I have in mind to tell the story of my upbringing and the paths that led me to become –among other things--a French professor. I say paths as if I could look back, squint a bit and see patterns reveal themselves or see logical outcomes from the circumstances that shaped the world I came to know. But what happened to me the summer of 1967, the summer I turned 18, even from this considerable distance in time, looks more like a fairy tale than ever. Like Lucy and Alice and Aladdin, I stepped into the armoire in the spare room, climbed right through the looking glass, rubbed the magic lamp all innocent and ignorant. Pouf! and there I was, spending a summer with a countess in her chateau in the Loire Valley. Since every bit of the story was unlikely, fate and chance have come to mean just about the same thing to me.
It begins, though, when I was five because that is the year when my shyness finally got on my mother’s nerves.
In the spring of 1954 Mama sent me to a kindergarten three days a week. Kindergarten was composed of other children I didn’t know and didn’t much want to know, women who were not my mother and a despised daily dose of tomato juice. Every day lasted forever because I knew there would be tomato juice at snack time. The tomato juice ruined the morning; apprehension filled my stomach with dread. And the afternoon was ruined because I had drunk it; sour humiliation replaced the dread. I did like the easels set up outdoors on fine days and the long wooden paintbrushes. They were so long and delightful to wave in the air that I could imagine painting the sky or the grass and did once paint the girl next to me. But on rainy days there were no such comforts, only the dreary waiting until Mama would come for me.
I had no wish to make myself agreeable to anyone outside my family. The sole exceptions were our next door neighbors on either side whom I saw nearly every day. They were old people, slow-spoken and undemanding who rarely appeared to notice how I stood wrapped in my mother’s skirt while she stood talking by their door. We went to one neighbor for eggs and the other for cake and flowers. The chicken neighbors had barns and a Model-T and an old woman so old she never left her bed. Her grownup daughter Helen did all the cooking and cleaning and she made root beer that made my stomach stretch. The other neighbors had sold us our own big house and moved into a smaller one up the hill set back from the road in a grove of tall maples. They were a man and his wife and also his sister. Besides my brother,mother and father these were the only people in our town I let coax me into a few words. Sometimes the sister who was thin and a stooped and who always wore an apron would ask me to help her pick something sweet like lilies of the valley or even strawberries. Like me, she didn’t seem to like talking in front of people. In the garden though, our faces about level, she would gossip about the fairies who played hide and seek among the flowers. She showed me small secret things like the inside of a columbine blossom, its chambers all arranged in a circle, a good place, she said, for a fairy to keep a secret, special thing like the songs and stories they collected. This was a notion I’d never considered, but her clear, hazel eyes, so close to mine, could never lie. She never told me anything about herself. I knew she was my friend.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
November Memories
The lingering evenings of summer have turned to memory. Lately the November sunsets captivate us -- as I walk back to the house up the drive they are one part gilded mountain silhouettes, one part inky, back-lit garden silhouettes. All the glory slips to shadow and darkness like running water. The light's collapse yesterday brought back the refrain from that folksong: “oh our good times are all gone and I’m bound for movin’ on.” The green slopes below our house carry my thoughts down the steep hills, down and down to the river. There's something about moving on in the air. Joni Mitchell also wrote a good sad song about summer dying into fall and how her lover just had to leave and how she had to let him go.
Every line in “Urge for Going” plucks at my memories. Tom Rush sang the song the first time I heard it. He was at Northeastern University in his very first one man concert. Between that and “The Panama Limited” my 16 year old self was struck dumb with desire. Not for him but for the romance. I wanted the departure without a place to go. To wander, to hop trains, to feel the drama of lovers parting, the farewell that only sang its hurt and thought not at all about the morrow...that was the stuff of my dreams then. So November sunsets still provoke some wish; maybe it’s only an unrequited longing from the past. And yet, 44 years later, with a house and attic full of stuff, a safety deposit box downtown and in it a last will and testament, well, the nostalgia about feeling free of things feels almost fresh. These very thoughts of lightness and simplicity beguile my soul.
I don’t go anywhere, of course. I shrug off those longings and turn back into the house where the light beside my chair falls on bright wools and my usual, several half-read books. I tell Hugh some garbled version of all those thoughts and feelings and in response he puts on a record of Pete Seeger in concert. My heart thrills to “We Shall Overcome” and to hear again the old hootenanny style Seeger never abandoned, not even in Carnegie Hall, so effective at getting everybody singing, everybody marching. What are these sentimental tears for songs of political purpose and protest? It’s been forty years at least.
The timer ticks; nighttime has darkened the windows, made them into mirrors. Dinner is almost ready. Now, deep in my body, I miss my mother and my father. If only they could have seen this house, petted these dogs, let me serve them at this table. If only they were here to kiss me. And to let me kiss them. To gaze on their granddaughters. These are November thoughts, that wild rushing wish to steal back what life has taken from us.
Every line in “Urge for Going” plucks at my memories. Tom Rush sang the song the first time I heard it. He was at Northeastern University in his very first one man concert. Between that and “The Panama Limited” my 16 year old self was struck dumb with desire. Not for him but for the romance. I wanted the departure without a place to go. To wander, to hop trains, to feel the drama of lovers parting, the farewell that only sang its hurt and thought not at all about the morrow...that was the stuff of my dreams then. So November sunsets still provoke some wish; maybe it’s only an unrequited longing from the past. And yet, 44 years later, with a house and attic full of stuff, a safety deposit box downtown and in it a last will and testament, well, the nostalgia about feeling free of things feels almost fresh. These very thoughts of lightness and simplicity beguile my soul.
I don’t go anywhere, of course. I shrug off those longings and turn back into the house where the light beside my chair falls on bright wools and my usual, several half-read books. I tell Hugh some garbled version of all those thoughts and feelings and in response he puts on a record of Pete Seeger in concert. My heart thrills to “We Shall Overcome” and to hear again the old hootenanny style Seeger never abandoned, not even in Carnegie Hall, so effective at getting everybody singing, everybody marching. What are these sentimental tears for songs of political purpose and protest? It’s been forty years at least.
The timer ticks; nighttime has darkened the windows, made them into mirrors. Dinner is almost ready. Now, deep in my body, I miss my mother and my father. If only they could have seen this house, petted these dogs, let me serve them at this table. If only they were here to kiss me. And to let me kiss them. To gaze on their granddaughters. These are November thoughts, that wild rushing wish to steal back what life has taken from us.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Part the Third: Then I put my tools away in my customary, tidy way
...and finally sat down to do my research on fiction and the art of the novel and what many a brilliant old white man has had to say about them. After I selected some pithy excerpts for my reading group friends, I wrote the reading tips that follow. I don't expect they will appeal to a whole lot of people. You may have to have spent hundreds upon hundreds of days and nights reading when you might have been doing something, as my Mama used to say, to like to think about books and the problems they set us so much as this suggests. If you are of the same tribe or merely curious about how former literature professors think about reading, then forge ahead.
And here's a clue to my method in all things literary: the picture above contains some secrets in plain sight. Remember the lumpy bag?
Strategies for Reading Fiction
Here’s a sneak-peak at the way professors and critics read and what they teach their students. Even for determined graduate students all these caveats, “remember to wear your mittens” kind of thing, seem to hinder the reading process at first. But as the reader internalizes these techniques and further shapes them to suit her own interests and character, they engender a relatively easy-going, or at least unburdened, manner for enriched reading of any text.
Read slowly. Speaking pace is the right speed. Run the words across your tongue and lips, at least imagine that you are doing so, so the assonance and alliteration, the rhythms and repetitions, the sway and speed of a sentence are palpable and enjoyable. Professionals read everything twice at least. It’s true that authors don’t expect that from their public but nor do architects expect their admirers to go poking about the foundations in an effort to find out what holds the thing up. --Grammar and word choice can slow a sentence down or speed it up. If you’re not aware of that already, just reading a good paragraph out loud should reveal the nearly musical controls a skilled writer utilizes. –
Interact with the text. Cultivate and notice your reactions, both your emotions and your thoughts. Keep notes. If you can’t or won’t write in your book, then keep a little notebook close at hand. Exclaim, question, disagree, note comparisons with other books and/or authors that come to mind and write down the page numbers. (Of course that sounds obvious but you’d be surprised how many students forget to write down the pages and come to grief later.) Notice when you are swept away or perhaps stunned with pleasure. Try to identify why. What happened there? Where in the text did it start and how did it come to a close?
Look things up. Whether it’s history or geography or fashion or custom, don’t let the chance go by. Use your dictionary, encyclopedia, or Google. Enrich your reading by researching the answers to your questions or amplifying your knowledge.
Remember that the topic of a novel is rarely its subject. The author’s primary interest (or subject) may well be quite different and even hard to ascertain—as in buried beneath or around or within the storyline.
Bear in mind that you’re examining a work of art intended, oddly enough, for upper middle class consumption. (This may pertain to all the arts, I don’t know. Certainly all art was once the exclusive domain of the wealthy and powerful since the Church and nobility were the only patrons. Our notion of the avant-garde (indicating a profound rejection of middle class mores and values) derives entirely from a society in which artists could survive on very little. There are historical cultural reasons why this happened in Paris before other places –think Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Rodin, Monet, Mallarmé, Cocteau-even foreigners like Man Ray, Beckett, and Ionesco thrived in Paris.
Ask yourself what you hope to receive as a result of reading a novel and how that expectation or wish influences your appreciation or interpretation of the text.
Bring everything you’ve ever read to bear on what you read now. Novelists do the same although I’m sure they sometimes wish they could choose not to. As you do this, notice how every rhetorical device used in other literary forms has its use in ficton. Metaphor, metonymy, allusion, ambiguity, antithesis, parallelism, hyperbole and analogy. Also that the impulses behind tragedy and comedy and the narrative devices that belong to each, shape fiction. I think the only exceptions to this last are epic and saga where the heroic mode prevails. And heroes, whether alive or dead, are neither tragic nor comic. People say tragic hero and comic hero but they don't really mean it. Or, rather, they use the word "hero" to indicated the main character. But these two are not at all the same thing.
Jolly stuff, huh?
Good Times in Old Hat, Part the Second
So after the dogs stretched and romped and lolled a bit--the old yellow one got done with the romping before the white sprig who may never grow up--
I finally got to pruning the Japanese willow which, had we known it would grow to 16 feet, we would never, ever have planted right next to a young crab apple tree. So this year I cut it down by 10 feet instead of the usual 6, half-wondering and worrying (since I am so good at worrying) that it will punish me next spring either by out and out dying first thing or by behaving like the broom in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, growing alarmingly and uncontrollably until our driveway disappears from view and we might have to be rescued.
I imagined that lively scenario for awhile partly because I'd been thinking about Sleeping Beauty only the day before and comparing her sleep with poor Rapunzel's wandering in the desert (a metaphor with a poor translation; I'm guessing wilderness was real word and the concept behind it was the shunning of an unmarried mother) and partly because I'd been wondering if Rochester's blinding by fire in Jane Eyre and his later reacquisition of sight once love and parenthood blessed redeem him, well, if Charlotte Bronte was thinking about or remembering somehow the Rapunzel story and that made me finally go in because I had to find out when the Brothers Grimm published and/or when Andrew Lang brought out his version. Turned out the Red Fairy Book was too late--1890. I didn't think Charlotte Bronte read German but then I remembered that the Brothers Grimm collected the story but that the original was probably the French version by Charlotte-Rose de La Force in the 17th century. Since Charlotte Bronte spoke French I'm sure she knew this tale well...
You can read all about Rapunzel's history and see some splendid illustrations here.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
A Favorite but Much Worn Hat, Part the First
My bookgroup has me running our next two meetings. November and December pose their own obvious challenges as few have time to meet for three hours on a Friday afternoon before either Thanksgiving or Christmas, let alone read a tome.
For November I am supposed to say something intelligent about three things and in December to put my statements to the test by using them to consider, interpret, appreciate--something like that--a novel of my choosing. So I chose a short one: Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, who was born in Dominica, seems to have asked herself a few questions about that woman locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, the woman Rochester had married in the Caribbean and who had gone mad shortly thereafter. Rhys' answers to her questions constitute her exceptional novel. Her storyline is gripping, exquisite, ambiguous--almost Gothic--and provides dual historical lens through which to view popular conceptions regarding women and sexuality and their connection to popular conceptions regarding women and madness; Rhys manages both the Victorian perspective mid-19th century and her own one hundred years later.
I chose this book because it's beautifully written and short. (Remember the holidays' demands on leisure time.) It's also complex, one of my criteria for the November Three Things. First I am assigned to speak to the difference between literature and all the rest, the great body of not-literature, and explain how one might tell the difference and justify this difference as valuable to anyway who isn't a college professor. There, that's Thing the One.
Next I'm to say something intelligent about the novel. I might speak to its history, its practitioners, its popularity, its construction or even its topics. Thing the Second.
Third and last requires both theoretical and useful remarks about reading strategies, the variety of ways one might approach a fine novel (assuming I've set to rest the literature question) to gain the greatest pleasure.
It was a treat to be invited to labor away like a college professor again. It's been a very long time since I gave a lecture, no matter how informal, and even had the chance to follow up with the close examination of a text. Nothing so sweet as theory AND praxis. So, here's fair warning: I plan to keep track of the preparation process here over the next few days and share whatever tidbits surface as I research what many a famous critic and author have had to say about LITERATURE, THE NOVEL, and THE READER.
But the sun is shining and the willows are only half-pruned and the dogs are nudging and nuzzling for outside time. Out we go for a few hours.
For November I am supposed to say something intelligent about three things and in December to put my statements to the test by using them to consider, interpret, appreciate--something like that--a novel of my choosing. So I chose a short one: Jean Rhys' The Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, who was born in Dominica, seems to have asked herself a few questions about that woman locked in the attic of Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, the woman Rochester had married in the Caribbean and who had gone mad shortly thereafter. Rhys' answers to her questions constitute her exceptional novel. Her storyline is gripping, exquisite, ambiguous--almost Gothic--and provides dual historical lens through which to view popular conceptions regarding women and sexuality and their connection to popular conceptions regarding women and madness; Rhys manages both the Victorian perspective mid-19th century and her own one hundred years later.
I chose this book because it's beautifully written and short. (Remember the holidays' demands on leisure time.) It's also complex, one of my criteria for the November Three Things. First I am assigned to speak to the difference between literature and all the rest, the great body of not-literature, and explain how one might tell the difference and justify this difference as valuable to anyway who isn't a college professor. There, that's Thing the One.
Next I'm to say something intelligent about the novel. I might speak to its history, its practitioners, its popularity, its construction or even its topics. Thing the Second.
Third and last requires both theoretical and useful remarks about reading strategies, the variety of ways one might approach a fine novel (assuming I've set to rest the literature question) to gain the greatest pleasure.
It was a treat to be invited to labor away like a college professor again. It's been a very long time since I gave a lecture, no matter how informal, and even had the chance to follow up with the close examination of a text. Nothing so sweet as theory AND praxis. So, here's fair warning: I plan to keep track of the preparation process here over the next few days and share whatever tidbits surface as I research what many a famous critic and author have had to say about LITERATURE, THE NOVEL, and THE READER.
But the sun is shining and the willows are only half-pruned and the dogs are nudging and nuzzling for outside time. Out we go for a few hours.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Book Sale
Walpole village held its annual book sale this past weekend. When we first moved here some 12 years ago they held this sale in spring. Tables on the sidewalk in front of the library held the books weeded from the collection that year as well as the hodegpodgy assortments that spilled from boxes donated by patrons. I'm sure each box held secret stories of never-read self-improvement books, hobbies begun and cast aside, gifts from from relatives who only consulted their own tastes, and the dusty purchases of impulsive youth. For starters. Just imagine all those stories about unwanted or no longer wanted books.
Well, under the eager and kind management of some of the library's best friends, the sale grew to such proportions that they moved it into the Town Hall years ago and even selected a generally cold and gloomy weekend. The sale thus fills the lull between foliage tourists and Thanksgiving that so bedevils our country calenders with doldrums. The weekend also boasted Halloween, of course, not to mention the beginning of muzzle-loading season, but never mind, this town had its mind on books. Witness the fact that the sale moved this year to the middle school gym and auditorium, the only space in town to accommodate goings on of such magnitude. Our village's once dinky and disorganized but neighborly and charming country book sale now needs a full-fledged parking lot, refreshments, two squads of volunteer teenagers, numerous volunteer pick-up trucks and dozens upon dozens of long tables. But only four cashiers! I am happy to report though that my cashier at least was still totting up my purchase in her head--not a calculator in sight--relying only a little on the fingers of her left hand. After several efforts that arrived within a plus or minus margin of $3 I suggested we round things off in an upwards direction. She looked relieved and a little grateful too.
So was I. Although not one of the books I'd been coveting came to hand, I'd found a few treasures.
Okay, I was coveting a Joy of Cooking (any early edition, just not the most recent) a copy of Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks (inexcusably out of print for the longest time) any old copy of Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice, and any older editions of Margaret Wise Brown's books, particularly I Went for a Walk in the Forest. Also Happy Winter by Karen Gundersheimer. Both also out of print. We own all the children's books but they are worn out with reading.
My discovered treasures were several small, fit-in-the-hand small cookbooks. This is a style I'm fond of anyway and have collected in an idle sort of way for years. The best of all time in this category is Fish Facts, a tiny compendium of classic preparations sold by just about every fish shop in New England for decades. Each shop had their own name, location and phone number printed prominently on the cover beside drawings or photos of doughty sailors and boats under sail. The copyright is 1938 so it's not surprising to see phone numbers like: Arlington 1127. I also like The Strawberry Cookbook from Coventry CT. Even though it contains no publishing information whatsoever, it covers the territory like no other.
My new addition, The Vermont Beekeeper's Cookbook I found at the bottom of a nearly empty box of cookbooks, disregarded, I bet, because of its small stature. It's full of dainty, black and white block prints and chockablock with honey lore, honey thinking and honey recipes and history. Like I said, a small treasure. I also adopted a book on the history of women in the Middle Ages, a subject of considerable interest to me but not perhaps to everyone's taste. Finally, only because it was the only book left in that box,I picked up a book with the unprepossessing title FOOD by Waverly Root. Waverly Root? I had to see how Mr. Root approached his topic, further described as: An authoritative visual history and dictionary of the foods of the world. As it turns out the key word really is food. You won't find omelette or stew in this book, because he limits himself precisely, thoroughly and I'd have to say with glee to eggs, potatoes, spices of every name and provenance and all the rest. I now know all about cloves and nutmegs, their discovery, how they were hidden and smuggled, how astronomical was their price, how false charts were created and sold by the Portuguese to keep the Dutch and others from finding those few islands where they grew and much much more. The book delights me. Of course it's out of print.
Now I see I've taken a turn that led me away from my chosen topic which was a discourse on hunters in small villages as November gets underway. Six such stood by their pickups alongside the road not far down from our place. They looked oddly apprehensive what with their rifles and their camouflage. Maybe I was projecting my own anxiety but this lot looked green around the ears. I imagined them feeling a bit silly standing about in their outfits on the day of Halloween asking themselves if really and truly they were really going to enter the woods and kill something.
Well, it's too late to write about hunters now. I need to get to my outside chores while the sun's out.
Well, under the eager and kind management of some of the library's best friends, the sale grew to such proportions that they moved it into the Town Hall years ago and even selected a generally cold and gloomy weekend. The sale thus fills the lull between foliage tourists and Thanksgiving that so bedevils our country calenders with doldrums. The weekend also boasted Halloween, of course, not to mention the beginning of muzzle-loading season, but never mind, this town had its mind on books. Witness the fact that the sale moved this year to the middle school gym and auditorium, the only space in town to accommodate goings on of such magnitude. Our village's once dinky and disorganized but neighborly and charming country book sale now needs a full-fledged parking lot, refreshments, two squads of volunteer teenagers, numerous volunteer pick-up trucks and dozens upon dozens of long tables. But only four cashiers! I am happy to report though that my cashier at least was still totting up my purchase in her head--not a calculator in sight--relying only a little on the fingers of her left hand. After several efforts that arrived within a plus or minus margin of $3 I suggested we round things off in an upwards direction. She looked relieved and a little grateful too.
So was I. Although not one of the books I'd been coveting came to hand, I'd found a few treasures.
Okay, I was coveting a Joy of Cooking (any early edition, just not the most recent) a copy of Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks (inexcusably out of print for the longest time) any old copy of Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice, and any older editions of Margaret Wise Brown's books, particularly I Went for a Walk in the Forest. Also Happy Winter by Karen Gundersheimer. Both also out of print. We own all the children's books but they are worn out with reading.
My discovered treasures were several small, fit-in-the-hand small cookbooks. This is a style I'm fond of anyway and have collected in an idle sort of way for years. The best of all time in this category is Fish Facts, a tiny compendium of classic preparations sold by just about every fish shop in New England for decades. Each shop had their own name, location and phone number printed prominently on the cover beside drawings or photos of doughty sailors and boats under sail. The copyright is 1938 so it's not surprising to see phone numbers like: Arlington 1127. I also like The Strawberry Cookbook from Coventry CT. Even though it contains no publishing information whatsoever, it covers the territory like no other.
My new addition, The Vermont Beekeeper's Cookbook I found at the bottom of a nearly empty box of cookbooks, disregarded, I bet, because of its small stature. It's full of dainty, black and white block prints and chockablock with honey lore, honey thinking and honey recipes and history. Like I said, a small treasure. I also adopted a book on the history of women in the Middle Ages, a subject of considerable interest to me but not perhaps to everyone's taste. Finally, only because it was the only book left in that box,I picked up a book with the unprepossessing title FOOD by Waverly Root. Waverly Root? I had to see how Mr. Root approached his topic, further described as: An authoritative visual history and dictionary of the foods of the world. As it turns out the key word really is food. You won't find omelette or stew in this book, because he limits himself precisely, thoroughly and I'd have to say with glee to eggs, potatoes, spices of every name and provenance and all the rest. I now know all about cloves and nutmegs, their discovery, how they were hidden and smuggled, how astronomical was their price, how false charts were created and sold by the Portuguese to keep the Dutch and others from finding those few islands where they grew and much much more. The book delights me. Of course it's out of print.
Now I see I've taken a turn that led me away from my chosen topic which was a discourse on hunters in small villages as November gets underway. Six such stood by their pickups alongside the road not far down from our place. They looked oddly apprehensive what with their rifles and their camouflage. Maybe I was projecting my own anxiety but this lot looked green around the ears. I imagined them feeling a bit silly standing about in their outfits on the day of Halloween asking themselves if really and truly they were really going to enter the woods and kill something.
Well, it's too late to write about hunters now. I need to get to my outside chores while the sun's out.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
A WRETCHED START!
What a way to begin things! No sooner do I launch this blog than illness stalks the house --do you hear the father from National Velvet? I think that's him echoing in my head, puffing on his pretty pipe. -- and I'm completely taken up with doctor, pharmacist, cups of tea, cans of Gingerale and all the rest.
Since you won't unless I tell you, you must imagine all these nursing trips up and down the stairs with a laborious limp--the result of falling over a tree root in my own front yard when I was seven months pregnant 22 years ago. Several surgeries later I walk pretty well generally but hillsides and stairs present several challenges. So tea and Gingerale and freshening the pillows entail a slow and graceless climb (or descent) during which I sometimes reflect on the good fortune that made me include a landing on the stairs when I designed the house but also on my lack of foresight because I didn't make the landing big enough for a window seat. The view up the hill to the big oak and stone wall is pretty enough to have made it worthwhile; anyway, I regret the oversight as it would have been nice to sit down halfway up or down. As it is, I pause on the landing, always, and take the time to look directly down into the garden sheltered in the corner where the barn meets the house. How rarely garden books feature the downward view from a window! Well, there's a subject for another time. I think I was saying something about wretched beginnings...
....Oh, right, illness stalks the house. So here I am thinking again about my best laid plans and how very frequently the eruptions of every day life in a household have disrupted those plans. Also how I used to resent those disruptions, thinking I desired my own angel in the house so that I could just now and then continue with my writing. It was a feminist sort of point of view...how when I intended to sit at my desk and stay there laundry would put me in a quandary of conflicting demands, how the necessity of getting dinner on distracted me, how the children wanted this and then that and always
Then there's the other point, the one that took me years to fully acknowledge and that changed just about everything, namely that the interruptions and disruptions were mine, my very own life, part of what I wrote about and parcel of how I wrote about it. The girls, the house, the garden, the dogs barking, the laundry spinning and all those meals with all their dishes, how would I have known who was writing without them? And no, I don't believe this revelation indicated I'd succumbed to Stockholm syndrome. Affection for what you love and what loves you back can hardly be perverse.
And all these things (Note, I'm leaving aside the fond husband and spirited girls) do love me back, each in their own way. The lilies bloom abundantly, the bread rises, the laundry flaps on the line against the summer sky absorbing the scents of green grass, sun and mountain air, the dogs follow me everywhere on a summer day helping themselves to green beans and strawberries (their favorites) and sleeping in the soft, light shade of the birches. It's the best kind of love; they do their own thing, fulfilling their animal, vegetable, mineral destinies severally and in context with one another.
So I've learned to accept the mystery, to chill, to relax, to try to remember that the whole lumpy bagful of disruptive life betokens life itself and that the illusion I entertained as a child, namely, that the reward of becoming a grownup would be that you would understand all things and have control over your life, the illusion that so stuck to my imagination that I saw much of my adult life as a failure because I hadn't understood much and seemed to control even less, that ,in sum,it was time to put away that illusion and enjoy the lumpy bag. That's when I started hanging the laundry as slowly as possible. You can see me there maybe. Barefoot in deep green grass, looking down our hillside and over the tops of the far maples to the river valley from which the Vermont hills rise and stretch to the horizon. There's always a breeze, even on the hottest summer days; the sheets brighten in the sun bringing back memories of hiding from Mama, scampering down the long row only to tumble into her arms.
Speaking of Mama, she had an epiphany of her own about staircases. Thirty years ago when she was in her sixties we were climbing the grand staircase up to the Abbey at Mont St Michel. At the top of the 350 stone steps my irreverent dear thing plopped herself down and gave me a look.
All of which is to say that I take the lumpy bag to my heart. It's my subject and my life. And I begin to think of this blog as my landing.
Cheers,
S
Since you won't unless I tell you, you must imagine all these nursing trips up and down the stairs with a laborious limp--the result of falling over a tree root in my own front yard when I was seven months pregnant 22 years ago. Several surgeries later I walk pretty well generally but hillsides and stairs present several challenges. So tea and Gingerale and freshening the pillows entail a slow and graceless climb (or descent) during which I sometimes reflect on the good fortune that made me include a landing on the stairs when I designed the house but also on my lack of foresight because I didn't make the landing big enough for a window seat. The view up the hill to the big oak and stone wall is pretty enough to have made it worthwhile; anyway, I regret the oversight as it would have been nice to sit down halfway up or down. As it is, I pause on the landing, always, and take the time to look directly down into the garden sheltered in the corner where the barn meets the house. How rarely garden books feature the downward view from a window! Well, there's a subject for another time. I think I was saying something about wretched beginnings...
....Oh, right, illness stalks the house. So here I am thinking again about my best laid plans and how very frequently the eruptions of every day life in a household have disrupted those plans. Also how I used to resent those disruptions, thinking I desired my own angel in the house so that I could just now and then continue with my writing. It was a feminist sort of point of view...how when I intended to sit at my desk and stay there laundry would put me in a quandary of conflicting demands, how the necessity of getting dinner on distracted me, how the children wanted this and then that and always
Now, Mama!The same old song. Still true but increasingly a cliche. Besides, I've always known that I had it easy (well, apart from a ruined ankle) by comparison with other women who would write or paint. Way easy--an appealing juvenile phrase if ever there was one. In any case I now pity those who skip down the stairs or even bound upwards two steps at a time. For them the staircase can exert no more charm than an opportunity to rush. Little do they know the slow moments they are missing in their hurry to get somewhere else.
Then there's the other point, the one that took me years to fully acknowledge and that changed just about everything, namely that the interruptions and disruptions were mine, my very own life, part of what I wrote about and parcel of how I wrote about it. The girls, the house, the garden, the dogs barking, the laundry spinning and all those meals with all their dishes, how would I have known who was writing without them? And no, I don't believe this revelation indicated I'd succumbed to Stockholm syndrome. Affection for what you love and what loves you back can hardly be perverse.
And all these things (Note, I'm leaving aside the fond husband and spirited girls) do love me back, each in their own way. The lilies bloom abundantly, the bread rises, the laundry flaps on the line against the summer sky absorbing the scents of green grass, sun and mountain air, the dogs follow me everywhere on a summer day helping themselves to green beans and strawberries (their favorites) and sleeping in the soft, light shade of the birches. It's the best kind of love; they do their own thing, fulfilling their animal, vegetable, mineral destinies severally and in context with one another.
So I've learned to accept the mystery, to chill, to relax, to try to remember that the whole lumpy bagful of disruptive life betokens life itself and that the illusion I entertained as a child, namely, that the reward of becoming a grownup would be that you would understand all things and have control over your life, the illusion that so stuck to my imagination that I saw much of my adult life as a failure because I hadn't understood much and seemed to control even less, that ,in sum,it was time to put away that illusion and enjoy the lumpy bag. That's when I started hanging the laundry as slowly as possible. You can see me there maybe. Barefoot in deep green grass, looking down our hillside and over the tops of the far maples to the river valley from which the Vermont hills rise and stretch to the horizon. There's always a breeze, even on the hottest summer days; the sheets brighten in the sun bringing back memories of hiding from Mama, scampering down the long row only to tumble into her arms.
Speaking of Mama, she had an epiphany of her own about staircases. Thirty years ago when she was in her sixties we were climbing the grand staircase up to the Abbey at Mont St Michel. At the top of the 350 stone steps my irreverent dear thing plopped herself down and gave me a look.
WEll, now I'm penitent!she rasped with a delighted grin.
All of which is to say that I take the lumpy bag to my heart. It's my subject and my life. And I begin to think of this blog as my landing.
Cheers,
S
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