If only pictures were words...

 

This morning, chilled inside and out, I have been staying under the covers (the top one being a warm alpaca throw my mother gave me decades ago) while I read, do word games, make lists for today...ignoring as long as I can the day's call to get up, get dressed and do something.

There is plenty to do, inside and out...to wit:  this blog and its thousand words waiting to unfold themselves to you...

• travels to the idyllic Victoria, B.C.     
  
  
• visits with dear friends of my youth     
  
  
• my 78th year at the shore, partly cloudy, with loss   

  

  
      
• the leavings of my Aunt Sadie snuggling into my over-crowded but welcoming house and history       
  
  
  
• old photographs in a box and an overflowing scrap book that I am struggling to make sense of               
  
  
   
• a painting I've finished which I'm struggling to like (and the next one, sitting empty on the workroom table, so far only a blur of gray-blue cloud);   
• last night's dream, set of all places at the edge of the North Sea (no picture of that).

But none of those are revealing themselves.  Not that I don't want to write them; it's just...I don't know.  When I finally open my laptop, nothing but this word-wandering seems to ensue.

Last night I half repaired the arms of a wing chair I've had since the late '70's and don't want to give up.  I'm attached to that chair, one of the first pieces of furniture bought for our very first house.  The boys were toddling around the San Pedro store, climbing  over sofas and under tables while we chose this one.

But mostly I keep it because it's comfortable and has, no matter what house I have lived in, found its perfect place somewhere...living room, bedroom, study, whatever.  It's stood now for a few years on the corner of Front and Porch; under it is a small stool Mr. Bailey, the woodworker from West Virginia, made.  I can slip into it and watch the whole house from this corner.  And the birds in its fabric, flying among the most unlikely floral pattern, center me.

Alexander, I notice, also makes for it when he comes over, first opening the glass cabinet where I keep my black wedding glassware (see cabinet above), and choosing one for his juice cube concoction, then settling down to unlock his words.  He's coming over tonight to stay while his dad goes to a concert.  

He's growing up, and has less time for after-school visits now.  I run out to catch a quick hug from him as he gets off the bus in front of the house.  Friday nights, when they are free, they come for dinner. While I see him with pleasure as he matures, I think that there is also a kind of grief to growing.  It's Fall, besides, the season of rue and sorrow.  Maybe that's it.  The cold feet in my dream would seem to point to that.

But to return to blogdom:  If only pictures were words, you'd already have read all those subjects listed above, one at a time, in order.  

Alas, order doesn't seem to be the order of the day these days.  

A good story (but no pictures)

Dear Readers:

This post from the end of August was never sent out...somehow I lost its thread  and let it languish in the Draft file.  Since then, there have been so many things to write about that I don't know where to start...travel, birthday celebrations, visits with friends from college years, more travel, mnd receding.  Then there's fall, its dry beginnings...  

Well, I will eventually chip away/tap away at them. Maybe tomorrow.  Meanwhile, I offer this old one.

Aug 28th.  Outside, the fire engines are sirening their way up toward campus...not too far away, it seems, since they've already stopped.  Somewhere, there's a story going on...it's hot enough today to start a flame just from the heat on the pavements and make trouble for the rescue team.  Not me, though.  I'm staying inside in the cool, avoiding shopping errands and garden chores, not only because of the heat.

For one thing, my right ankle has been feeling harsh when I walk for any length of time.  There's a name for it (I looked it up), something about a tendon inflamed.  The Scottish National Health Service site offered a few simple exercises to do a few times a day and promised it would be better in three to six months.  I'm doing two of the exercises, but obviously I can't wait that long to walk painless.  So, gingerly, I keep walking.

To keep busy indoors, I've been taking stabs at different kinds of art and I've been reading.  The library, only a short drive around the corner, has been a frequent collaborator.  There I've discovered books of short stories and two novels built around old legends.  They've reminded me, one way or another, of how stories become legends, and how, culture to culture, generation to generation, storyteller to storyteller, they often go back to being stories again.  A story changes with the tides, it seems...that basic human need for tales that reflect what and who we are.

Some are successful translations, some not, I'm finding.  Of course, my standard for mythical stories is Miss Eudora Welty; her collection (almost a novel), The Gold Apples, follows Zeus and his compatriates through their devilry by moving them to Morgana, Mississippi.  Golden men disappear from and reappear to their small-town homes, their wives meanwhile creating heroic status on their own.  Girls drop their talented futures to chase a dream, then come home to their mothers, who sit in amazement at a girl who has finally learned to mind.  Girls who stay home all those years, teaching piano out of yellow Schirmer books, watch all this happen...they are as rooted as their mythological heroine, Hestia, who tends the home fires, but can see the wanderings of others with equinimity.

I don't have to read Miss Welty again...I've practically memorized all her works over the years from way before my dissertation days.  So the stories that modern authors embroider from old myths have to be up to her kind of speed for me. 

 On the library shelf, two novels over two weeks drew me in...one I finished every word of; the other left me annoyed by the way its author took the thread of a good tale and wove it into something blasphemous, something Athena would have no trouble judging dishonorable and turn its writer into a spider, or worse.

It was the title of this last one which drew me to pull it off the shelf...Babayaga, by an author whose name shares the same typeface and pointsize on the cover as the title (I think now that that should have been a clue).  It had been years since I'd even thought of that witch, who lived and rode in a house that whirled around on chicken legs.  This book ought to be fun, I thought...especially since, reading the inside flap of the jacket, I discovered that the witches had been transported herein from their Slavic origins to Paris.  A long and hard journey, imaginably so, through centuries of wars, betrayals, death, and the terrible cold of winters that enwrapped them across desolate countries, took them to the city of light.  Paris could, I predicted, be quite an appropriate backdrop for their updated sorcery.  I love Paris.

Alas, though the witches were women with potions and passions for everything, and bore their terrible adventures in the manner of their centuries-old ancestresses, their lives were made miserably second-rate by the author who cluttered the story with such inane others...a fat, rather dim-brained lover whose head eventually hangs from a scrolled-iron post; a self-absorbed detective turned into a flea, nonetheless able in his flea-dom to detect; and a mild-mannered innocent ad man whose troubles stuck to him like fly paper, thanks to that era of the not-so-secret CIA machinations in Europe.  Surely witches like these deserved better.  They were, after all, the point of the legend and...most important...women in Paris.  But here, they take second and third place after their writhing victims' already pathetic lives.  I threw the book down last night only half-way in, and this morning read the last few pages to see if by chance it had redeemed itself.  It hadn't.

On the other hand, the hefty pages of Every Rising Sun, by Jamila Ahmed, a Pakistani writer, brought a new perspective to the ever-retold story, the Thousand and One Nights...the ultimate story of stories.  Ahmed's version begins with smitten young girl and her earliest affections for the once-gentle but now betrayed and angry Malik, and records her brave attempt to save both other young women and the Malik himself by marrying him and telling her stories.  Hers, besides, is an empire in trouble, though at the beginning the trouble is as far away as her innocence. Stories litter (yes, that is the right word) these pages...not only the ones she conjures as the latest wife of the destroyer of wives, but those she tells others along the way...for entertainment, for comfort, for distraction, for rescue, for edification.  The point of the story is always on point.

Anyway, these two novels and another book of short fiction got me to thinking about the power of the story in human life.  We tell stories to save ourselves, like Scheherazade, and invent a sane perspective of the world which otherwise seems to be powered by chaos.

For instance, what do the Slavs mean by inventing the terrible Baba Yaga and her witches...is it just a mean legend filtered down to us, like Grimm's dour fairy tales, teaching that evil lurks in the dark beds of every turn in life, no matter the illusion of happiness?  Why have studios recreated a cartoon of wicked stepmothers and made them pay in the end?  Why do Greek and Roman and Norse and Amur gods and heroes show up in graphic novels and young adult films, while online games, filled with horror and wretchedness...killing being their only cacaphonous solution...seek to justify themselves by borrowing their names?

I once taught part of The Arabian Nights to a survey class in World Literature (part I).  The anthology from which we read had only selected stories from the longer tale, but in one semester, with so many hundreds of years to cover, all we could do was flip from culture to culture as centuries flew by.  One student, though, whose origins were from those Eastern countries, their traditions perpetually in conflict, argued furiously against our reading.  "That's not what Arabian literature is about at all!" he just about shouted at me.  I knew what he meant.  The text before us was a rather brazen Englishman's translation, romanticized for his 19th English readers.  We had come to accept it as genuine, despite so many versions derived from the old culture itself.  

I wished too late that I had avoided our anthology and given them Mahfouz' Arabian Days and Nights instead.  There, its Egyptian author, those tales part of his heritage, has moved them into the present tense and illuminated the parts of the story that still resonate in modern life.  It's a slim book, but it's whole, and the point of its story makes us go back to the Nights and re-assess what storytelling is really good at...changing lives in whatever century or eon they live.

We tell stories to give ourselves a framework in which we can own a history, live through today, see to tomorrow.  We tell stories...family stories, personal stories, native and national stories...so that we and the world can make (a kind of) sense.  I wonder what stories those children...of any age...are living on, as they play on their screens those games with borrowed names?

Summer fruit

 

My neighbor Joanne isn't a fan of figs, she told me when I offered her some.  That's one of summer's fruits going around the neighborhood these days...riches from another neighbor's garden, picked and passed door to door with gleeful anticipation while she's away.  "Oh, that's too bad," I said to Joanne after she'd confessed that she'd never had a taste for them.   More for me...selfish, I know.

Oh, don't worry...Amy of the fig tree knows about our indulgence in her fruit and encourages fig-loving neighbors to pick freely and indulge.  She's away, anyway. Figs, as far as I am concerned, are the high gift of summer.

Besides figs, here are some of the summer'largesse we've been trading:

Ratatouille   -   oops!  I gobbled up my portion of Kim's delicious offering too fast to take a photo...sorry!  

   

But I sure did snap a photo of Betty's  Pig Pie...it's from Bill Neal's Southern Cooking (the one with his photo, young among the foods he loved).  You will want that recipe, but first you need a biscuit cutter in the shape of a pig.  I've already ordered mine, even though I'm not much of a meat eater.

Summer fruit reigns here:  every morning, I have some variation...blueberries and cream, tomato and avocado toast, peaches and yogurt.

But figs...

My grandmother's fig tree stood in the back corner of her house.  I wish I had a photograph to show you.  My love for those pink-fleshed goblets of sweetness began there, certainly, and ever since, I've waited for August to come, even while early strawberries, then blueberries and raspberries, then peaches (my second in favorites) tumble onto the markets.

(Watermelon, too, but that's another story altogether...like corn and tomatoes and okra, it comes to the table to share summer's spotlight.)

I really can't remember how my grandmother used them, only that when the figs were ripe enough, we fought the birds for them, and tasted them off the tree. Slightly less-than-ripe ones were placed on the back porch sill.  Some years were leaner than others, a disappointment; others pulled the branches down with its largesse.

There are so many things you can do with figs...bake them in tarts and breads, carmelize and top them with brie, preserve them to serve with mascarpone and poached pears, dry them in baskets to send for winter gifts. But I don't see the point.

 Well, okay, I might make that fig salad in the photo above, which I clipped from a recipe site I can't remember the name of, now...if I had the patience to wait, or enough pounds of fig. It does look good and doesn't change (much) the nature of a fresh fig with too many adornments.  I'd probably leave the goat cheese out, though I love goat cheese.  No point in distracting me from the fig.

I'm not the only one with relish for a fresh fig.  With great generosity the other day, only minutes after a portion of Amy's figs arrived at my door, I shared them with a friend who does crave them as much as I; later, he told me, "I ate every one before I drove into the parking lot."  

Art

Letitia Huckaby, Ms. Angela and the Baby

 Cassilhaus, hidden at the edge of town on a drive that eventually gravels into a wildlife\cattle guard and wildflower garden, and then backs into a forest, is the home of a couple who are such advocates for the art of photography that they have designed their beautifully open house to hold exhibits and lectures, as well as working space for interns and resident photographers.

photo courtesy of Frank Konhaus

I mention this first because the house of Ellen Cassilly (its talented architect) and Frank Konhaus (its enthusiastic organizer) is not only a great opening to the collected work of friends and strangers alike, but also a drawing room of inspiration.

Ellen Cassilly, photo by Frank Konhaus

 

Frank Konhaus, photo by Jerry Siegel

A week ago, brilliance came in leaps and bounds at the talk by artist Letitia Huckaby, who has, among other endeavors, been printing photographed silhouettes on vintage textiles.  

Letitia Huckaby, photo courtesy of Ms. Huckaby

Her work, often framed in embroidery hoops, is storied with the history of her family...their origins in Greenwood, Mississippi, in a little Louisiana town north of Baton Rouge, and now outside of Fort Worth where her husband's people come from and where she lives with her family.  It's also a testament to the lives, current and disappeared, of African-American communities, and the people whose spirits she allows us to find there still.

Letitia Huckaby, American Light

 

Letitia Huckaby, Testifies

Place, for Letitia Huckaby, is as much a character as the faces born anew on her collected old cottons.  Reality shows through in spots where the fabric (like that of life), is worn and thin.  Seeing her work through her eyes reminded me right away of the character that Place becomes in Miss Welty's fiction and memoirs...she who spent a portion of her life photographing the South for the Works Progress Administration in the dire times of the 1930's.

Letitia Huckaby, What the Land Remembers

Brought up in Germany, where her father was a commander of a U.S. base, Letitia's African-American heritage was pretty much taken for granted, and, as she noted a few times, protected.  But once grown and studying in Boston, the still-simmering northern vein of xenophobia was an eye-opening experience for her.  In art school, though she learned the rules of traditional photography, Letitia's work slowly turned toward the places the generations before her inhabited, geographically and culturally.

Letitia Huckaby, Ms. Joycelyn

Instilling that history in her vision, she found materials that not only reflected, but became, the work she leads us to envision.  It is so easy to open to the stories she tells through her camera, through her eyes, and her ancestors' and cultures' eyes; for me, in fact, a lot of the places of her work are ones I've lived in and journeyed through.

San Antonio, first, where the McNay, one of my favorite museums, gave her space and time to build an installation, as part of their larger project, Limitless!  Five Women Shape Contemporary Art, and then to her delight bought her installation to keep; Greenwood, which Jake and I explored intently and stayed several times on our way up and down the Natchez Trace, crossing back and forth the bridge dividing life there; Louisiana, along Route 191 and the towns around it, land we found fraught with the thickness of long and difficult and interconnected history. Tulsa, the echoes of Greenwood where migration brought a whole community to live, and now would be lost, except for Letitia Huckaby's work.

 

Letitia Huckaby, One Week Old/Haskell Place [Tulsa]

But she was here in Chapel Hill now, and luck had it that I came face to face with her.  I'd first met her, a quick moment a few weeks before, at the "Draw or Die" film preview about Minnie Evans, the Wilmington, North Carolina artist who was self-taught and only lately honored. 

But it was at Cassilhaus that Letitia and the stuff of her art sparked my visions:  fabric, needlework, the bones of old houses and the lives they engendered, the stories that are behind and ahead of us...all that taken up by a photographer who chose to use the implements of women's crafts to project her art.  It is no secret that those are also the things that inspire what I do (though, I humbly admit, in far less impressive ways as hers). I was struck by the way she went further with our tools...framing her silhouettes in needlework hoops... imagine!  I stood in rapt attention at all she talked about and showed us that night.

She was, as you can imagine, busy with people's questions afterward, so instead of keeping her standing longer I just introduced myself quickly and asked her to come for lunch another day.  And graciously, she accepted.

A few days later, on my porch, the fan whishing away the heat, we talked for a few hours about her life, her journey into the fascinating art she does now, and her ideas for the future...old handkerchiefs, she's thinking, will be a perfect material for her work.  Like Letitia, I've collected them from family or old-thing shops.  I can't wait to see what she makes of them.  

We talked about the wider culture, too...her son going off to college now ("any school that ends in 'Tech'", she laughs...he's into robotics and engineering), away from the protection she and her husband (a painter whose work has, over the years, crisscrossed with hers in theme and vision), have in their turn afforded their children.  It worries her.  It reminded me of a friend's conversation recently, worried the same way about her grandson when he's older, the dangers of racial ignorance brought to bear on the young.  That, too, echoes through her subjects.

It has left me wondering...is there hope, a way to inspire hope for openness among us?  Does art like Letitia's...like anyone's...have the potential to change our children's lives for the better?  Though she didn't mention it at the time, on her website I found another connection...Miss Huckaby, I read, is co-founder of Kinfolk House, a 100-year-old house for artists of black and Latina heritage in Fort Worth...women who work together to influence a broader, more accepting vision of art.

Detail, Setting a Place at the Table for Peace (rvm)

Looking around at some of my work before she left, she shared  possibilities..."Why not try this on bamboo," she said of one of my fabric hangings.  Easy to do, I told her.  We happen to have a small forest of it in the dips of wood around the corner, and Alexander loves chopping into it for his own arts. Letitia had been surprised, she told me, that so much bamboo grew in these parts...it's not native...how did it end up here?  How does anybody and anything end up anywhere?  There are so many journeys, intended and not.

But back to those handkerchiefs...all the old ones I keep in coat pockets and purses...and stacks of linens in drawers.  I'm not a photographer, but mono-printing on them, or transfering, or sewing on pieces of wood or clay or found metal, and inscribing, somehow, words that tell real stories...

Letitia Huckaby,, Bethlie and Naika

You see what I mean.  Not only her talk, but our lunch was an experience open and opening, humor and sorrow woven through it.  Among women, sharing visions in art across any genre or age or culture is an opening...a woman's eyes seeing, a woman's skills and choices of material and ways of doing, no shadow of the old guard between to interfere.

Speaking of that, it had bothered me that at that Ackland presentation of the Minnie Evans film-to-be, it was Ms. Evans' great-grandson who was asked to join the panel  discussion, while her great-granddaughter, Beverly, sat in the audience.  Ironically, more than once, he had to call on her to remember family stories, family arts, who-was-who.  "She's the one who keeps all that," he laughed.  Someday, I'm going to have to have lunch with Beverly Evans, too.  For the real story.

I hope Letitia Huckaby and I can keep in touch, but meanwhile, her waves of art are pushing my own small efforts to welcome shores.

 

 

 

Memorial Day

 It's going to rain...the forecast for the next few days.  My hard ground and the plants struggling in it will be happy, and I will be happy for them.  In celebration of Memorial Day, I've asked a few friends in on Monday, rain or no.   I've got plenty of the first summer's foods ready to be fixed into watermelon salad with mint, roasted potato salad with thyme, baked corn (or cornbread...haven't decided yet) with cayenne and green onion tops, chicken tikka, shrimp the same. (Mary Ellen has her desserts in progress already).

I always enjoy fixing holidays, but frankly this time it's given me something to do to lift my spirits.  As if it knows a different definition of Memorial than this weekend honors, memory has been assaulting me lately.  I am, as we all are, missing Aunt Sadie, and with her passing the passing of all others come to light.  Our griefs, as Hopkins reminds, are our own reflection in the mirror of mortality.  I know that, but it seems these past two years have riven us of more than death's share.

The assaults come from strange places.  Mostly I sleep pretty soundly at night, start to finish, but last night I woke from the clock in the other room striking 3, and wondered.  I must have been dreaming, but the visions there seemed real.  Waking, they continued, one after another...ancient ones from childhood, silly ones, foolish ones from the years since, dangerous, heart-breaking ones, too.  It occurred to me, before I drifted back to sleep again (the same films running in my head), that they must be trying to tell me something, solve some problem I may or may not have known needed solving.  

During the day, a walk down the hall to my workroom stops me short.  A collection of old photos I am meaning to sort and reorder, I give up on after a few vain attempts.  Memories on walls and in boxes, or floating invisible in the air, shake my resolve, even for simple tasks.

What they're after I haven't figured out yet, though at this age I had better accept the challenge.  This morning, darkening, cooling, moistening into the weather to come, portent with change, may bring some enlightenment.

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

Meanwhile (here's a switch and change), in an hour, Joseph and I are going to pick up a small settee I found yesterday at ReStore, the Habitat for Humanity thrift place I troll for finds. A few weeks ago, my favorite chair I'd had since the late '70's collapsed on one weakened leg.   I'd already sent it out to Dan, the chair fixer, but the emptiness of the corner by the window where I'd spent countless hours in its comfort seemed to be needier than that chair occupied.  

My living area isn't big; nonetheless, as is my wont, I have crowded it with sitting and dining furniture (there's a visiting piano, too) until there is not much room left to walk.  So relaxing space is at premium.  I began searching for something that, though small, would at least add an extra place to sit.

I meant to go down to Pittsboro, where their ReStore has a whole building full of good furniture, but I thought I'd try the nearby one first.  When I walked in the door, the very piece I could have imagined was facing me, looking new and bright, calling my name from that persimmon color I have on my walls and the small white dots that spelled cheer. I pulled out my measuring tape, checking the size, dismissed the 8 inches extra I'd assumed, and went to the counter to buy it.  It's going to fit, I insisted to myself.  At home, measuring again, the space appeared, nicely, to accommodate it.

 I think that there is a twist to that purchase which entwines memory and change.  My old chair, which I loved and still do, its leg dangling precariously from the worn fabric, might be the end of something bigger than itself.  It's fixable, the chair, at some not insignificant expense, and I might still want to try.  But if it comes back to me repaired, it will be enwrapped in a different sort of affection, the kind one can shift off to the side, usable still but with its mortality tried.  Like mine, with that rush of memory, culling the past to make possible the future.

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

N.B.  Nothing goes simply when anticipation is in the mix.  We left for ReStore in light rain, so I'd brought a tarp...but it was the wrong one I pulled hastily out of the shed, the one you may have seen earlier in the season under all that mulch I was shoveling.  A once-perfectly-clean couch rode home dry, but lightly dusted in shredded hardwood.

Still, it vacuumed off, as Joseph said it would, and sits in place now, where I am about to settle for a while.

For settling I need.  Fortunately, on such a day, it's easy to do.

Generations

 My Aunt Sadie passed away last evening.  I know I should say our Aunt Sadie; she was first of all Barbara's mother and Nancy's mother...I should say that, too.  If you will forgive me, though, this remembrance is about what her life and passing has meant to me.

Yesterday, I spoke a few words to her over the phone, and heard the sound of her voice...harsh, short sounds...if she intended words, they were indistinct.  After all, she was hard at work trying to die.  A few weeks ago, she and I talked:  she'd gotten a cough and her chest hurt...likely, she said, it was pollen, especially thick in her area (as in ours) this year.

Another phone call:  she'd been to the doctor, and was given more medicine to take.  "I don't think I should take any more medicine," she told me firmly.  "I'm ready to go." 

 Something she had said to me times before.  She was 100 years and 8 months old, after all.

Did I respond the right way?  I don't remember.  I hope I was sympathetic, not dismissive (even if fondly dismissive).  I hope I said,  "I know."

Anyway, it turned out her symptoms were more complicated than that.  Her heart was failing, she whose heart was as wide open as the ocean, which she loved.

  It took her a long time to finally leave us...over a week, while she was so intensely  willing herself to go. 

"Those sisters!"  My sister Ann said.  "Their bodies are so strong."  She was thinking of my mother, Gilda, the first of the three to go...healthy for 93 years, until she lay two weeks in hospice after strokes, unable to talk or to take sustenance, listening to us sing, talk, pray our way around her.  (What could she have been thinking the meanwhile?)

And their middle sister, Vi, who fell one day here, and, though at 98 she'd been living with heart diseases and blindness, finally succumbed...weeks later, fighting death all the way.

Strong, yes.  Loving, yes, each in her way, all through our lives.  Resilience born of strength and care (care of all kinds).

Now they are all gone, that whole generation.  

While Aunt Sadie was with us, we could still be the younger ones we'd always been.  Now, what?

Here comes the selfish part of this reflection:   even while the sorrow of my aunt's death washes over me, I think to myself:  

I am the eldest of the young...or was.  Now I'm just the elder.

And I wonder:  have they managed, in their passing, to pass to me that strength, that care, that resilience that keeps going?  (All those years, I could be so resistent!) Can I even in a small part, live up to what they were?  Can I?