This is a chair in a room in a very old house, owned and created by an inspiring and wildly talented friend. When an old house is a visual poem, a chair is not just a chair, a cup not just a cup. Stepping over its worn threshold, I can see the way light pours through watery glass and plays on the fibers of a threadbare carpet; see the underpinnings of a chair, the way it’s tufted and tacked and flounced and fringed; see the imprint of countless, long-ago footsteps on the steep, narrow stairs; see the glorious color of a withered bunch of daffodils long past their prime over a once-smoking fireplace.

It is a sensual arriving, this house. When I listen, I hear the wind whistling off the ocean just across the street. I hear the gale pushing through the cracks of the front door with a stormy cacophony of howls and whooshes and clatters, and in response, I hear the old house creak and whisper its warnings. In the morning, after the storm, I hear the spring chives growing and the alley cats skittering up the rough fences and the songs of last night’s black stars.

And I smell Ireland: stone, clover, thatch, potatoes, linen, Guinness, and the Book of Kells. I smell muddy wellies, marmalade, wool, clotheslines, fog, tobacco, and bread rising. I smell crooked chimneys and moss. I smell my grandmother’s scoldings. My grandfather’s late hours.

When morning comes around in this poem of a house, there are plushy geraniums climbing the watery windows and eggs sunny-side-up on the slightly burned toast. There are line-dried sheets caught in the now-sweet wind; there is strong coffee in French cups. And in this house, I stand in my thick-soled shoes and swirly skirts and discover light again in my bones, flowers in my lungs, and I sing…if not quite an aria…certainly a heartswelling chorus of thanks.

In here & beyond there...

Romance. I think we’re starved for it…need it like bread and water, like rain, like air. It doesn’t matter if it comes from a commercial holiday like Valentine’s Day or from an annual event like an anniversary or birthday. Wherever or whatever its source, romance springs from a deeply human impulse…the need to heighten experience, the need to wake up our slumbering sensibilities and to perceive the moment in all its fresh, glistening glory.

Most of the day, living out the dream called reality, rushing from one place to the next, our minds are a jumble of mish-mash, a cacophony of restless and often contrary thoughts. If I’m doing this, I should be doing that. If I’m here, I should be there.

But sometimes, something happens, and romance intervenes. A little black cat jumps on our lap, and we put the cell phone down; the wind picks up, drifting lilacs and wood smoke; the light suddenly changes and thunder makes the windows shudder; we bite into the season’s first strawberry or asparagus spear or tomato or ear of corn; our husband looks at us like a lover; our lover looks at us like a husband; the red geranium pushes up through the lampshade; the candles dance in a frenzied dervish; we open a trunk and our grandmother’s ghost escapes into the hallway; there is a love note in the crisper.

No doubt, it would be a great challenge to live every day mostly awake and aware of the moment, though poets and children make a valiant effort. But the fact remains that romance is in here, over there, behind this, under that. It isn’t always happy; sometimes it’s wistful, sometimes a bit melancholy, and if it is beautiful, it’s not in a perfect, retouched, magazine way. It’s the beauty of laugh lines around the eyes; the beauty of a dog with three legs; the beauty of a souffle whooshing down; the beauty of a child’s handwriting; the beauty of your old car suggesting one long last road trip.

There is romance in here. There is romance out there. In this very moment, all we have to do is wake up.

A Bouquet of Potatoes

The best gifts are the ones like these…delivered this afternoon to the back doorstep by my friend and neighbor Richard. “Close your eyes and open your hands,” he said. And then he proceeded to empty his pockets, filling my cupped hands with beautiful little brown potatoes. “Organic,” he said.

The potatoes are a sort of bouquet, I think…a bouquet of humble, earthy things. I happen to be crazy about potatoes in every season, but now when the March winds blow cold off the ocean, there’s nothing better than chunking them up, tossing with a bit of olive oil and a sprinkle of dried thyme and roasting in a hot oven for 20 or 30 minutes. They’re best eaten right away with a dash of salt and pepper out of a round, fat, earthenware bowl.

What could be better than this: fragrant roasted potatoes, a crackling wood fire, a glass of malbec and the curtains shirred against the night. I think of the little hobbit with his armchair pulled up to the fire, smiling at the goodness of his life.

Goodness of life…let me count the ways on this first Tuesday in March. Cotton sheets flapping on the clothesline; the sun, thin at first, then taking hold by mid-day; the news from my sister that my second grandnephew, Rhys Douglas Campbell, saw that very sun for the first time at 9:20 this morning; a good work-out in the wilderness behind my house, vine yanking, raking, loping briars at their roots; the voices of four friends on the phone; reading Emily Dickinson’s “On a Columnar Self–How ample to rely…”; reworking the verse of a Story Picture about “desire lines;” and now sitting here at Gracie, my computer, writing to you…all the friends I know and all the friends I don’t.

The goodness of this life. A bouquet of potatoes. A birth. A poem. A daunting effort to tame the wilderness. All on one seemingly ordinary Tuesday. And now, it’s time for dinner.

Just About the Extent of It

I’m unsettled about this winter that wasn’t. Aside from one snowstorm, the bit of ice on the welcome mat is about the extent of it. Snowdrops have been in full bloom in my neighbors’ yard since mid-January. Crocuses are popping up in mid-February. The palest sweep of red buds is just discernible if you squint and look hard.

The old battered snow shovel leans by the back door, used only once. My snow boots sleep by the stove. The landscapers look at their snowplows and shake their heads. The towns are pocketing the snow removal budgets. And a few of us born and brought up in a place where each season is clearly marked are nonplussed and a little uneasy.

Is it further evidence of global warming? Is it just an aberration? An annual reprieve? Is the jet stream taking a new course? People say, “There’s still March.” True. March can be a little iffy…one of those long months that often has a trick or two up its sleeve. But I say, “Where did winter go?” What happened to late November, December, January and now, February. What happened to the North wind rattling the windows? The snow piling up by the back door? The eternal quiet the morning after a blizzard? The unknown whiteness of the world? What happened to sledding and cross-country skiing and ice skating?

Daffodils blooming in early March is just plain wrong.

Most of my friends would wholeheartedly disagree, I know. But I like the seasons here. I like each one to be fully realized. One defines the other: because of winter, I know spring; because of summer, I know autumn. But a winter like this is like too much water in a watercolor, and spring, though beautiful, will be a paler version this year. There’s something too about commiserating with your friends and neighbors about the perils and punishments of winter. Drives home the old truth that we’re all in this together. We’ll all tough it out. We’ll look out for each other. We’ll make it.

Maybe it’s just old Yankee stuff or maybe it’s all those childhood years in upstate New York where winter was a serious affair and summer too…when the heat built up over the fields and the thunder rolled in and the lightning took your breath away. If we had had winter this year, I would feel a bit more at ease, balanced, without this twinge of worry nagging me. I would complain, yes, but even in the complaining, a part of me would say, “Well, it’s January. What do you expect?”

And spring, when it finally got here with its daffodils and forsythia, would have transformed the bare white landscape behind my eyes…the months of living with snow and cold forgotten. This year, there is nothing to forget. But I will remember those January snowdrops.

Witchy Shoes & Bare Trees

This is a photo taken by my friend David Ellis when we journeyed a year or so ago up to the Berkshires and stopped to see Selected Works of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison at the Simon’s Rock Gallery. When I saw this sculpture, I knew I would be possessed by these shoes forever.

Quite simply, because I love them.

They combine three of my favorite things: witchiness, shoes, and bare trees. But the thought of putting them all together could only come from artists with exquisite and edgy imaginations, which this couple has in abundance. You can see more of their work at www.parkeharrison.com.

I once wrote a poem about Witchy Shoes…that they have enticing eyes and are not afraid of thunder or dark alleys or stepping on toes. That they are best complemented with scrunched black socks and should always be worn judiciously because they can so easily cast a profound spell on the innocent…like the man behind the Stop & Shop seafood counter. Witchy shoes are always cool and haughty; they hunger for the night, for the stars…not salmon, not mackerel, not even scallops at $16.99 a pound!

But imagine having a pair of witchy shoes with bare trees sprouting out of their eyelets. I’m in a swoon…just sitting here, my chilly fingers in their David Copperfield gloves racing across the keyboard, trying to consider what a day would be like wearing shoes with bare trees. It would be foggy, of course, and the wind would blow salt off the water, and the crows would be completely understandable, sharing their secrets about buried treasure down by Town Dock and who is currently courting whom.

Wearing such shoes, I would hear poetry recited everywhere…the surly man at the Transfer Station would be spouting sonnets one after another and even the dentist would be savoring the delicious words of Keats. My house would recount stories of everyone who has lived here before me…their favorite windows and places to read, what they enjoyed for breakfast.

I would easily find my way in the fog, the shoes clickety-clacketing down the misty road’s pale yellow line…all the way to the shoes’ ultimate destination. And once there, dangling above the clouds, I would hold my breath, carefully cross my ankles, and watch the stars tangle in those bare trees like a song.

Miss Rita Rose & Joanne Rossman

There are people in our lives who inspire us to bloom like wild-headed peonies, to wear the outrageous hat with the wires and feathers, to drop everything and head for Paris, to rent the red convertible, to give away the living room rug and replace it with a threadbare Persian, to put up our own cumin-spiced pickles.

If we’re really lucky, people like this become our friends. I’m really lucky. Joanne Rossman is my friend.

I met her years ago, when I donned my best dancing petticoat and Maytag shoes and stood on the doorstep of her store at #6 Birch Street in Roslindale, Massachusetts. She  had sounded so nice on the phone, but I was nervous…I had a basket of Story Pictures to show her that no one (short of my sisters and a few friends) had seen. This was my first sales call and selling is not my forte. But the minute I saw the store window, I knew that sale or no sale, I had stumbled into Wonderland.

If you’ve not seen Joanne’s store, you might want to give your imagination a tonic and take a look at her website: www.joannerossman.com. This little shop is as captivating as it is quirky, as mysterious as it is playful…a wildly eccentric mix of Buddhas and ravens and cowgirls and old paintings and candles that smell like wood smoke. Ribbons and sticks and fountain pens and notebooks and stones and clay pots and fabrics from all over the world. Books you’ve never seen before and beautiful socks and tiny ancient ottomans. There is even a resident pug: Miss Rita Rose, who regally presides over this kingdom, has been rumored to occasionally sport a tutu, and often runs the ka-jing old cash register.

And then, there is Joanne, who greets everyone with a smile and a heartfelt, “Hello, Darling!” Even if she has never seen you before, you’re still one of her Darlings simply because you’re in her world now…and everything you see around you has been chosen by her, filtered through her splendid imagination and original, marvelous sense of wonder.

We hunger for places like this in our on-line world…in our box store uniformity. Places that bring us back to childhood when the first snow took our breath away and Santa could make it down any chimney, or up any fire escape, or even let himself in the front door. There was poetry in an icicle, a December star, a big tree in the living room.

Joanne calls herself, “The purveyor of the unnecessary and the irresistible.” I agree with the irresistible part, but as for the unnecessary, I think that Joanne and the gift she gives us all is as necessary to our spirit as bread to our bones. A sparkling imagination at work, full force, nourishes us, reminds us that each of us, in our own way, has the capacity to soar.

Stories to Tell

Shall I start with this black crepe dress I found hanging rumpled and discouraged from a bent hanger in the basement rummage of Barnstable’s St. Mary’s last April?

Shall I start by wondering who chose it brand-new from a rack of store dresses long ago? In my imagination, she had long arms and was probably tall and had straight hair and wore reading glasses. She no doubt had a silver tea set and believed in long walks, fresh air, and good manners. She may have summered along the New England coast.

I look again at the dress, and I am certain that beneath the patrician veneer, there was a mysterious, even other worldly aspect to the prior owner of this dress, though carefully guarded and only allowed out in dark, playful moments.

Shall I start by believing that she knew about the worlds beneath the senses, beneath her carefully ordered life? The worlds of clouds and deja vu, shadow, and memories of memories. There were spirits in her driveway; her cats had eyes like stars; the wind roused her heart; the broom twitched in the corner; the moon begged for her glance. Now and then, she woke up at first light and wondered if she had made it all up: the night, the wind, the moon, the pounding of her heart, the voices filled with songs of all she had been before. Before the black dress, the tea set, the beautiful table. Before the church dinners, the library sales, the sensible shoes. Before the broom beckoned. Before the hunger for the moon.

I put on the dress. It is October. The leaves are dry and raspy from September’s hurricane, and the air is full of golden smoke. The little neighborhood cat at the back door meows when she sees me, and I swear the broom by the fireplace jittered once or twice. I shall have a cup of tea by the fire. I shall listen for the clink of silver and the wind in the brittle leaves and the stories I know this dress can tell.

Prize Winners

This weekend, my friend David and I stopped by the Truro Agricultural Fair, a lively small-town celebration of cackling chickens, banjo players, local farmers, and sunburned families. We oohed and aahed at the fresh tomatoes, basil, garlic, onions, flowers, pies, and jars of honey. We used our dried fava beans to vote for the most handsome rooster, the most comely hen. We smelled the tangy salt air, redolent with hay and manure and chicken coop and oregano.

Then we wandered over to the line of tables displaying the prize winners: most original wild flower arrangement, most scrumptious pie, biggest pumpkin, strangest looking vegetable, and as pictured here: the best looking dozen eggs. I took this picture because if I opened these eggs in the stainless steel coolers of the Stop & Shop, I would reject them on the spot…maybe even trot them up to the front desk.

But here they are at the Truro Aggie Fair winning first place. (I’m assuming, of course, that there were other entries, and these eggs really were the most stunning.) Look at them! Brown, white, peach, mottled, some dirty, some really funky looking…a far cry from the perfectly pristine eggs I’ve come to expect at the supermarket. And that makes me wonder what the egg sellers do to their eggs to make them so spotless, so uniform, such a far cry from the real McCoy, as seen here at the Aggie Fair.

I’m not a fanatic about freshness or organic-ness but I do like food to look good. And now I wonder about that, wonder if maybe those good looks are deceiving, wonder if those perfectly plump tomatoes, those shaggy bouquets of bitter greens, those so so orangy carrots, those glimmering apples are given the veggie/fruit version of Botox.

Maybe I’ve forgotten what real looks like. Growing up in the farmy lands of upstate New York, I remember my father’s garden, and if I brush away the threads of memory, can recall tomatoes that looked like a snarling grimace, corn with a few icky borers burrowed in, zucchini that curved into itself, gnarled little apples…and pretty much everything had dirt on it. But it was all organic, all nature’s own presentation…no one fussed and mussed with what the good earth, under my father’s patient and kind hand, produced.

So I look at these eggs and then I look again, and I see that beauty, real beauty, the kind that wins first place is spottled and speckled and splotched and funky and decidedly, freshly original. Yes, decidedly that.

Dewey & Robin

This is a picture of my sister’s cat, Dewey, taking his early summer morning stretch & yawn on the front porch. If you look over to the right, deep in the middle of the wisteria bush, you can see a robin sitting on its nest, warming its eggs, and paying no apparent attention to Dewey.

I love this picture because I love what’s going on here. There is a cat and there is a bird, and isn’t one supposed to be deathly afraid of the other, and isn’t the other supposed to be primarily focused on having the other for breakfast? It makes me examine some of my foregone conclusions about cats and birds and all sorts of things.

I watched this scene for a while and it stayed the way it is in the picture…there was no flapping about or stealthy stalking. My sister says the robins have returned for a few years now to the wisteria and each year build a new nest. But next summer, the picture and its contents will be completely altered.

Dewey passed away in July.

Now it is mid-August. Last night, after the rain, the air turned sharply cool and the crickets began to jingle. Even if I didn’t have a calendar, I would know that summer is fast fading. The once bridal-white hydrangeas are now a pale, wistful green and the once orange day lilies are skinny stalks with no head and the crabgrass is growing like mad. Morning comes later and evening earlier.

We have these seasons of summer now and then to color our lives, our days…brief honeymoons of golden warmth and achingly sweet bliss. Falling in love is summer. So is a vacation in the mountains. So is potato salad and arugula and melons. The season of summer can make itself known in the picnic on the stoney shores of a dark green lake or breakfast in a sunny little courtyard or a dinner of fried clams on the rough deck of a beach cottage. It can make itself known in the scent of wild roses or the fragrance of sweet corn. It can make itself known in a whirly sundress or a blue bike or scratchy sand on the kitchen floor.

It made itself known to me when I took this picture of Dewey and the robin enjoying a late June morning with nothing to do but sit and dream and let the season of summer in.

Scullery Sink

This is a photo of the scullery sink down in the lower nether regions of Edith Wharton’s famous home “The Mount” in Lennox, Massachusetts. Upstairs there were ceilings with wedding cake moldings and elegant silk settees and Belgian tapestries and French marble mantels, but it was the floor below that captured my imagination. The places the restorers hadn’t gotten to yet.

That’s where the real poetry was.

I loved this sink and wished I could transport it to my own funky 50’s knotty pine kitchen and replace the double Elkay stainless that’s there now. I would put old faucets on this beauty and scrub it and pile the dishes in it and let the soapy splashes fly on that zinc surround, and I would wear black aprons over my white summer dresses and dream upstairs/downstairs dreams. Old things can do that to you.

The wall behind this sink is beautiful too with its resurrected collage of plaster, lathe, and stone, no doubt hidden since the house was completed in 1902. It is as mysterious and arresting as any work of art hung in a museum or gallery. I would transport that too and rather than look out a window at a yard, I would look into a deep eloquent past and wonder whose hands built that wall of Berkshire stone and what did he eat for breakfast that morning. Was he singing when he layered it with mortar or was his mind beset with thoughts of paychecks and rents and mouths to feed?

There’s an old house down the street from mine that was recently purchased and redone…for the purpose of resale. Now with its spacious tiled showers and chrome appliances and new windows and polished floors and freshly painted walls and opened floor plan, it is, in the eyes of many, quite perfect…expensive and perfect. Wandering through it at an open  house, I found myself instinctively drawn out of the French doors to a small old barn and tiny potting shed in the back yard. Both are cheerfully askew with worn shingles and wooden shutters faded by sun and rain. Both have settled nicely into the landscape with its white hydrangea bushes and wild honeysuckle. Both, I sense, have stories to tell, while out in front, the new old perfect house is strangely mute.

There is, I know, a balance between ruin and upkeep, between neglect and care, between old and new…but for me, the time-worn imperfect things and the long-ago places sing the melodious and pale tinged music of the heart. My kind of tune.