Thinking of you

Orchid Ball, by Jim Langdon

15 April, a brisk morning

                                            for Michael

Last time, decades ago

but after days of rain, overnight

wind sweeps across to change

the nature of everything

                                    I open

the kitchen door to a brash awakening

catching its refreshing candor

walk the yard, gather its leavings

count new buds on the lilacs

I transplanted before I knew

you would appear

                               and die again

Still, you grow with us

the striking black branch of dogwoods

      whitening hair glorious

against new-washed blue

between gusts, the wink of a neighbor’s 

azaleas, magenta and pink 

                    as babies’ bottoms

          barely out of their pods

I wonder what you think of us

enmeshed here in a landscape

                                    of dreams

ears tuned to every sound as ground

                                                      swells

our resolute trust 

                  ...caution to the winds!...

listening, season by season, for

                               your re-emerging song

                                                love, Mom

04 15 19

                                               

Travel plans

Spring has sprung.  And I, I have been feeling in need of a change of scene.

I'd just about begun to luxuriate in the solitude of the house my own again (not to mention the heady energy of moving furniture to my own comforts), when I suddenly got the impulse to get up and out.  The garden, springing into bloom, came to mind first...digging, transplanting, making new beds, mulching...all in the warming air and sun.  But then I began to think much farther out than that. A change of scene came to mean real change...of mind, of scenario, of anchorage.  I suspect that something inside me has been ready for revision for longer than I could see.  Change, that constant current of my life (I might as well take the symbol ～ as my monogram), was rising to the surface again.

Not that I am complaining. Even unfortunate, drastic changes have brought some necessary self-awareness (if sometimes too late), a widening of the field and travel into new dimensions.

This time, finding myself open and willing to be somewhere else, I decided to dedicate this year to heading out to see the world, one place at a time.  To that end, I have been making a few living adjustments...like simplifying the habits of home that keep me in old, now worn out encumbrances...pulling travel guides by the dozen off the library shelves...getting on with what's next.  If that sounds familiar to you, perhaps it is because, interestingly, that sort of change seems to be in the air for lots of people I know and hear about these days.  (Some years do seem to have archetypal themes, for visible and invisible reasons.)  It's time to move on, people say.  It's time to widen our vision, they say.  It's time for something new to become the people we are inside, they say.  It's time to shake out the musty old narrow carpet we are treading, they mean, and spring onto a new one.

Mine being a flying carpet this year, it will transfer me not only from one country to another, but also from one segment of my age to another.  Next year, I will be three-quarters of a century old, and I am curious to learn, one sight at a time, what that next quarter (or at least part of it) might be going to bring.

The first episode, though, seems to be going backward, rather than forward: May will find me, if all goes according to my nearly completed plan, in Havana, where 70 years ago I found myself peeking  over the elaborate iron railing of a hotel in the middle of the old town.  Down below was the teeming, noisy, exciting street, and I was a small person from a rather restrained suburb faced suddenly with a culture electric with energy.  I have only a few memories of that trip, but that one is one of two most memorable.  I am curious to see what time has wrought of both of us.

I know all about the history of the place and its culture between those years.  I have for decades read (and taught) more than a few Cuban and Cuban-American writers and their tales of pre- and post-Castro landscape and living.  I have looked with great admiration at the colors and sensuousness of Cuban painting and am fascinated by their found-art, a pulse dancing to its musical beat.  So now we are getting at the greater reason for my travels there:  I want to study the art of the Havana scene, the people who make it, the inspirations and inceptions of their work, the materials and methods and insights.  I want to learn from them the way they turn out such vibrance from the ground up.

It's good that I have that reason because, as you might know. we have to deal with new governmental restrictions these days on who we are supposed to know and comport with.  I am glad to be in the majority of countrywomen and -men who roll their eyes and greet the world anyway.  Anyway, one of the permissions of traveling to Cuba is that one must have a good reason...and a written plan...for going to such a place to see such people, albeit neighbors only 90 miles from our shores. Apparently it isn't legally enough just to want to travel there for travel's sake. 

When I return, you will be inundated with blogs about the artists of Havana and their work, and, of course, what all that means to our ever crossing paths.  My journal will chart my way through there and into future travels.

Other sites are also on my horizon.  I never make travel plans too far in advance...every time I have, something arrives around an unseen corner to obstruct it...but later this year the South of France, with Barcelona and Messina on the side, and the British Isles, revisiting London and Scotland and newly meeting Wales...I don't know which one first.

 In 2020, Morocco, if I can manage it, and then somewhere in the Far East, Thailand or Laos or Cambodia, if my legs can hold out for those long flights.  In between there is travel among the states, too...the shore again in June, a trip at some point to Sedona, and one back to San Antonio to visit friends, Vancouver and Portland with perhaps my sister and brother-in-law to accompany me.

But that's just this week's thinking.  Who knows where and when I will actually find myself?

The color purple

Lately I have found myself wearing that color a lot, from raincoats to underwear.  It isn't by design, at least not conscious design, but one day last week, in West Virginia for one of a triplet of family funerals, it seemed to me an odd coincidence that, with the exception of the black suit I would wear for the service, everything in my small travel bag (which was itself purple) was some shade of it.

I suppose you could consider it one of the bruise colors, as my friend Pam's daughter once called them...red, black, blue and gray (the new black)...the standards we shop for at a certain age; easy to coordinate a outfit without more than a grab in the closet, and safe as houses for fading skin and hair, only a bright scarf needed to pull everything together and hide one's scars.

Purple, though...I wonder.  That seems the bruisiest of all.  And today, seated before the front window, watching the brave north-facing daffodils finally rearing buds into bloom despite the day's chill, I am feeling as tired and achy as a bruise would suggest.  Sturdy as I like to think myself, these two and a half months have taken a lot out of me, I'm just realizing.  One takes each day as it appears on the horizon and goes forth to meet it, accepting what comes however one can.  Shoulders raised in defense, one does what needs to be done, and gets on with it.

Now that life has changed again, I'm glad for my uncle, for whom the pain and frustration of dementia are now relieved by his passing.  Now that sympathetic company have drifted away, I feel at home once more, rattling around in my more-often-than-not silent rooms.  Now that my muscles have unclenched, I am slowly awakening to what's next.

Still, my eyes open too early in the morning, though there is no longer any reason to.  I retire early, emptied by the day, though with one thing or another on my mind I fall asleep later.  Last night it was after one o'clock, and only after I'd gotten up to make a cup of Echinacea tea.  Each morning I make my list to focus the day, and, amazingly, tick off each item...calls to make, affects to sort out, services and furniture to rearrange, appointments to show up for.  Everything else, I put on hold for when my fatigue rides away on the spring winds.

Ah, but there it is...the other side of purple...not the bruise but the promise.  Look here at my Valentine's gift from Joseph and Alexander, a pot of the first flowers up in the returning warmth, and the rich bloom on the hellebore, a gift from my neighbors Betsy and Vern.

Even the pure white roses my aunt and cousins sent for our memorial gathering were cushioned in purple.

And here, the gray-purple of the first show of light.

The chill in the air may pretend to a flurry of snow tomorrow to spite yesterday's warmth, but it's a facetious swipe no one really believes in.  I don't.  Purple may be the transition between lives as well as seasons.  It's good to know.

Birthdays

Today (the day I write this) is Alexander's birthday; he's six.  And I am here to tell you that there is a huge difference between being five (5) and being six (6).  He's taller in body, yes, but also in stature of mind and attitude.   Not something I would expect so practically overnight, though now that I think about it, I could see bits of it coming, a word here, a shrug there.  He doesn't like to be called cute or handsome or tootsie pie (well, I will give him that...); he is Alexander, plain and dignified.

A curious, thinking boy, he is also at work on something all the time, as he always did--generating an idea a minute, building towers and machines and camps, wrapping yarn around chair legs for a trap, hiding under tables and in bushes so that he can spring out (and not a second too soon) Surprise!  Singing to himself, making up jokes and games (he has his own rules for backgammon, for example, quite complicated and changing every minute).  He still likes the making part of cooking and baking, moreso these days for someone specific...egg salad for his mom or dad, pumpkin chocolate chip muffins (without pumpkin, he insists) for his great-great uncle.  He likes learning his numbers and letters, but on paper his favorite are lists he can check off and measurements he can chart (and arguments about such which he can win); there is the theoretical and there is the practical, and there is no question about the one in which he finds his strength.

He loves that he is now in the six-year-olds clay class, not the beginners in which some are only four (4) years old, for heaven's sake, and proud of being in the Super Boys gymnastics group instead of the mixed group with only two boys and lots of little girls in specially selected gym outfits (with glitter, if you please), hopping and flipping around them and doing splits.  He still loves his bearded dragon, Beardie, but you can see him moving into a little different relationship to him now that he is older...more I-you then I-we.  With toys he is as excited as ever with things that run on batteries, race around the house or climb to the moon.  He has begun to hanker after the games his older cousins play.  "When I am seven," he ponders, "what day will it be?"

But there is the Alexander that stays the same, too...his affection, his humor, his energy--goodness! what energy!--and his need to be his own person and do his own things (that is, do things his own way).

Mostly he is concerned that things should stay the same, even while he grows beyond it.  There he inherits the child's greatest wish:  to keep the world safely around him, while he takes his own good time wandering in it.

↠↠↠

Interestingly, only a day later I turn 74, and some of those child's traits appear to belong to me, too, though in more questioning form.  You can forget the energy...that, I am afraid, has long dissipated.  But I watch Alexander's idea-a-minute, and have to smile.  "There is nothing you like better than a project," my husband used to say, not without a hint of exasperation.  And though I have long given up acrobatics, which I was pretty good at once upon a time, I like clay, too, the way it forms and reforms under your fingers, the way its smooth surface can turn into any shape you wish.  I am attracted far more to the used and discarded than I am to the new...there is so much more to invent with them.  So I am an artist, in that way, and so is my young grandson.  Alexander and I can turn anything into anything else in pretty much the same minute. 

Like Alexander, I am a person who chases theory into the practical.  I am going to admit here, after all these years, that during my time teaching, I had little use for writing postulatory articles on minute subjects I didn't think the world especially needed to have to read or wasted paper on, despite the fact that it seemed to be the way to the heart of an academic career. 

You are hearing this from a person who has used writing as her best form of communication all her life...a bookworm, a wordsmith, a close listener to the tales of others.  Papers at conferences?  Ok, but only to share a conversation with a group of people present and already interested, and then we would all go out to dinner and then go home and back to teaching and doing something about something.  Whatever the rules are, I too prefer to do things my own way.  (Some people might call that stubborn; Alexander and I just ignore them.)

There is another side to that trait:  a woman I once worked with (Colleen something I can't bring up now, though I remember her as if she were sitting right here smirking at me, imposing, acerbically funny, caring, and fun to be with) once said to me on greeting, "Ah, Rachel...still trying to save the world?"  It took me back for a minute, but then it set me forward, too.

And yet another:  the need for belonging, which in funny ways contradicts my great need for solitude, for having regular space around me to think and not think.  The pleasure in friends (and that includes family), both long-time and nearby, and in their correspondence or in sharing walks or spontaneous visits during which we can catch up with each other, in sharing holiday tables.  Alexander and I like cooking for people; we like finding their pleasure in being so served.  Likewise, my happiness in finding myself in a neighborhood as neighborly as ours comes from the same source.  Further than that is my tendency to be the gatherer of information about who is where and doing what...not unlike Alexander who knows where every single child in his class is on the playground at any moment. It can lead to one more trait fortunately now dropped from use: to find myself in charge of whatever organization I volunteer for.

So on these birthdays, I celebrate, gratefully, that Alexander and I are part of each other's everyday theoretical and practical working world.

Happy Birthday, dear boy (if you will allow me the dear just this once), who, despite my climbing years, gives my life one more soupḉon of youth.

A winter morning

The sun is not yet above the ridge of houses across the street from me, but the signs are there...pale pink streaks the white sky behind the complicated network of leafless trees, like the fractures of lead in Tudor stained glass.

The paleness of the morning is the season's signature, and shed of holiday clutter, we, too, feel pale.  Coming home yesterday afternoon from Angie and Jim's ebullient, warm Christmas brunch on the farm, that paleness had already begun to return to the sky from the blue of the morning, the day tiring early, I suppose.  It made the huge red poinsettia, a marvelous gift from the faraway Baers, seem to stand out further in the front window.

Right now, even the sun behind Taylor and Gina's tall oak (all the trees hereabouts are tall...oaks, maples, pines, tulip poplar--the giant behind my house--and sweet gum) hides a pallid face.  It will be a nice day, not quite chilly and mostly sun, I know from the weather forecast, but the squirrels and birds seem to have had other information and run around picking, pecking whatever they can find, preparing for something.  I wonder what they know.

We are alone today, my uncle and I, the holidays having diverted our caregivers.  He is still asleep after a whole night of breathing roughly, bouts of coughing, long periods of apnea.  Exhausted from thirty-three hours of being awake and jumpy inside the strange plane of his mind, he has hardly moved under his tweed and wool covers since 7 last night.  These are upside-down days of increasing dementia, so each day brings its own scenario. (In the photo above, dressed for Christmas, he tried to take apart his walker to figure out what it is.) Last night, I camped out near his room so that I could jump up before he tried to raise himself on his crumbling legs, but though I kept as awake as I could I heard nor saw any reason for me to rise, either.

I also wonder if winter enervates minds struggling with the mental and physical flips and slips aging brings.  Why not?  All nature goes underground, in its own ways, and we in cooler climates do the same.  Huddled into sweaters, coats, hats, we take on the skin of another self, sort of molting in reverse.  Born in winter, though in a tropical clime, I have never been much of a cold-weather person.  And yet winter, as I look from the inside out, has its charms.  That low-angle sun skirts the shrubs, topping them with white slight this time of day.  If there is frost, or fog, its glitter enlivens the ordinarily dull landscape.  The elianthus, not our favorite green, shows its prettiest white flower this season.  The hellebore has bloomed early but right on time to make us smile.  And the one flower, the anomaly of my yard, a winter-blooming azalea, braving dullness, stands down snow or sun.

And I?  The inside more than outside draws me.  I feel myself succumb to dullness, too, hunkering  like the roots underground for brighter inspiration. Sometime soon I will return to my dangling vine and gem project, but not today, though its crystals would certainly dance on the worktable in this winter light.  (I am having a technical problem with it, but one morning, I am sure, I will wake up from a dream, like Newton, and solve it.)

I look to other pursuits...a gift of lovely pears I poached with ginger, and some scarves Alexander asked me to knit for his cousins, aunt and other grandmother he was about to visit on a holiday trip...he wants to do it himself, but he hasn't quite got the hang of knitting; perhaps because I'm right -handed and he's a lefty, it's hard for us to figure out together.  White I knitted, though, he painted and made some pots from clay for them.  He's never at loss, inside or out, for something to do.

A new year to you all of peace, kindness, calm...winter's dream we wait hopeful to come true.

A new brain, or Is life a carousel?

My sister sends me a text the other morning, meaning to forward the video from my nephew's wedding, but instead when I open the link, there is an instagram post with a rather unlikely quote in caps from Gloria Steinem.  It's followed by a note from the instagrammer, whose moniker is "growingbolder":  Life won't always be easy but sometimes those tough times are what enable us to fully realize our true selves.  "I hope you can open the video," Ann adds.

"There's no video," I text my sister back.   Whoops! she writes back.  Let me try that again...

Eventually, the wedding pictures arrive, but it's too late...the real message has been driven home to me. I can't tell if the instagrammer is quoting someone else (if she is, she's also borrowing that cracked infinitive), but those words, tough times...enable us to fully realize our true selves, zaps my somewhat less than cheerful consciousness that moment, and my first thought is, Either times aren't tough enough, or my true self, if there is such a thing, is this ratty, weighted-down lump, kicking the hours around like tin cans on the street.

Okay, okay.  All that wallowing in life's complications is tantamount to fussing over a bad hair day (which it also was), I know that.  I need a new brain, not a new life. I like my life.  I just don't like the way I have dressed myself for it...hatless and in the wrong shoes.

But as if to give me a good shake, that evening along comes an email from Kathy Steinsberger, reminding me that I have signed up for her Carousel Book workshop at Blam! the next day.  Yes, I'm coming, I tap back, and race up to my workroom for supplies and tools.

I have to wade through a mess to find them;  I still haven't made the beds from my sister Ann's visit last week, and I've been cutting up paper and testing paints for holiday cards, which I am not entirely happy with, but which will have to do.  Plus a shelf holding 30 years of journal workshop stuff broke, and the papers are strewn about yet, while I waffle over what to do with them, or the shelf.  (Do I re-order them?  cull them?  toss them?)  But I digress.

I am sorry to say that my mood was still in wallow gear (are you enjoying all these mixed metaphors?) when I reached Kathy's studio the next morning, late as usual. I sat at my assigned place and tried to focus on her demonstrations.  At first, I seemed to trip over each direction, though they were straightforward enough.  Kathy, bless her, took me in stride.  But then something clicked.  I pulled papers together, cut and glued, changed direction and angle, and as I worked, things began to happen.  Art. 

When I left (early), I was still grumbling (for which I apologize profusely to all in hearing range), but I had seen the light and knew how to finish what I had started.

Later, Alexander came to dinner.  We made a house out of clay.  We lit candles. We changed our tune.

It worked.  Not only the carousel book, but an uplift in spirits I am still living out. You saved my life, I wrote back to Kathy. 

Interestingly enough, when Kathy's reminder came in that previous evening and I had jumped up to ready myself for it, my uncle's caregiver tried to puzzle out what the fuss was about.  I explained what a carousel book was, showing her some pictures from the book arts site, and how I'd need to think fast to create an idea for it before I got there.

Carousel book with floor and ceiling, Kathy Steinsberger

 She looked at me a minute, and then said, "Well, it's cute, but what do you do with it?"

Readers, I didn't really feel I could answer that.  I'd have to go back to forty centuries of art history, creative theory, a thesis on the left and right brain, a visit to the art museum, and then underscore it all with that line from King Lear, "Oh, reason not the need..."  I knew I would fail.  I went upstairs and packed my art bag.

Today, after I clean up that studio mess, I begin again.   Some of you, I hope, will see the results in a week or so.  Meanwhile, here is my Carousel Book, Pace (Peace), a re-framing of the poems I had written for my Set a place at the table for peace.

Pace, front cover

Pace, back cover

         
 As I used it say to my creative writing students, changing one's standpoint...that is, the point where you are standing (or sitting)...changes one's point of view. 

Pace (no floor or ceiling), star formation

  

Pace, open accordion

To wit:  though the poems on their own mean the same no matter what print you make of them, each art piece which encapsulates them defines them in a different way.  I like both my Peace pieces, and, frankly, like the art of the carousel better than the art of the table; although I still think of the table as the more dedicated one, Pace has the more interesting viewpoints. 

But I'm not about to try to explain that to our caregiver.

May art light your world this season, a little more each day.

Around the bend

An email from Frank Harmon, architect of fine sensibilities, recently popped into view, as one does each month, sharing an image of memorable travels.  "Native Places", he calls them...simple watercolor drawings followed by brief but often poignant reflections on the scenes he passes, and the pleasures and insights he finds along the way.  Sometimes, as you might expect of a man of his profession, they depict famous facades...a hidden cathedral...an ancient marketplace... but often they are just interesting street corners, or a string of power lines, or a barn in the country.  No matter the fleeting glance we might have given them ourselves, each one grows in significance as we see them through his eyes.

Frank Harmon, In Praise of Curved Roads, November, 2018

Though he is by far the wider traveler, the places he records are, curiously, often places I have been.  This month's was as familiar to me as the back of my hand on the steering wheel...a point where a bend begins on I-85, the curvy road that stretches from us north to Petersburg,Virginia, through forests and farms and smaller byways, over waterways and under overhanging boughs until, at a raucous switch of speeding lanes, it is overcome by I-95, the north-south horror people insist on using, as he observes, under the illusion that it's faster than the older highway, if only by a few minutes.  Those minutes, though, are worth it:  I-85, he writes, a road without "sunburnt grass medians and billboards [that] hawk fast foods and no-credit loans", reminds us of the journey more than the destination. "After all," he adds, "Americans naturally look for adventure around the bend, just like Huck Finn."

 I know what he means...bends in the road always spell me, too.  And also curiously, I had been thinking of those rolling roads, though in rather a different way, when his message came through. For instance, this watercolor by artist Kathleen Vanderbrook.  Once of New York State, she and her husband Terry (whose elegant ceramic jar is also a prize among my pottery) moved to the tiny community of El Rito, New Mexico, where a few other artists came to settle and to begin a journey of desert proportions. 

Kathleen Vanderbrook, On a Clear Day, 1993

We found ourselves there one summer, taking a bend in the road on our way to the more celebrated Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, and for a moment...indeed for years...the place itself enchanted me.  I thought to myself, I could live and work here.  Even later, I thought, This is a place to run away to. I never did, of course; places like that are places to dream on, and in my travels there have been plenty I've dreamed the same about.  But the studio we visited, the Vanderbrook's, was a small opening in my field that gradually enlarged not only the path I was on but the art I could envision for myself.  I brought home her watercolor, to remember the road's bend up to a hill where who knows what would lie ahead.  It hangs in my studio now, with other pieces that inspire me, and around each bend it shows me something else.

Road on the Hill

Since my own art began with small, rather clumsy watercolored drawings like the one above, I admire Frank Harmon's for their effortless wash.  His have the quick-sketch charm of travel journals, accompanied by the few words that skirt across your mind as you pass by a place that turns your head.  Like him, I myself prefer to take 85 going north, just as, when I lived farther east, I would eschew the maniacal interstates 64 and 95 and ride the saner and waterier US 17 to 13, over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, through the flatlands of coastal towns to the Lewes-Cape May ferry, then up the parkway through the beaches and the pine barrens, around bend after bend.  Even now, I will drag my tires along narrow quiet US 15 as long as I can before even 85 becomes a necessity; taking the small roads allows me access to the live worlds along the roadsides in ways that interstates never can.

Rachel Victoria Mills, Solitude, 2000

Metaphorically speaking, it's the bends in the road that I have come to expect (perhaps only later to appreciate) on journeys, more than the straightaways. Bumpy as they can be and unpredictable, they are more hospitable than the competitive, horn-honking asphalt. Before you make assumptions, I assure you that I am not exactly among the ranks of the tortoises you curse at...I am as likely to pass you in the left lane as you me.  Otherwise, you will find me the laggard, wandering, wondering.  The fast lanes just don't inspire me...they never have.  I am in fact famous for making my own bends in the road just when things get too straight ahead.

Bends in the road, though we cannot see around them, bring us to the points where we leave old roads behind and open ourselves to the new ones.

The other day, my friend Lee and I, coffee cups in hand, chatted awhile about the way our lives had changed, how with each change the years segment, forming their own characters, one by one.  Our old versions follow along behind us, and yet there is a separateness about them, a theme in each, undeniable and dominant, with its own landscapes and undercurrents.  I think of the roads I have traveled, bend by bend. Who am I?  I ask myself each morning. Have I been to this place before?  And what is this new perspective I am treated to today? The ever-changing view as the road twists this way and that lets us know we are traveling farther, further, day by day.  Where we end up is another story entirely.

A grateful Thanksgiving to each of you, wherever you have been, wherever you are on your way.