arrondisement that I hadn't heard about, though apparently it's becoming trendy.  I made a note to find an apartment there for a month or so, somewhere close to the tiny streets of burgeoning art galleries and ateliers, convenient outdoor cafes, and small hidden prizes among les bistrots. I see Saint Chappelle is in easy walking distance for concerts.  Ah!  bon, there is an open-air market, where I can get everything I need, even if I leave on the next plane without bothering to take a suitcase.  

photo:  France Today

When the French decide I am responsible enough to resume visitation, I promise myself to be the first one off the Paris Star from London.  (Maybe I should fly to Heathrow now to be ready ...will they let me in?) 

 I promise to wear a mask everywhere and slide far enough away around crowds.  I will pick a morning when everyone is at a boule tournament to visit the Jacquemart-Andre and, though I love lunching in that elegant salon, will picnic all by myself in a quiet copse of that little garden attached to a little museum on a street I can't remember right now, except it was down the rue from the Carnavalet.

Is all this fantasy healthy, I wonder? And yet I can feel it in my bones, particularly today when a sort of wanderlust has sacked my energy.  Though I have kept the ordinary going...cooking market vegetables, tearing out and re-hemming a difficulty in what ought to be a simple child's quilt, making list upon list to do another day, watching Alexander learn with his virtual schoolmates...here is this blog post about Paris.  It could easily have been about Menerbe.

Outside my window, the leaves of the tulip poplar drop yellow, one by one.  I think of the plane trees along the boulevards about to do the same.  It's not a difficult leap to make, imagined or en realite'.

Old lives

Last week, my sister sent me a message that echoed back a decade ago.  "I was looking through my computer files," she wrote, "and found a copy of your novel from 2011!  I remember I really liked those characters.  I am going to read it again."  She wasn't sure she had the whole thing.  Would I look to see?

Well.  That set me into a quandary.  Where to find the original now, since the years hence have had me cleaning out and clearing at least four times, and the manuscript, done that many life changes ago, would pretty much be a stranger to me.

Fiction is not something I've done much of.  In all the words I have put on paper, only a few have been devoted to it, mostly in the guise of a family story, part of it (necessarily) imagined.  In fact, this story, too, began as one, told me by my husband Jake about his grandmother, a woman who had died fairly young and whom he hadn't much chance to know.  As family stories often do, this one had a mystery about it, mostly because it had been handed down in parts by different people at different times.

But it wasn't so much the story but the occasion which prompted my deciding to write from it...if, in fact, you could call it deciding.  One fall morning, Doris Schneider walked into the journal workshop at the library with a flier from New Bern arts festival literary contest.  New Bern is an old town about half an hour from Washington, where were were living then, like New Bern an old town on a river which used to be important.  There are many similarities of history, landscape, and social design.  But it also has its differences, particularly among the people who live there.

That, however, is beside the point.  Doris' point was that we should enter some of our work in the contest.  Doris was a novelist-in-training, one who has since shown her talent in print several times.  So it was not a surprise to hear her so interested in the contest.  But the rest of us were in the workshop for very different reasons, writing for ourselves primarily, reading to a closed and respectful group, so her flier didn't receive much enthusiasm.

I felt a little bad about that response, so I told Doris I would think about it.  There were separate contests for poetry, nonfiction, and fiction entries, and it would have been easy for me to turn in a poem or two.  But a few days before the deadline, I sat down with an image in my head for which poetry would not suffice...a young girl, running from home, hoping for a life outside the one slowly suffocating her.  It was the girl from Jake's grandmother's story.  To this day, I can't figure out why, at that moment, she came to me.

The limit of five-pages went quickly, because that image erupted into words from the first.  I turned it in, as Doris did her story, and another journal writer her poem.  In a few weeks, all three of us received a call indicating that we had won something.  New Bern might be the judges, but Washington was holding its own.  We were pleased with our success, and I, especially, was grateful for the remarks of one of the judges who sought me out.  "I really liked your work," he said, almost sotto voce, "I could see that girl, such an interesting character."

Not too long after that, there was a suggestion, I forget how, that perhaps I should keep her story going.  So, having nothing pressing to keep me literarily busy at the moment, I did.  All good fiction, said someone who knew what she was talking about, begins with a question, even if at first one thinks he/she has the answer.  The question now was obvious:  where did she go?  And then, What did she do?  Until, What became of her?

Like that first chapter, words rolled out into shapes of characters and plots, and what turned out to be an interesting historical setting...mill life in the thirties in a place changing character too swiftly, and not a little roughly.  More immediately, there was the setting of boarding house life, which has for a long time fascinated me anyway.

Jake, excited to be my guide, drove me all over his home town, filling in the facts of the town he knew so well:  who was who, who did what, where to find more.  He tagged along with me to two library archives where facts and photographs rose up like painted scenery behind her story.  I moved my girl, Anna Lee, up about thirty years ahead of her model's real time, to take advantage of the possibilities history presented, and also because, frankly, I couldn't envision the 1890's the way I could the 1930's.  I imagined houses, streets, buildings, roads and the faces of people whose lives could easily interject with hers.

Best of all, at the invitation of Jake's sweet cousins, we went to stay awhile in the old family cabin out in the county where, each day, I set up my laptop on the porch overlooking Stony Creek, and a new chapter a day bloomed.

Beyond some family and a few friends who know writing, I didn't send it out anywhere.  I think I wrote one publisher about it, but having no response, let it dangle. And then Jake died and the need for it died, too.  It went on the shelf, where a few other manuscripts lay collecting age.  To be honest, I am a person who, when she is finished with something...writing, painting, whatever...is done with it.  I don't care how it gets out into the world, or whether it ever does. 

So, that's the story of my story.  Now the trick would be finding that manuscript in one of a few stored closets, digging for some missing parts, and then, one Sunday afternoon, all afternoon, sitting down to read it again.  That turned out an adventure in itself.  Had I really written this, I kept asking myself?  The story was familiar, but the words...how did I ever think of those phrases?  Where did that fellow out of New Orleans by way of Brooklyn come from?  But obviously they were my inventions, some other mind ago.  Now, like a stranger reading a new book, I was looking with other eyes at that girl, and at all the others who crossed her path along the plot.  There were, in fact, numerous plots, for each character brought his or her own story into the fray, weaving in and out of the happenings and places to change their direction or import.  That was the fun of writing it.

I also found a few startling abscesses, for clearly not quite all the story had left my head for the black and white of the page.  There were misalliances and leaps of incredulity I hadn't seen from so close. (I think Wayne Caldwell, for one, tried to tell me something like that back then, bless him; now I see it.)  Still, I have to say, the story was in the main pretty good.

Eventually, I found that my sister was, indeed, missing a chapter, and promised to send it.  I also mentioned that it might be interesting to go back and see what I could do about revision, after all this time, even if it were just an exercise to help fill these virus-enclosed days, in the hours when art, reading, walking, and Alexander escape me.  Maybe the characters everyone seems to like deserve  not to stumble over their lives so.

I haven't got to it yet, but if I do, I'll let you know how it goes.

Philly, or the Way the Wind Blows

So, last week, my friend Denise and I took the train at the station half-way between our homes, and rode in style up to Philadelphia.  We stayed with friends Anne and Phil, most gracious, genial hosts, considering that we exceeded the Fish-and-Guests rule by at least one night.  Amtrak at its best is the vehicle I prefer going north, which I do at least five or six times a year, mostly for family reasons. The I-95 corridor is a horror; the eastern and western routes are more scenic and only a little slower, but still a tedious ride through craziness.  This time, the day was beautiful, Amtrak was almost on schedule, and the reason for going was pure pleasure.

Train trips for me are usually solitary events.  I bring my stash of books, sewing or knitting, correspondence to catch up on, etc.  I can get a lot of things done on a day trip by train, that is, after I spend the first hour or so gazing at the passing countryside, counting clotheslines and pastures, old towns the train passes through the center of, and cars and people stopped for our passage.  It's like meditation.

But this time I had a fellow traveler.  So, mostly Denise and I talked, and talked, and talked (snacking in between, both of us having come well provided).  There seemed a lot of catching up to do, but also a lot of planning about what to do in the City.  Denise (I guess she won't mind me saying so) has been thinking about moving there.  Her first visit to Philly last spring was what she called her "honeymoon" phase, enchanted enough to make it her own.  This trip, the post-honeymoon, was meant to explore it in more practical terms.  Staying with Anne and Phil helped enormously, because each morning we left out for neighborhoods unknown from a beautiful and very central part of town, and their help with sights/sites along the way was invaluable.  Phil, particularly, made sure we had a good history, familial, civic, and architectural.

What made the visit even more spectacular was the season.  There is nothing like windy, cool weather in a city of brick sidewalks, tall brownstones and short triplets with Hallowe'en pumpkins and spider webs on stoops, imposing marble and concrete facades with historical and mythical figures sculpted across facades and friezes (I think that's the right term), and modern glass towers,with five or six more of them going up.  As in Aruba, it was the architecture which told the story of the place best, at least to me.  Even on our way to what we believed would be a definite destination, we meandered around streets, circling and snaking to pass another monument, only one or two...or four...blocks beyond our way.

Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods.  Each has its character, as neighborhoods do, each its charms and quirks.

House  

We traipsed up and down Chestnut and Walnut Streets, dropping into a paper store, a tea shop, an old book shop, and the path along the river, the wind ever our companion there.  We toured City Hall, the great Masonic Temple, the Terminal Market.  We wound through the Italian market to taste the once-a-year Betty Cheddar, the fabric warehouses for bargains (I now have new porch cushions and a beautiful piece of sea glass silk to join the other beauties I pick up along the way without immediate purpose).  We lost ourselves on sidestreets and peered curiously into intriguing alleyways.

Cheese

We admired the Free Library, its spacious airiness, but that was after we had perused the shelves at the Friends bookstore, coming out with even more books to carry home.  We stumbled on the Basilica, obviously recently restored, shining with gold and blue.  We loved searching out the murals, particularly a clever one behind a Sunoco station wall, and its tangent, which illustrated the church once standing there, as if reflected in the buildings' ghostly windows.  The city remembers its past.

Church gone but still present

Like neighbors, people talk, give directions cheerfully, offer advice.  Mid-morning on our first day, we eyed enviously a man at a small market holding a cup of steaming coffee, and asked where he got it.  He told us, and pointed the way.  Then, he turned around and came back to offer a second opinion.  "What kind of coffee do you want?  OK or really good?"  The second, we both assured him.  "Oh, then, instead, go to that place across the street."  And he was right.

Person after person, most of them natives, said to Denise,  "Oh, this is a great city!  You'd like it here."  Cities, of course, change with the generations who come and go, with re-purpose and re-design.  One coffee-shop fellow shrugged wryly when we asked about his neighborhood, where he grew up and still lived.  "You wouldn't have found this place here ten years ago," he said.

Spreading the news in the Marketplace

We walked and walked, six and seven miles a day.  It's easy to do, always something to see and all those parks, from Rittenhouse Square, near our stay, to Washington, Fitler, and Logan Squares, the latter of which opens the way to the elegant, peaceful Barnes Museum park.  There were smaller children's neighborhood parks nearly everywhere we ventured (with coffee shops nearby), so it was easy to consider the usefulness of each area not only for visiting but for living. There were grassy parks, waterside parks, orderly paved-and-landscaped parks, parks for nannies and babies, parks where police in closed gazebos watched, parks where runners trained, where pedestrian commuters plod to work across the river.  There were entertainment parks (we didn't bother with those), ballparks (or those), pocket parks between tall buildings where readers ate lunch in peace.  

Rittenhouse Square

At the end of each day, we were tired, but not undone, and full of adventures to relate to our indulgent hosts.  "You're making me want to visit my own city again," Anne laughed.

Obviously in Denise I had a companion worthy of the voyage, and despite my wanderlust was glad to have her mission as our overall goal.  We weren't, she reminded me, tourists as much as travelers.

By our last days, we had come to two cultural icons with real Philadelphia stories:  the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and the Barnes.

What to say about them?  Neither were experiences language translates well, though the Rosenbach is full of words--a grand (I use that word literally) collection of books by a man who gathered, from childhood, ancient folios to dog-eared paperbacks, classics to commonplace.  Being housed in his home, those rooms full of creaking leather and closely packed titles still seem a personal library.  They are easy to find if one is browsing, well-organized if one is researching.  And yet there are quirks, too, the idiosyncratic part of the collector, I suspect.

The Marianne Moore room, a replica of her own parlor (the Rosenbach owns her papers), was unfortunately closed, for some "issue", our guide was vague. (A woman more at home with administration, she seemed to know the books by hearsay rather than reading; I wonder what the Rosenbachs would have said about that.)  But she knew her Rosenbach history, as did our hosts, so we learned their story as well as that of the collection itself.  On Bloomsday each year, James Joyce's Ulysses is trotted out and read by volunteers; wouldn't that be fun?  Only half tongue-in-cheek, I volunteered for next year.

As for another eccentric collection, Dr. Albert C. Barnes's carefully studied, impeccable and foresighted hobby has afforded us a vision of impressionist and post-modern art that boggles (I'm using that word pretty literally, too, and not unlike the dice game) the eyes.  Both scientist and art lover, his friendship with the Philadelphia artist William Glackens and his pharmaceutical studies in Germany gave him superb vantage points for acquiring art that matters.  Ironically, his growing (and celebrated) antagonism with the Philadelphia Art Societies means that while the works were at first too closely guarded, and then after his death badly kept, it now resides in a building that showers light, calm, and dignity--not to mention access to  the public--to his life's affinity.  Even if it meant crowding 25 to 40 pictures into each small exhibit room built to the sizes of the Barnes house display rooms (the main halls and downstairs library and sitting room are enormous in comparison).  Even if it meant breaking his will.  Which is not an easy thing for me to say without shuddering.

All right, enough lecture.  Here's what I saw, which is the only way to describe a venture into the Barnes. [As photographing wasn't allowed, at risk of copyright infraction (I checked, and I think these are public record), I show a few images, to indicate the varied scope of those rooms.]

The Barnes is modern, spare, and both over-and understated, fitting into the landscape like a fortress and a temple, depending on which way you approach.  It is raining lightly and around the corner from the nearly hidden ticket booth, around a shower of green ground cover and high grasses, a long, low, perfectly rectangular pond of dark gray stones, leading to the entrance, shivers a little.  Small, discreet signs point to the high stone facade and glass doors, both equally squared and angled.  Around (another long) bank of ticket takers, the reception hall opens.  In the near corner is a round table set with event-oriented decor; in front of it, eyeing the settings, perhaps for a wedding, are a mother and daughter and a persuading staff person.  But that's only a miniscule part of the room.  At first it seems as if we will never find the way to the paintings across this cloud-ceilinged immensity, but there is a cluster of staff at a center door, and we follow them in.  And lo, the first room.

Each room is numbered, so the comb-like nests can be traversed without confusion.  Otherwise, the paintings themselves draw us into confusion, as our eyes slip haphazardly from one to the other, hardly able to take in what's there.  Only a few large works own their own space.

What's fun about these exhibits, particularly in view of the crowding, is the enticement they offer to make a game of viewing them.  There is no particular order apparent to the way they are placed.  Not, as brochures and room-monitors told us, by chronology or painter or period or country, or subject or theme or anything.  They are simply hung as Barnes hung them, the way he saw them relating to one another.  That's Game One:  what did he have in mind?  Denise and I began to notice patterns in placement, color, even depth, not always repeated but often enough.  More interesting were sometimes wildly diverse companions on a wall which spun a witty tale of  human folly or perversity.

No, we didn't tire of the Cezannes and Matisses, and found artists we hadn't known to appreciate.  We spent four hours that day, but for the sake of those narratives, I would visit again, because I am convinced that Barnes' eye saw more than design or value in his collection.  I think he was a storyteller, too, using his art as his tablet.

Interestingly, the question of beauty...what makes art beautiful?...had come up at breakfast that morning, after Anne's evening group, reading the classical philosophers, had rather hotly debated the issue.  It was no surprise to find it echoing throughout our stroll through the Barnes.  I remembered Athena's judgment of Arachnea:  no matter the expert skill, there is no beauty without lending the subject its dignity.  So much can be answered that way.

I made up Game Two just to get through the enormity of so much imposing (and some not so imposing) art at once.  As a way of centering myself, in each room, I'd look around before I left and figure out which one I would take home.  Don't laugh!  It was, in fact, harder than you think. Appreciating all those famous pieces is one thing.  Willing to make one at home on your own walls is another.  I rarely came away from a room having to decide between two.  Mostly I knew the one.

     This one, for instance.

Walking through the Barnes--and the Rosenbach, as well--out of the weather's wind but into the breath of its creator's wonderland reminded me of the way we personalize art, the way we take to heart one book, or one painting, and then another and another, and fit them snugly into our lives.  Whatever our reason for acquiring, keeping, holding them dear, they become us in a way.  Some of us are lucky enough to share that with the world.  I thank Philadelphia for offering us that.

Philly, or Travels against the Wind

A few weeks ago, rounding the corner of Hurricane Matthew, I flew to Aruba with the children for their family vacation.  I'd held as my beacon for a long time a trip to Paris I've been saving up for in early spring, so at first, when they asked me, I waffled a bit, thinking about the lure of cafes and walks through elegant parks on my own time.  I'm not good with resorts ("That's a great first line for a story," Jill McCorkle joked when I told her about it). But I did want to spend relaxing time with them, and I'd never been anywhere in the Caribbean.

So off we went, and the pilot, though he'd warned us apologetically of a bumpy trip, made in fact a pretty smooth affair of it, gliding around the storm, costing us barely an hour and saving the journey from Miami to Orangestad.

 Aruba is a small island, only about 20 miles long and barely 6 miles across, nearer to Venezuela than anywhere else, but it was a Dutch possession for so long (with farther back Spanish influences and even farther back Amer-Indian) that one's impressions of it are shaped by the fantastic architecture, smooth-faced low buildings with the curled accents of European inhabitants, but in bright island colors.  At least, those are what built the original towns--the capitol's back streets, Santa Cruz, Savaneta, San Nicolas among them.  You could hear its roots tangled in its language.

On the other hand, the resort area of Palm Beach, where we stayed, is another story, pretty much indistinguishable from those photos cluttering websites and print ads of beach resorts everywhere...high white hotels with uniformed guards (the more expensive the place, the more they frowned at passing intruders), miles of blue lounge chairs facing the sea, low pools whose central gathering place is the floating bar.  And on the streets behind them, fancy shopping of the kind found anywhere from Fifth Avenue to Nice to the great mall at Tel Aviv.

Because of Matthew, the famous white sands were, when we first arrived, gray with rotting seagrass and pieces of sponge and coral, and the equally famous seas, known for their clear blue-green jewel tones, were dulled (Aruba isn't hit with hurricanes directly, but does receive the resulting ocean debris nonetheless).  Hotel staff spent all day trying to rake and cart away the mess, but it took them most of the week, and only on the last day were we able to enjoy its return to the advertised normal.  On that day, we floated and dived under the morning's bright sun, watching the fish school in and out around our legs. Ah.

What I wanted most to do every day was walk on the beach, but debris and the jutting hotels made that difficult to do for more than half a mile or so.  Instead, we built rock forts and walls with Alexander, lounged around the pool while he splashed with other children from everywhere (resorts are wonderful for the younger set), and in the hot afternoons, took drives to the outer limits of the island.

For me, those drives were the highlight of the trip to Aruba.  We saw the brochure-touted landmarks, yes--brilliant white lighthouse, tiny precious chapel, the beautifully, perfectly restored historic museum and the Fort downtown where there was an intriguing textiles exhibit, both historic and contemporary.

But we also saw the everyday island.  That's what interests me about a place.
Along the roads, there were coves that dipped protectively in and out of sparsely inhabited shores, cottages with porches where people gathered after work, larger estates, once the neighborhoods of the all-but-defunct oil industry, now barred and mostly for sale, the corner bodegas and grocers, dogs and children roaming street to street, a neighborhood fair where green-iced homemade cakes and Dutch fried breads competed for tasters and music filled each street-end.  Out even farther, in the desert that covers a good deal of the island, fields of tall cactus, thick as forests in some places, formed mileposts.

Aruba's best art is as much her artless countryside as it is her artists' native expressions.  I was inspired by both.

One afternoon, we drove out up the narrowest of roads, bumped every few feet by rocky drainage spurs, and found ourselves at the Quadirikiri caves, black and pitted from the spray of the nearby sea, storm-spurred, crashing against the bulwark of cliffs.  We walked down toward an abandoned house wide open to the elements (it could be yours for a single year's underpaid academic salary, and then two more years' overpaid salary to make it habitable again) and found there the remnants of two gardens, a flowing creek pooling under a canopy of graceful limbs, and, inside, the once beautiful floors still tiled coolly against the heat.  I imagine a life there, at the edge of the world, just the right size house, nearly self-sufficient (though supplies would be a long long trek, or helicopter delivery, each month), the bones of the desert white in the moonlight, the hardscrabble ground blinding day, and this calm outpost the shelter of the mind.

Travel, even the kind one waffles over, brings such surprises, such visions, and, eventually, such art.  Like houses, being shown the parlor isn't seeing what's really a home. I think of the stereotype of the place I imagined, and how, though some of my reasons for it turned out to be true, there is always a reality worth realizing, a life beneath the mask tourism paints on a country.

And by the way, if you are puzzling over the title of this piece, you'll have to wait until next time to realize that one.  When I started out, I meant to write my more recent trip last week to the City of Brotherly Love, using Aruba as only a short preface, but this is what writing is like, isn't it?  You never know where it's going to take you. So consider this Voyage I, and Voyage II (the Real Philly) to come walking in just after it.  And walk we did.