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.

Cellar Door

I try for a clean sweep down in the cellar of my house, but the broom is ancient (not to mention inexpensive), and its bristles are worn to a sharp slant. So I end up sweeping with the stubby ends. Down in my dark, damp cellar there is much to sweep: dead leaves, live spiders, stone dust, earth, webs, bugs, rusty screws, nails, shatters of clay pots and clumps of potting soil. I’ve always wanted a real basement in my house, but like a separate bathroom for guests and a mudroom, a clean, dry basement has eluded me. I look longingly at those subterranean family playgrounds with big-screen televisions, modular sofas and pool tables, or workshops with tools and saws and jars of nails, or even studios where the artist sits on a high stool under modern, squiggly lights with all the  flotsam of her art meticulously arranged on shelves behind her. These images are all dreams…life has given me since childhood cellars in the true sense of the word: always dark, always damp (often with dirt floors and empty coal bins), stone-walled, spider-flecked, web-spun…the kinds of cellars Freud believed dwell deep in the unconscious…where we are lost, alone, scared out of our wits, keeping company with pale ghosts and little brown mice.

Dream House

This is a little gray house with tiny rooms and a sagging roof nestled into a hillside that looks out to the headlands and the cold blue sea beyond. I am an Irish girl wearing a ruby petticoat under a brown tweed skirt, sturdy almost galumphy boots, and a warm moss-green sweater with worn elbows. This is my house, and the rooms have ceilings so low you have to stoop in the doorways. There is a sooted little fireplace in the sitting room with two wing chairs in front of it and golden reading lamps bent over the backs of each chair.

At night, when the wind off the sea howls round the corners of the little gray house with the sagging roof, I sit in one of the chairs and read old books that are fragrant with paste and lavender or scratch out lines of words with a jagged fountain pen in yellowed journals. Sometimes a friend takes his or her place beside me in the other wing chair, and we talk and listen to the sea wind and let the fire blaze and then die, waiting for the shadows to creep back into their corners, waiting for the first whisper of pale light to fall around our shoulders, waiting to begin again.