Yard Sale Table

This weekend, my sister and I had a yard sale, so we were up at 5 on Saturday morning to greet the early birds, who were there by 7 a.m. Even though the sale didn’t officially start until 8, everyone who has ever held a yard sale knows that time means nothing to people on the hunt.

And on the hunt they were, hungry as rabbits in an arugula patch. Looking for stuffstuffstuff and stuffstuffstuff we had…aplenty. I wondered as I wandered around my house last week how I have ever managed to accumulate so much and took a merciless, grim-faced joy in tossing things into boxes and shopping bags to take to my sister’s yard and hopefully, never see again.

But I must admit that when one of the hunters stood across the card table from me with a hand full of quarters and tight-fisted dollars, ready to buy the fireplace screen from my long past married chapter or a book I bought in England thirty years ago about herbs or the long-legged fabric angel I won in a Yankee Swap or the wooden Jamaican vase that’s collected dust in the cabinet for ages or the Mexican tiles from an 80’s trip to Puerto Vallarta and never used…I felt a twinge in my heart, a last-second misgiving, and wanted to snatch the item back and say, “I’m sorry. I was wrong. There’s a mistake here. You can’t have it!”

And that night, I woke up around 2, the ghosts of apartments and houses and all their furnishings, all their rooms, swirling in my mind, the memories piling up like the now empty cardboard boxes under the tables. There is space now in the attic, the cellar, the bookshelves, the closets…and that’s good, I know that’s good…but there is an emptiness in my heart when I wonder where that long-legged Yankee swap angel is now or the Martha Stewart hors d’oeuvres cookbook inscriped by a friend long gone, or the tennis racket that can tell a whole love story…but only to me.

Maybe that’s why stuff matters…maybe that’s why we’re all, in varying degrees, hunters.

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.

Dream Dress Dreaming

Dream dresses look like this…I think this is a Vera Wang dress in her shop window on Manhattan’s upper East Side, but I can’t remember…all I know is that this dream dress is a web, a weaving, of dreams. To wear it, you would have to be tall, beautiful (but in a jolie-laid sort of way), accomplished (violin? poetry? venture capital? architecture, law? ballet?), well travelled, at least bi-lingual, financially secure, and probably vegetarian.

In short, perfect.

Most likely, this dress is a wedding dress to be worn once in an emerald garden or a sumptuous hotel or a glittering rooftop or the porch of the old family shingled house with the ocean beyond. And after that one magical occasion, perhaps passed on to an equally accomplished and beautiful daughter or hang forever in state in an upstairs guest room closet (all clean and sacheted, of course).

I look at the dream dress and I sense that it wishes otherwise…wants a different kind of future. Maybe something like this: to be worn on fresh Monday mornings while hanging out the sheets; or dancing in front of the fireplace on a mid-January night as the snow blankets the world; or apron-layered and rolling out a real pie crust; or driving in a perfectly ordinary car with the windows all down, headed west on a black October night; or making out in the front seat of that perfectly ordinary car by a dark green lake, the night fragrant with earth and iron and cornfields.

Maybe this dream dress makes its way to Port Clyde, Maine or Roslindale, Massachusetts or Honeoye Falls, New York or Quebec City or even Dublin or Venice or Paris or Tokyo. Or maybe it just stays put in its own back yard, happy there with the ordinary–the maples and cedars, the petunias, clover, and dandelions, the robins, the stray cats, the humming mowers and rusty swing-sets, the crooked snowmen and the barking dogs, the ordinary people, dreaming behind the square white windows of dresses such as this, of dreams all webbed and tangled in the ordinary living rooms of the heart.

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.

Robin...Twilight

As I sit at my computer in this April twilight, the last of the day’s sun is caught in the wild yellow forsythia bush outside the window. And a robin is splashing in the copper birdbath, completing his evening toilette. The day is winding down, and I want it to linger longer…until at least eight. I’m not a great fan of darkness (though I have friends who love the night and work well into it); for me, darkness is a time of folding into oneself like the purple oxalis that closes its witchy wings and turns inward toward dreams.

Here is a poem about April, titled “The Angel of Pure Joy.”

When you smell spring in the silent stars
and taste the ginger of narcissus, the bite
of newborn chive; when the saffron forsythia
clings to your tongue like fairy dust; when you hear
the sweet voice of your wild bird threaded through still-
bare maples, caught in song; when your big, yellow cat
curves just so behind your knees and the smooth, cool
sheets are spun of fog, rosemary, salt and pine;
when there is no difference between dreams and the night,
then it is that the Angel of Pure Joy speaks your name out loud.

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.

Newport smiled back at us with our cameras and reveled in our ooohs and aaahs at its old houses built so long ago by men with names like Jacob and Jeremiah, Silas and Samuel. These are not the mansions of Bellevue (those are a whole other story) but the simple square structures of the seafarers and their wives.

Life would be good here, I think, living in one of these crooked houses with the sea air shaking the windows in January, wafting the curtains in July. No doubt the salty ancestors of these houses rattle around the attics, closets and cellars of these houses and are frequent guests at tea or cocktail hour.

The only thing that would have made this day absolute perfection would have been a chance to go inside one of the old houses and have a good look around. Or sit in a chair by a wavery window, look out at the harbor and listen for the silent stories the old house might be inclined to tell.

Barn in Early March

It is a raw and windy day here with four o’clock snow that isn’t sure if it’s snow or if it’s rain. Still I ventured out for a walk down Main Street past the houses all shuttered and silent, past the old weathered barns, the outbuildings, the side yards with the covered boats, down to the sea that today is the color of gull feathers and buried dreams.

March has entered with a roar.

Wearing a gray wool coat, dark red muffler, sturdy boots, two pairs of gloves, and a wool hat that pulls down over my eyes, I decided to pretend I was in New York and opened a leopard-print umbrella to keep the rain/snow off. (New York women do this all the time: carry umbrellas when it’s snowing out.)

It’s a stretch of the imagination to pretend to be in New York when I’m walking down the quiet street that leads to the water and there is nothing and no one in sight. Only the sound of the gusting wind and the smell of the pewter-gray ocean, only the snow falling in circles into the black puddles, only the crows cawing their late afternoon sojourn to the fading day. I try to picture New York with its bright windows and flashing cabs, its sounds of horns and subways, its wide sidewalks, the lights coming on in the Empire State Building.

It’s a stretch all right.

To tell you the truth, I’m oddly enough happy to be walking in silence, looking out under the leopard-print umbrella at the three colors of lichen on the ancient oaks, at the snow dripping from the delicate tips of the bare spirea hedges, at the dove-gray shingled houses turned inward to ponder their empty state, at the way the wind has shaped the cedars.

Today, the four o’clocks are resting in peace.