Changing times

I know...that's the buzzword for these odd pandemically disordered days, but it's not what I have on my mind right now. 

Today is my mother's birthday.  She's been gone ten years now, though it hardly seems that long ago we were at the shore together, having started out on our annual journey there, and, in a matter of days, suffered her loss.  My aunt Sadie, her youngest sister, called just now to say she was remembering her, and we talked awhile about where everyone was, and how times change.

What zinged that phrase for me, though, was her beginning apology, "Oh, I just looked at the clock and didn't realize what time it was.  Are you in the middle of your Sunday dinner?  I could call you back later."  

The clock said 12:15 and in half an hour she was to get herself ready to go up to the communal dining room for her dinner.  So she had in mind that I, too, would be setting out a Sunday dinner for myself, right on time.

As it happens, I had just finished my lunch...tuna salad and almond bread...though usually I do have my largest meal (if one can bend the definition a bit) at noon. Unless, like tonight, the boys are coming for dinner.  Eating mid-day is better for health, but frankly my reason is that I'm mostly too lazy by evening to put together anything more serious than leftovers or a higgledy-piggledy snack.  It's partly living alone and partly my energy level that peaks by ten am and practically shuts down at four.  If I know a real evening dinner is nigh, I try to have it done mostly by mid-morning.

What keeps echoing at this moment, though, is my aunt's timeless assumption that midday Sunday dinner still holds true.  Once upon a time, that was our tradition.  Sunday dinner meant a full complement of a meal, no rush, an afternoon to settle it.  Somewhere, someone still does that, I am sure.  But lives change.  Times change. Meals change character.  We are elsewhere, doing otherwise, caught up in different patterns of a week.  Sometimes, one day is very much the same as another.

There must come a point at which, after decades of changing times, we, like my aunt, go back to seeing life reflected in earlier times.  I find myself doing the same.  Though I am long retired from school, both as student and as teacher, I still feel Friday as the week's end, and the weekend ahead as the breathing time.  Sunday night, I catch myself thinking, oh, if only it were only Saturday again.  Yet for my days, there is little change between M-F and the precious open hours of the weekend.

Today, for instance, Sunday, already I have felt time's hoofprints on my back.  Why?

There is something I must confess here...Time is my nemesis, and always has been.  Time, that invention of some frightfully left-brain person still running from the dinosaur era, runs counter to the rhythms I run on.  My body does not adjust easily to time, particularly in those spring-fall changes.  Its metric system is its own.  (Stories tell that my great-grandfather, an engineer, refused to go along with those seasonal manipulations.  I envy him.)

Though the calendar upsets it far less than the clock, I would be glad if one day ran into the next, if my daily to-do lists did not have to have a particular day stamped at the top, if Monday felt like Saturday, if the day I didn't feel like doing some art or attending an appointment or digging in bulbs (well, I used to) could be as easily shifted without fuss to another moment in time. I'm not talking about procrastination, but inclination...I'm likely as not to be early as late.  So why not give up, and live on my own time?

But that would be chaos, you, shocked, are thinking.  How would you organize your social interactions? Well, there could be compromise, I suppose.  After all, a little chaos never hurt anyone.  It's the way the world began, it's the beginning of any sort of creative endeavor.  It's the way we learn to swim.  So why not?

To all these whys I have no answer.  I think of a line in a movie (I can't think which) in which one of the characters asks another why he thinks he has the nerve to do some awful thing, and the other responds, Habit.

Even having done nothing horrendous except blindly follow out the 24-7-12 agenda, I answer the same.  Habit...the cage I live in. 

I am going for a walk now, not because of the time, but because the day is fair and I need to breathe.

As the year ends, the calendar shifting us once more, we all need some fresh air and a break, even if temporary, from the Habit of Time...

I wish it for each of you.

The poetry of cotton

 On the nowhere road between home and office, those 18 years I lived in the Eastern part of the state, this time of year the fields flatten and turn to short-haired flax, much like the farmers driving their loads along the highway next to me.   Along the road, the cotton workers go about their work, hatted and gloved, darker and more serious as they gather the seed-specked balls in combine-waves across the landscape.  Trip by trip, I must have absorbed that common scene until years later it has impressed itself indelibly in memory.

Cotton field, Eastern NC

But it is Laura Frankstone's Instagram photo of her painting, yesterday's "warm-up" (as she calls it), which brings that vision back to me.

Cotton, Laura Frankstone

I'm glad of it, not only for the spark of memory, but also for the inspiration to poetry again, something  I find suddenly re-surfacing over this past month.

This morning, her dancing cotton balls inspired not only the vision, but also a poem, not something I have been doing regularly, though occasions, like holiday cards and once in a while a commemorative birthday, will bring me to verse again.

Cotton, in its various envisionings, has been a sort of opening of the field, to borrow Robert Duncan's phrase. Laura has been writing about the slow work of getting back to art after a long time of personal trials and removals, and her days finally in her new studio,"warming up" again to the field of making.  Whether, like her, there is now a new, big bright space to work in, or like me at this small table before a window which looks out, just as brightly, to garden beauty, insights come from all the windows we look out of.

And now, the renewed impulse to poetry is here...flaxen, flat enough to invite words for themselves, in the patterns, sounds, rhythms, images and gyrations down the page toward meaning...mine, yours, anybody's.  And in ink.  Though these posts and some letters are written straight onto this laptop, more personal things, like poems and other letters, journals and art, come out from the nib of a pen. I've always done that, draft after draft until it begs to be put into print...if it ever does. 

This time, interestingly, so did the first drafting of this post, on the nearest paper and pen I could grab...a sketch pad I keep by the side of the sofa for Alexander and me.

Here's the poem, which, as you see, begins the way this post does.  The poetic line came first.

Bounty

On the nowhere road between home and town

the fields flatten and turn to flax...cotton, soy, and tobacco

succumbing to the fall reapers.

                                         

Cotton is the last crop in, being the less sensitive to chill.

Here, bent workers, hatted and gloved, still glean,

while combine harvesters lumber toward the field's

edge where, like sheep herded and branded, the white

brick giants await their transformation.  For now,

cotton is king and queen again; for now, from field to market, 

it reigns.

 

At home, I lay my gathered bolls to rest while I consider 

their meaning; there lies the path into their world. 

What they become, finally, out in the world, or in my

hands, they (and I) wait to discover.

If only, I think, we stopped to glean more leavings, how much

richer our visions, our understanding, our love.

                                                            r            12 .17 .2020

December, or how it comes to be

 The last holiday card has gone out, and now, facing a worktable without a brush or paper or glue in my hand, I'm feeling a little at odds.

That task, which this year began in early November and filled my mornings until the whole list of 108 family and friends was satisfied, gave me not only purpose but an illuminating beginning to each day.  Today I looked desperately through my address books for people I might have forgotten, but alas there's only one and he's moved without a forwarding address.

I could, of course, just continue to make more cards, for whatever occasions come up in the future, but I discovered something this year:  art seems more inspired if I have someone intended to receive it.  

And these days, the work served a more essential purpose...in relative isolation from what in other times would be a pretty busy set of celebratory months, art was a connector between me and the others I would have ordinarily enjoyed celebrating with.  

Over the summer months, what I called small art kept me busy, and some of those, with or without potential receivers, pleased me. (There is always my discard pile for the others, though historically,  someone happening upon it may have snatched up one or two and carried them home...)  I could go back to that.  There is a year full of birthdays to greet, as well, so I suppose I could begin a 2021 list and follow it out a few pieces at a time.  Birthdays are numerous in certain months...May, September, for example...and not many in others, like November and December (emptied by deaths and geographical desertions, both of them).  But there is no month with none, thankfully, and that keeps me going.

This year, though a few of those holidayers were watercolored, I found the most pleasure in collage.  Just as I was beginning in earnest, I discovered a new local source for handmade paper, a tiny gift shop opened this year in an old railroad station by some people who also own one of my favorite clothing stores nearby.  I  don't make paper myself (sorry, all you talented papermakers), the process being not to my aesthetic tolerance.  But I admire those whose work I can unroll, tear and cut, put together like a puzzle, often the pieces suggesting their own places on the stock.

Sometimes there are ornaments (the bookmakers have a word for it, but I can't remember now what it is) to be added, but mostly the paper seemed not to want accessorizing, though they would accept a stab of pencil or pen now and then.  (My white, gold and silver pens need replacing by now.)

The thing about paper is that no matter how precious (and costly) the sheet, little of it goes to waste, at least around here.   Under my worktable is a basket of large scraps torn from the rolls, and I scrounge around in it until what I want can't be found. 

 On the work surface itself are the very small scraps, which you would think were destined for the waste bin, but they come in too handy for that.  In fact, they have the most creative spirit of any size...there is always a tiny shape that fits perfectly to make a leaf or to fill in a gap of color or to edge a mountain or to become a sliver of lake.

Just like a jigsaw puzzle, as the shapes fit themselves together, so does the vision.  It doesn't take but an initial piece or two to realize the person it's meant for; the title, too,  The tools at hand, pretty much, do their own work, silent and unappreciated except by me.

The way all those papers worked, especially this year, also broadened my images...they didn't necessarily need to be stock holiday pictures, or even winter ones, for that matter.  They just made themselves whatever they wanted to be.

Often people will send me thanks for what they receive, and I appreciate that, but they needn't...the pleasure of the work is all mine, and I'm grateful to have someone to pass it along to.

I hope each of you has some holiday pleasure you can count on to lift your spirits these days.  

I'd love to know what it is.

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...

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

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.