Grace Mattern

March 6, 2013March 6, 2013

Generations of Jewelry

There was a package in the mail on Saturday, with the return address of my Aunt Muriel, and big $2 stamps plastered on the front. Aunt Muriel is a writer, and for years we’ve exchanged news of our writing when we exchange holiday cards. She was delighted when The Truth About Death was published, and I cheered for her when she had stories selected in local writing competitions and published in local papers. It’s been a relationship of letters that I’ve valued, even though I haven’t seen her for 30 years or more. I didn’t know what to expect in the package, since it’s past the usual holiday card exchange time frame.

Inside I found an ancient looking jewelry box, and a card. The card read, “I have enjoyed keeping in touch with you and reading and empathizing with your work. I am getting near the end of my life, and I have been going through and deciding what to do with different things and ‘treasures.’ I came across this piece that was made from Grandma McKinlay’s necklaces and I thought you might like to have it. I hope having it will please you.” I opened the box, which had been carefully taped shut, to find a necklace of shell beads.

Delighted with the gift, I brought the box and card to show Alison the next day, when we met to go skiing. “Just look how old this box is. What, maybe 50 years old?”

“Wait, I have a box just like that,” Alison said and went upstairs, coming back with a box that, though a big larger, was indeed very like the box Aunt Muriel sent me. Alison opened the box to a pink and silver pin.

“My Aunt Jean gave me this at the end of her life,” Alison said. “It’s a pin my mother gave her, and that she thought I’d like to have.” Alison’s mother died when she was a child, and her Aunt Jean knew it would mean a lot to Alison to have something from her mother. “There’s even a card,” Alison said, pulling out the small card behind the pin. “My mother gave this to Aunt Jean for a birthday, and told her it would look good with her black and white dress.”

The fact that Alison and I will most likely never wear the jewelry our elderly aunts gave us doesn’t matter. We both have “treasures” that we may pass along some day ourselves.

February 28, 2013

Above Tree Line: February

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The winter world on Mt. Washington’s eastern slope was in black and white on Tuesday, when David and I fulfilled our intention to get above tree line for February. We hiked into the alpine zone at the base of Tuckerman’s Ravine, on a wide well-packed trail. Before we left on our hike we could see we’d be hiking into the cloud cover over the mountain. The view above tree line was of snow, cloud, and dark spruce trees below, mounded with white. The monochrome day reminded me of a poem from years ago.

Absence or Everything

Moon laced through cold
curtains, the world
in black and white
since the last storm.

Glass feathers freeze,
skin seeks skin, vision
blurs as if walking
into winddriven snow.

The bedroom pinkens,
yet still, outside,
monochrome
trees, fields, fences, sky.

February 25, 2013February 25, 2013

Jackson XC

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David and I have been staying in the White Mountains for the last several days, cross-country skiing at Jackson XC, “The #1 Cross Country Ski Area in the Eastern United States,” according to their tag line. Jackson has long been a favorite cross-country ski destination for me.

Decades ago Eric and I came to Jackson to ski at least once a year, often with our friends Alison and John and often for multi-day ski trips, like the one I’m on right now. In those days we looked for maximum downhill thrills, taking a gondola to the top of the Wildcat ski area whenever the conditions were right and skiing down the backside of the mountain, on a cross-country ski trail. We were using long, wooden, Bona skis, which had to be treated with pine tar and then waxed, and we wore wool knickers and long socks, wool hats and mittens. Yesterday at the Jackson XC center I walked up to a display of wax and the young man working behind the counter asked if he could help me. “No,” I said. “I just want to look and remember all those years of waxing.” Now we’re on fiberglass, waxless back country skis, outfitted with wicking fabrics and soft shell jackets and the only wool we’re wearing is in our socks.

As we drove north on Saturday it started snowing, and kept up for more than 24 hours. With over 6″ of fresh snow since we’ve arrived, the skiing has been quite fantastic. Yesterday we skied the East Pasture Loop, following the tracks of several skiers before us, one of whom had cut graceful, sloping curves of telemark turns in the fresh snow. Today we climbed a long, gradual ridge up the shoulder of Popple Mountain. We skied the Maple Mountain loop at the top of the ridge, climbing to an area with sweeping views of Iron Mountain to our south, the cloud-shrouded mountains on either side of Pinkham Notch to our north.

While I’ve been fully present in the moments of the last several days, enjoying the fresh snow, the kick and glide of well-groomed trails, and views of mountains whenever the snow clouds cleared off, I’ve also been remembering those ski trips from 30 years ago. I’m beginning to understand that one aspect of aging, beyond less willingness to ski the steepest slope I can get to on my own, is how past experience enriches what is happening right now. I can still go out and ski 20 kilometers a couple of days in a row, and I can still climb over 1,000 feet on skis and manage the fast sweep back down, and for that I’m grateful. But I’m also grateful for how past memorable skis layered under today’s quick trip back down a hillside after a long climb up, and the realization that some joys can come again and again.

February 19, 2013

Once Again

“Look at that tree,” David said. We’d been following the snowmobile trail that runs past our house for several miles, the fresh snow well packed for our cross-country skis. “It looks like a tree in England.”

The oak tree does look like many of the trees we saw as we walked across England last summer. Sitting at the edge of a yard bordering an open field, the tree stands by itself, which is common in English pastures — a single tree with an unimpeded crown, standing grand and full, left to grow on its own for decades and decades.

I know this oak tree, and in fact have been so stuck by it I wrote a poem about it many years ago. The poem asks a question I’ve yet to answer.

Once Again

If there’s an oak I recall
from year to year for the fineness
of its winter crown against dusk sky
as I climb from woods to cross
the Bailey’s fields, its branches a black
articulation against last light,
do the scars of the intervening year,
matter, all those months without considering
this simple view, now new
and long remembered all at once?

February 12, 2013

Blizzard

I couldn’t ski the winter after Eric died. He had once said about me, “Grace would choose cross-country skiing above everything except her children,” and he’d been right. Though I had started as a downhill skier (I cut insignias and racing numbers out of sticky cloth for my father’s sail making business as a young teen, 5 cents a number, saving to buy myself inexpensive downhill skis and skiing lessons at the ridiculously small, but still skiable, Blue Hill Ski Area outside Boston) from the first time I cross-country skied I was in love.

My parents gave me wooden Bona skis for Christmas in 1977. Eric and I were living with friends in Williamstown, MA, and there was an abundance of snow and hills. I went out into the sloping fields across the street from our house one afternoon and came home and told Eric he needed to buy skis. He did, though he’d never done any kind of skiing before, and gamely followed me up and down hills, learning to snowplow, learning to turn, learning to glide. That was the beginning of almost 30 years of skiing together. When I was first faced with skiing without him, I just couldn’t do it.

Then the next winter came, and I realized that not skiing, because Eric couldn’t ski, wasn’t doing anyone any good, least of all me. “Get over yourself and get out there,” I said to myself, and I did.

When the grand dump of snow blew in to New Hampshire at the end of last week I was delighted. The idea of a blizzard, as long as people could be safe and warm and dry, was exciting. Waking up Saturday to continued snow and drifts up to my hips all I could think about was getting out skiing. Which made me think about Eric. “Active with glide,” was how Eric described his favorite outdoor activities — skiing, kayaking, biking, swimming.

I was in touch with Adrienne and Sam Saturday morning, both of them wanting to ski as much as me, but too far away to join me. And my sister, who loves to ski but can’t manage it right now due to health challenges, had told me to ski for her. So I had a whole pack skiing in my head this past weekend, gliding along for the ride.

January 30, 2013

Talking About Feelings

“I sad, miss Mama,” Emilio said to me on a Friday morning, after Adrienne had been away since Tuesday. I’ve been impressed with Adrienne and Matt’s natural parenting instincts since Emilio was first born, and they’ve enhanced those skills through reading and paying attention to what other parents have to say. One thing they do is help Emilio recognize his feelings behind difficult behavior, like saying to him, “I know it’s frustrating to you when I say no more videos,” when he fusses as they put away the iPad.

So I felt proud of both Emilio and his parents that Friday morning when he was able to tell me what he was feeling. Helping a toddler recognize his feelings, and express them, is important regardless of the child’s gender, but it’s particularly encouraging with a boy, given how few cultural messages there are for boys to express feelings.

All of which reminded me of a talk I tried to have about feelings with Sam and two of his friends, more than a decade ago, when they all were about 12. It was late on a Sunday afternoon in the cottage we were renting for a week on Squam Lake. All our visitors for the weekend had left and I realized I now had a week ahead with a lot of male energy in a small space — Eric, Sam and his two friends Ben and Mike. The boys and I were sitting in the living room of the cottage.

“Okay, Guys,” I said. “Since I’m going to be the only female here all week, let’s practice talking about our feelings.” The boys looked at me. “What are you feeling right now?”

After a pause Mike said, “I feel hungry.”

Ben looked puzzled for a moment and then smiled. “I feel sand between my toes.”

We all had a lot of fun that week.

January 23, 2013January 23, 2013

My Loss Guru

After Eric died, his mother Natalie and I grew closer than ever. Our relationship was already a happy story of transformation. When Eric and I married in 1980, I hadn’t yet converted to Judaism — in fact, that didn’t happen for another 20 years. Disapproving of Eric’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman, Eric’s Orthodox Jewish parents didn’t come to the wedding. They’d been unhappy about our relationship for the five years we’d been together — I was divorced (so was Eric), I wasn’t Jewish, I was a feminist who refused to convert to a “patriarchal religion” as I told the Rabbi Eric’s parents arranged for me to meet with prior to the wedding.

For years there was controversy about our attendance at Passover Seders and other family events, and arguments among the aunts and uncles and cousins about how we should be treated. But over time, and especially as Eric’s parents got to know me better and began experiencing the joy of their first grandchild, Adrienne, their attitude towards Eric and me warmed and softened and then grew close and supportive. As Adrienne and Sam grew up, visits to Eric’s family were frequent and happy occasions. When Eric died in 2006, the strong connection between Natalie and me got even stronger.

I would call her several times a week to talk about Eric. We would relay the dreams we were both having about him, talk about how much we missed him, where we thought he was now, how we could stay connected to him. Natalie told me stories about Eric as a baby, Eric as a boy, Eric as a teen-ager. I told her stories about Eric’s jobs and the wonderful sympathy cards I was getting from people who’d known Eric, how much they admired him.

Natalie was devastated and overwhelmed with grief, as I was, but she kept plugging through her daily life, as she had through so much loss. Her mother died when she was eight, her father when she was a teenager. She lost her oldest sister in her 50’s and spent close to a decade caring for Eric’s father as he became more and more disabled from MS. Ray died in 2004, and within 3 years Natalie lost another sister, a brother-in-law, Eric and three of her closest friends. Then she lost her remaining sister, her sister-in-law, her brother, and many more friends. When she talked about surviving and moving through grief, she knew what she was talking about. I called her my Loss Guru.

Now Natalie is gone. She died early Monday morning, after a year of failing health. I can’t call her and talk about grief and how to manage the groundlessness of the ever shifting world that includes both joy and pain, loss and gain. I can’t call her and cheer her up with happy news about her grandchildren and great-grandson. I can’t call her and listen to her talk about seeing and talking to Eric, because over the past year she’s been in touch with him a lot, a trick I asked her about at one point. “It’s really interesting that you talk to Eric so much, because he doesn’t exist in this dimension any more.”

“I know,” she said.

“Then how do you talk to him?”

“He calls on a special number,” she said.

Now she’s taken that number with her.

January 19, 2013

The Clock

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Imagine a 24 hour movie, devoted to an exploration of time, how it’s measured by clocks and watches, how and why people pay attention to its movement, how it flows seamlessly, moment by moment, minute by minute, how people think and talk about time, how it affects our movements and expectations and actions. That movie is The Clock by Christian Marclay, currently showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

“Christian Marclay’s The Clock is a cinematic tour de force that unfolds on the screen in real time through thousands of film excerpts that form a 24-hour montage. Appropriated from the last 100 years of cinema’s rich history, the film clips chronicle the hours and minutes of the 24-hour period, often by displaying a watch or clock. The Clock incorporates scenes of everything from car chases and board rooms to emergency wards, bank heists, trysts, and high-noon shootouts.”

David and I spent an hour and a half watching The Clock during a visit to MOMA on Thursday. We were entranced, in the showing from just after 11:00 a.m. until 12:30. The build up to noon through various clips of movies, many showing huge clocks like Big Ben, was as suspenseful as any movie I’ve watched. The pace of the movie snippets accelerated, the action of the clips was tense, the music strongly paced, and shot after shot of giant clock hands beat time, clicking closer and closer to their perfect vertical alignment, and then it was noon, midday, bells and chimes ringing out the hour. Then it was 12:01, 12:02, 12:03. . . . . .

We could have stayed in the showing for hours, but time was moving on and there were other things we wanted to do with our day in New York, include seeing the exhibition Inventing Abstraction, 1910 — 1925. Another excellent show, and particularly captivating for me was the confluence of poetry and painting during the rise of abstract painting in Europe. The connections between painters, musicians, dancers and writers throughout this period were displayed at the entrance to the exhibit, a web of relationships punctuated by red names, those whose connections touched at least 25 others involved in the rise of abstraction.

Several poets collaborated with visual artists to create cross-genre works of art, including “the first simultaneous book,” a narrative poem about a trip across Russia by Blaise Cendrars printed alongside a painting by Sonia Delaunay-Terk, the paint overrunning the text. A book of poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire written during his service in World War I included calligrams, poems in which the graphic layout of the poem was as important as the subject, creating an image that expressed the text. Apollinaire was a master of calligrams, such as his poem in the shape of the Eiffel Tower.

But time marched on, as it does, always and always and over and over, and we had a train to catch to be back on Long Island to take care of Emilio for the evening. I left with a journal full of ideas, and images of clocks and watches ticking on.

January 12, 2013

Above Tree Line

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“I’d like to get above tree line once a month,” David said, when I asked him if he had any New Year’s intentions. I didn’t want to talk about resolutions — too resolute. Being intentional about making sure we do things that make us happy is another thing altogether.

Hiking up to an open ridge makes both of us happy, so we began making plans earlier this week for a hike up the Crawford Path in the White Mountains to Mt. Pierce today. We emailed some hiking buddies, got an enthusiastic response, and ended up with 10 people hoping to hike with us. The weather forecast wasn’t promising, but David and I were willing to do the hike in almost any conditions, short of downpours.

Then the forecast worsened, by 8:00 last night it was raining, and the other hikers started to bail out of the hiking plan. By the time we went to bed last night, we were down to 5 of us planning to hike. We got up early this morning and checked a high summit forecast, and looked at the radar. No rain anywhere in New England and a chance for some breaks in the clouds this afternoon. So we drank coffee and started packing up to go. Another set of hikers dropped out via email, and I called the friends who live up north as we drove into the mountains. They also took a pass, but David and I kept driving.

By the time we got to the trailhead, I knew we’d made the right choice. Clouds were lifting all around us, and we could see the range to the south of us. The trail was well-packed powder, making hiking effortless with just microspikes on our boots. “No rocks, no roots, no bugs,” David and I said to each other, the winter hiking refrain. As we climbed the snow on the trees thickened, draping the spruce, and the sun began to break through the clouds.

When we got above tree line, the southern slopes of the Presidential range swept off to the north, occasionally threaded with a piece of cloud. From the summit of Mt. Pierce, we could see the tops of the mountains to our south, dark peaks in a sea of clouds. With unusually warm and still weather, we were able to take a lunch break on the summit, then walk a bit further up the ridge, just to enjoy the view.

Above tree line for January: done!

January 8, 2013

Hospice II and III

“How did you get here, Helen?” Natalie asks me.

“I’m not Helen,” I say. “I’m Grace. And David is here too.”

“Oh,” Natalie says, nodding, her eyes unfocused. She’s almost completely blind from macular degeneration. She has been for years, and now that she’s in Hospice, after a year of disorienting illness and moving around from home to hospital to rehab to home to hospital to rehab, over and over and over, when she has any idea at all who is with her it’s a victory. “Is this real?” she asks.

“I think it is,” I answer. “And that’s a really good question,” I say. “You’ve had so much confusion over the past year, checking in about what’s real and what isn’t makes sense.”

“And we’re happy to help you understand what’s real,” David says, coming over to touch Natalie’s arm. I’m holding her hand.

III

“Is this a truck visit?” Natalie asks. We’re back after two days, having been to New York for Emilio’s birthday party. We’re on our way back to New Hampshire.

“What’s a truck visit?” David asks. “People who come on a truck?”

“Yes,” Natalie says.

“We didn’t come on a truck,” David says.

“We’ve been to Emilio’s birthday party,” I say and Natalie puffs out her cheeks. “Are you making cheeks like Emilio’s?” I ask and she nods.

After I’ve helped her drink some water and eat some soup for lunch I ask, “Are you comfortable? Do you want me to put your bed back down?” We’ve raised the head of the bed so she can eat and drink.

“That’s two questions,” she says.

“You’re right,” I say. “Are you comfortable?”

“You can ask me two questions,” she says.

“Okay. Are you comfortable? Do you want me to put your bed back down?” Natalie nods and I press the button and the bed flattens.