Ashokan Reservoir December

Big Joe

Big Joe used to hoard office supplies.  He was a retired cop and had never worked in an office, but he had an affinity for office supplies; mostly paper, but pens and markers too, though to a lesser degree.  He hoarded in secret, putting the supplies, still in their Staples bags with the receipts, down in the basement of his three bedroom ranch.  There could be found several bags bulging with: reams of copy paper, packages of loose leaf paper, steno pads, legal pads, yellow lined and white lined; packages of Sharpies, Bic pens and highlighters.  These items seemed to be the repeat purchases; he wasn’t too big on binder clips, staples or tape. 

I know because my sister, his wife, started referring to the basement as the office supply store.  When I visited she would ask if I needed ‘anything’, with a sideways motion of her head and her mouth stretched in that direction, towards the basement door.  Never one to pass up some paper, I’d say sure and we’d go down after Big Joe had gone to bed, and I’d “shop”.  Her grown kids did the same, always surreptitiously, occasionally calling ahead to ask her to check the inventory. The goods were always removed when Big Joe wasn’t around or they were hidden in other bags upon leaving.  Diaper bags were roomy receptacles for office supplies. 

Big Joe never commented on the decreasing piles.  In fact he never once concurred that he had even put the bags down there.  Prior to the basement stash, he had been putting the bags in the small spare room that had belonged to his older son.  That was when my sister, his wife, seeing that a buildup wash happening, began to give the stuff away.  He never asked where the bags of supplies were going, but had changed course and started depositing them in the basement.  It was never discussed, never pointed out.  It was all very secret and covert.  

There were other bags that he left here and there – the plastic type of grocery bags.  They would have receipts or some other odds and ends of paper – just stuff he never went through to throw out, but would accumulate.  My sister, the opposite of an accumulator, has the reputation of throwing the current day’s newspaper out before the end of the day if she knows she won’t have time to read it.  So she had taken to throwing the plastic bags of paper scraps out when Big Joe wasn’t around to see. Sometimes brown paper bags too. 

It was that one time that she noticed him in and out of Young Joe’s old bedroom, up and down the basement stairs; each several times. It was not his personality to wander.  Mostly, he drifted from bed to table to car, completing his errands, then back to couch, table, bed.  My sister finally asked him what he was looking for?  “Oh, just a bag” Big Joe said.  Humph, she thought, just a bag?  Days passed and the hunt continued.  Big Joe seemed to be getting pretty worked up.  My sister began to worry about the bags she’d been throwing out (which of course she would never, could never, tell him, or admit to doing).  Some days later Big Joe asked her if she’d thrown out a certain brown bag in recent weeks.  Of course not was her answer.  It was then that he sheepishly admitted that he’d been saving some money in a paper bag, just throwing bills in with the intention of counting it up and banking it when he had the time.  “How much was in there?” my sister asked tentatively.  About two thousand, Big Joe replied. 

In later years, Big Joe began hoarding Vodka, in addition to the office supplies.  This was a true mystery, as Big Joe was a Bourbon drinker all the way, though in fact he drank less and less as the years went on.  My sister started showing up with a bottle of Vodka when she visited, or slipping a bottle of Vodka in with the paper supplies when I was in the basement choosing my papers.  No one asked Big Joe why. 

When he died, he wasn’t remembered for his office supply hoarding; that remained his secret.   I remember him for his sudden outbursts of laughter, which brightened and illuminated his face.  He wasn’t known for being a talker, but he sure loved a good laugh.

Until Next Year

Mid October sees windows snap their mouths shut

against the chill air
Bird chatter is hushed in a churchlike whisper
Wind chimes, like an admonished child,
are seen but not heard
Socks urgently rush, duty bound, from drawers,
plates clatter with cold from the cabinets
the oatmeal box marches confidently to the forefront

Without struggle
the house adapts this quietude
then quickly switches to the clatter of logs
dropping to the basement floor
furnace rock and rumble
The dehumidifier nods to duty well done
Until next year

Woodstock Relaxation

Ah – if even part of every day could be as peaceful and relaxed as this morning.  Who would believe that a visit to the dentist could start out my mellow experience?  But, yes, even the smileScan or whatever the three dimensional rotating x-ray thingee is called that orbits around your head. One needs to remove all metal; off go the studs, the small hoops, the thin chain, the hair clippie.  Then one steps forward and is instructed to bite the stick, get positioned, swallow, put tongue to roof of mouth and then the gizmo pans around your head, whilst one is lucky enough to be staring out at a small pond at the edge of the wooded lot.  Very Woody Allen in Sleeper; I feel a taste of what it might be like to cavort through the woods in a space suit.

Dr Fred is the calmest man ever. He inspires meditation or whatever it is that gets him to that place.  He is slow, methodical, so, so patient.  He advises, explains, shows, helps to make decisions.   So, no crown work done today, but he elected to do two, not four crowns, and there was talk of pin-drop of my gums and one implant and drilling of the bone, (he says the bone structure looks pretty good, which is the only time in recent years that those two words could possibly have been applied to me in the dentist chair) and even the mention of drilling a titanium rod through my gum did not un-do me. 

Following that, I took a trip to the natural foods market where one is surrounded by glorious smells, including natural candles, fresh coffee, scones.  I purchased a New York Times to ground me, some yogurt and granola, bulk style, like the old days, a tiny tin of perfume crème – gardenia vanilla.  I drove to a parking lot, sat in the sunny car with coffee and scone and paper, then took my camera and walked, looking for photos. 

My foot felt good, the right hip protested sharply a few times then seemed to begrudgingly settle into the walk.  As I turned at the end of the winding road to walk back, a man with longish, thick white hair called over from a porch where he sat “where’s your dog?”  I knew him, but it took a few minutes for me  to realize he didn’t know or remember me, or maybe he did remember my dog who died ten years ago.  He did say short, and Jessie certainly was that.  

Something was not right and though we chatted across the grass for a short while, he was not the same dashing flirt I knew him as ten or fifteen years ago.  Something missing; our conversation had a slight electrical short or outage.  We’d become two elders of our town, seeing each other rarely, one perhaps remembering more than the other.  There is no catching up with what has transpired in those years.  We used to cross paths every day in the retail world.  He’d once introduced his mother to me when she was visiting.  He’d always called me “Hey Beautiful”.  None of this was part of his desultory conversation today.  His movements are slower, as are we all.  We said good-byes.  He said “call me when you get rich” as he turned to walk into this house.   

I walked on, a bit sad but grateful that I can still walk down such a lane and have that chat. As I crossed over to the main road, a car pulled up, seemed to be in a hurry.  The electric window whizzed halfway down, the man asked “Hey, can you tell us where the music concert was?”  “It was in Bethel, about an hour and a half southeast of here”, I replied, proud that I did not give in to a nasty habit that some of us locals, tired of the endless question in the summertime, were prone to do – make something up and send them driving around town.  “No, the woman next to him said – the rock concert.”  “The one forty years ago” the man almost snarled, as though my brain  were malfunctioning.  I didn’t correct him to say it was almost fifty years ago, but said “Yes, it took place in Bethel, and hour and a half from here.”  “Then why did they called it the Woodstock festival” he asked, completely cynical about my response.  “Well, it got that name because that’s how the promotion started...”  I didn’t get to finish.  He yelled “yeah thanks”, zipped up the window and sped off, apparently in search of more reliable information.  I should have made something up –it would have been much more rewarding.

Driving up over the mountain, Van Morrison came on the radio to sing “Going down to ole Woodstock”. 

Woodstock calms me.  Not on a weekend.  And especially not on a summer weekend.  But yes, on a Thursday morning in the afterglow of most August visitors.

August Light

Wave Hill, the Palisades, NJ

 

Pink evening pond

Monet Summer Pond

Monday Morning Shadows

Slipping Away

August slips away

Not slowly like a gentle morning mist

But rapidly

Too rapidly

Like a flock of birds startled by a car door slamming

 

I grasp for it

A desperate clinging spider

in panic

To protect its web

 

Mourning is just scant weeks away

I recoil at the sight of

Errant orange and red leaves

Displayed brilliantly on lush summer green grass

 

I listen attentively to crickets in the blackening night

Is their song getting fainter

Are their numbers dwindling?

 

The bull frogs wane in number

As the strategizing heron grows plump

Their deep throated honking

No longer cacophonic

Sporadic instead

 

Soon the nights will be stilled again

 

Mourning is just scant weeks away

August slips from my grasp

 

I Cane Stand It

I was rude to the young woman in CVS.  Besides being in CVS, which always creeps me out because it used to be a the supermarket in the small hamlet when I first moved up here, where town folks met and chatted, and went late at night for ice cream and cookies when they got the “munchies” and would wear their dark glasses which I thought to be hilarious, but so cool and mysterious in a way, and some old folks used to hang out on the bench up near the checkout counters in the summertime to escape the heat and feel loved and not lonely and part of the community, while keeping a close eye on the cashiers, especially the one with the steel grey hair pulled painfully into a bun, who wore the thirteen or eighteen or twenty five slim silver bangles on her arm, and then it closed and the stalwart folks picketed the imminent arrival of CVS into their small franchise-free town but it wasn’t enough, and then tons of us vowed to never, ever enter through the CVS portal, and for quite a while the parking lot was conspicuously and satisfyingly sparse to empty, though of course we couldn’t stop the unknowing tourists from going there, but after a year or two, more cars, even familiar cars, ones we knew, and then seeing people we knew dashing across the street, a bit sheepish because they’d heard this or that was on sale, and oh well, we can’t boycott it forever, can we?
But I’d not succumbed and still feel traitorous when I’m there, except my pharmacy across the street had no canes and I had to get one, doctor’s orders, but the idea of it was so repugnant to me, so old and doddering and yes, demeaning, that I yanked the bronze leopard printed one from the rack and held it gingerly away from me, all the while thinking, pretending that I was buying it for a friend, and then I could deal with it somehow. 

And then at the checkout, the smiling young woman in the purple shirt said “Let me cut that tag off for you”, making the assumption that I needed to use it immediately, like how could I be standing up at the counter on  my own?  And I snarled at her “No! Leave it on.” I wanted to add something about having to make sure the person I was buying it for liked it, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell the lie.

So, she just pleasantly said “Ok, you can take it off when you get home.” I took my receipt, curling my lip as I walked out.

 

David Bowie Sat Here

Rosa is like a small bird, flitting with purpose from painting to poetry, gardening to Qi Gong. Though flitting might be misleading, implying an inherent non-stick-to-it-tiveness.  And Rosa is nothing if not tenacious.  Bird-like she is, but she may well be considered to be a hummingbird, the cheetah of the bird kingdom.

I was happy to visit her last weekend in her new cottage created for her by her granddaughter’s husband, and attached to their house. It has the same warm charm that her last place had, and in fact seems quite similar, having a lot to do with the wicker couch and chair, the small paintings leaning everywhere against the walls, the back of the couch, even on the stove, where the ever present kettle awaits, ready for tea.  The plan had been for me to pick her up and bring her back to  my house, but she seemed not to want to do that (had she forgotten the plan?) when I got there, saying she had tea ready and had made cookies for the occasion.  If you knew her, you would understand that I proceeded to settle in for tea. 

I met Rosa twenty three years ago.  She arrived in the doorway of my little shoppe not long after I’d moved to this little corner of the world.  She’d seen my small ad in the newspaper about the poetry group I was forming:  Women Only Poetry Group, 3^rd Thursday of each month.  8pm. $2.00 Tea served. “I never wrote poetry, but I have journals I keep.  Maybe I could read from them?  I like what you’re doing here.”  And so it began.  Rosa began to read from her journals; they were well received by our small group and we enjoyed hearing about her early life, her escapades, her organic farm, her goats that she was so fond of.  

Encouraged, she began to write poetry. We published a chapbook the following year as Evening Circle Poets.  Our circle usually numbered five women and all looked forward to that night of poetry, tea, crumpets and a growing friendship.  Over the years, the circle had indeed been broken, but we all continued to write.  Rosa, for her part, would publish three of her own books, poetry, then essays. We didn’t see each other as often, my job taking me out of the very town I had been drawn to by some strange but real force.  But whenever Rosa called me I knew it was to extend a personal invitation to a reading of her new book or an art show that she was in. “Hi Fern, I finished a new book and I’m having a reading, can you come?"  Inevitably, when the intimate audience was seated and she was introduced, she would begin her reading by acknowledging me saying “Fern is the reason I am here today.  If it hadn’t been for her poetry group, I never would have started writing.” How gracious. Of course, my providing the platform for her was inconsequential. Her tireless determination propelled her to continue on her own.  Along the way, Rosa participated in a weekly drumming class for ten years, worked in an art gallery, planted her own garden each year and took up Qi Gong, which she continues to do.  She told me on Sunday that if I took up Qi Gong, I’d be good for another twenty years.  “Look at me.  I only started when I was seventy.”   Rosa is ninety two. 

We had a typical girl chat, catching up on families, friends and what (or whom) aggravates us most.  She brought up politics and her concern for Obama “I’ve been watching his hair, it’s going all grey!”  “Who do you think will run?”  What do you think of Hillary?”  There is always a blend of the good memories as well; her raising her granddaughter when she was in her fifties, going to England, having a lover.  Further back, how she raised goats and chickens on her organic farm with her then husband.  Studying at the Arts Students League in her heyday, working as a nude model for extra money.  Dating whomever she wanted.  “I never thought about religion or race, I wasn’t raised that way.  I didn’t care if the  guy was black or red, if he was sweet, I went out with him.” Spunk, yes, she embodies spunk.  And I can get her to giggle like a girl.

She is so pleased with her new place (except for the free range chickens that strut around the yard and plop in her pansies), and so grateful for the hard work that her grandson in-law has done. “He recycles everything you know” she told me.  We walked in to see her bedroom, and then the bathroom. 

“Wow!” I said “that’s quite a sink!”  A modern white cabinet base, with drawers that open out and a fantastic, mermaid turquoise slab top, with a square sink perched on top of it.  Rosa started to laugh, saying “you know Bill’s been doing some work at David Bowie’s house, and they were throwing this sink out, so he brought it home. “Wow!”  I repeat “I have David Bowie’s sink” she says giggling, then turns to point at the commode and says “and the toilet is from David Bowie’s house too.  I keep thinking I need to put a sign up over it, like how could I say it?  David Bowie sat here!”

 

Graffiti Walk, Knoxville, Tennessee

 

I Discovered Myself in Mt. Tremper

Sad to say I was already past the half century mark. 
Why does it take so long?
It took me awhile, and yes, it continues.
It broadens, goes deeper, changes course,
erupts in moral zits from time to time
But it gets a little clearer.
Like the windex of age is starting to do its job
On the life experience windshield.

Life, kids, work, hard-scrapple times propelled me in unplanned and indeterminate directions

Learning, loving, always learning, learning from children, from the love for them
That hidden capacity that lies unbidden until the tiny fist, the fist that you brought into the world,
curls tightly around your finger
Till that first gummy smile indelibly assures that you will fight for them
Work to assure their place in life; struggle to implant the values necessary
for their growth and emotional safety.
And I caused pain along the way to those little souls
By wrong choices, naïveté, an ignorance about people and capabilities, or lack thereof
And, at times, an unrealized need for flattery
Unrealistic promises of unrealistic dreams.

I learned that there are people who will walk through your life, your house, your body, your soul,

with intentions of their own that have nothing to do
with what you want, what you need, what you agreed upon.
and you won’t recognize them right away for what they are, who they are, what they’re after
where they’ve been in their mental meanderings. 

And you’ll take detours, ride with the bumps, sometimes crash and burn
Sometimes hang on for your life and take the thrill of the ride
Sometimes hang on till the weather clears for take-off
But you’ll figure it out, read between the lines
Look inward
Get back on your path
Then you’ll rise up and carry on

"Pasted Pages" Series

Here are some random "Pasted Pages".  I don't tend to think of them as collages; rather a spontaneous cutting and pasting session where I get to use lots of scraps of papers that I just can't seem to throw out.  They are all the same size:  7.5 x 9.5 approx.

Mountain Man

This is  Home #7 in the Neighbors Essays series.  The series chronicles a memorable neighbor from each home that I've lived in) 

I rented a small log cabin, and began life on my own.  My children remained temporarily with their father until the courts and lawyers could figure out our snaggled mess. I missed them desperately and wrestled daily with the scary newness of living by myself. The cabin was small and dark, shaded by towering pine trees, and one of only three houses (one boarded up for the winter) on a dead end street that went downhill and ended at a pond. It was termed a “winter” rental, as the owners lived there in the summer, moved out on Labor Day.  I would be there until Memorial Day when the owner would return and I’d need a place to live again.  My life felt ruled by holidays. My belongings stayed in storage; I had my clothes.

It came fully furnished; I felt like I’d just dropped into a stranger’s house and elected to live there, which is what I did.  The two bedroom walls did not go all the way to the ceilings, allowing for circulation of air in the summer.  The living room was large, and carpeted in ugly gold shag; the couch was brown plaid. There was a fireplace which I was not to use, and a large deer head mounted high on the wall.  I named him Walter and hung a wreath on him at Christmas.  The bathroom was delightful, wood paneled and cozy with a big footed tub.  A tiny kitchen, and an even tinier added on room in the back both had slanted floors so that it felt like you were falling into the rooms. It was either enchantingly unique or the eeriest place ever. I had both reactions from friends.

It was a long, lean winter.  I was awakened one night by a noise right outside my window. 

The spotlight had gone on and shone brightly in the window as well.  A raccoon, pure white in color, was sitting on a tree stump, enjoying the remains of my spaghetti dinner from the overturned garbage can.  He was gracefully eating the strands with human like fingers, and completely ignored my frantic banging on the window.  My neighbor’s lights were all on.  He seemed to never go to sleep. I went back to bed, pulling the covers over my head.

In the cabin on my right lived a man named Greg. I called him Mountain Man. He was a smallish man, not as tall as I, with a trim build and longish brown curly hair. He told me he was a Vietnam vet, and didn’t work anymore. He heated his log cabin with a wood stove, which he often asked me in to see, but I never took him up on the invitation. He said the temperature inside his house was seventy five to eighty degrees in the wintertime.  With no curtains on his windows, and the sweltering temperatures he had to endure (while I layered on more and more sweaters and sox) he habitually walked around his house in his jockey shorts. In the brutal months of January and February, he could be seen shirtless chopping wood in the backyard. I was unable to start a measly fire and had to conserve oil, in order to pay the bill, so I could be found wrapping myself in blankets to survive the winter. On several occasions, in between laying out boxes of poison, and replacing them when they were empty, I called to ask Greg to come over and empty my mouse traps, which he did, each time resetting them, saying he didn’t mind at all.  One time, as he was leaving, he handed me something wrapped in a tissue. It was fragrant. “Do you smoke” he asked?  (I’d been smoking for years I thought to myself, but I’d never wrapped my Virginia Slims in tissues)

One particularly frigid winter morning, a “friend” of mine was attempting to make a quiet exit, but soon discovered his Camaro couldn’t make it up the hill to the main road. It was a sheet of ice.  Greg saw him struggling and came out to help, then called to the garbage men to help, seeing them about to turn down from the main road. My friend came in to get me; I was needed to sit in the trunk and provide some weight to keep from skidding, while they pushed the car backwards up the hill. Jumping out of the warm bed, I quickly threw on a long parka and scarf and boots, but was wearing nothing underneath the coat.  I sat in the trunk feeling naked and trashy with three men pushing the car up the hill and my friend chuckling at my discomfort.  After we got his car back on the main road and he took off, I picked my way back down to the cabin, keeping to the snowy sides, instead of the ice.  I stopped to thank Mountain Man as he stood in the middle of the icy road, grateful for the woolen scarf that I had wrapped around my face, so he couldn’t read my embarrassment.

 

 

The Two Dark Blue Plastic Shallow Bowls from Boonton

(Note:  BoontonWare/Melmac...plastic dishes, popular in the 60’s and 70’s)

The bowls have been with me since 1973.  I know the date because they belonged to Aunt Marion, and that was the year she died.  Now, plastic would never be indicative of the fancy, and somewhat glamorous life she’d led. 

Aunt Marion worked on Madison Avenue in the media department of an advertising agency and that was plenty fancy to us.

Aunt Marion was the kind of woman who had a dressing table, with a mirror above, and an upholstered oval bench to sit upon, where an enraptured seven year old could lift the delicate bottles and sniff slowly, pick up powder puffs and make believe she was a stylish woman, who went “to business” and dressed up every day in fine dresses and gloves, stockings and heels. Aunt Marion wore a black Persian Lamb coat in the winter.  It had a brown mink collar and a silken lining of turquoise and pink stripes.   It appeared to weigh her down, it was so heavy; when she shrugged out of its warm cocoon, you caught a whiff of her expensive perfume seeping out, ever so lightly.  My sister and I fought over who got to carry it into the bedroom to place on the bed when she visited.  It was very heavy, but there would be the silk scarf, pushed gently into the sleeve, the striped silk lining smooth and scented with her perfume.  

Later on, she remained glamourous but slightly bent. She would laugh and say that her Persian lamb coat was too heavy.  But her arthritis got very bad.  Dishes were harder to pick up, and more likely to be dropped and broken.  Uncle Harry, fifteen years older than she, tried to help out in the kitchen, but that never went well. 

One Christmas, I gave her a small set of Boonton Ware: two each of dinner plates, lunch plates, cereal bowls and soup bowls.  Maybe there were cups as well. They were colorful and fun (red, school bus yellow, dark blue, white); meant to amuse, rather than serve as a reminder of the difficulty they were both adjusting to, in their lives. 

Six months later my sisters and I traveled to Queens, meeting at the small attached house of Marion and Harry. They had lived in the upstairs apartment for many years, having converted the living space downstairs for rental income.  The house was sold.  There wasn’t much to empty out.  Harry had been moved to a nursing home, where he seemed to thrive, unaware of where his sweet Marion was or had been, entertaining the other residents with tap dances and old vaudeville routines.

We ended up in the kitchen, not wanting to spend time in the small living room, where our glamorous Aunt had succumbed to pneumonia while lying on her French provincial pink sofa.  We divvied up assorted items, mostly boxing it to give away. It was decided I should take the bright plastic ware.  The plastic ware traveled back to New Jersey with me; my kids used the bowls regularly.  When the “great divide” happened in the mid 80’s, I left most everything behind.  But some things had been packed, and two dark blue shallow bowls were all that remained of the plastic ware.

Many times I moved, maybe six times since then, and still those bowls rest in each cabinet in each kitchen.  They match nothing, but I have ritual uses for them.  Like morning oatmeal when I need to rush for work; the plastic cools it down fast, making it easier to eat; yogurt with strawberries on the deck. 

The Aunt Marion memories are not always strongly present, but a hint of her lovely smile flits across my thoughts when I reach for them.  I don’t need to look at the photo of her standing on the boardwalk dressed in a clinging white dress and an outrageous hat.  Or see her tenderly holding one of us as babies, in her bold print dress and large brimmed straw hat with a massive flower on one side, her eyes tender.  She was beauty and grace and she softened our lives. 

Spring Soak

The high-mounded, extraordinary froth of bubbles created by the Jacuzzi pulsing into the bubble bath was just how she liked it.  She sunk, hidden under the white froth. It was quiet enough on an early Saturday afternoon to hear the tiny hiss and pop as the bubbles subsided after the Jacuzzi turned off.

She stared at the painting that hung at the end of the large tub; her favorite, always.  When she’d brought her old friend up here last summer, who’d been visiting from Florida and had never seen the house before, she’d commented, “that’s my favorite”.  Open mouthed, her friend had turned to her saying “and that’s why you hang it up here behind a plant where no one can see it?”  Defensively she’d said lightly – well, the plant wasn’t that big when I hung it in here.  The plant in question, an over productive, root bound spider plant, heavy with fifty or more ‘babies’ hung far down into the tub and now, as she watched, was buried in bubbles as well. 
She remembered well the inspiration for “Winter Walk”, and how it felt so deeply personal she never wanted anyone to critique it, or, god forbid, say nothing about it.  People could be unwittingly cruel in their attempts to say something, anything, about art.  If it wasn’t Monet’s water lilies, or Van Gogh’s sunflowers, or some ghastly seascape (god, she hated seascapes) or a pop art poster or any other recognizable art, they usually chose to go one of three ways: “you did that?’” It’s...interesting” or “wow” (her friends did that) or, the worst – look at it, then look away and talk about something else (her sister did that).

She painted Winter Walk in 1995. So very long ago.  The brief snowfall in the morning of that late winter was over by early afternoon, the sun breaking through in spectacular glory, almost apologizing for the unexpected snow drop, just when everyone was shedding their down coats and heavy boots. When the sun came out, it seemed possible to believe that spring would arrive very soon and not disappoint them again. She’d wandered down a familiar lane, free of cars, fresh, snowsoft and still. She’d turned up a smaller, private road, drawn by the evergreens with their snow coverings like lace shawls, the promise of spring in the faint earthy smell of the woods, mantles of snow clumped in misshapen circles amongst the brown leaf ground cover. 

The sky was breaking blue, the yellow sun peeking out, the short and curvy road glistened black amongst it all.   It made her smile now to think of it, though her afternoon bubble bath was more therapeutic than lazy.  She thought of how pain changes lives and attitudes, how injuries and setbacks in your forties and fifties accomplish little more than strengthen your resolve to excel and succeed and accomplish as soon as the pain is gone.  She thought about these other pains that come about with age and the gene pool and lifestyle choices and old habits and bad habits.  And the surprise when the pains stay with you and you long for a day to be painless, you wonder at the future, the goals not yet achieved, the limitations that might lie ahead.  Yet she was grateful for the Jacuzzi, the painting, even the all –encompassing spider plant; grateful for the lazy Saturday afternoon, grateful for the memories. 

Carol

Editor's note:  This is the 6th in the Neighbors Essays series, chronologizing essays about neighbors at each home I lived in, and how I remember them.

Home #6                                                 Carol

Ann and John continued to visit for awhile after we moved to our new home, but gradually the relationship dissolved; no longer neighbors, and their teens now young adults forming their own relationships, starting their own families, we lost our common thread. The new house had woods in the back and on each side.  The front yard was deep and wide and fronted on a fairly busy road.  On the left side, separated by a lot of woods, lived the Sanders.  I never met Mrs. Sanders in the fourteen years I lived there, but Ed appeared at my door a few months after we moved in, with an offering of venison, in a carefully wrapped paper package, blood smeared across one side.  “This is the best part of the deer” he said proudly “very tender, just fry it up lightly in oil and you’ll have yourself a real treat”.  His eyes were small and completely disappeared when he smiled.  He had a weather beaten face, but a kind smile.  I thanked him profusely and put the package in the freezer.  Some time later, I cooked it up for the dogs, handling the frozen meat with wary, New York City hands.   Who eats deer meat, I wondered.

During most of hunting season, when you drove past their house, you could spot a deer stretched out in the doorway of the Sanders’ garage, draining its blood into buckets on the floor below. Behind the garage, in the deep back part of his property, Ed had chicken coops and a rooster that crowed all day intermittently, sometimes every hour.   

After seven years, the property that lay between us, sold to a young couple who built a house there.  They had a small boy and lots of energy for the big, modern house.  The first Christmas after they moved in, three year old Michael showed up at our door at 8am, as we were unwrapping.  He stood there in his footed pajamas, his hooded jacked unzipped. “Can I come in? Mommy and Daddy are still sleeping”. How had he gotten out?  Did he know it was Christmas?  We fed him some cereal, gave him the small gift we had for him and then walked him back home, knocking loudly to wake his parents up. 

Across the street lived a pleasant family with three teenagers (if a family with three teenagers can ever qualify for pleasant). The father was a musician who taught music at a local high school, and drove into the city one night a week to play clarinet in a jazz group. Jay was short, dark, bearded and broody.  He was bearded and wore black all the time.  He wore a beret and a purse crossed over his shoulder.  He seemed exotic and out of place in the rural town we lived in. His loud, battered Volvo started up in the morning with loud bangs and sputtering and great clouds of billowing smoke.

His wife Carol was fair and red headed and pleasingly plump with a contained bustiness, the sort that shook when she laughed and you imagined she would be relieved at night when she took off her bra.  She had a warm, winning smile and a neighborly cheeriness about her, though she and I talked rarely, living on opposite sides of a busy road as we did. We nodded and waved a lot. Occasionally we arrived at our mailboxes at the same time and exchanged hellos and how are you doings?

One beautiful day, as I arrived at the edge of the road to get my mail, Carol called over hello.  We chatted across the street about the daffodils and the weeping willow for a few minutes, and then, as the cars whizzed by between us, she called out “Jay left us. He said he was tired of being a father and having so much responsibility. He wants to concentrate on his music career now.”

I didn’t know what to say.  Was I envious of him and his newfound freedom or relieved for her ( he seemed so morose and dark)?

Much later, I wondered what she thought when our own household split like a house of cards and family treasures could be found heaped curbside, placed there by an angry man, free for the taking. 

 

Saturday Nonsense Tribute

Saturday Saturday
Glorious sleep-in Saturday!
Saturdays the day of laundry and putter
Saturday’s my day of oatmeal with butter

 
Saturday mornings, nowhere to go

Quietly ponder the ebb and the flow
Up in the closet down on the floor
Saturdays a day you just can’t ignore

Oh hail to Saturdays!

when some ladies shop
for me the beauty lies in having to not
To mosey, to amble, to shuffle, to poke
The day to be dreaming with stories unspoke

Saturday's a blessing on which I count dearly

To remove all the traces of a work week so weary
Awakening  from slumber so long and extended

The cheeks may look pinky, the fears apprehended

If your Saturday portends no company to please
And the house need not be tidy but just as you please
then no bustling  or hustling or running about
need mess up your Saturday, cast you in doubt

Oh hail to Saturday, the three syllabled day!

It’s said Saturday’s child has to work for a living
for me that has always been my misgiving
Yet now I do not on Saturdays toil
In the work place where manners and limits unfurl

To flit without deadline from task to task

With no direct outline and no one to ask
I thank all the powers for giving this day
Each week I live on, for as long as I may,
Tis a blessing for me to be able to say
Saturday, Saturday, what a wonderful day!

The Simpsons

editor's note:  This is #5 in the Neighbors essays series, begun in July 2014.

Home #5                                             The Simpsons

That autumn, pregnant and ostracized from my family, I moved to the hills of North Jersey with the man, Leo, Leo’s mother Misty, and six puppies.  We settled into a rental house, situated at the top of a steep hill on a cul de sac with three other houses. It was the first house I’d ever lived in.  A city girl, apartment dweller, I was used to the familiar sounds of another family, over or under me.  Used to the smells of other people’s dinners, the sounds of families laughing, shouting, fighting, bumping around.  I reveled in the largeness of this new space and the quiet of it all. We rented the house partially furnished; there was a color TV, the first I’d ever seen. There was a heavy, antique dining room table, with six chairs and velvet seats that sat on an orange shag rug. There were heavy draperies across sliding doors and even across tow small square windows, that gave the appearance of opulence when they were closed.  There were three bedrooms, a spacious living room, a kitchen with a washer and a dryer. I'd never lived like that before.

 

The man traveled to the city every day in my car, leaving in the morning dark and returning in the evening. I had Leo, Misty and the puppies for company.  That winter, growing larger and more clumsy, and with two large pups we hadn’t found homes for, I spent long hours wandering around the house, taking naps, and ultimately writing my first poem, something dark and dramatic about being trapped in a stark, cold, canine world.  I cried a lot and smoked cigarettes and ate too much.  I gained forty five pounds. 

Neighbors across the street befriended us. Ann and John had two teenaged children and became surrogate grandparents to my baby, when she was born in the Spring.  Ann, grey haired and well cushioned, had a ready smile and a good nature. She had a charming laugh and very smooth white hands. When she held the baby, the baby was quiet and content.  John used to say, with a glance in my direction, that she was happy with Ann because “she didn’t like lying on bony laps.”

John was fleshy faced and ruddy complexioned.  He liked to eat a lot of nuts and make juvenile asides to his wife about his gastric reactions later in the evening.  On the occasional night when we had them over for dinner, John always brought a brown paper bag and slipped it to the man when he thought I wasn’t looking.  As it turned out, the bag contained some eight millimeter nudie films that he thought the man might enjoy in his spare time.  Would he guess that they were set up in our bedroom for us?  Fascinating; at last I understood the “black sox” reference.

One late spring morning, John ambled across to our yard, as I set about to plant petunias next to the walk.  We exchanged pleasantries and he then took up leaning against the car in the driveway. He smoked a cigarette and watched as I struggled to dig deep holes with my small spade, through rocks, rocks, and more rocks.  Finally he spoke. 

“Are you gonna plant them or bury them?”  He threw his head back and howled laughing.

“What?” I asked, annoyed. 
“You ever plant flowers before?” he asked.
 “Not really” I replied.
“Well, make those holes half as deep and half as wide, and you’ll be okay” and back he went across the street. 

 

 

 

 

 

The True Meaning of February in the Northeast (the Catskills)

I have a friend in Florida, we’ll call her Blondie, who replied recently, after reading my single digit woes in an email, that “cold” is just a temperature. I'd written about the morning weather report that we could expect a high of 10^ at the end of the week. She had the Blondie nerve (as she always does) to whine that the temp is down in the 40’s in sunny Florida...”don’t hate me" she always says.

Of course I hate her.  Well no, not really. But the whole email exchange got me thinking about what is really true about this frozen February here in the northeast.   Because, it’s not  really just about the temperature, as some would say...and say...and say... like the co-workers who spar each morning about the temperature reading in their cars when they left for work. 

It’s not just about the temperature. The problem with the fucking cold is everything they’re not saying.

There’s the cost of a frigid winter in the northeast.  Yeah, gas prices are down. So what?  How does that compare with the price of heating oil per gallon, when the wheezing, groaning noise of the furnace works non-stop to keep the house barely warm; drafts continuing to swirl in corners.  The floors hold enough cold to punish ones feet; sox are not sufficient, not by a long shot.  One needs slippers, shoes, boots, to do the trick.  Nighttime sleeping: the cold hair, the tunneling, the turtle like behavior; some worrying about the woolen scarf wrapped around your neck and killing you, like Isadora Duncan, in your sleep.  Dressing for winter is an art form, and needs to be done well.  You need enough pairs of long johns to make it through the work week; yes, they are necessary.   You have to have wool sweaters. Forget cotton, forget acrylic, forget the fluffy blends.  Wool, merino, cashmere.  Wool sox only; hats, layers, layers, layers.  Do you know, do you remember about layers Blondie? 

Catching the winter vacationing mice that have moved in, like Glenford is their Caribbean paradise.

The supermarket:  there will be shortages. Cream of Wheat wiped off the shelf.  Specials on chicken broth, soups.  Marketers dress in black for the most part, mourning the brutality outside, leaving their baskets to roll around the parking lot, not willing to walk them into the basket corral. They breeze through the aisles, rapidly shopping for hearty meal components: chickens, soups, potatoes, mac and cheese. Fuck salads and ice cream - too cold! 

Your fingers are cracking, splitting; forget citrus fruit, you will drop dead immediately from the pain of a an orange dripping on your cut fingers.  Additional dollars must be spent for dry skin crème. Pump it up baby! Slather! Schmear!  Remember the foot crème, or you won’t recognize your heels in the spring, when you go sock-less.  You must take your clothes out of the closet in the morning and bring them to room temperature; if not, that skirt you’re sliding into will have the effect of ice cubes rubbing up and down your legs.

Static hair?  Goop and grease, hair clips, clamps to hold it down.  Hat hair?  It doesn’t matter, your face is so tight and dry, just do up your lips bright red, smash the wool hat on your head and hope for a bohemian effect. 

Your car is an unrecognizable color.  All cars look frozen and talc powdered, and it ends up on your coat.  Pot holes, sink holes, parking lots chinked up and heaving; driving around 10 foot mountains of piled snow.

Ok, yes, the beauty!  The silence, the pure white wrapping the landscape. The sparkle of sun on new snow, the blinding light and glitter of it.  The soft pervasive stillness of winter.  The opportunity for introspection.  The smell of woodstoves in the air of the small village.  Following footfalls of the deer prints up the driveway. The pink and orange kissed skies on the drive home.  Winter, it’s such a short time really. Sorry you’re missing it Blondie!