7. What a Look

This picture reminds me of certain photo-averse friends of mine.

(click image for larger view)

Winter has settled in, and now it's the long three-month haul until spring finally arrives. I'm not complaining: Demeter's wanderings are already almost three months shorter than usual this year. For indoor creatures, it can be wearing, and maybe the one in the foreground is no exception. She lives in our studio, on an upper-level floor, and although there are large windows they look out on a busy street full of menacing, fast-moving cars: not a pleasant association with her past history.

A friend came over yeserday and observed that no matter what we do, it will never completely satisfy our cats. "I believe we live on a cat planet," he said. "Actually, it's their place, and we exist to serve them — we just haven't gotten it through our heads yet."

Time to Celebrate!

So sweet, and so reluctant! Hope you're anticipating New Year's Eve and the New Year more than Manon. We're having dinner with friends, and, I hope, going to bed shortly after midnight. See you in 2012!

 

Tango

Yesterday we went to a wedding. The bride and groom are both talented, accomplished professional musicians  — both organists — who will be making their first home in England. Our choir sang for them. From the loft, on an extremely hot and humid day, I watched the bride walk down the aisle toward her waiting husband-to-be; she in an elegant strapless white gown, carrying a sheaf of delphinium and calla lilies; he in a morning coat. Over the past four years I've watched her grow from a gifted, determined, but less confident young woman into this poised, mature, accomplished and beautiful woman who was walking now, with grace, toward her new life. And I cried a little, as I always do at weddings, because even with all their hope and joy, no young couple can possibly know what they're getting into.

Tomorrow, J. and I will have been married for thirty years. We laughed with H. and D., the couple who married yesterday, that their marriage followed right after a royal wedding, just like ours did: we were married the week after Charles and Diana. Our wedding, and theirs, were both a whole lot simpler, and, fortunately, we've been a lot happier. "Be happy forever!" I told H. as I hugged her after the ceremony. Her face lit up, as it does when she smiles, and she said, "I really think we will be!"

What does it take, this elusive thing called happiness? One thing I think I see now, that I didn't then, is that happiness doesn't mean the same thing. No one, and certainly no two people together, can maintain the bliss that they feel when they fall in love and embark on that crazy promise to spend their lives together. Staying together becomes work at times. Hard work. It also takes some luck, a lot of patience, and a sense of humor; it requires a growing sense of one's own self as an individual as well as a partner, and an increasing flexibility to allow the other person to be who they are meant to be, and to see the beauty not in some idealized notion of what the other person and this union ought to be, but in what they are at any given moment. And frankly, sometimes it's better to let it go and move on.

We've been fortunate. It's been, and continues to be, an adventure. We're still growing and changing, and have become not only "the protectors of one another's solitude," as a dear friend remarked about his own marriage, but the protectors and defenders of each other's quirkiness. One day, we may be protectors of each other's dignity.

What a beautiful and insane endeavor; how much we expect from it and from one another, and how far we fall short! But as the tango shows us, there are infinite ways for human beings to dance together.

 

 

A Farm in the Catskills

 

This was our final stop, after Cooperstown, before heading back to Montreal. We stayed overnight in the farmhouse, visiting someone dear to us, who served us white wine and cheeses and huge pickled capers and olives in the garden, and a delicious dinner afterward, and then talked until we were all falling asleep. The next morning we got up and ate the breakfast I've already shown you. Then we went on a walk to see the ancestors' resting places, the basil and tomatoes, the barn filled with new hay, the old tractor and the young workhorses — and finally, reluctantly, headed back up the Northway in the Hudson Valley and along Lake George and Lake Champlain, the long and beautiful waterway that lies between the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

 

Farmhouse breakfast

My blue heaven. Blueberries, peaches, chewy whole grain toast with feta and dark wildflower honey, scrambled eggs, strawberry jam, coffee and rooibos tea…and a petite angel who prepares it all for you with love.

We're home now, after a beautiful drive through farmland and mountains. Home to our well-tended cat and garden, grateful for good neighbors and friends here, too.

More pictures and stories to come, including a visit to Cooperstown (not far from where I grew up) and my first fact-to-face meet-up with friend and writer Marly Youmans!

La Maison des Cyclistes

This Montreal landmark isn't far from where I live but I'd never looked at it so closely as yesterday afternoon when I sat across the street doing this sketch. I haven't conveyed the busyness of this intersection, with bike, foot, and car traffic constantly swirling in time with the lights – I'll have to practice sketching moving bikes, and have left a little room in the foreground to add some later, maybe. La Maison des Cyclistes is a cafe and shop which is the headquarters of VeloQuebec. Located across the street from Parc Lafontaine, and on the intersection of the rue Rachel and rue Brebeuf bike paths, both busy thoroughfares for bicycle commuters, it's a favorite place for both cyclists and pedestrians to stop. Plus — they have free air!

I had fun doing this sketch, which took quite a long time, and had a nice conversation with a cyclist who stopped to take a look. He was from Manitoba originally, now living in Montreal, and has cycled all over the west coast of North America but never in New England – when he heard I was from Vermont his eyes lit up since that's somewhere he really wants to go. "It's right next door!" I said. "Go!" "I haven't got any money right now," he said. "But maybe soon…" The other people who peeked were little kids from the garderie nearby, but they were all clutching a big rope and got hurried along by their teacher, looking back at me with big curious  eyes. I've got to draw those little kids sometime, they're absolutely adorable.

Art has been therapeutic this week, because we've had two losses. One is an old friend our age who has had a remarkable international artistic career and died in New York City after a long illness, and the other is my uncle, a taciturn titan and dairy farmer who died surrounded by his family, at 87, a little more than a week after going to the doctor. He was the patriarch of that branch of our family, and an oak tree I could never really imagine falling. Up until a little more than a week ago, he was still working in the barn and running the farm. So if one of these deaths was prolonged and tragic, the other was perhaps the way it should be.

Continuity

We're at our niece's home in Philadelphia, where we're stopping for two nights and a day on our way back to Montreal. The furthest south we got was Richmond, Virginia, where we attended the college graduation of a close friend. It's fully summer down there; hot and humid, trees in dark green leaf, daisies and – how gorgeous and startling to this northerner – bright red poppies in bloom along the roadside. I got very little sense of community life, or what the more rural landscape is like, though – we drove down I-95: urban corridor all the way. And below D.C., our GPS map showed large tracks of land given over to military use for bases and weapons proving grounds. I can do without that.

Back here in Philly, we're spending the day on a street lined with mature sycamores, in a house filled with the warmth of children. Their drawings and paintings are all over the walls, and as we eat our breakfast of scones and coffee the family dog sleeps on the back deck after taking a long morning run with our niece. Her husband left early for work but will be back tonight for another family meal.

We've visited here only rarely, because the locus of our family has always been in Vermont where the grandparents lived, along with J.'s sister and, of course, us. Now, a year after my father-in-law's death, we've already come down to Washington twice, and are glad both to feel more free to travel and to be able to learn more about the daily lives of our family members who've so often visited us in our own home. We weren't able to visit everyone on this trip, or stay as long as we'd have liked, but did pretty well.

It's also made me happy to look around this house and see (to my surprise, because I sort of forget these things) things we've made or given over the years – J.'s framed photographs, a quilt I made for our grand-nephew, my own great-grandmother's gold-and-white dishes in the china cabinet. And last night, our grand-niece brought me a ball of light grren yarn and a crochet hook, and I taught her how to do single crochet. I asked her, "What kind of things do you like making the best? Paintings? Clay?"

She thought for a minute and then answered: "I like making fuzzy things."

The Greening

A flock of geishas,
green-parasoled,
alight on the maple

Early afternoon on the side of the mountain. I walk around the pond, watching the slowly-swimming small-mouthed bass in the shallows, and a hatch of water-boatmen, all paddling madly like some sort of single-crew race gone amok. The white birches stretch toward the water, their stiffly-pleated new leaves emerging in tufts. A quick skirting around the water's edge, off the path, and sure enough, I discover blossoms on the hidden patch of trailing arbutus, and get my knees wet bending down to smell them.

This was supposed to be a walk for exercise, and I even jog a little as the path heads into the woods, but I keep getting distracted. There are Wake-Robins – dark maroon trillium – and cinnamon ferns unfolding their tightly-curled heads, and the leaves of dog's tooth violets and jack-in-the-pulpits. I take the branch of the trail that goes straight up, walking briskly enough to get my heart pumping; the canopy is still bare above me, but lower down all the shrubs and smaller trees have leafed out, just today, and the cloud of delicate green forms a band through the woods shimmering in the shafts of sunlight. Near the top, I see a deer trail heading off toward the gulley, and veer off into the deeper woods. The trees are huge here: white pine I can barely span with my outstretched arms, large maples, beech, mature birches; the peeling bark is as silver in the sunlight as coinage.

I lean against one of the largest pines and look up the trunk and notice something I've never seen before: as it goes up toward the top, the great swaying trunk moves more and more like liquid as it swings back and forth in the stiff wind. I lean one ear against the bark, and hear the tree groaning.

All my exercise resolve has gone now, and I slowly make my way down the bank toward the stream at the bottom with its little white waterfalls and pools, wandering from tree to tree, conscious of being as silent as possible, stopping often to look closely at what's near my feet and then up and out at the forest's unfolding panoramas that change with every few feet of elevation or distance. It's been a while since I've been in a place like this, and after half an hour I feel as cleansed as a pebble in the quickly-cascading water of the stream.

I hear dogs and voices in the distance, and decide to take a different route back down. From here I can look out over the Vermont hills and see the green creeping up the mountainsides across from me. Near my hand, the maples proffer their little umbrella-shaped leaf-and-flower bundles. I think suddenly of this exact week, three years ago, when I brought maple branches into the house, and my dying mother pored over the leaves and blossoms with our old hand lens, marveling at complexity, at rebirth.

Changing Lives, One at a Time

My husband received this letter today:

"I read with sadness in my private school's alumni bulletin of your father's recent passing. Here below, for your family, is a personal reminiscence of this unusual, lovely man.

I studied Arabic and Near Eastern Studies with your father in 197x, and I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting with our small class in his home at the school. As class began, he insisted we have tastes of exotic delicacies he offered us on a tray. When we protested we were not hungry (this was an evening class, after dinner) he rejoined, in his musical singsong voice with a twinkle in his eye, "One does not eat because one is hungry, one eats because food is offered." We dutifully partook of a morsel or two before delving into the dramatic history of this distant part of the world none of us had ever seen.

Thanks to your father, the Middle East began that year to open up in color and joy. Ever since it has seemed to me both human and accessible, even as the world news would have us believe it different and dangerous. I have never forgotten the warm way it was introduced to me.

My deepest sympathies and gratitude to all your family."

(New readers who aren't familiar with the stories of my father-in-law posted here over the past few years will find them collected, in reverse chronological order, under the title "The Fig and the Orchid.")

That quiet like no other

I’d intended to write something entirely different tonight, but when I came across this poem of Cesare Pavese, who was born September 9, 1908, I had to reproduce it here. You can read this and other poems of Pavese, translated by Linh Dinh, here, or follow other links via wood s lot, where I found this one.

Of course, it reminds me of the death of my father-in-law. Today we went to the Arab supermarket where we often shopped for things to take down to him in New Hampshire. I hadn’t been thinking about him too much until I saw the bins of fresh dates, yellow and brown, still attached to their stems.

This is what stops: the body that sees, that tastes, complains, appreciates. The material world of associations goes on, but irrevocably altered from the natural impulses: pluck the fruit; cook the succulent meat; prepare the soup in the favorite bowl. Now our task is to go on plucking, cooking, preparing, but for ourselves, with absence seated across the table. Only in my own middle age have I understood that the dead had their own associations, mostly unspoken and unknown to me, their student, and that in my own life I am creating, unwittingly, associations that will stop someone else, someday, in the market or the street, stung for a moment by the grief and joy of having loved me.

End of Fantasy
by Cesare Pavese

This body won’t start again. Touching his eye sockets
one feels a heap of earth is more alive,
that the earth, even at dawn, does not keep itself so quiet.
But a corpse is the remains of too many awakenings. 

We only have this power: to start
each day of life—before the earth,
under a silent sky—waiting for an awakening.
One is amazed by so much drudgery at dawn; 
through awakening within awakening a job is done.
But we live only to shudder
at the labor ahead and to awaken the earth one time.
It happens at times. Then it quiets down along with us.

If touching that face the hand would not shake—
if the live hand would feel alive touching it—
if it’s true that that cold is only the cold
of the earth, frozen at dawn,
perhaps it’d be an awakening, and things that keep quiet
under the dawn, would speak up again. But my hand
trembles, and of all things resembles a hand
that doesn’t move.

At other times waking up at dawn
was a dry pain, a tear of light,
even a deliverance. The stingy word
of the earth was cheerful, for a brief moment,
and to die was to go back there again. Now, the waiting body
is what remains of too many awakenings and doesn’t return to the earth. 
They don’t even say it, the hardened lips.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my
father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid";
please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the
whole series.)