Photo #17

maple damaged in ice storm, 27 Jan 2012

 

Very sad. This lovely maple with dark leaves had a perfect symmetry this morning and now it’s quite damaged. Hope we can save it.

Photo #16

dad walking, Hickory Hammock State Park, Florida, Feb. 2007

I wrote this piece in November 1993 — more than 18 years ago.

At Home

My father called last night. He’s finally changing his will and he’s made me executrix. The term surprises me, and before I can stop myself, I flash on Electrolux vacuum cleaners, then high-priced call girls performing exec-u-tricks for CEOs. I don’t think about what it really involves until after we hang up, and then I can’t stop thinking about it.

Dad and his girlfriend, Nancy, are renting a house on the Carolina coast for three months, then they’ll decide what to do next: either house-sit in a Michigan lighthouse, or build their own log cabin in the western Virginia hills, with the idea of living in it half the year and travelling during the rest. Either way, he’s still looking for a home, temporary or less temporary. He’s spent the last 10 years hiking, living in the woods, living in other people’s houses while they’re away – usually without a telephone, so my sisters and I never know when we might talk with him again. We make up for it by talking about him, comparing the evidence of our lives and finding him both mutable and constant.

Lately, Dad talks a lot about money. He never used to mention it, not specific dollar amounts. Until I was 25, I had no idea what his salary was or what the house cost. If I asked, he’d say “Oh, we have enough. You don’t need to worry.” Now, he brings up the subject while we’re talking about breakfast or the Orioles. He tells me what his 401k will mean for my sisters and me when we split it three ways. He tells me how much money he settled on my mother in their divorce last year, and how much she’ll receive from a life insurance policy. I write it all down for later.

I remember when I first realized my father wasn’t all-powerful. I was 7 and my mother, who never listened to me, was vacuuming around me one evening while I talked. I packed a few stuffed animals and fewer clothes, and I told her I was leaving. “Goodbye!” she waved, stepping over the cord into the living room. I slammed the door, walked through the dark to the back yard, and stood under the redwood deck Dad had made the summer before, wondering where to go now. The mint grew thick in the shade, the aroma so strong I’m overpowered even now when I pull it out of my own garden. I heard the front door open and close, and then my name yelled into the night. I heard him coming towards me and as soon as he got close, I took off. It felt like a game, then. We ran three times around the house but I was more agile around the corners and stayed well ahead of him. He couldn’t catch me. I felt powerful, strong, safe in my youthful body. It was only later, in bed with my animals, that I felt a cold sliver of fear near my heart.

I feel the same chill now, sometimes. When Dad and Nancy visited this summer, we played 4-card stud, 7-card draw, hearts, and any other card games we could remember most of the rules for. Suddenly, Dad got a charley-horse and fell writhing to the ground. I ran to get the analgesic cream. After Nancy and I rubbed it into his calf, he was able to stand up again, but he seemed a little shorter, a little stooped. I don’t think I had ever witnessed his pain before, so direct, so unmitigated.

When we talk about his will, or the house they may build, I know that hiding just beyond the circumference of this conversation is another conversation, one much more difficult to navigate.

I had a nightmare the other night that my father killed himself. In the dream, he had made a promise to me that he would live out the length of his days. Everyone in my family dies young; few have lived past 65; and he knows I’m anxious that someone break into old age, just to show me it can be done. But, in the dream, he kills himself and the promise is broken. In life, he’s made no such promise, and even if he had, I couldn’t hold him to it, no matter how strong I am or how weak he becomes.

Eventually, he’ll find his home and he’ll want to stay there.

Photo #15

Rothkos in National Gallery of Art, 31 Jan 2011

National Gallery, 1989

“Art does not reproduce the visible;

rather, it makes visible.” -Paul Klee

In the National Gallery of Art,
we ramble like children on a field trip
through archways and corridors
that lean into us,
brush our shoulders and fingers.
Like fine shimmering sand, this chaste air
shifts between us and whispers its omen.
We pretend no knowledge,
but when I catch your sideways glance,
I know this game is not for children.

In the East Wing, you tell me you don't like Rothko:
"It's just formless color. What does it mean?"
I sit with Earth & Green for an hour,
caught colored in eternal stirrings, memory, desire,
but I admit I don't know what it means.

You like Renoir, because he paints people as people.
It's the same, I think, people as they are.
It's the same, your black wool sweater and pale thin lips
hold back like solid canvas the quick beating of your heart.
When I reach to brush a hair from my mouth,
your hand drifts to my face, skin on paint on skin on paint.

Later, we sit in your parked car,
the space between us pulsing with old and urgent dreams,
half-forgotten summer strands of beach and waves,
salty fingers inventing castles under the
true yellow sun and the sky blue sky, no clouds.
Blocks of color best left to children,
these yearnings are so palpable our lips taste
like seaweed, we hold each other's dreams undone.

Your wife doesn't know you are here.
My husband knows, but he trusts me.

Photo #14

Photographer Joel Sartore

“We have a very non-nature-based life. That’s why zoos and aquariums are so important. It’s the only place now where the public can go and actually see something without it being on a screen. It’s real, these things are real.”  (National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore)

Satore’s passion and avocation is taking photos of 6,000 animals in zoos and aquariums before they don’t exist anymore:

“”The goal of this project is to get people to look these things in the eye before they go extinct,” he says. “Not everything I shoot is rare, but a lot is. … Look these species in the eye and tell me you don’t care about them. They’re amazing and they’re funny and they’re sad and they’re lazy and they’re energetic and they’re mean and they’re aggressive and they’re everything we are.”

I’m not easily inspired but this project inspires me, combining exquisite photography and the desperate, respectful way Sartore is looking these animals in the eye and reminding us of their worth and beauty. I’m also inspired, and have been for a long time, to live a more nature-based life. One that is more in tune with the seasons (semi-hibernating in winter, outside most of the time in summer); more noticing of the sounds, smells, sights, textures, and colours around me; more engaged with nature every day, whether by taking a walk in the woods or on the beach or in town,or  snowshoeing, or sitting outside and observing, or carrying a camera with me to remind me to pay attention …  be astonished …

Photo #13

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The pine I call the umbrella tree, on our regular snowshoeing route … first pic is from 5 March 2011, second pic is from yesterday (22 Jan 2012). I felt like I was greeting a familiar friend when I came across it yesterday. What insects, birds, and other animals have interacted with it in the 11 months or so since I last saw it? And where did that big rock behind it come from?

Photo #12

shelf fungi, snowshoeing, 22 Jan 2012

 

Sometimes natural phenomena is disorienting: is it snow in the woods, or is it sand on the beach? Is it fungi (plant) or barnacles (animal)?  Is it an imagined world or a real world?

Photo #11

people at Café Crème, May 2005

I’ve written a lot about this before (e.g., here: The Third Place), but it’s worth saying again: “Third places” are key to community.  A third place is a neutral public or semi-public place, not home or work/school, where no one is guest or host. It’s inclusive and multigenerational (no membership, no status), accessible and accommodating in time and space, come-as-you-are, allows and fosters conversation (and possibly other activities), has a light or playful mood, and feels like a home-away-from-home.

In The Great Good Place, urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg describes third places as “informal public places on neutral ground where people can gather and interact.” They are places where we can just enjoy company and conversation.

A third place nourishes a diversity of human relationships, helps foster a sense of place and community, evokes a sense of civic pride, provides chances for serendipity, promotes companionship, is socially binding, and encourages sociability instead of isolation. Third places are the bedrock of community life and all the benefits that come from such interaction.

The locally owned coffee shop shown in the photo above, Café Crème, opened in a small Maine town in 2004 and flourishes today. It’s a vibrant, life-enhancing third place. It’s open from 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night, six days a week, and from 8:30-5:30 on Sunday. It showcases local art, offers opportunities for musicians to perform, provides a bulletin board for community notices and a selection of books and magazines for anyone who wants to read, has ‘theme’ days — Pirate Day, Vacation, the 1970s, Superheroes, Hawaiian-Tropical, Prom, Hollywood, etc. — with lavish decor and costumes (patrons are encouraged to donate decorative items and dress up, too), and sells many locally made items.

One of the essentials of a successful third place is that it be free or quite inexpensive to enter and purchase food and drink. At Café Crème, most customers buy a drink (from $1.50 or so and up), or a drink and a food item, and linger in the café for a half-hour, or an hour, or two; this is exactly what the owner envisioned, a place where “you could meet people … and talk and hang out. That’s what was lacking in [this town]. A place where friends could sit and talk without being rushed.”

I hung out there several days a week, meeting friends usually, and enjoying the parents with babies, the business meetings, the tourists, the regulars who sat and chatted around me. I miss it now that we have moved. There is a locally owned coffee shop in this town, too, and I’m glad it’s here, but it lacks the playful mood, the cozy couches, and that certain je ne sais quoi that makes Café Crème the excellent third place that it is.

Photo #10

Your Stuff Here sign, from train, near NYC, 3 Feb 2011

 

I like moving. I like planning and planting a new garden. I like living in houses and places that are different from each other (brand new suburban, rustic post and beam on 10 acres, Victorian in a coastal small town, mid-century modern … what will be next?). I like reinventing myself, unhinging my identity a bit, not knowing anyone or anywhere, gradually making discoveries. Of course, some of this can be done by staying in one place for a lifetime, but some of it can’t.

Most of all — and what moving facilitates so well — I like getting rid of stuff. I like selling or giving away books, I like weeding out clothes, shoes, and other apparel and accessories.  I like tossing knick-knacks, puzzles, games and other things I never really liked anyway but kept because they were (usually) gifts. I love throwing out letters, postcards, and other ephemera. I like the freeing feeling in my body when I let go of what I’ve been hanging on to.

It’s been 2-1/2 years since we last moved and I feel ready to do it again. Not move, necessarily, but purge the house of the unnecessary and unbeautiful.

As designer and Arts & Crafts Movement forerunner William Morris put it, succinctly: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”  I still have a long way to go to reach this ideal.

Photo #9

NYC architecture, Oct 2008

 

Sometimes, I really miss living in a city. I miss my idea of living in a city. Walking everywhere, little groceries and carry-out places on every block, museums, Central Park, walking everywhere. And the architecture. Small-town architecture, in the main, is nothing to write home about.

Photo #8

Thinking Facebook is Google

Sort of love that even though someone posted a Google search query on Google’s Facebook page!, someone else on Facebook answered their question, correctly.  It’s like amateur librarians are everywhere.

(Original story at Buzzfeed.)