In my shoes

I promise that this isn't going to be a morality tale about learning the trials of others' lives...it's really literally about shoes and how...well, I'll come to that later.

I've been walking a lot lately, since an arthritis study I'm participating in gave me this basic fitbit to keep track of my "activity" each day.  

It isn't the easiest contraption to wear and keep charged, but, though it insists on showing me data I really don't need to know...like the number of times I get up from a chair each hour...it has been an admittedly helpful way to think about moving my feet.  And since spring has sprung fully around here, the longer days mean I've more chances...and more incentive...to get out and hit the ground more often.

Spring is our most enlivening season.  Each day a new blossom; each day a new urge to walk among them.  The sun changes the shape of shadows, the moon stays in the morning sky a bit longer.  Last week the redbuds burst out; this week the azaleas take their turn.

Bouquets of all sorts burst out from passing yards, and tulips, thanks to friends' gifts, appear at the door.

But I digress...back to those springier walks, and the shoes I step out in.

Lately, my walks have been a little lumpy.  I thought it was just the unevenness of pebbly or cone-littered roads, but the other day I turned my shoes over to find each sole a little thin...my finger could pass right through.  I sighed.

I like these shoes, which my brother-in-law Jim found for me the last time I visited their favorite shoe store with him and Eileen...they were a brand I wouldn't have thought would take the place of the more orthopaedically supported kind I usually go for, but they have kept me comfortable company for the year and a half (or more, now?) that I've had them.

Since time and tides don't permit me a trip west, I took myself to the huge shoe warehouse in the mall here, looking to replace the ones I'd worn to the bone.

I hate shopping.  Thinking about a drive to a store sets me frowning (grocery and art  stores excepted).   There are too many choices, too many unhappily unsuited things before me.  More often than not, I walk out empty-handed, exhausted and confused with the uselessness of it.  My only gain is that, having parked in the spot farthest from the store, and doggedly plowing through the crammed aisles inside, I can rack up eight or nine hundred new steps on my day's tally.  Still, it's not the most charming of vistas to enjoy stepping into.

Necessity, however, dictated.  At least, I thought, I know what I am looking for, so I  deliberately wore my holey shoes to be sure I found the right thing.

But alas...like most things you favor, this style no longer existed.  Newer designs, with gel cutouts and laces that tangled when you looked at them, had edged my good practical ones out.  Sizes, too, seemed off...I measured my old shoes to the new ones which claimed to be 7.5s and found them off by a quarter-inch.  To cut a long (frustrating) shop short, I chose a pair of purple laced sneakers I thought would work, leaving behind under my try-on bench eight boxes of pairs that didn't.

Once home, however, walking around the rug, I noticed that these new ones ("Shoes Made for Women", they cackled on the box top) didn't give me much top support.  I sighed again.  Back to the store.  In the rain.

This time, only five boxes aside, I made do with the ones above...a half-size bigger to allow for an insert and heavier socks, should they last through next winter.  This time I walked up and down the aisles in them for at least a quarter hour until I was sure.  In each aisle I passed heels higher than the stand they stood on and women trying them on for spring wardrobes.  It's entertainment, of a sort, I guess.

Last evening with my friend Laurie, I, newly shod and with a springier step, headed out to the arboretum to check out the new blooms.  A pair of gel pads helped take my mind off my feet and onto the Spanish bluebells, cherry blossoms, tiny hyacinths and snowdrops...a fine evening's walk indeed.

At bedtime, I charted my steps with a smile (9,764) and slept happily.

I'm sorry there's no moral to this story...just a spring complaint and a confection of flowers.  Forgive me.

The double-edge of March

 

March has brought us flowers and pain, new life and old woes across the world. 

 I just put up my monthly sign for PORCH, our local volunteer hunger relief organization (I've written about it before), and sent a note to neighbors to remind them of our bag of food/donation collection next weekend.  

Hunger, like March, is a many-sided brute.  While aesthetics consider it a path to holiness; others a staff of life for themselves and families; and some a dietery  regimen, or the latest diet, there are those for whom, through lack of basic resources or famine or the destruction of war, hunger means more than food...homes destroyed or abandoned, families separated, children unfed in so many ways, the loneliness of an unreachable distance...with miles to go to safety, if there is means and strength and time. 

I am glad to work for PORCH...they are a wonderful, dedicated, and determined grassroots group of volunteer women and men, young and elder.  The relief of hunger, even here in this privileged town, is important; the food-challenged (I'm wary of this euphemism, though it's used a lot) can be invisible but present in multitudes.  Mostly we worry about children and the strapped families who care for them...grandmothers, immigrants, refugees, single parents, teenagers...the  stranger at the gate.

But as I wrote this morning's PORCH reminder, I thought of all those far from reach or help.  It seems an impossible task, that saving of life through its most elemental need...food.  In spring, the season of flowering, the earth bringing forth its beauty, promising abundance in gardens and farms, we yearn for...even expect...hope.   The connotations of March delude us.

Our book group this month read a novel from a newish writer who needs reminding that it's best to write what you know and can feel.  It centered on librarians in Paris who struggle to keep safe their books and themselves from the coming invasion of Hitler's ruinous corps, and while it looked promising, it read quite superficially...I'd call it a romance novel.

The book seemed a surprising choice for a group like ours...indeed, we couldn't figure out who recommended it.  We like history, and certainly we grew up in libraries and books, but we usually ask of writers some sensibility, some insight, into the human spirit.  It is well, if you are out to please a quick reader, to paint a backdrop of historical anecdotes (usually ones that can be gotten from the encyclopaedia), the most poignant to swell the heart and the most horrifying to thrill...and then draw in the foreground a romantic intrigue or two.  

rvm, "Wish you were here"

Our discussion, though, broke through into the subject of betrayal...the betrayal of one people to another, of one person to another, of the horror of both betrayal and reprisal.  Who can you trust if the climate of hunger is thrust upon you?  What would you do, even against the common good (or the family good, if it comes to that) to survive, physically and emotionally?  How do you live with the consequences, life-long?  This last, it seemed to me, presents an intriguing look into the varieties of ways in which denial and doubt tangle the spirit, foiling hope.

If we thought the inconvenience of the Covid pandemic was problematic (betrayal, denial and doubt rife there, too), think of the constancy of war betraying the hunger most of us have for a life of substance beyond survival...a life not pitted against the power hungry, the egoists, the tunnel-visioned Goliaths.

Alice Dodds May, "Invasion"

It's hardly up to March, its namesake the god of war, to find a way through the conundrum of beauty and horror...the season is meant only to illustrate it.  For us, who must take it to task, person and people, where is the inspiration, where the means...where the hope?

Joy after Hope, photo from Susan Stein

Perhaps, to begin, we need to accept hope as it comes, 

one spring-scented breeze at a time.

A long time coming...

 

This morning I finally finished an art hanging that I'd begun in 2017,  a book of seven copper pages with various found things attached.  At the time, I'd been fiddling with  elementary metalwork and wood...mainly rusted pieces, wire and scraps from the street and from generous neighbors, often with holdings of dried branches or twigs or their bark...anything with a texture that caught my eye.  Ephemera, some artists call it, though that seems too airy for such solid earth-elements.

  

Some pieces, like the two above, are easier than others...they know how to tell me what they want to be.  The copper book, though I enjoyed doing the individual pages, was a challenge because once the pages were finished the whole seemed to elude binding.  Yet I knew that the pages needed to form a book...they weren't fighting me on that point.  But getting materials this bulky to come into readable "text"...how to do that?  Over time, I tried three binding methods in vain.  

Eventually, I left the pages stacked in a leather sleeve on the bottom shelf.  But they lived in a corner of my mind and would surface now and then, question mark intact.

Finally, earlier this month, I undid the package and laid it out on the floor next to my work chair.  I walked around it, still confounded.  I asked various experts for their ideas, and continued to frown.

Then, this morning, after a sleep frustratingly interrupted by sporadic knee pain and a forced awakening that turned out to be a mistake, I thought, well, I'm dressed and it's too early for the rest of  the day's chores, and wandered into my workroom, walking over that line of copper pages.

Perhaps because of the bad night and the topsy-turviness of the day's beginning, it suddenly occurred to me that I was looking at the piece wrong way round.  I'd meant it to be bound in a literal arrangement, one page after another, like a library book.  Except this wasn't a book bound for the library.  Its title should have been a clue, for what in life ever goes from left to right (or even right to left) in a linear track?

Just two days before, my nice neighbor Holly had given me, in a treasury of supplies she no longer used, a coil of copper wire.  I picked it up.  It was just the right gauge to use as hangers...not side to side as I'd always assumed, but top to bottom.  My book would hang, in its own right and clearly its own preference, one page over another, vertically.

I couldn't believe, as I sat winding the wire through each set of pages, that I hadn't thought of it sooner.  For one thing, a string of horizontal pages would need a very wide wall to display; a bound set of pages would need a shelf to sit on, clumsily at best, or a specially designed holder to underpin its uneven size and shape.  But there were always places to hang a long, narrow piece.

Clearly the elements were now aligned to bring this book to fruition.  In less than an hour, I had hanging on my wall the completed work.  When the carpenter and painter arrived a few minutes later to attend to some also last-minute house projects, I could show it off.

Left or right? top to bottom?  horizontal or vertical?  forward or backward? 

 bound or free?  late or soon? 

 Aren't those the elemental choices we are faced with in life?  For some of us (me), you would think we'd remember that there isn't only one way to arrange a work,  especially one entitled Life Instructions.  But I guess we just go on learning that day after day.

Each day...

...remember who you are

So says the daily morning prompt on my calendar.  It's been dinging at me for a few years now;  every now and then I consider it seriously, but whether I barely glance or stop to ponder, it keeps me attentive to what I have become so far.

Last night it snowed, more than the forecast allowed; this scene is brightening my window as I write.

Today, for some reason, that prompt seems to nudge me a bit more than usual...perhaps because this white landscape addresses the quiet light of inside...perhaps because only five days ago I turned a new age...a double 7, when, as in the gambling life, anything can happen.

That, of course, is the theme of life itself, but it's one more frontally before us these days when the going on and going out and coming in are continually in flux.  I, for one, have settled in to whatever.  So far, that has made our next season, Spring, a state of mind long before its time.

At the moment I am reading early chapters for a friend who is writing about the settling of the Jamestown colony, but, as is his wont in writing, it begins much earlier...it opens with the teenage future Elizabeth I being imprisoned by her half-sister.  (Goodness!  I hope he won't mind my revealing that...) He's a good storyteller, and this is a good day for reading a good story.

So, to begin here, I'm thinking that I'm lucky not to be 16th century Elizabeth, her father having died leaving a legacy of discord at home and abroad, beheadings at every turn of events.  

I'm glad to be my own age...I don't mean chronological age (octagenarian life is only a few years ahead now...hmmm), but inward age.  I'm always surprised at photos of me, my gray hair finally coming in like a dusting of powder around my temples, my smiles slopes of wrinkles.  I don't think of myself that way.  But there I am.

As this birthday card reminds me, I have all the things I need by now to be who I am 

(except I haven't worn lipstick since college).

Inwardly, I am a non-age...somedays younger, somedays older.  Every day seems to be a turning toward something and yet also a stay of time, of self.  That's hardly a profound thought, I know.  But it leads me to say that at the moment my prompt, remember who you are, is opening a peace/piece of mind that belies the world's turmoil.  I'm feeling (devil, close your ears) as if so many parts of me have come to fruition.  I breathe in this life and it fills me with a steadiness I sometimes think is cushioning against reality...like this snow today, bathed in beautiful but blinding sunlight. 

It reminds me of another daily prompt I more recently put up (on New Year's Day, actually):

Nous ne voyons pas les choses comme elle sont; 

nous voyons les choses comme nous sommes.

[We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are.]

I am not naive; I am not immune to hurt and sorrow...deep sorrow, deep angst (which includes anger, too); I am not unhearing of difficulty, others' as well as my own...I imagine struggles to come.  And at root I distrust, as I always have, easy living.

Who I am is all this life I have lived...stumbling through naivety, through difficulties of mind, body and sense (some virtual beheadings, even)...through and through, on and on.  My husband and I were once on a walk in the woods after a small tornado had hit the countryside a few days before.  Our path was suddenly cut off by a hefty clump of debris.  He began to pull it apart to get through, while I looked for (and found) a way around it.  He laughed.  "Is that the way you think the world works?  Just walk around trouble..."

I wonder.  How does that resound now?

Transitionally speaking, it seems I have come not only to a verbal blank...where does this piece go from here?...but also to a bench on the path, somewhere to stop for a while and rest in what is or in what I am...as Shakespeare quips in one of my favorite comedies, What You Will.

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And by the way:  I love old movies from the '30s and '40s and also films, if they are done well, of Shakespeare's plays, so here are the two I am making sly reference to above:

Jean Arthur and Edward Arnold in Easy Living...a comedy of errors from the 'forties

Imogen Stubbs and Helena Bonham Carter in Twelfth Night...an ageless comedy of errors in which HBC, as the lady Olivia, gives the best imaginable rendition of the line "Oh! wonderful!".

I'll bet you can find a few more...

Slow time

 

Pierre Bonnard, "Corner Table", 1920

Goodness.  I could have sworn that there weren't but two weeks since I last wrote, but here it is three.  I could say that time flies, but that would be misrepresenting these past days for me.  Time, like the seasons, has slowed.

These mornings, I'm in bed long passed when, not but a month ago, I'd be up before dawn, feet slipping to the floor, the day calling out some urgency.  I still wake early, but stay under the covers, letting thoughts surface instead of me...like scenes from a movie coming into focus, memories, constructions of new and old possibility.

Then, still resting on pillows, I read some...this morning the last part of Nella Larson's Passing, which I'd picked up from the library yesterday.  I check mail, check the weather (it's cold...still below freezing), the instinct to get up and dress lagging.

Writing this post now, showered and sweatered, sitting in my chair in the front room as the sun streams across the floor, I hear the clock strike 9.  Nine o'clock.  I'd be halfway through errands or chores or art or a walk by now in the warmer seasons.

I'm slow during the day, too, the signals to the brain announcing the next thing to do with the bowing formality of a footman required never to rush.  I deliberate, do smallest things possible, one by one, walk the same routes, until I settle down to a movie and knitting, and then to bed again to read, and fall asleep.

Even this minute, words unfold between spaces you can't see, spaces of time in which I am regarding with slow intent the walls and floor around me...the art, mostly; three cards I've saved from the holidays which I can't put out of sight yet, so part of the room they've become; that sun, equally tardy, for this flash of light would have slipped around the corner of the house by now.

Yesterday late afternoon, my neighbor Maureen came over to work on what she, excited, described as a "vision card"...a collage of what we would like the new year to look like.  Spread among scissors, glue, pens, paper, old magazines, our choices of images seeming vast, but we were remarkably focused.  Hers was a declaration of voices to be heard, environments to be saved and treasured, family and community to keep.  Mine (while certainly I value those things, as well), became a window through which silver-lined visions of sky, desert, ocean, night, a smeared moon, shelter, trees (trees, of course...my own emblem...I draw or cut them out without a conscious thought).  A tray of guest-intentioned treats made its place.  Peace, a white dove with a silver branch, comes in from the left; another, silvered as well, holds the heart of a shadowy woman, its still point.  I am inside looking out to all that.  Hope is a pane of clear glass between.

Closing in on myself seems to be the theme of this wintery January.  I don't bother to wonder why.  It's just the way it is.

Houses

 

Good morning.  In the quiet of everyone flown away, I have a chance to re-read holiday cards and their messages.

Here's what comes from that:  My friend Anne writes inside her beautiful card, "I think of your house--with the brown wood of the dining room table and the wonderful red on the walls and your art also....There is no modern decorator's 'touch,' and yet the colors and the furniture are all in quiet harmony.  My friend Kitty...has the same sort of living room...the same dark and memory-filled atmosphere."  I know what she means, though I remain humble.  It's homely, that style.

She doesn't know that I have in the past few days gotten a new dining table, a fine gift (though I insist I'm just borrowing it long-term) from my neighbors Cathy and Steve, who refinished the top, built new legs and then carried it over to put it together.  The table was Steve's mother's...the one he and his sisters grew up around.  Over the years, the cherry wood had grown dark, but, once stripped of its dusky film, shines again beautifully in my room.  Though I possess no end of tables, all shapes and sizes and uses, this one seats eight, with two leaves that allow 12.  It was just what I needed.

As if Anne's words were prophetic, the tones and colors of the wood on this one reflect easily the other wood in the room, from oak floor to Aunt Vi's elaborately veneered dresser.  Flashing off those red walls (it's persimmon, actually), this newcomer finds a mirror of itself even in the paintings and pottery strewn about.

Mostly my rooms have been homing places for the inheritances of others' tastes.  Even those unrelated to us...thrift store finds, treasures left along the street...they make their way, as well, and their origins arrive with them to stay.  This last is probably what makes them fit in so well.  That, and their usefulness.  Because we are not talking about simply decoration here.

What makes a home?  At least 40 years ago, I saw an ad for Karastan carpets which sought to attract younger people whose houses were furnished, like mine, in a style  they called, tongue in cheek, "Late Relative".  Carpets like theirs, contended Karastan, would bring together the disparate items begged, borrowed, passed along, bequeathed. (Unrelated to that ad, we bought our own two Karastans back in the '70's; they were mill trials from the factory, and are still anchoring rooms here.)

Though I'm far, far from young, "Late Relative" continues my lifelong style.  I remember a visitor to our San Antonio house, who walked through until she reached the kitchen, and said, "This house...it's heimish...do you  know that word?"  I did; it's a word impossible to translate because it means so many things beyond what we would call homey...it includes that other word, homely, but not necessarily in the disparaging sense, and it takes into account all the essences, the spirits that emanate from not only its furnishing, but the way its inhabitants live and value their lives. 

Adopting other lives with value is part of it.  I seriously can't remember a single furnishing or art that hasn't fit no matter where or whom it came from.  

To wit:  lately, another gift entered my door...a watercolored sketch, painted early on in her life by Edith London and passed on to me by a friend, who attentively collects her work.  As he brought it in, he worried that it might not "suit my style".  I didn't point out the irony of that to him, but immediately put it up against that persimmon wall where it looked like it had grown there.  There, I showed him.  All the art there is will make a home here.

Really, it's its history which enlivens each piece.  Even those few we acquire in their new state we choose because something in its origins draws us...perhaps it was handmade, perhaps it is the only one of its kind because of a peculiar but tantalizing blemish, perhaps it has hung too long on the farthest-back rack in a dusty hardware store, or  under a pile of sketches meant for discard.  There is, as my sister-in-law Jean once noted, a story for everything here.  Space, too.  Anne's friend, for example, built an addition to her house to hold remnants of her father's law office. We shift around rooms to accommodate other lives.  Anne called it an aspect of "southern manners", more than the northern tendency to acquire the new, but I believe such manners sneak north when they can.  I know for a fact that they live a high life in the west.

Design by accident, you could rightly call it, but really it's design by instinct...the instinct to preserve, to add to, then to fit together the pieces of one's lives that matter.  We save lives, sometimes without knowing whose. None of us subscribe too quickly to the theory of "letting go", of the popularly considered "uncluttering" of what once were and matter.  (And no, a photograph of a keepsake is not the same as your grandmother's well-worn quilt still covering a bed for real.) We homely ones are certainly not hoarders, but we make space for things' stories to abide and be useful well into the future.

I suppose it's fitting that this post is writing itself with barely ten days to the end of the year...an historic year both personally and publicly.  I can see it in the light from the kitchen, glittering off the glass tile and specked countertops...old pottery, china from a century ago, kitchen implements dug out of my grandmother's cellar...even thin linen handkerchiefs from the 'thirties folded in a small drawer.

The other day, two friends and I chatted about a subject lately nudging at us:  so what will happen to all this stuff, these furnishings of a life, these stories, when we are gone?  Will they move on to someone else's home, making and remaking a life?  

To be honest, we didn't have a clue:  one of us was wonderfully blase' about it, another perplexed on the side of worry, and I...I've decided to suspend the long view.  For now, it's the house where I live and what and whom I live among.  It's home.

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My dear readers, I wish you a home with such spirits in it (if that is your wish, too), 

A gift of bay and rosemary...
bay to burn away anxiety, rosemary to remember

    And a very cheerful holiday season 

                                And a new year of good for us all.