Brain Power

This morning, my friend Alan sent me a quote from a 19th century English poet, Dinah Maria Mulock Craik.  I don't know her work (yet), but her words echoed so much the way I feel about writing in this space that I will share them with you, too.  Especially since for today's journal, they mean even more.

"Oh, the comfort--the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person--having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness blow the rest away."  --from A Life for A Life

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Back in early December, I began a post to you which I immediately entitled Brain Power, but I never finished it; it seemed to stall somewhere around the fifth or sixth paragraph, and since then it has languished in draft mode.  Now, nearly five months later, I know why.  I'm sorry these are not the long-promised reflections on my marvelous visit to Paris and London, but I'm afraid that the City of Light has to step aside for the moment.  Life intervenes in both joy and sorrow, and each has its time.  This time, it's my brother Tom's.

Here is where I began in December, but it would have read the same two weeks ago, and so, changing only two verb tenses and a determiner, I will start with what I wrote then:

"My brother Tom and his wife Jean were in town this week for his regular six-week check-in at the Tisch Brain Tumor Center.  It's usually a speedy affair; they arrive one afternoon, spend the next morning at the brisk clinical consultation (I go along for the ride to take notes), and then the next day they are on the plane back home.  But meanwhile, we have the opportunity to see what his brain is doing, both in pictures and in the neurological and physical observations of the medical staff.  It's a rare education in the control center of our physical, emotional and intellectual lives.

It's been more than two years and two surgeries, and many doses of therapy, since Tom was diagnosed with his aggressive tumor; he seemed to be holding his own--that is, the tumor hadn't grown more, at least visibly.  The two years, as you might imagine, have been fraught with dire changes in the way not only he lives, but also his family, including his grown children and his siblings.  Most certainly it has changed the way we think about the life we have because of our brains. Though Tom has been jolted into an entirely new existence by his glioblastoma, we around him have also made noticeable adjustments, hoping to support him and Jean as best we can in both emotional and practical ways, but also responding to the awareness that what we take for granted, especially in a family as usually healthy as ours is, is really as vulnerable as all life.  Thinking about that changes the center of our gravity a notch, a quiet seismic shift.

For me, learning about his glioblastoma has made me think a lot about brain power.

Some decades ago, I came across an article about memory and the way it's stored.  It seemed significant to my teaching at the time, because it described the way an experience or vision is stored in the brain, not as I had imagined it, as solid as stone, so to speak, but variably in pieces here and there in that gray matter.  Further, it could be recalled by very differing impulses piece by piece, culled from different locations in the brain.  I could see how that was happening in the people whose journaling I was privy to, particularly when they wrote again, days or weeks or a year apart, about the same experience.  Each time, depending on a lot of factors being different--time of day, the catalyzing observation or sensation, whoever the writer was sharing the memory with--the related memory would change, from slightly to drastically; or it would begin differently, or center on a different aspect of the experience.  Like a spotlight moving randomly over those stored cells, one piece or another would show up as the highlight...at least most of the time.

I'm sorry to say that my initial intrigue didn't make me want to do a more exhaustive study on the locii of memory; I took the article's information and applied it, accurately I thought at the time, in the way writers, especially journal writers, whose memories were the basis of their words, draw out by simple cues--a word, a gesture, a sensation--a reflection on a past part of their lives."

That's as far as I wrote in December.  Somehow, my intention that morning had drifted away--I can't remember why, only that, interrupted or not, it slipped my mind what I really want to come back to about Tom's disease.  All sorts of alien threads began to weave themselves in, and I wasn't sure they were leading me to the right place.

As a journal writer (and teacher), it would have been wise of me to practice what I preach...that in the sort of writing that we do, there is really no such thing as irrelevance on the road to meaning; our minds' eye has a better sense of the whole picture than, consciously, we do.  Keep writing and the connections will make themselves known.  Memory, I should have reminded myself, comes in pieces, not all on the same track, either.

So here, writing now, the story picks itself up without hesitation.

In those long ago days, I wish I had continued reading about memory and the brain in more depth, because now it might have bolstered what I had been scrambling to understand during and beyond  Tom's visits, his clinical reports, scans and behavior.  As well as those changes in thinking and feeling which his disease pushed to the surface in all of us.

Memory, it seems to me, is not only about past experience but about the uses we make of it every minute, every second of our lives.  Though we learn it in elementary biology, it often escapes that searchlight of recall that the rest of the body outside the mind also holds memories, depending on them to function in the most ordinary ways...how to walk, how to talk, how to blink and recall pain or happiness, how to wake and sleep, how to eat, play, work, love, dance.

Nothing illuminated that more than Tom's last visit two weeks ago when he drew himself out of our brother Charles' car after the ride from the airport.  I could see he was slower of movement and will, though what impressed me more was the way his mind seemed to work differently than his body, as if a disconnection between them had occurred in the last two months since I'd seen him.  He had little trouble with what I will call intellectual memory (I'm sure there is a better term for it, but this isn't a scientific reflection, only a sister's impression)--indeed, facts about the present and the past came forth easily enough, if in halting speech.  His body, though, appeared to forget how to walk, even eat (though he still had the healthy appetite all of us do), or recognize direction.  Jean, bless her, had grown so accustomed to being his physical motivator that she could no longer leave him for even a few minutes.

It saddened all of us who had seen him in those last months because he appeared so unlike the take-charge, do-this younger brother that we (and he), beyond reason, were hoping would emerge again, even for short periods.  His favorite response to how he was feeling was, "Oh, I'm okay...really."

From the beginning, we were all cognizant (the brain holding that information firm; the spirit keeping it at bay) of the way his tumor would progress, and his life diminish with it.  But hope is one of those aspirations that rides the soul between mind and body; it was in us to hope for the best, even the impossible.

What I know now, watching Tom over these last years, and then watching him as, smoothly and quietly, he passed away early on the Monday after Easter, is that the brain is most remarkable at keeping us going beyond the body's tenure, purely by memory, and certainly by its compatriot trust.  That beyond what we think we have the strength for nonetheless invites us further to the realm of possibility. Through brain power, even damaged and waning, we are privileged to follow to that realm if we remember those lessons of living we have been storing unused for just such occasions as life--and death--carry us to.  There is a fine sense of timing inherent in us, and there is valor and fortitude for the grasping.  If we are lucky, we find them at hand at the right moments.

Only a day after his visit here, Tom's brain finally gave way.  In his hospice room, waking intermittently, but mostly sleeping, Tom was surrounded by as many of us as could come to stand watch, to be near and to comfort (but who comforts whom at such times, one asks?).  It is memory, and the force with which memory becomes us, that gives such moments their dignity and power.  Not a depletion of self as we wrongly assume when the body falters, but the transfer of a self into what we others can carry forward within us, the good continuing, the past a seamless thread on which life endures.

The faithful hand, Miss Mulock reminds us, will "keep what is worth keeping, and with the breath of kindness, blow the rest away."  And in Tom's passing, there is so much good to keep.

Jupiter sunrise
photo by Ann Rexroad

One of Those Days

In the film The Best Marigold Hotel, one of the characters, a high court judge in London, drags himself along to a retirement party for a colleague.  One day soon he will be next, he grumps to a fellow judge, who reminds him that he's heard that before.  But no sooner does he enter the room than a shock to the heart overtakes him, and he backs away through the crowd.  "This is the day," he announces to the crowd at large.  "This is the day."

This is the day for me, as well...not to retire (supposedly I did that a decade ago) but to get on with a journey I have been, like the judge, threatening (here read hoping) to make for some time.  Sometimes it doesn't even take a TIA to know when the time comes.

So, I thought a few weeks ago, it's time I went to Paris.  Really time.  I wondered what I'd been waiting for, though the answer came quickly enough.  But a look at the calendar and a bit of foresight into the future told me that what is usually a scarce commodity around here...time...had broken open its tightly held trove and offered me a gift.  I grabbed it, running to make a plane reservation, then a week later, more pensively, to find a place to stay.  Friends in London, when I told them, signed on for part of my journey, so I will be stopping there on the way so that we can take the Eurostar together to the City of Light.

Mon vieil ami d'ecole, Will and, we are hoping, Dorothy will spend a few days visiting friends there and, if I know (and trust) Will, walking me around the city recounting les histoires des toutes des pierres dans les boulevards and les rues.  Having spent a goodly number of years taking students on the best European tours of their lives (he's known as a legend in the trade of studies abroad), he has learned a thing or two about le terrain, but, more important, he remembers everything.  His mind, like that of his old mentor (whom I fortunately later married), un professeur extraordinaire, is a veritable trap of data, history, and tales with a fine sense of life and humor.

I still remember our trip through London nine years ago, especially along the Thames in Southwark, Shakespeare's old haunts. Then I was traveling with both of them, trailing along while they traded dissertations on everything from Renaissance theater to the Clink and its attendant streetwalkers.

For many reasons, seeing Paris first with Will along for the ride makes me smile just thinking of l'aventure a venir.

[Pardonnez moi, all you French majors and maitres:  I can't figure out how to make cedillas and accents, neither grave nor acute, not to mention carets, on this site...but s'il vous plait, just assume there is a chance I know they should be there...like that one in plait...]

Which aside brings me to the time spent since I made that last reservation...learning, encore, all the French I have forgotten since school.  I know...it's pretty much a cliche', dredging up high school language lessons from fifty years ago.  I won't know how I've done til I get there, of course, but so far so good.  As long as I am speaking or reading simple subjects and verbs, I'm sure I'll be fine.  But the French films I've been watching nearly every night, just so I can listen to la langue real, have taught me another lesson.  Aside from picking up the occasional idiom, when I shut off the subtitles I'm able to recognize only a word or two every sentence or two.  Quel dommage.  

Fortunately, there are great contemporary books about all sorts of aspects of Paris, all of which I have been absorbing like a sponge. Along with the requisite guide book, I think I will tuck David Lebowitz's The Sweet Life in Paris and Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon in my travel bag to relive once my feet are on their ground.

Alors, on continue d'apprendre.  I've still got another week.  Wish me bonne chance!
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At this moment, more interesting than French grammar, there are fifty or more robins in my ailanthus bushes, a female cardinal among them.  They're fluttering wildly through the neighbors' ailanthus, too, feasting on the berries with which for a short time spring decorates those otherwise unremarkable plantings.  Ailanthus are way too prolific here, because they'll grow whether you care for them or not, and so everyone's predecessor put them in among the trees and rocks to fill in, knowing they keep their leaves all year whatever the weather.

For that reason they're a lesson in the reliability of sturdiness over the all too short summer's lease, and fill the yard with wandering tendrils (growing as long as you will allow them to lengthen) when all else fails.  But like me the robins are taking advantage of the moment and have set themselves to pick clean the red pearls that are the ailanthus' fleeting glory.  I can't blame them,  We are in the tail of the great northeastern storm that is bringing our temperatures into the twenties tonight, despite the fact that we have had weeks of sixty and seventy degrees, spoiling us for spring.  Fortunately it's only some spurts of high winds, helping to prune the dead branches from the trees and giving the sun a little run for its money.  We dig our scarves and gloves out of storage and carry on.

Besides, there's Paris to look forward to.

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Wait!  Don't close that page yet...



This weekend (March 17-18), the 7th Pamlico Writers Conference opens in Washington, North Carolina.  On the program Saturday afternoon will be my session on Journals as the Ultimate Sourcebook for writers. Both my workshop and the whole conference are open to anyone interested in writing or writers of any level. Join us if you can.  You can enroll at the door, or on their website.  For more information, go to https://pamlicowritersgroup.wildapricot.org/event-2260134.

The Eye of the Beholder

Recently, when my niece announced she was heading for Asheville, her mother and I went along for the ride.  We stayed, as we almost always do, with my sister and brother-in-law, in their place a bit south of town.

The drive up, like the drive back, was beautiful, warm and sunny, but the days between were mixed...some fog, some wind, some bright sun, some warmth, an equal amount of chill.  The weather certainly wouldn't stop us relaxing in Eileen and Jim's comfortable home.  Everything in their house seems set up for letting go and enjoying each other.  There are puzzles to decipher, word games and card games, and plenty of coffee and tea (or wine) to take on the porch with a good book, or settle into a living room chair for a chat, the sort, especially, that doesn't find its way across geographic distance by phone, email, or text.

Visiting Eileen and Jim also means a chance to hop in the car and take a ride anywhere there are natural beauties, trails, and destinations to explore.  The Asheville area is full of them, so many, in fact, that on each visit there develops a list of places we need to go next time, and the next and the next.  Sometimes we take a picnic, sometimes we stop for salads on the way back.  One constant, whichever the direction, is Jim's camera bag.  Each trip, no matter where, is an opportunity to capture what only that moment can lay claim to.

This time, on the morning we wanted to get out on the road, it was overcast and chilly.  Such days aren't a problem for Eileen and Jim, however.  "We'll just go up to Biltmore," Eileen suggested. Particularly on days like these, no longer deep winter, not yet early spring, when the otherwise lush gardens seem ghostlike, its conservatory is the place they head.

photograph by Eileen Langdon

Jim has been photographing people and nature forever, it seems.  Ever since he was a young father, his photographs of his children growing up or the families coming together draw memory not only to the occasion but to the personalities and interactions gathered in one time and one place.  That is photography's best gift to us...recording not only a moment in time, but the story in it.

When my second son was born, his father presented me with a copy of a book of that very title. I was in the final leap of a dissertation on Miss Welty, a baby at home only just passed his first birthday,  and another just arrived, and it seemed to me the sweetest gift, that book of photographs, tendering to all the parts of me so juxtaposed by time and place.  Its cover is worn and pages loose, but it holds its magic tightly in the heart.

Despite that, time passes.  All our sons are grown and gone, one way or another, and my brother-in-law has turned to the outdoors to decipher its fragile, mysterious code of life.  I admit I do the same, though perhaps not so technically proficient.  So that morning we set out for Biltmore, cameras at the ready.

Though from the road it looks bereft, it's not fair to say that nothing is in bloom on the wide, rangy grounds;  buds are popping up through the tips of plants, green leaves shoot through the newly mulched ground heading for a daffodil explosion, even the woody detritus of winter's shearing seems lying in wait for regeneration.

And in the conservatory, room after room of hothouse plants spill over onto the narrow walking paths, inviting admiration and inciting the imagination to more glorious horticultural possibilities.  Jim brought his talented eye to it all.

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

As for me, I walked the grounds thinking of both past and future...blooms past, blooms to come.

my daffodils

When you receive this, it will be the first of March, and so for me daffodils naturally come to mind...the ones in my yard now, the ones that were in high bloom when Joseph was born forty-two years ago (for Michael, it was tulips brazening the pathways). Interestingly, as if to cater to the earth's warming, their yellow and white heads now arrive nearly a month earlier.  But that's time for you, always rearranging space, and memory.  As Wordsworth reminds us:

...in vacant or in pensive mood,
they flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude;
and then my heart with pleasure fills
and dances with the daffodils.






Here are more of Jim's beautiful visions.  It would be redundant to offer words about them.  Their stories are in the eye of the beholder.

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

photograph by Jim Langdon

Where There's a Life, There's a Story...

It's windy today, and cooler because of it, but the sun after this morning's rain is grinning down on us as widely as if my friend Frances, who died last week at 88, were sending those rays to us.   It's a common enough anthromorphism for the fondly remembered, "smiling down from above", but, believe me, Frances' grin was anything but common.


I'm thinking of her today, especially because, though I moved away only a few years ago, only a few hours down the road from where she and I and others used to sit around the table and share our lives, no one thought to tell me about her death until Michelle, from her perch in Canada no less, saw it on Facebook and texted the news late on the day of her burial.  So this post is by way of a celebratory memorial, my own.

Frances, though she was born, by the accident of her father's work, in Newark, New Jersey, was a Southern woman through and through, as evidenced not only by the ground she walked for most of her life, but also by her sweet, kind, motherly, girlish, funny, curious, and resilient sides.  Her father had passed away before she was grown, late enough in her life to remember the particulars of their fond relationship, but early enough to encrust him in legend.  They moved to the Norfolk area of Virginia where what we might call her formative years were spent, and it was those times, along with the later ones as a nursing student at Charlottesville, the romance with her future husband Tally (a reticent, puzzling medical student at the time), and her life as a country doctor's wife which occupied the tales she told us.

Formally, we were a group meeting to write and share journals, recording our lives, our thoughts, our quandaries, our families' histories, and anything else that occurred to us.  Since 1982, I'd gathered together those small groups in whatever town I'd lived at the time, from Texas to New Hampshire; and finally in Washington, about midway in the 15 years the group existed there, came Frances to join us.

In all my teaching career, though teaching isn't really a word I'd use for that workshop (I having as much, if not more, discovery and life lesson as my "students" did), it has been what I think of as my highest achievement.  I say that not so much with pride as with humility. Wherever the gathering, there was, always had been, something binding about the way our writing, laid out on the table, drew us together in ways that even long friendship missed.  We listened as words opened up layers and layers, bringing experiences and sentiments to light that often times illuminated our own.

All through the years, among us were really good writers, creative writers, willing and reluctant writers, but Frances was a natural storyteller, both on paper and in conversation.  She'd had a full life even by then, her triumphs and tragedies remembered with not only her signature humor, but wonderful openness and equanimity; her love of social gatherings and her long, close friendships, her enthusiasm for music, art, travel, children and life itself became the seat she took each week among us.  When she decided to write a book for her children and grandchildren about her and their early lives...the stories of the way they were born and grew up, and the way she and her husband fared, too, over the years...we read her chapters and pulled even more from her.  Long after she'd stopped writing, long after, loss overtaking me, I'd given up what I'd loved doing more than anything, she'd meet me on the street, at someone's birthday lunch, or at an art reception and ask, "When are we beginning journals again?"

What both Michelle and I remembered instantly, though, was a trip we took one summer to the mountains, Frances among us.  The four-hour drive on the interstate became the road along which Frances' imagination came to life.  On the way home, we stopped for lunch near a sign that directed travelers to the small highway north heading toward a hamlet called Harmony.  None of us had ever been there, and this time we didn't detour toward it, either.  But all the way home we listened as Frances, enchanted with the name, laid out and populated the town, inventing relationships among the characters, homes they lived in, bars they frequented, intrigues they would fall into, histories they were prey to, and threads of a mysterious future to ponder later.

"Frances was such a gift," Michelle wrote the other day.  "Her stories always made me belly-laugh!
...that car ride was so entertaining...Frances got talking about staying at [an old] hotel and said something cheeky about her romantic life with her husband, whom she adored."

As she talked, we told her, only half teasing, that her story would make a good screenplay for a soap opera (Michelle, a media producer, would know), but Frances was the one who--it being her invention, after all--kept it alive, and eventually began to scribble chapters.

None of this is in her obituary, obituaries being what they usually are, but it's the life I remember her by, the life of that generous good humor that loved people, that could raise their stories equally from the dust of memory or the flakes of imagination, enriching them and us.

Thank you, Frances.  Here, just for you, is one more journal piece.

Porch Weather

Just about now, early February, when, in spurts of two and three at a time, days here can be as warm as April, the impulse to grab clippers and trowel and get to work is too strong to overcome. For the last three days, all charmers up in the 70's, I've let it overtake me gladly.

Yes, I know it's too early; the weather channel brings us back to reality with hourly updates warning of dipping temps tomorrow.  But in the yard, there is always something to dig into, and so I've begun some prep work for the less fickle warmth to come, marking out new beds, stripping the trees of last year's creepers, and pulling too-eager weeds out from among the driveway stones.

Actually, so far it hasn't been a very cold winter, barring a few anomalies of ice and snow back in early January, when I tucked myself into the house and stayed out the three-day freeze.  I don't do ice and snow well.  The latter looks pretty as it falls, sometimes enough to pull on hat and boots for a (short) walk in it, but its co-conspirator has never been my friend.  I suppose it's because of my south Florida beginnings that I suffer this February impatience for winter to be past.  When I noticed the quince flowering, I took to the garden.

During this latest warm spell, each day I've chosen one part of the yard to focus on. First, I simply wandered about, getting a spring feel for things, admiring the tiny buds on the tulip poplars and dogwood, peeking down under the winter cover of leaves to see what's budding or what's lost its lifeline.  I picked up fallen twigs along the way, tried to calculate which way the grasses will spread among the flagstones that lead to the picket-fence bench my nice neighbor Steve made for me, and invent new scenarios for spaces heretofore neglected.

I don't have an elaborate or formal yard; neither the landscape nor the neighborhood, or, for that matter, my own inclinations, are suited to it.  It's a hilly town, for one thing, and my street in particular rolls along with it, leaving one end of my yard at street level and the other a good ten feet above.  The slope in front is a challenge I puzzle over every year; this time I'm saving it for last, concentrating first on the high ground looking outward from the porch.

Did I mention I am sitting out here writing this?  Porch weather is the best season of all.  Shiny faces on the evergreen leaves dazzle and the signature blue in the sky holds all our gazes upward and outward.  Inspiration rides high as I rock along to the small breezes that float through.  What's especially pleasing is the new view I've created in the formerly unused corner by the kitchen door.

 After the porch was finally finished last fall, I'd thought about, actually planned out, a raised kitchen garden of herbs and lettuces, but yesterday I had my doubts.  I called in Cathy, who zipped over in record time when I texted her that I wanted to talk garden, and she threw out some ideas that made me re-think things.  Here where soil (think thick clay...it's not for nothing we're famous for our pottery) needs replacing nearly every time you want to plant anything, a fully raised plot suddenly seemed more trouble than it was worth.  Given the fact that we are on the deer highway, as I call it, despite the fact that we live right in town, I could see my raised garden vanquished each night.  I have enough trouble keeping a few hydrangeas or daphnes I love.  Isn't this nice of her, I can hear them whisper at dusk about my ground-level herbs,  a whole platter to choose from!

Just try a few pots first, Cathy advised, and see how that goes. Those words were my cue:  seeing how it goes is the way I do everything.  So I grabbed the keys and headed out to the garden center.  I told myself I'd just be looking, but barely an hour later came home with not only pots, but bags of organic soil, and a leafy trellis for some sweet peas to climb up the wall behind. I dug up pavers, filled the pots, then went back for some large gray beach stones to spread around the pots. I liked it.

In keeping with my mood, it seemed that my parsley hadn't quite given up its ghost, and the sun had nudged upward a little piece of chive, so I transplanted those into the new pots, and then a speck of mint greening beneath its winter detritus.  Rosemary, something that grows like crazy for other people, hasn't ever been more than spindly for me, but it deserved a second chance, too, and I fed them all.  (Angie, bless her, reminded me to put down cayenne to deter the deer.)  Basil, thyme and lettuce will come in their time.  As the fishermen say, no good rushing the season.

This morning, I'm even happier about it.  It rained a little overnight, and the wetted stones were a darker, brooding shade that spells calm to me.  I am now wondering if a small ripple couldn't wash over it now and then, creating a peaceful hush.  What a fine sound to listen for from the porch.

What is today's gardening going to be?  Wandering again, this time to find the best places for my growing collection of bird feeders.  I already see flutters of wings in the thorny ailanthus...nesting maybe?  There is a limb just beyond where I sit that seems ripe for hummingbirds, perhaps.

I think what I am working toward is a garden of peace, though at the beginning I wouldn't have realized it.  Goodness knows, we could all be working, in all sorts of ways, toward that.

Life Lessons

[photo from the Philadelphia Milton Hershey School alumni website]

Hershey, Pennsylvania has its name all over the map, usually wrapped around their famous chocolate.  In town, that confection is the symbol of the city (coming and going, a billboard with the iconic bar pronounces "Welcome" and "Thanks for Visiting"), as well as the theme of festivals and tourist attractions, the names of major streets, and, in a dash of humor most probably not intended, the small brick corner building entitled Chocolate Workers Local #464 AFL-CIO, a sweet oxymoron, if ever I saw one.

butterfly garden in the Hershey conservatory

Milton Hershey's legacy has its elegance, too, in the gardens and conservatory, which includes a charming butterfly garden with friendly inhabitants who will light on you if you are wearing the same coordinating colors they are, and legendary generosity in the schools he created and children he and his wife Kitty have fostered there, even long after their deaths.

It's been interesting to explore the town in various seasons, especially fall and spring, though I am not usually in tourist mode when I travel there.  This last visit, however, brought a sweeter treat, an introduction to a painter whose work still brings amazement to the few people who are lucky enough to view it.

friends Sadie and Mary

Mary De Bon and her late husband moved to Pennsylvania when they retired some years ago, and after his death, she eventually left for an apartment at Country Meadows in Hershey, where, as luck would have it, my aunt also moved last summer and soon met her.  "I want you to see her work,"Aunt Sadie has been telling me.  It isn't the first time my aunt has directed me to art--because of her I found the Print Council of New Jersey, where I fell in love with monoprinting. This time, she arranged for the two of us to visit Mary so I could see what she so admired.

Mary herself is a friendly, good-humored woman (and, by the aroma coming from her kitchen, a wonderful baker), and she took us on tour of the dozen or so paintings in oil that she has hanging there.

Mary De Bon, husband and son at lodge

But, here's the thing...it's been forty years since she's painted.  "Before I had children, a friend told me about a group they were starting; they'd go into the city together and take painting lessons from a man they knew about.  I thought I'd like to tag along."

Mary De Bon, early still life

Join them, she did, and her prolific work began, at first whatever the instructor had them copy, and then, as their technique grew stronger, finding inspiration from their own sources.  Mary often chose photographs of people from the National Geographic, whose faces drew her.  "Faces are the most difficult things you can paint," her teacher warned.  "But I like painting them," she told him.  Obviously she followed her own muse.

Mary De Bon, face

Mary De Bon, portrait of a star

 Followed it until the children came along, and painting became something that, as she puts it, seemed to belong to another life.

She didn't stop art, however...needlepoint became her medium, and later fabric collages, and you won't be surprised to learn that she brought thread and needle to the complicated images of portraits.  "Oh," she demurs, "I was just following the patterns."  Well, there are followers, and then there are followers.

Mary De Bon, needlepoint

I hope I didn't gasp audibly when she told us that the rest of her paintings, many more of them, were being stored in her daughter's basement.  Mary smiled, "She has different taste," and mentioned that one of these days, she'd divide up the treasures among her three children and their children, letting them choose whichever ones they'd like.  Mary hasn't sold her work, or tried to.  It's hard even to talk to her about showing them at Country Meadows, though she has had a few hung there in exhibits with others, and she's won prizes for her Christmas card designs.

Her art is about as far from mine as mine is to the English portraitists, whom I also admire but could never emulate.  What they have in common is their high talent for impressing on us the character of the faces they paint.  It's not only the precision of the lines and shadows that matter to them, but the unseen root of the person...that expression at that moment.  As much as I sigh over Winslow Homer and his wild skies, I stand back at a piece by Mary and shake my head at the clarity of her vision.

And not only the vision of art.  I can understand perfectly the notion that art, of whatever kind, can be useful to us at certain points in our lives, and then we move on to something else, driven by a wholly reformed phase of self we've fallen into.  We see the world through changed lenses; we see art through the motions of hands that take to other tools, to other subjects.  We don't disparage our former work; far from it.  We use it as a foundation for seeing, if not doing, more.  Life and art make good tradespeople, lending one another their best experiences to shape and reshape as the conditions and circumstances of life reshape us.

It's really a matter of dedication, not necessarily to art, but to ourselves.  I admire that, most of all.

A Hint of Spring

I know.  It's been weeks since my last post, and this one is dawdling on the page, even now. Goodness knows, it's not for loss of words, or subjects...most of January has been spent in a complication of plots that would rival Faulkner's Sound and the Fury, not to mention Welty's Losing Battles. Either title might do nicely for this writing.

Since mid-January, I've been away tending to my aunt and uncle whose lives in their late nineties are beginning to be...well, there's no other word for it but complicated.  My aunt, with a weak heart, and blinder and deafer, needs more care; my uncle, though his sight isn't the best, either, is having trouble assimilating to the changes that such age brings to my aunt and to him, especially the infusion of extra people needed for their care. I can't blame him: some days at their apartment are like rush hour at a train station, home care, house cleaners, physical therapists, nurses in and out.  I, too, would want to shoo them all out with a dust broom, no matter how well-meaning, and settle myself in to ordinary life.  In some ways, organizing people to help, including myself, feels traitorous.  But they're safe and cared for, and certainly loved.

I'm glad to be able to be with them at critical junctures like these, and try to keep life as comfortable for them as I can. But I live 400 miles away, and distance is also complicated.  The telephone helps us keep in touch and my cousin who lives a few miles from them is also a good communicator and on-site resource, especially in emergencies.  We work together, all four of us, to make peace with old age.

Coming back here the other night, I picked up life as usual, or thought I did.  It's a long, boring trip, and the interstate isn't my idea of a good ride, but, as it was Sunday, traffic was fewer in number and more polite in attitude.  Instead of turning on the radio, I thought new thoughts about work on the art I'd left and new work I might begin, about the garden I'll plant in spring, and I returned in good time.

In the last decade or so, I've traveled quite a bit between relatives, and my routine leaving and returning is pretty much pat:  clean up my desk, do the wash, pack, close up house, stop for gas, head out; then, whatever given time later, re-pack, say goodbyes, head home, stop for gas and groceries, unpack, wash, deal with desk stuff again.

This time, though, I walked in the door, began to unpack, and stopped.  Enervated, I left suitcases and bags in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, made myself a cup of tea, and collapsed in front of a movie I've seen a hundred times.  Tomorrow, I thought, I'll undo everything.

The next morning, I picked up where I left off, and, feeling more purposeful, I made my usual list of things to do, wash, errands, visit to the library where I picked up a half-dozen films I hadn't seen before and two books I hadn't read, walk around the neighborhood, decent dinner.  In my studio, I turned to the copper book I'm assembling and added some page embellishments, leaving them to dry.  When I went to bed last night, I'd seen one film (good humored, thank goodness:  Chinese Puzzle) and read one of the books (don't bother; I can't think why the author thought that was a story).  Tomorrow, I told myself, will be back to normal.  

This morning, though, it was as if yesterday had never happened.  I woke early enough, but instead of rising, I pulled the covers up, picked an Ann Tyler book from the shelf next to me, and lost myself in it until lunchtime.  I'd read it before, yes, but it couldn't have seemed more appropriate...Back When We Were Grownups.

Finally crawling out of bed, I washed and dressed, and step by step made my way downstairs.  I'd wanted to get back to my copper book, to plan the journal workshop I have to give in March, and certainly write you a new post, though heaven knows I had no intention of making it this complaint...instead, I'd wanted to introduce you to an artist I found while I was away.  But something happened on the way to the laptop. Half the day was done, but I was just getting started, my energy only slowly rising with me.  I made tea and sat on the porch for a while...the day was sunny, the breeze cool, but the sun warmer, like that old story about whether sun or wind could make a man unbutton his coat.  I relaxed into this hint of spring for a few minutes, and began to think about the next step in the day.

Phone calls from my aunt, my sister, and the care coordinator brought me back to earth.  Scheduling complications still reigned, despite two weeks efforts.  My poor aunt and uncle didn't have their comfort yet, and I was still halfway between here and there.

But that little while on the porch, spring showing its head, even if only for a day, was a respite not only in time but faith.  Around the corner, a redbud tree had bloomed, a few crocuses showed up across the street.  Even the chill wind couldn't keep them away.  It's good that nature sends us these little lessons, and just in time.

Later, I'll take another walk, and undo the knots in my muscles, including that complicated tangle in my heart.  If this post isn't what I really had planned to say, I will append my apologies here, and get to it before long.  Tomorrow is another day.