November weather ii...a sharing of pleasures

 If you have a chance, re-read the last post, November weather, for some last lone dandelion additions/editions.  We seem to be collecting them from geographic points far apart, and I am developing a hypothesis about that...

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Meanwhile, Susan's daughter Barbara, who belongs to a group of Austin women miraculously called The Goodness Group, sent her mother this poem by Wendell Berry.  

So Susan sent it to me, writing, I thought of you because your post from yesterday had a photo of bricks with the pattern of leaves still visible.  "Day-blind stars" seems to be in that category.  Sometimes photos or phrases are just so perfect and a keen pleasure.

Yes. And it is good to have friends who also notice and share such signs.

 The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,

....

I come into the peace of wild things 

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light.  For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                        Wendell Berry, from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry

November weather

November

 "I thought to myself, it's been a while since I have a post from Rachel," Angie told me on the phone yesterday.  

I know...I can feel it without thinking. Sometimes when I am waking, or walking, or peering out the window, a note for a post rings in my mind.  I mean to write it down, but the laptop isn't in my lap that minute, so away it goes, unsung.  (Think of what you've missed...)

This morning, my first glance out to the patio showed a Noah's ark of activity.  After yesterday's hard, fast rains (four inches in Angie's gauge), two of every creature in these parts raced, darted, or flew through the garden.  Some carried pecans from the neighbor's tree to hide here (leaving the shells scattered everywhere, as squirrels do), some drug up worms from the wet ground, some dived at invisible prey, coming up triumphant.  Leaves scattered around their tails and feathers.  I'm sorry I don't have a picture of that.

In ordinary times, the scurry to feed in the fall means a cold winter is on the way.  But since these are not ordinary times, who knows what winter will bring?  In the meantime, we have an autumn that feels like late spring some days, late July some days. 

And not only here. Susan sent me a photo of the last dandelion in her Texas yard, but then added, "today is 80 again, so maybe another seed will sprout."

After she read this post, Michelle wrote:  "...happened upon this sole dandelion on my morning walk!  Astounding for a November in Ontario..."

And then, on a walk through campus yesterday, Alexander spotted one last dandelion here:

Hmm.  Are these stars, popped up here and there, somehow forming a constellation on the ground?  Something for us to read, name, follow?

Barbara's gourds

Aunt Sadie reported that she and Barbara had had lunch the other day on the back deck in Pennsylvania, where 80 registered on their thermometer, too.  Then the next day dawned damp and chill.

Bench with leaves

We here in NC are used to such fluctuations; we have four seasons, true, but often they get confused about which month they are supposed to show up.  We've been in shorts in December and sweatshirts in June.  So far, I have relished every day of this November:  beautiful blue skies, breezy 70s one day; rain and clouds, reaching not quite  60 on another.  On each of my walks, there is always something that brings me to a halt, and, camera out, I try to capture it.  The other day it was red leaves, wet and shiny, springing up from the ground...not whole trees of  them, but one by one or branch by branch; 

 the day before that, white things that survive in a fallen or near-fallen state. 

I hardly think of these outings as exercise anymore, as I did plowing through the humidity of summer. Instead, they seem more an adventure in light, shape, and change.  Which means that I am seeing things with a new eye...the eye of the camera lens, even before I hold it up to see through.   These last years, beginning with my travels abroad, the camera has become another sort of journal for me.  More lately, in this non-travel year, I find myself recording differently...I know...that's a useless word, but I can't come up with exactly what brand of seeing I am doing.  Perhaps like that bench above, seeing the point of the very ordinary?

In November, especially, as the year closes, so seems to my lens, focusing on smaller and smaller things, parts of things...noticed and appreciated, perhaps, in this smaller, slower life.  So different than November of '19, when all I had eyes for were those white hills in Spain.

 After the rain brought in a cold(er) front last night, this morning's chilly walk made me absolutely heady with the fresh clean air, and I found myself on a few extra paths in honor of it.

As the sun hadn't made it up yet (it didn't appear until almost two this afternoon), what I found on those paths were ghosts...leaves that made their mark, before the wind or the groundskeepers blew them away.  They made me remember the bare white birches against the dark rocks gray in New Hampshire...still my favorite November icon.  Now, here, it seemed that the eleventh month had finally decided to be itself.

At the moment the sun is below the trees and I am still in the morning's chilly mood.  The squirrels and birds are back to chasing each other to the best finds.

As you can see, this time I have not forgotten to record my waking note.

So, simple or silly, I sew...

This morning, walking in this glorious fall weather, I am reveling in the leaves raining down.  I hold my face up to them as they drift around me to the ground, and the air seems to lighten at their touch.

This season, I've been more and more picking up needle and thread to do little quirky sewing projects (the weather is far too pretty for winter knitting yet).  Though I don't do much shopping except for weekly groceries, I admit to sneaking into nearby Mulberry Silks and Fabrics, a fantasy in a cozy brick complex that was once a mill. It now houses small shops, as well as my primary grocery, Weaver Street Market, and in Mulberry I buy a yard here and there of colorful, eye-tickling material, sometimes knowing what I am going to make with them, sometimes not.  Bright orange and blue, yellow polka dots, fanciful images...I can hardly choose.

In a wide-open, light-filled room the size of two-bedroom apartment, it's hard enough ordinarily to take in the jewels there.  Indeed, wandering among the piled and hanging and binned bolts could take a whole afternoon.  These days, wandering is forbidden...the store is open online, with online popup sales every week, or, for the very brave (like me), the cheerful, helpful, masked and gloved ladies who run the shop have set up a table at the doorway and will bring you any bolt your wandering eye wishes to consider.  They like to know what you are planning, too, and offer suggestions and accessories.  It's a dream, really...like shopping in Mr. or Mrs. General Store way back in those old television Westerns, only the ladies at Mulberry are a lot nicer than the mainly arch characters who, depending on the plot, may or may not deign to serve you their wares.

So far I have made two simple quilts to give as gifts (one successfully, one not so), two little bags I am keeping back as holiday gifts, some luncheon napkins (I'm infamous, I'm afraid, for my napkins, which I can turn out anytime I am bored), and, of course, a few more masks for everyday use.  

The one most fun, however, was this lady, which in its primary stage Alexander called,"The Stinky Cheese Lady", after the children's book.  Since then, I've managed, with a lot of scraps from those earlier projects, to lift her spirits, and at the moment, she's sitting outside on the porch waiting for Hallowe'en to begin.  I'm thinking, with a week left, of giving her a friend.

The key word here is simple.  I'm not anywhere near the adept seamstress my forebears were, but I can hem, patch holes and replace buttons and zippers...even, if pressed, put in a button-hole.  I've made pillow cases and porch chair cushions when the need arose, curtains, tablecloths.  I've tried needlepoint, but not often, and not so it mattered.  I've sewn in art, of course...book bindings and collages, hangings, and other ephemera.  But I'm not my grandmother and aunts, who whipped out practically my whole wardrobe from infancy, and made sure I was fitted and stitched properly otherwise.  And while I greatly admire their skill and prolific activity, I am sadly not dedicated enough to do the precise and astonishing needlework of my friends Anne or Marty.

Beginning with a mostly clueless Singer Sewing Center class my mother and aunt desperately signed me up for one summer in my early teens, every now and then over the years I'd make A-line dresses or skirts, a tennis outfit, ties for my husband to wear to the clinic in the '70s, and years of Hallowe'en costumes, of course, as the children came along.  I'm not sure I got any better with the practice, just more experienced at what to take on and what to leave to someone more expert.

I do have a sewing machine, my grandmother's old 1940s portable ("Don't ever give this away," the last repairman told me firmly.  "It's working like a charm, and will keep doing so if you keep it clean.").  I take it out only rarely.  Sewing by hand is my personal charm...so satisfying a needle and thread feels in my fingers. It doesn't matter how much longer it takes to do a seam or a hem than whipping it through an electric foot; I'm happy to spend the time pushing and pulling the needle, while in the background music or a familiar film entertains me.  Like Marty's mother (also my dear friend), Kaye, who claimed it her favorite pasttime, I let my hand stitch up my pleasure.

Making things the slow way makes me feel...I'm not sure how to put it, exactly...a small link in an historical tradition as old as Eve, who had to find ways to cloth herself after the vines in Eden dried up.  And there is no better way to induce calm, for sure.  Even when the thread snarles, or I've got to rip a whole piece out, I'm still happy being part of something that feels essential. These days, that's a pleasure to hold tight to.    

I realize I am romantizing what is really just a functional act, but still...does it not go along with art itself by hand, and music by hand, and building by hand and inventing by hand, baking bread or cultivating cheese or planting a garden?  It is the process that engages me, like probably all those other creators, more than the product that ensues, as if the end result is just a byline of the real joy of making.  It reminds me of my father in his garage workshop, who used to say about whatever he was working on, "Just making sawdust..."

Anyway, that's my excuse as I delve into my sewing basket.  What's yours?

Inside life

 

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile I have my Friends' books to enjoy.

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

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

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

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

                                            

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

to make Alexander something chocolate for his afternoon treat.  

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

Out my window...

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

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

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

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

Images twenty years old appear in the fitfully moving branches.

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

You are invited...

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

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

The imaginary traveler

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

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

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

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

photo:  France Today

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

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

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

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

Of loss and the lost

I know I promised to write this time about the art I'm framing, gathered from trips abroad, but I can't settle into that right now, though the two photographs, painting and poster are laid out in front of me, their inspirations still vibrating.  What is on my mind has been almost life-changing; but if that sounds like hyperbole, I can't blame you for thinking so...so much is overblown these days (think about that poor word amazing, which has lost its true meaning with every inexact stab; life-changing, like incredible, fails that way, as well).  But hear me out.

A week and a day ago, carrying Alexander to the Farm for an afternoon swim, rushing first to get him on his feet and ready for our reservation (in these days of distancing and caution we have to sign up for a place in the pool), I forgot, while I changed into my suit, to remove my necklace.  We were in the pool, diving under water and playing Alexander's game of Torpedo, when I suddenly said to him,  "Oops!  You wait here by the pool side, while I go up to put this in my bag."

I dropped the necklace in the deep well of (oh, look! here comes some travel art, after all) the canvas bag, a David Hockney reproduction which I'd picked up at the Tate exhibit while in London a few years ago, and which became thereafter my swim bag.  Then I went back to fun with Alexander.

We had a busy afternoon...the swim, then coming home for a snack and rest, then making dinner for Joseph (it was Friday night)...so I didn't think of it again until just before I went to bed.  Unloading the bag, shaking everything out, then shaking out again, I began to panic.  No necklace.

I'm not much of a jewelry person, but this one is always with me, part of me after all this time.  It's the one Jake gave me for our tenth wedding anniversary, three small diamond and gold droplets, graduated in size to represent, he told me (as I stared, astounded), our past, our present and our future together.  It was a gift so unlike anything he would have ordinarily chosen that it became a kind of icon of the moment. 

Jake was, really, a romantic person.  Each holiday, birthday, anniversary brought a huge bouquet of flowers to the door.  Celebrations were often weekend trips or longer journeys, often surprises (we were only a few miles from Williamsburg when I realized where he was taking me one birthday), and tokens picked up along the way to remind us of where we had been. But something like this...I couldn't get my head around his head thinking of this gift.  That day I clipped it on me and there it stayed, all through the next decade and on into widowhood, removed only for showers, MRIs...and of course swims.

The next morning I called the pool, emailed the Farm director, and then, the minute they opened, rushed over to beg the lifeguards to help me look for it in the only two or three places it could have dropped out. They checked lost and found, drawers and cubbies.  Ben, the director, kindly sympathetic, promised to keep an eye out.  All kinds of scenarios were going through my mind, including, I'm sorry to say, the not very generous image of someone finding it and deciding it was their lucky day.  On someone else, I imagined bitterly, it would be bereft of meaning, only a sham.

In a few days, Ben wrote to say a necklace did show up, one with gold stars, but it wasn't mine.  I looked for a photograph to send him, but because I am not a selfie taker, and, frankly, dislike having my picture taken at all, it was difficult to come up with any.  Finally, my sister texted me one she had snapped in front of the Louvre last year (neither the museum nor I come out looking dignified, but at least the necklace shows clearly.  And,no, it won't appear here, though Mary Ellen looks good).

Meanwhile, my mind was undergoing a sea change, not unlike those transformers all the kids had to have a few decades ago.  Though I live only a block from where Jake is buried, I avoided that corner when I walked each morning, shamed by my carelessness.  It occurred to me that this might be some sort of sign.  He's been gone eight years last month, but maybe the universe was trying to point out that life with him had become, as Grace Paley wrote, a known closed book.  My sister, trying to salve my sorrow, reminded me that loss often means an opening to something else.  Like what?  Goodness knows, life has changed almost constantly these past years.  Haven't I changed enough with it?

When a week had gone by, hearing no more news, I briefly thought of filing for insurance, but I didn't dare open that can of psychological worms.   Money, or even a close replacement was useless; it wasn't, after all, so much the jewelry that was precious but that signature of a life.

Interestingly, my reading during the past week has been, first, Jill McCorkle's new book Hieroglyphics, about a couple whose lives were each founded on loss, and for whom such small leavings mean everything.  (The book comes on the heels of her Life after Life; my favorite of all of hers, it also, though in a different context, threads through the same theme.)  When I came to the last page, I reached automatically for one of Anne Tyler's to re-read.  Jill's stories and the telling of them always seem to me to share the same sensibilities as Tyler's, and three novels later, An Accidental Marriage closed beside me, I lifted my head, now wrung out with late regret.

About now you may be saying to yourself, perhaps understandably impatient, "Yes, yes, how sad...but we do lose things, after all...one gets over it."  It's how I too kept thinking I should be thinking.

Should have been thinking, should be thinking still.  And yet...our losses return over and over in waves, no matter what the latest event that brings them forth.

I put aside Marriage, and picked up my phone, which, by the way, had been oddly silent the hours I was reading.  On it was a message from the Farm:  "Necklace", Ben had entitled it.  It had been sent an hour before, probably just when I had gotten to the point in the story where Michael, the husband of the couple, finally comes face to face with the now-grown child they had lost track of over 30 years before.  I don't think there is significance in that...only in the message that lay for an hour unreceived while I read it: Good morning.  I think my assistant manager, Seth, found your necklace.  Picture attached.

 "I'm on my way," I wrote back, grabbed my keys and headed to the Farm.

Seth, who, it turned out, was no longer at the pool, but at the grocery while his kids napped, told me the story of the find when we met in the parking lot.  He and his family had been leaving their swim session when his little one dropped the top of her sippy cup just outside the entry gate.  He leaned down to pick it up, and there, half buried in the gravel, he saw my necklace.  Unwilling to leave it at the desk, he put it in his pocket. "I'd been reading the emails about it," he said, "so I knew it was important to you."

I didn't know how to thank him...a nice dinner, I offered?  a gift? anything at all? I kept babbling my thanks over and over.  No, no, he repeated.  "I'm just glad to get it back to you."

In the car, I clicked the necklace on, still a little rough from its week in the gravel, and went shopping myself, every few minutes patting my neck where it lay like a security blanket.  Now, a day later, I seem to be traveling between the way things were before its loss and a different place I haven't figured out yet.  I'm relieved, of course, but what I am swimming in is much more complex than relief.

In the meantime, however, I am pretty sure I owe Seth's little girl something for dropping her sippy cup just where it could turn my day and my sense of where I am around.  Monday, I'll see to it.

And I am thinking that that loss and that find with all their reverberations would play good parts in either of those authors' novels, wouldn't they?