Grace Mattern is a poet, writer, artist, mother, grandmother, partner, friend, community activist, gardener, triathlete, hiker and for 30 years was the Executive Director of the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. Her chapbook Fever of Unknown Origin was published in 2001 and her full-length poetry book The Truth About Death was published in 2012.
I’m back in Stone Harbor, on vacation. Yes real vacation. No gardening (though cooking all the garden vegetables I brought with me), no cleaning out the storage pod in the driveway and reorganizing the barn (David’s new studio in the barn is done), no cleaning out the decades of accumulated stuff in David’s parents’ house in Lancaster (which is what I did for the last two days until I was bone-achey and as dirty as I ever get). We have 5 more days here and Adrienne, Matt and Emilio are here until tomorrow night.
Today we sat on the dock with Emilio at high tide, when the water rises over the walkway a few inches, and introduced him to salt water. He loved it and happily splapped the water and sucked our salty legs. Tomorrow I want to plop him in a pool of water at the beach.
Then days of reading, writing, sleeping, thinking. The one major drawback is the lack of reliable internet. So I just downloaded a WordPress app. Thus, my first post via my Droid. Workable but tedious. One finger typing is way slow as you all know.
Adrienne and I have thought for a while that Emilio sees Eric. I’ve heard that babies up to about age 2 often can see people from different dimensions, and since everyone in our family has experienced Eric’s presence in different ways, I’m certainly ready to believe Emilio would experience his presence too, and maybe in very direct ways he can’t articulate yet.
When Emilio was tiny, Adrienne came out of the shower one day and he was on his back in his bassinette, smiling up at something above him. “Daddy,” Adrienne thought. I’ve also seen him looking at what appears to be blank space, smiling and cooing as if he’s locking eyes with someone. And yesterday morning when I came downstairs, Marianna who had gotten up with Emilio said, “He’s been talking to Eric. He keeps looking over into that corner smiling and chattering as if someone is there.”
Maybe he was particularly attuned to Eric because he visited the grave for the first time the day before. He looked like he knew where he was, and was comfortable being with his grandfather in whatever dimension that’s possible.
There are ten people on the porch this morning. David is reviewing the hike up Mt. Isolation, and Anne is here to help convince him it’s doable, fun and scenic. At 13.3 miles, David isn’t convinced it’s a hike he wants to do with the limited hiking conditioning we’ve had this year, though hike convincing isn’t why Anne came over — she’d never met Marianna and is here to see her, as well as Emilio, the attraction for Alison and John to be here. Or a Sunday morning hanging on the porch is attractive in itself. David’s brother Doug is here. With a meeting in Boston later this week, a couple of days visiting in NH made sense, and I’m glad to have him here when it’s warm and there’s power. His last visit was during a major ice storm and resulting power outage, and we spent the night at the house feeding the old wood stove to keep the pipes from freezing. It was dark, dirty and cold, and we had to get water out of the half-frozen stream in a five gallon bucket to flush the toilet. Hanging on a porch full of friends and family drinking coffee is a much better way to experience this house.
What makes me particularly happy is that I’ve been home long enough to keep my flower pots out on the steps and they look fabulous. Flowers + family + friends = happy me.
Emilio was delivered to us in bed at 7:30 this morning. “We’re off to work,” Adrienne said and she and Matt were gone. David and I handed him back and forth as we made coffee, then put him down and watched him squiggle and soldier crawl across the floor, occasionally doing a plank stance with his hands and toes touching down as his diapered baby butt rose in the air. We went for a short walk with Emilio in the Ergo (this generation’s version of the Snuggli) and Khadijah on the leash, admiring a garden down the street with pear trees, amaranth, sunflowers, giant tomato plants and dahlias.
Then it was time for the 9:00 bottle and the rocking down for the first nap of the day. The unsuccessful errand I did (involving trying to get something positive out of Verizon to help fix a phone problem) while Emilio slept isn’t worth even thinking about in reflecting on a pure Mimi-day. When Emilio got up, we packed up and drove to Fire Island, stopping at a state park to have a picnic in a shaded pavilion, overlooking the bay behind the island. The air was warm, the breeze strong, and Emilio had his second bottle, though he seemed too enthralled by the beautiful day to finish it, then gnawed on a red pepper and a peeled New Hampshire peach.
Back in the car, Emilio napping again, David and I explored the barrier beaches of western Long Island, looking for possible kayaking spots (not much luck there). Emilio woke up when we stopped to get gas and got fussy, so I sat in back with him while he finished his bottle (breast milk, so I was motivated not waste any). Back at the house Emilio played on the floor again and in my lap and David’s, making little animals pop up on a toy with big colored triggers. A bit more milk, more rocking as he sucked my shoulder, then sleep again.
Right after Emilio woke up, Adrienne got home and he pumped his little body up and down and smiled and cooed. She left the room for a minute, and he went back to popping animals out of the toy, then focused right in on Adrienne when she came back. We made dinner and ate in the yard, Emilio sitting in his high chair smooshing cherry tomato halves into his mouth, mashing peppers and bananas with his gums and taking in some turkey burger. Good and dirty for bath time, Adrienne took him to get ready for bed.
David and I sat in the yard for a bit longer, watching the clear sky get dark and talking about the day, what it feels like now that his father is gone, our upcoming trip to Kigali, our plans for this week with Sam here, when we’ll fit in our next hike — random musings of contentment.
This is new. Instead of the usual pre-week crank-up of Sunday evening, I’m relaxed. I was relaxed last Sunday evening too, sitting on the darkened porch of my friends’ house on Squam Lake. This evening I’m in the air-conditioned living room of Matt and Adrienne on Long Island. I just finished making ratatouille with vegetables from my garden — the entire dish, other than the olive oil, from my own labor. The cucumber salad is from my cucumbers and Adrienne’s. Adrienne is nursing Emilio down for the night, the jasmine rice in coconut milk is cooking, and in a few minutes I’ll start the grill for the marinating salmon.
Earlier today we all did the Damon Runyan 5K in Yankee Stadium, a great event for a great cause. The Damon Runyan Cancer Research Foundation raises money from the race, and the entire 5K takes place in Yankee Stadium, including running around the warning track twice (providing shots of yourself on the Jumbotron), up and down ramps and stairs and around concourses. It’s incredibly fun. Anne joined us and even Emilio was there, sleeping on Matt’s back as he walked with David.
And tomorrow we’re not heading back to work or to NH. We’re spending the day with Emilio. I am exactly where I want to be.
1941 Two Girls in Spanish Harlem Watercolour on Paper 20 1/2 x 15 1/2 inches / 52 x 39.4 cm Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library
Last week Anne suggested our writing group go to a local screening of the film “Alice Neel.” She had seen three of Neel’s paintings at the National Portrait Gallery the week before, and was astonished by their power and vibrancy. None of us had heard of Alice Neel, but we agreed it would be fine way to spend an evening meant to nurture creativity, to see a movie about a woman who devoted her life to her art.
The film was directed by Andrew Neel, Alice’s grandson, and “it explores her struggles as an artist and a single mother from the Depression era until her death in 1984.” There is extensive commentary from Neel’s two sons, who grew up with a mother clearly possessed by her art and not always as focused on parenting as women of that era were expected to be. Having lived through my own possession by a poetry demon (my language for that intense year) when I wrote The Truth About Death after Eric died, I have a tiny idea of what an entire life ruled by that kind of need to create can be like.
The film was excellent, and as Anne had said, Alice Neel’s paintings even as seen in a documentary, were powerful, direct and “fresh,” as one of her artist friends in the film said. Now I need to see some of her paintings in real life — there is one at the MFA in Boston — and I want more people to know about this extraordinary woman and painter. Thus this post. Click on the link above and check her out.
Somebody said to me recently that there are only 12 people in New Hampshire, and we all just change our hairstyles and clothes a lot. Everyone here is connected in some way. We walked into Susan and Woodie’s big screen porch overlooking Squam Lake, and of course already had connections with the other couple there, though I’d had no idea they knew Susan and Woodie. I once worked in the same building with Deb, who worked with Susan two jobs ago, and David and Deb’s husband worked together and I had met him last winter at a poetry reading.
Mark and Andi and other friends were out on their boat, so I texted them where I was on the lake and they came by the dock and got off for a visit. More connections, of course. Mark keeps his boat at the marina where Susan’s son works so they know him, and Mark knows one of the carpenters who recently worked on an amazing house Susan and Woodie had been describing from a recent visit for a benefit party.
But the best part of the whole little Squam vacito was just the connection with letting go. We spent the afternoon overlooking the lake, chopped by wind and ruffled into a sparkled blue. We took a short cocktail cruise in Woodie’s 1965 wooden motorboat, a gleaming beauty, and watched the fledgling eagles flapping their already great wings around a tall pine as the sun set through clouds over the Squam Range. Susan and Woodie and David and I threw together a random dinner of nachos, garden green beans and caprese salad with goat cheese and ate on the darkened porch, only citronella candles providing light as we moved into an after dinner recounting of family histories. And for David and me, we kept reconnecting with the reality that even though Monday morning was just around the corner of the upcoming night’s sleep, we didn’t have to go to work.
David and I have been home for five days now, and have actually been having fun. My sister and brother-in-law came for dinner on Friday night, we climbed Mt. Garfield yesterday (which remained in a cloud for the entire time we were on the summit, but it didn’t matter, we were off in the forest with good friends, the first date we’ve been able to keep since June) and then we came back to a dinner party with close friends, eating a wonderful array of fresh vegetables from Alison’s garden. I’ve had time to take photos of the flowers around the house, and today we’re headed to an afternoon and overnight on Squam Lake, with a friend I recently reconnected with after years of not seeing each other.
David was reviewing a document from his parents’ lawyer this morning, outlining the duties of an estate executor, and he just declared, “I am done with estate duties and am declaring myself available for a vacito.” Vacito = mini-vacation. Good idea.
This is too hilarious. Apparently this was my 215th post, which brought me to a WordPress page when I hit the publish button. Suggesting ways for me to bring more traffic to my blog, there was a list of possible additional categories to use: Add a couple more to make your post easier for others to discover. Some suggestions: stress hormones, corn chips, sleep disturbance, days like today, and insomnia.
Corn chips? I’m definitely adding corn chips as a category on my blog. Now I know why I published that self-indulgent, tired-ass post — it was my path to corn chips as a blog category!
Grace Mattern 