Think Spring

All over New England, the detritus of multiple snow storms leans against walls and crowds walkways – shrinking infinitesimally with every day of feeble sunshine.  This dirty, icy glacier crouches on the asphalt behind our townhouse, probably 8 feet tall, extending almost 50 feet along our south wall.  The sidewalk on that side of the building will be buried until spring!!

The mild weather of the last few days has encouraged us to venture outside at last.  It is still really cold, but the roads are dry and the sky is bright and clear.

~ROAD TRIP~

We layered up and headed out of state.

A friend recommended a drive to Portsmith, New Hampshire to stroll the downtown area – long on charm and less than an hour away.  Highway One wanders sort of north-easterly through a frozen hardwood forest.  It looks rural.  The reality is that the population is pretty dense, even up here, but the towns nestle into the landscape and lots and lots of trees stay in place.  Small businesses dominate the economy.

Even on the highway, we passed few monster stores and almost no fast food at all. (Buying a coke on the road is tough without McDonalds and Taco Bell at every exit.  We stopped at a state liquor store in NH, only to find that they sold, well … liquor … and that is ALL.)  

We stopped to check out the Adirondack chairs at the Village Hardware Store in Hampton.   Come spring, I will be owning the purple ones.  I think he should get an “A” in marketing!!

Parking in Portsmith limited us to 2 hours – just enough time to dawdle through a few galleries and boutiques before lunch in the brewery.  In spare New England prose, the local free paper straight talked its way into hubby’s cynical heart. Who wouldn’t love a comments section called “Hate Mail” and an editorial cartoon featuring Reagan as an idol à la Easter Island?  I may have to cross stitch a sampler … “LIVE FREE OR DIE”.   I could not resist suede gloves with fluffy faux fur cuffs in a place called Odd Gallery, a bohemian mishmash of resale, yarn arts and handmade jewelry.

Once my spouse had exhausted his patience for tchotchkes we headed for Kittery, Maine where we visited outlet stores along with the Kittery Trading Post, Disneyland for Big Boys.   It’s a three story outdoor bonanza in knotty pine decorated with trophies that used to make their living being moose or bear. 

This has got to be fishing heaven.  If it lives in the water, the Trading Post will help you pull it out.   The size and engineering of the deep sea fishing equipment boggle the mind.  Some of those reels are as big as meat grinders and cost more than our fishing boat.  Fake squid the size of my forearm “swim” along the ceiling. When the bait belongs behind the seafood counter you know they are after bigguns! 

Need a tacklebox?  You can get Sponge Bob, Dora, Spiderman  or Disney Princesses, depending upon your preferences.     

By late afternoon, we had traipsed and gawked sufficiently to call it a day.  We turned south just as the huge orange sun started to slide behind the horizon.  Three states in 6 hours! We are tired babies now!!

Grief

I wish I had something smart to say about dying.  A really good man passed on Wednesday – leaving a stunned and saddened family that wasn’t finished needing him: a wife that has loved him since she was a child; adult children who counted on his support and guidance; grandchildren to whom he rated somewhere between Santa Claus and Jesus; a great grandchild who will miss knowing him altogether, except through the stories that will inevitably become myths.  In the end, his importance to those people didn’t matter – it never does.  We all die, and it is always too soon.

I talked to her this afternoon; the wife-become-widow just beginning the redefining of her own life.  No self pity here.  No drama.  She laughs at the inconguencies of letting him leave her; his taciturn nature becoming playful and even funny as he bore the pain and indignity, still uncomplaining.  The rugged, silent man she had lived with for decades, forever stoic and uncompromising, now charmed his nurses as he lay dying; cracked jokes; socialized.  And she is cherishing that time, when he surprised them all.  He lived life by his own rules and he left life the same way, his way. 

The house he built her is full now, of children and phones and long-absent friends like me, clamoring to soothe our own grief with some small service.  Please – what can I do?  But today’s commotion only masks the changes.  Soon, the phones will stop and the rest of us will move on.  She will hear a new silence, not his silence, not comfortable and secure like it was before.  And she will begin the struggle to make sense of the almost-familiar world around her as it wobbles and swerves; looking for new equilibrium. 

In calligraphy and suitably subdued colors, my condolences look silly and empty, even if I pay extra for delicate embossing in mother-of-pearl.  My awkwardness frustrates me; nothing I can think of is adequate to express my sorrow.  And nothing I can do will help her face this new and unwelcome reality.  How have we omitted this one monumental function of culture?  Every joyous new arrival sets in place an inevitable departure, and yet we have not mastered saying goodbye.  So we will fumble along, trusting Hallmark and casseroles to convey our emotions: loss, love, shock, helplessness. 

What we really mean is Dammit!  This SUCKS!!

Meeting Isabella

Today is the day!  Isabella Stewart Gardner, her museum and her eccentricities have always tickled my fancy – and today, I get to meet her!!  She built the three story Venetian palace that houses the collections; she scoured the Earth to find the art; she designed, displayed and arranged the pieces and when she died, she laid down the law – no changes. It is HER museum and I am finally going to see it. 

The brief museum bio highlights the adventuress rather than the Boston matron.  A strong and independent woman in the Belle Époque, she kept company with artists, musicians and writers – scandalous!  “Don’t spoil a good story by telling the truth", she said.  I can hardly wait!!

The sound you just heard was the shattering of my illusions.

Bold and eccentric gave way immediately to kitsch-y and bizarre.  For example, this Stylobate Lion was carved as the base of a column.  I just can’t imagine that it was this column.  Neither the styles nor the materials match.  I don’t think I would have cemented them together, but if I had, I hope I would have done a better job!  The museum is full of these strange juxtapositions; A Moorish arch frames an impressionist masterpiece and a collection of distressed enamelware in a hall lined with primitive Mexican tile.

As we wandered through the exhibits, we found bits and pieces of salvaged architectural details plastered awkwardly into the walls.  Paintings crowd haphazardly throughout the museum, paving entire galleries.  Indifferently lighted, they are clinging to the ceiling, propped in corners and hung behind doors.  Drawings and etchings are clustered on rows of hinged panels which are layered three or four deep on the wall.  So these wonderful sketches, some only a few inches square, hang far above my head and as I flip through, I feel like I am shopping for rugs at Home Depot. 

On our arrival, an enthusiastic and well-informed docent spent ten minutes trying to help us understand the genius behind the strange installations, but frankly, I just didn’t buy it.  Isabella bought Rembrandt, and Botticelli, and lots and lots of John Singer Sergeant.  But she couldn’t buy style. 

P.S. The courtyard was gorgeous!

(No cameras are allowed, so the pictures are from the website.

Snow Day

Weather reports for New England have been dire, and they tell us it is not over yet!  Fifty inches of snow in the last month!!  Parking lots look like ice houses and the pavement is cloudy white with salt.  Some of the icicles clinging to the eves behind my house were eight feet long…EIGHT FEET!  Tonight’s forecast is negative – literally – seven degrees below zero.  Twice now, the college has asked us to stay home to avoid the dangerous commute.  This is not what I am used to!

Some people have taken advantage of the time off to prepare for the beginning of school on the 24^tt .  Not me!!  I played hooky with a vengeance!  Santa brought me books for Christmas so I lounged on the couch in flannel jammies, lost in glorious fiction. 

The first time, we knew a day ahead, so I stayed up late and watched my first ever LIVE episode of the Daily Show – ignoring bedtime, secure in the knowledge that the alarm was NOT set.  I crawled into bed at midnight, wrapped myself in billowy down and fell asleep dreaming of snow fairies and lazy mornings.  Remarkably, sleeping in is so much more challenging when you are sharing the night with snow plows.  I am grateful to those guys – really – who must have been miserable out in the cold at 2 am – and at 4 am – and at 6.  Despite the vigilant attention of our nighttime caretakers, the cars in the parking lot looked like biscuits bobbing in a pan of white country gravy the next morning.  The patio was knee deep and the height of the walls and gate had been raised accordingly.   Twenty-four inches, baby!!

Friday, we woke early-early to the phone ringing downstairs.  Again, no school, so I crept back upstairs to relish my sleepy windfall.  All morning, cookie sized snowflakes drifted down like a cold version of Asteroids, gently but relentlessly covering the grimy leftovers from the last storm.  Neighbors bond in the Brotherhood of the Shovel…clearing not only their own cars and walks, but those of others while they are out.  The good news is that there is plenty of clearing to go around.  Let me take this moment to tell you how much I adore my husband, who swaddles himself in wooly layers to perform these rituals – leaving me inside, toasty and dry.

And today – it happened again.  School is closed, effectively scotching my trip to UMass Boston with my boss.  (Color me bereft!)  We are not surprised.  Children here have been wearing pj’s inside out, sleeping with spoons under their pillows and flushing ice cubes down the commode – all to buy us another day of winter vacation.  This time, the snow has stopped early, and the ever diligent plows are making progress, scraping and stacking huge mountains of ice.  By noon, we will be able to dig out the Yukon and go adventuring!! 

God I love snow days!!

Maxine

Our good friend taught her granddaughter that once the cookies are in the oven, you turn up the music on the radio and dance.

And they do!

So forever and forever, that child will remember her grandmother dancing in a toasty, sweet smelling kitchen, holding a dish towel.  Maybe she will even pass it on to HER grandchildren!

And I started thinking about my own grandmother, and what she left me.    She was a woman of her time: severe, practical, and not overly fond of children.  Baking, for her, was all business, and the results were never delightful, merely serviceable.  There were no tea parties at her house, no whispered secrets, no dancing in the kitchen waiting for cookies to bake.

She lived until I was in my 50’s, the matriarch of a disjoint and rambunctious family that little reflected the order she tried to impose upon us.  She wore pants long before it was seemly for ladies, and Chanel No. 5, which still evokes in me a sense of substance and security.

When she died, her daughters dug through boxes of memorabilia and stacks of ancient snapshots: long dead dogs and children gone agèd.  Maxine was there often, sharp, stern and forbidding.  But they also found one tiny and contrived strip of pictures as she mugged for the camera in some photo booth long ago, 1930?  Her hair was short and asymmetrical, with one long curve swinging out past her thin young face, a budding flapper?  The mischievous smile was definitely not status quo.  No other picture ever caught that smile. 

Hanging in her bedroom, was a print, delicate and vibrant, a saucy impressionist girl casually tossing her head and smiling broadly at an unseen admirer; completely incongruous in my grandparent’s spare, useful house.  And I wonder if somewhere in her soul, that girl and the flapper were both Maxine.  I hope so.

Jordans

Slowly, we are filling in the bits and pieces that will make the townhouse comfortable; pans, rugs, end tables…the list seems endless.  So early this month, we followed a tv ad for discount furniture to Reading – where Jordan’s advertises not only a huge warehouse, but a discount center as well.  Discount?  You know how cheap I am – so it was on!!  Now that was an experience!!

What looked like a mall, was the store itself – complete with Verizon, Boze, Jelly Belly and Fuddruckers – all inside!  Don and I went in looking for a couple of bedside tables and an entertainment center – and spent the better part of the afternoon.

While Don bought goodies at the ice cream shop, I picked out a table close to the dancing water – yep – like Bellagio. 

Seven big fountains and innumerable auxiliary nozzles and squirts sway and splash while Frank Sinatra croons in the background.  It is soooo pretty!  The show plays every ten minutes or so, whenever the trapeze school takes a break.

You heard me.

Students synchronize with a catcher and then swing out to connect sixty or seventy feet above the floor.  Once the catch is made, the victorious student lets go, lays back in space and free-falls into an airy, blue marshmallow-y thing.  For recreational participants, there are two hour lessons but for the serious folks, like those of you who have varsity letters in trapeze, there are walk-on performances of – well, whatever you can pull off. 

We didn’t buy any nightstands, but we did by Jellybellies.  And we are planning a trip in the very near future to one of their other convenient locations…I’m told the entertainment will be entirely different!!