Graduation Day

In June, my sister and I traveled back to our hometown deep in the farmy lands of upstate New York for our nephew’s high school graduation. When the daisy arches were lifted over the heads of the Seniors in their caps and gowns and the band played Pomp and Circumstance, I was aware again how much our traditions and rituals ground us.

It has been years since my high school graduation and yet, that day, it seemed as if…in my heart at least…very little time had passed. I felt the thrill of it…the long white robe, the crazy hat that flattened the already fragile poof in my hair, the wild daisy-festooned arches over my head, the stirring notes of the processional, and the sense that something hugely important was taking place in my life.

I was seventeen that afternoon in June…had never seen an ocean or Paris, never seriously kissed a boy, never knew that I would come to love the arrangement of words on a page, had never cooked with real garlic, didn’t even have my license yet. But I knew, sitting up there on the stage, that a strange new landscape was taking form, and all that was comfortable and familiar was fading the way my vision had blurred in sixth grade and nothing was ever quite the same.

Mostly I was apprehensive about the beginnings, sad about the endings…homesick already for those seventeen growing-up years, for my friends, my house, my street, my town, my family. I always joked with my sister that just as I was getting the hang of it in high school, it was over. And that has been a recurrent theme: getting the hang of a job or a house or a city or a marriage…and then sometimes long before I was ready, it was over.

So when the Class of 2010 tossed those strange hats up into the air and the applause swept them to their feet, a beginning and an ending merged in one moment. We all bore witness to it. We all remembered.

Manhattan Birds

Every now and then, I’m fortunate enough to leave my Cape Cod village and zoom down to Manhattan with my very cool sister and very very cool niece. Even if we only stay one night, we live it well, shopping the thrift stores and consignment shops, eating things like fig and olive salads, taking note of street fashion, wondering at what the Whitney considers art, marveling always at the heights, the bustle, the pace.

Several things about New York astound me. One, that every person I see on the crowded streets and even more crowded subways has a life. Two, where does all the trash go? Three, just imagine what’s under Manhattan!

Four, what would it be like to be a child growing up in the city and living on the 45th floor? Five, how does all the food get here because people in New York are always eating. Six, how can you live here without oodles and oodles of money because something is always enticing you to buy it, eat it, try it, own it, rent it, experience it. Seven, where do you go for quiet and solitude? Eight, do people in New York ever use their kitchens? Nine, what is life like without a car? Ten, can you hear the birds singing in the morning?

Passing these two pigeons caught in conversation along Madison Avenue down in the 30’s, I asked several of these questions. They looked quite nonplussed, as if I had come from another planet. “Such silly questions,” one replied. “Just because you can’t hear the tree fall doesn’t mean it hasn’t come crashing down.” Now I look confused. “Listen,” said the bird’s colleague. “You’re in Manhattan. Nobody really knows how it works…it’s a Universe…it just does.”

Bike on Lane

I can still feel the heft of the old bulkhead door as my sister and I lifted it one day in early April, then scrambled down the cement steps into the dark stone cellar to drag our bicycles, all cobwebby and coal-dusted, up those steep, subterranean steps to the sun.

It was a primary ritual of spring, as essential to our well being as stories and dreams.

In upstate New York, there could still be traces of snow in damp, shadowy places under porches and behind barns, but the unmistakable scent of spring was in the air:  sweet, colored with longer light, tinged with the fragrance of yet unborn lilacs. A scent that awakened us, excited us and made us wild.

We would drag up those blue bikes, dust them off, walk them up to the Dodge dealer at the end of West Main and give the tires bracing shots of air. And then, we were off, out past the muddy cornfields, past the barely budding maples, past the limits of town and winter’s edge. We rode hard and fast with the cold April wind in our ears, mad with joy.

And now, so many years later, I still ride my bike with the girl in me calling the shots. She loves the downhills, sets her heart racing with the uphills, is lost in the glorious moments of green wind and pale sun and lilacs and lilies yet to come. She is a lost girl finally found.

Nothing B-flat about it.

At the consignment shop where I used to do the windows, we would say, “Oh, that’s a B-flat blouse, a B-flat jacket, a B-flat sweater,” meaning that garment was dated, nondescript, boring, maybe a little faded, a bit worn. B-flat. B-splat.

I look in my closet…what’s B-flat in here? Probably most of it…or none of it…since to me, something is B-flat only if it’s worn in a B-flat way. If I wear a plain black crew-neck sweater with ordinary black wool pants, well, that’s B-flat. But if the ordinary black wool sweater is worn with a red, square-dance petticoat over black, voluminous Charlie Chaplin silk pants…or that same sweater over a Hospital Thrift Shop short, knife-pleated black skirt over the ordinary pants…then maybe topped off with red Doc Martens and silver socks, it’s B-flat begone!

I wish everyday I could un-B-flat things: notice how colorful the cereal boxes are in the Stop & Shop aisles; notice the red flags on mailboxes; notice the abandoned sculptures of bedsprings and storm windows in the metal heap at the transfer station. Open my eyes to the way the rainbows fall into the blue coffee cup; the way the daffodils nod in the cold breeze; hear the click of the computer keys as the words sprinkle down the page; hear the sound of the ghost plane headed for Paris when the twilight is thick with clouds.

Today, this B-flat short skirt I’m wearing has an A+ verve  over a slender Lilith long tube skirt with black socks that say “Joy” in big white letters. I’m about to bite into an organic Pink Lady apple, cold and crisp and fresh. Later, I’ll take a bike ride and see how the ocean looks this afternoon. I’ll think about England and Ireland and wonder what the people there are making for dinner. Today is an ordinary Tuesday…nothing B-flat about it.

Clothesline in March

One of the most glorious sights to behold on brisk, chilly March mornings when you could drink the air is a clothesline in full use. I have loved clotheslines since I was a girl when my mother taught me how to hang the big white sheets (doubled, of course) and my father’s workshirts (upside down) and the pillowcases (open so the wind could billow through). We hung our little white cotton undies in the middle lines so no one could see.

It was a splendid clothesline at 80 West Main Street with at least six or seven lines stretched far between two large metal T’s. Way out in the back yard, it was flanked by the neighbor’s barn on one side and a gnarled apple tree and flowering quince on the other.

With her infinite practicality, my mother used to put the top sheet on the bottom of each bed and wash the bottom sheet and the pillowcases every week, rain or shine. Even in winter when the sheets froze on the line like great pieces of white cardboard, the clothesline was in use. It’s such a part of my memory–one of those things I rarely think about–unless I am clothesline-less.

When I finally got a clothesline here on Cape Cod after a hiatus of several years, I wondered how I had ever managed without it…without the crisp fragrance of sun and wind caught in sheets, the scratchy towels, the crinkly lace curtains, the jeans that can stand up by themselves. It’s wonderful to thumb my nose at the dryer and its rapacious hunger for electricity. Wonderful to know that all’s right with the world when I look out the back window and see the sheets snapping in the March wind.

I am with clothesline again.

Ravinia at Work

Every writing workshop should be like this…held in Joanne Rossman’s magical store in Roslindale; attended by spirited, quirky, open-minded writers; nourished by chocolates and macaroons; and presided over by Ravinia, whose literary contribution was Poe-ish indeed. It was a grand two days, filled with words that often went right to the heart of the matter, with the sound of pens scratching across paper the old-fashioned way, with some tears, some laughter, with the age-old attempt to express what we feel about so many things: clotheslines, dogs, beach houses, ghosts, household hints, fathers, sons, daughters, mothers, husbands, great aunts, names, keys to rusted Impalas, lovers, high school, wallpaper.

At the end of it, I drove the long way home, my mind swirling with all the words and touched by the courageous efforts to write those words down the long blue lines and then say them out loud.

That’s one of my definitions of grace: to be part of that effort, to witness it, to know that as long as life continues to knock on our doors and whoosh its way in, there will be writers saying, “Welcome.”

Coatrack. Party Dress.

Coatracks are good and necessary things; especially when you live in an old house with one (only one!) closet on the first floor, and that single closet doubles as 1)the shipping department for my business where all the bubble wrap is stashed, 2) the wine closet and liquor cabinet, and 3) the place where the vacuum cleaner resides almost all of the time.

I’ve always lived with a coatrack in the corner by the door and find that it’s one of those things in my house that is both essential and invisible like curtain rods and bookshelves and electrical outlets. Without thinking, season by season, I toss hats up top, hang coats and slickers and dusters on old heavy wooden hangers that come from church rummage, and occasionally display a party dress that I’m not wearing, perhaps will never wear, but want to look at just the same.

The one pictured here on the coatrack came from a barn/antique shop in Friendship, Maine. I thought it would change my life and imagined wearing it with a billowing underskirt around my workshop or on a late afternoon walk down by the ocean with my sister or perhaps to the supermarket. (Strangely, a party never entered my mind.) So I took the dress to a tailor who lifted the hem and tucked in the shoulders for a goodly sum and had every intention of allowing the dress to work its magic.

I wore it once. Nothing worked: it was tight at the waist, big at the shoulders, and too bare around the neck. I tried a tight little shirt under it and shook my head–all wrong. I decided I liked two things about this dress: the sound it made when I walked and the way it looked on the coatrack.

So here it hangs. It has not changed my life but every time I go upstairs, I see it and have a glimpse of the dream behind it: I am gloriously sweeping down the Produce Aisle, skirts rustling, eyes clear, intention in my step…headed for Venice that very afternoon.