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

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