Under the Wilderness

From Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue: “I think when you’re young you should be a lot with yourself and your sufferings. Then one day, you get out where the sun shines and the rain rains and the snow snows and it all comes together.”

I have been a lot with my self and my sufferings this past spring, though I’m way old enough to be out where the rain rains and the sun shines. It’s like a tossed salad of sufferings: a leaky roof, an aching knee, numb fingers, a bit of pure adolescent heartbreak sprinkled on top like a bite of chive. Not big-time, major-league, macro sufferings, to be sure, but enough to satisfy me.

This is familiar territory. Quite comforting to kvetch with a friend about the trials and tribulations of keeping up an old house and yard: spiders, pollen, rotting boards, peeling paint, ticks, ice dams, stopped-up drains, wet cellars, ancient wiring. Quite comforting to swap notes about creaky joints, nanosecond attention spans, proper noun oblivion, necessary naps. Quite comforting to write a poem or two to drench the heart in further woe, slip on it like a mossy stone.

All of this worrisome stuff is weirdly satisfying, a dose of personal Schadenfreude. The greatest danger is that negative satisfaction might become habitual, a worn pleasure track in the brain. Since I have no intention of becoming one of those cranky, peevish old ladies besting each other in a match of misfortunes, I respect what Vreeland has to say here: “Then one day, you get out.” Out of so much with your self. Out under the open sky where the elements have their way with you. Out where some days take your breath away, others leave you limp as a wet towel.

I am blessed with friends and family who do brave things: travel to Europe alone; run Art Centers; read their poetry to an audience though their fingers tremble; drive a friend to chemo; work with special needs children and adults; listen with compassion to people battling addiction; pile flowers and birds’ nests in their hair; make art; make a commotion; or make a safe, peaceful place that welcomes every weary soul.

In the end, it all comes together, as Vreeland says. Once out in the fresh, wild, scary world where the snow snows and the sun shines, the cloistered dwelling of the self begins to feel like a hobbit cottage cluttered with teacups, crammed with knick-knacks. You hit your head on the beams. There is little room to breathe. So you step outside. See the moon coming up in the wilderness of sky. Flap your squeaky elbows. Do a creaky little dance. Trust in the raining rain.

Work at Hand

High summer here in my little Cape village. The grass is a crisp brown, hydrangeas are masses of feisty blooms, the air is redolent with grill smoke and salt, heavy with humidity, festooned with spider webs, specked with fireflies. The harbors are jammed with boats, and baseball games are the excitement for the night. People are dining on front porches, beaches, in side yards, clam shacks, and boisterous restaurants with windows open to the blue air.

Usually, about this time, I begin to fret in earnest about a big August craft fair held in my town. For at least ten years, this event has indelibly stamped each mid-summer with apprehension and disquiet. For most of late June, July, and early August, I feel haunted, as if something is shadowing me, a nudging reminder that a deadline is looming.

Like most other vendors, I make everything I sell, which means a great deal of summer is lived in my little factory, seated at the old door and sawhorses I call my work table. The good thing is that the fair forces creative endeavor. I have artist friends who show in galleries every summer, and say this helps them, that without the pressure they would turn into indolent sloths, spending these golden, halcyon days in a hammock, reading faded paperbacks with sandy spines…and never rouse themselves to work.

The bad thing is that creative endeavor forced by a deadline exacts its pound of flesh.

This year, I have decided that the price in time and spirit is too high and will forgo the fair, and all it entails: the creation and production; the big tent and the anxious, sleepless nights; the display and the schlepping; the nice people and their stories; the camaraderie of the vendors; the swiping of the credit cards; the exhausted smiles; the uncertainty; the packing up and the taking down; the money count at the end.

Like all traditions, the fair has seemed immutable, as if it will always define my summer. Without it, I feel rudderless, adrift on a wide, glassy sea. I am reading those novels, riding my bike, swimming on occasion, talking with friends, making a few cards but nothing of any substance. I sit outside at nine o’clock and watch the fireflies, savor bouquets of peppery arugula from my brother-in-law’s garden, dream restless dreams on these hot, still nights.

For me, few things are relinquished without a sense of loss. There is nothing on the creative horizon but sky. I feel no inner calling. I feel no compulsion. I am bewildered and unsettled by this space, this quiet, this emptiness. And yet, I am adjusting to it, happy to hear the hydrangeas breathe in the dusk, happy to bite into a sizzling hot dog, happy to follow the peaceful meanderings of the day, happy, for now, to say nothing.

Winter Cottage

February is the month we most need our angels.

I like to think that on these moonlit, 10-degree nights when ice festoons the windows and wind sweeps around the bare corners and snow turns blue that my house is full of company. A number of loving, eccentric spirits (most of whom I know but a few I do not) tumble down the chimney or drift under the back door and hang out for a bit while I am sleeping.

They sit in the wing chairs in front of the little stove or around the dining table or before the cold fireplace and tell each other stories of their long-ago loves, triumphs, sadnesses, their still unfufilled longings. Maybe they have a slow dance in the foyer or a cheese sandwich in the kitchen. I like to think they’re happy in this sweet house the way I am. I know they are surely welcome.

Winter is here in all its fierce, determined earnestness. Blizzards of blinding snow and wracking winds are followed by waist-high drifts and icicles long as sabers. And then a warming to 38 degrees and mushing through ankle-deep slush and driving through frigid lakes that swirl across once black roads. Then snow again, layer upon layer of snow and cold like a birthday cake in a dark fairy tale.

We walk in mincing steps on the slick back roads, those of us who crave the fresh, bracing air and a glimpse of the leaden or the stark blue sky. We visit the library to read the paper or thumb through an art book or make our way to a coffee shop or the post office or the grocery store, delighted just to be out and about and in the company of other hardy souls.

We make soups thick with black beans and onions and chowder to stand a spoon in. Tea is good with a sprinkle of cayenne, soda bread with bubbles of melted cheese. Socks are wooly; sheets are flannel; boots are serious. Summer is light years away. There is nothing on the beach but snow and an occasional crow, a sullen gull.

The spirits, known and unknown, sense our thinness, our weariness with the challenges of deep winter. In the pale mornings, you might find a love note on the refrigerator written in an elaborate, old-fashioned hand. Look for a tattered fortune or a torn secret under a chair cushion. There may also be a stone in the sink. Look around. We’re not alone. It’s February, the angels’ favorite month to visit.

Roses Dreaming

Finally, it is January. I breathe a big sigh of relief. Finally, the deep, beautiful, mostly empty month of bare trees and snow squalls and frozen earth and silence. After the rush-gush down the chute from the end of October to the end of December, January is like looking at a bare wall after absorption in a de Kooning…like the sudden hush of a library reading room off a cacophonous city street.

This is the month to take bundled-up walks around five o’clock when the ink-stained clouds and the blue dusk chill the fingers and thrill the soul. I wear hats and mufflers and gloves under wool mittens and breathe the cold air down to my knees and let my toes fend for themselves in thick socks.

I think of something I read once about the cold. The advice was good: not to hunch up or shudder or wrap your arms around yourself to ward it off but rather to breathe, to relax, to let go, to surrender.

This January seems to be a lesson in that, letting go of things no longer useful or beautiful like dresses that don’t delight; books read and forgotten; paper I thought would be used in my work but piles up now in plastic bins; plastic bins because they’re ugly; an angel food cake pan (really!); knicknacks and bric a brac (not charming); striped socks with mended toes; dried-up pens; threadbare potholders; wellies with split soles.

And deeper still…letting go of questions that no longer serve: Am I kind, lovely, smart, resourceful, creative, worthy? Is there enough to go around? Must love be earned? I am paying more attention this month to how I create my life, shape the days, spend the nights. How thoughts can restore well being or undermine it. Living the interesting question: in the end, what is left when you take away what is no longer useful or beautiful or nourishing to the work and to the heart?

January’s gift is the time and the stillness and the uneventfulness to go within and toss out, dust up, rearrange…to bustle about down in the dark cellar or up in the frigid attic. In this landscape of black trees, stark horizons, and crisp, white air, there is no place to hide. Best to show up. Best to surrender. Best to release. Best to listen to what the silence has to say. And pay heed.

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 added.

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 out of a fat, round earthenware bowl with a dash of salt and pepper.

What could be better than this: fragrant roasted potatoes, a crackling wood fire, a glass of wine 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 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; 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.