Words & Images
Home alone, the low hum of no-one-else-around-silence layered over the quick breath of fire in the stove. A day of solitude, largely spent with language — writing an article, revising poems, discussing poems and poetry with a friend, reading, reading, reading, mostly poems — has quieted me. This is my center, a warm circle, the hearth.
Last night was the sixth night in six and a half weeks that David and I were alone in the house. We have had an amazing richness of visits, which has meant a month and a half of being in the moment for the most part, because the immediacy of having loved ones so close by has kept me securely rooted in what has been happening right here, right now.
Yes, that right here, right now has meant lots of getting beds ready and almost constant food shopping and marathon cooking of many meals for many people. But then those beds were filled with our children and other loved ones and the table was circled by friends and family eating and talking and laughing, and none of it felt like work. The meals ranged from 19 for Thanksgiving dinner, to 11 of us eating vegetarian chili before going to a bonfire party on a frigid night, to 14 for New Year’s Eve, to Sam and a friend eating leftover soup yesterday morning after a late night out, getting ready to head off for a skiing and snowshoeing adventure. Thanksgiving night 15 people slept in the house, in beds, on couches and floor mats and rugs and a blow up mattress in the studio.
And now this evening it’s only David and me. The house is quiet, and we’re not expecting any overnight guests until the middle of next month. I’ve loved the richness and bustle and closeness of the last six weeks, but I’m feeling fine about the coming stillness. Last night at a party I talked with a friend about her intentions for the New Year. She wants to contain some of the pushing she usually uses to direct her life, to get her where she feels she needs to be. “I want to let more creative unfolding happen,” she said, and I knew exactly what she meant. Being still, listening to what is emerging, letting time unfold, can lead to unexpected places.
Just as a house full of friends and family can lead to unexpected conversations and connections and the pleasure of sharing a warm home and bountiful table, stillness can lead to a rich connection with self, and an awareness of what the next turn might mean, or be, or where it might lead. I’m feeling full and ready.
In my late teens and well into my twenties I loved to pick wildflower bouquets. Noticing a field with daisies, or black-eyed Susans, or yarrow or asters, I would stop my car or my bike and wade into the tall grasses and flowers. I sometimes thought about the people who owned the fields where I picked flowers, but I was living mostly in the country, and there were pastures everywhere, often no where near a house, and I couldn’t imagine any one would mind me taking home a free bouquet. When Eric and I got married, our bouquets were made with wildflowers.
In June, 1981, Eric and our good friend Anne and I bought the house where I still live. The house is surrounded by fields and hay meadows and pastures. The day we moved in I walked into the small field on the south side of the house and looked at the flowers — daisies, vetch, clover, Indian paintbrushes, wild multiflora roses. They were all blooming among the tall grasses with their full seed heads, nodding back and forth in the wind. I sat down in the field, happy and overcome with the thought that I now had my own wildflowers to pick. It felt remarkable that I didn’t have to stop at the side of the road any more and pick someone else’s flowers.
Since then I’ve mostly created bouquets for my house from the flowers I grow in my garden — columbine and iris early in the season, then peonies and on to salvia and zinnias and cosmos and rudbekia. But I still love a field in June, with its wild array of ever-changing flowers and its splashes of color — all, in many senses, for free.
“Our family’s fan is positioned too close to the source of shit,” Sam said to me Sunday evening, as we were leaving the hospital. We’d been visiting a dear friend, hospitalized because of troubling symptoms, yet to be clearly diagnosed. We had a Thanksgiving weekend rich in family and friends, all gathered essentially to love each other. “Your family has a remarkable capacity for being together without any conflicts,” David said to me at one point over the weekend.
True, but in the midst of the weekend gathering we’d gotten a phone call about our friend that let us know, once again, the fan was in the direct path of the shit. But our Thanksgiving weekend was also full of fun with epic eating, hours of sitting in the warm sunshine on the south side of the porch, and a walk everyone was able to take on Friday morning, including my mother who was in the hospital herself, barely able to get out of bed, just a few weeks ago.
The domed pile of brush I’d been adding to all summer and fall got torched on Friday night, burning quickly in a hot whoosh of flame, then settling down into a warm, firewood-fed campfire. A gang of Sam’s friends had come for the weekend, and along with family, and more friends, a ring of us sat around the fire talking and laughing and telling stories. Feeding the fire, we were feeding our selves, soaking up the fundamentally satisfying act of watching wood burn while sitting with people we love.
So I’m repositioning the fan, or at least putting it on oscillating mode, so it can swing between all this weekend’s memories — the food, the fire, the family and friends laughing and walking and sitting in the warmth of the sun and the burning wood, and yes, the suckiness of more illness in our lives. Back and forth. Here we go.
Today I was scheduled to be in New Orleans, for the grand opening of the newly relocated Family Justice Center there, planned to coincide with the 7 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the five-year anniversary of the creation of a Family Justice Center. The day was meant to recognize all the work a core group of committed people have done to make a safer city for victims of domestic and sexual violence, and it was going to be a chance for me to meet many of the people I’ll be working with there over the next year. Instead, New Orleans is preparing for the arrival of Isaac, and I’m on my way home.
This trip was to be the first of many I’ll be making to New Orleans, to work on a U.S. Department of Justice sponsored project to create an effective Sexual Assault Response Team (SART) and protocol for the city. I was looking forward to starting this job, which will undoubtedly be a challenge, as developing an effective SART anywhere is a challenge (think of all the systems you need to get to work together — law enforcement, advocacy, medical, prosecution — each understanding and valuing the others’ roles, and everyone supporting and not blaming and prejudging the victim). But it will be a challenge in a city of survivors, people who know how to face enormous challenges and keep moving forward. I expect to learn a lot, even as I’m bringing my own expertise in facilitation and sexual violence response to the table.
I thought about New Orleans all day today as I traveled home. Instead of waking up in Louisiana, ready to start this new job with a celebration, I woke up to a drizzly Long Island morning. I took the train with Adrienne into New York to get a bus home, and spent 45 minutes waiting on the corner of 34th and 8th, watching the Manhattan world flowing by. When I arrived in Boston I had over an hour to wait for my bus to New Hampshire, so I got a sandwich and sat in the sun, thinking about the clouds in New Orleans.
I came home to a safe, dry house, a garden full of ripe tomatoes, and my flower pots on the porch still pumping out blossoms. It was a day of city images, but certainly not the city images I expected. I feel blessed, and I’m sending some of those blessings to New Orleans, hoping that Isaac delivers a gentle anniversary.
Just about four years ago, in our first months together, David and I planned an art trip, an “art attack,” my friend Andi called it. We were going to see a couple of exhibitions at the MFA in Boston, then drive to the Hudson River Valley to visit Storm King Art Center, and then come home through western Massachusetts, visiting the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown and MASS MoCA in North Adams. We got to all the museums, but it was a very rainy weekend and we decided to wait for better weather to visit Storm King.
We finally got there this week. Planning our drive back to NH from Knoxville, we decided to treat ourselves and take our time to get home, staying in some lovely spots on the way. The first night we stayed at the Hotel Strasburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, a wonderful historic inn full of antiques, paintings, and Victorian decor. It was a welcome alternative to the big box hotels along interstates.
In planning our route home, David had realized we could visit Storm King, spending a night in another beautiful valley. Storm King was as astonishing and inspiring as we’d expected. Covering over 500 acres, the Art Center is full of outdoor sculptures situated on the beautiful grounds in ways that change perspective whether you’re looking at a piece from an open field, a picnic bench, walking one of the long allees (an allee is a planting of trees to form a long walkway; at Storm King there are 200 hundred pin oaks in one, 40 maples in another) or standing on the hill that holds the museum building. Over an afternoon and morning of glorious weather, David and I took in the grand Mark di Suvero sculptures that dominate the fields, the stunning David Smith collection on the lawn by the museum building, the snaking walls built by Andy Goldsworthy, the constantly waving rods by Robert Murray, the contrasting color and form of mown lawn against tall native grasses, the sloping lines of distant mountains against the hills of the park, the beauty and grandeur of it all adding to the high we were already carrying home from the wedding.
The night after we left Storm King, at dinner, we started talking about our ideas for creating sculptures in the land around our house. David has been thinking about outdoor art pieces for months; Storm King got me thinking about incorporating sculptural elements in my garden. Wherever our trip home leads us in our art, it led us to a happy journey home. And here we are.
Orchid blooms again
An annual April treat
Garden pride inside.
Kitchen door opens
Birdsong sunlight bright morning
Pack up the work day.
Home, couch, fire, food
Read, sleep, sleep, sleep, wake, repeat
Holding time’s hot hand.
Rainwater racing
Tracks across the porch floorboards
Chasing winter’s tail.
Grace Mattern 