A fine edge, a jag

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The maids are long gone who dusted the porcelain and fluffed the down. Bone-white pressed linens on pillows and perpetual shine on mahogany are visions of the past. A few of my grandmother’s things are here on windowsills and in corners, some broken—the Staffordshire cow and calf with a horn missing, a gap in a piece of trim on the Hepplewhite, the lip of the Baccarat decanter chipped, a threadbare velvet ribbon streaming down like a wilted vine from the needlepoint stool where a fine 19th century bustled lady picks flowers in accumulated dust. It is no longer fashionable to be counted among the 1%, though courting fashion has little to do with why we live here on this piece of land, with no hired help, and time-worn buildings.

Here they are, lovely whatsits transported from a fine house, yet belonging in this old farmhouse with us, though I do not love them well enough. In my way, I kiss them all—the crystal arcs on the hip of the decanter, rising like a tide in waves along the sand, one by one. Such a fine edge on each scallop—perfect ellipses, lip upon lip, then the smooth neck, and finally the jag where someone (maybe a servant) banged it on the mouth with the stopper or a glass, and perhaps cognac bled to the floor. I love her, that maidservant, and the lady who yelled at her too.

Somebody loves us all, Elizabeth Bishop said. What a privilege. See how someone planted the trees—to stand, long-necked, perpetually being, shading—and simply and dotingly witnessed.

 Mr. Baccarat decanter with a broken lip seems to watch

the maple sap buckets on the trees

and wonder how much of that elixir has accumulated overnight 

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Quick winter project: re-covering work as play

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves."   ~ Carl Jung

"Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder."

~ Mason Cooley

I love this chair that I adopted and then neglected. Now I'm gonna play with it.

I bought it fifteen years ago at a garage sale of a prominent businessman for $20. It is hand-carved, and although it is not meant for comfortable sitting, I like how it looks. It could be pretty old, I haven't had an appraiser look at it. I found fabric at Calico Corners to re-cover the seat, since I didn't particularly care for the colors and pattern of the one it had. The distressed-look linen I bought conjures Louisa May Alcott or Jane Austen. Drool. For years the chair has served a fine purpose as a "bookshelf" in the bedroom, with the fabric I bought lying on the seat under the books, well protected. A chair that you don't sit on much, because it might be more for decor than function, is called an occasional chair. This one could be called a never chair.

When we rearranged the living room recently and took out the bulky dining table we almost never used, I remembered the bookshelf occasional chair. Transporting it from a dark corner of the bedroom to the warm light of the occasional room, minus the books, renewed my interest in re-covering the chair.

This was a fast, easy project (about an hour). Quite silly that it took me fifteen years to get to this and enjoy the chair. Note to self: Play with the things you love now, don't put it off.

I took the ribbon trim off the edge of the seat, exposing the staples. I didn't need to take the fabric off; I just put the new fabric right on top.

I made a muslin pattern first, then cut the linen following it. While I cut the muslin I was thinking about the muslin dresses Jane and Elizabeth Bennet wore in Pride & Prejudice. Wouldn't I have loved to be one of the Bennet sisters . . . one of the elder sisters. I also thought about the younger sisters remaking hats with new trims. I felt connected with all those Bennet girls -- re-using, recycling, remaking.

Don helped me with the staple gun, stapling the new fabric onto the wood base, because I lack wrist strength (carpal tunnel). Then I re-attached the trim with a glue gun.

Here sits the occasional chair in the corner with a Paris pen & ink, 200-year-old poetry books from my dad's collection, and a few things I inherited from Grandma Olive, herself a very good re-user and re-maker -- a re-creator): Cupid lamp, lyre table, tea box, oriental carpet, and Navajo rug.

This has been a nice Sunday activity, and it gave me something to blog about. (I know, I always have such a hard time coming up with something, don't I? Pshaw!)

And as Mr. Darcy said to Miss Elizabeth Bennet:

"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure."

A great many things from the past give me pleasure!

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the university hall where I work

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A lot of the time the halls of my building really are this empty. Professors are in their offices with doors closed while they silently pore over texts. But these shots are mostly after hours, so it looks extra quiet. My building whispers: English Literature, writing, scholarship. To me - heaven. In theory, at least! As I tell dear DS, I am a very literary person for someone who hardly reads. At the end of the day, this time of year, the evening light slants in across the hall from the grad student lounge, from the open stretch of trees leading to the bell tower, where my favorite beech tree stands. This is the part of campus that looks like a quintessential university.

Sadly, the 110 years this building has existed may be its life span, since it will be demolished in the next couple of years. It doesn't have enough structural integrity to withstand refurbishment, and things have begun to fall apart, as you can see. I'm pretty sure in the new addition across campus where they'll move us I won't have a big office with a high ceiling and wide oak trim on the doors as I do now. So I'm enjoying every moment I work in this space. I do look forward to being close to the river when we move, but I will miss this hall. Most of us in my department - professors and students alike - love this old building. But some can't wait to be rid of it, poor thing.

I get too attached to certain old things. I never want to see them go, even when they're decrepit. There are lots of cracked, chipped, broken and threadbare items in our possession that should probably be tossed. Like this chair that belonged to my mother and her step-mother before her. I don't want to re-cover it or get a new slipcover made. It's not just that I don't want to worry about ruining something brand new. I really like it aesthetically. When a thing is beautiful to start with, made of fibers, wood or ceramics that are well crafted, it becomes more beautiful as it ages. Some things look bad even when they're new, like blue plastic tarps. But I guess beauty is as they say in the eye of the beholder. And if I had just lived through an earthquake, watching my house crumble into rubble, a blue plastic tarp as the sky begins to open up in a shower would be a beautiful sight.




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cold winter nights

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In January Michigan is cold. This week the whole U.S. has had a cold snap, with even the Orange Bowl football game being played in Miami in forty-something degrees fahrenheit (around 10°C). But that's far from normal, whereas here in The North, 0°F (-17°C) is not uncommon this month and next. When Mr. North Wind bottoms it out with some wind chill, staying warm is an art. Out in the country we have a propane gas tank that feeds our forced air furnace ducts that web into the walls of the house, but we try to keep the front half of the house where we live warm with heat from the wood stove, allowing us to turn down the thermostat and save propane. This means the rest of the house is chilly.

If you are truly of The North and love it as I do, this is perfect for bedtime, because where I sleep must be chilled - in fairy tale proportions. So for instance if Hansel and Grethel were sleeping in a cold room, a Grimm might have written something like -

The fire had gone out, and the air became colder every hour that the hands on the clock moved around the face's numbers. The brother and sister huddled together under their shared thin blanket, hoping to catch some heat from each other and fall asleep before morning. But there was one good thing about being too cold to sleep. They were alert to plan their escape.

But that isn't how it was in the wicked witch's cottage. She had fed them and was plumping them up to be eaten. After a supper of pancakes with sugar, milk, apples and nuts they were tucked into a warm bed for a cozy sleep, unaware of their impending doom. See? If they were cold they might have been more wary.



100% wool blankets made by the Orr felt and blanket company of Piqua, Ohio (pronounced pick-wah) could have been a blanket fairy tale children would cover themselves with. When I pull out this old blanket I feel like a child of an old time. Wool has been the warm weave for centuries, unlike microfibers in comforters nowadays, which are very nice and warm but just don't have the same aesthetic. However one blanket is never enough, and I don't put a wool blanket directly on top of the sheet, because it is too itchy and scratchy, even through a sheet. It's better at the foot of the bed in case I wake up freezing and need an extra layer against the frost.



On dark winter nights it is nice to turn pages of Grimm's Household Fairy Tales, illustrated by R ANDRÉ under a warm fleece blanket by the wood stove. Snow-White and Rose-Red welcome a big black bear in out of the cold to warm up by their fire. Evil dwarves and wicked Queens are always stealing or selling, and usually plotting to kill somebody, sometimes to eat them - all pretty scary and grimm.


When it's time for bed there are those uncomfortably Siberian minutes getting undressed, washing my face, brushing teeth, thinking about how cold the sheets will be. This makes me remember sleeping in a three hundred year old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands outside a village called Lairg on Loch Shin in November 1980. They kept each room's door closed and only heated them as needed. So our bedroom was freezing - more than even I could stand - but there was a heated mattress pad in the bed waiting for us after painfully undressing in the Frigidaire - I mean frigid air.

When one of you goes to bed before the other, or sleeps alone, there must be some strategy for warmth. I don't care for electrically heated pads or blankets. I like a heavy pile of three or four blankets that doesn't move when I do - first the sheet, which needs to be dense weave cotton, no polyester, then a soft cushy fleece, then a heavy cotton quilt, then a flannel blanket and maybe the Orr wool, and if it's any warmer than 60-63°F (15-17°C), I get too hot. Perfect is having your body toasty and your face cool. The heavy blankets feel protective when you've just read grim and scary stories too, I think, but I don't want the story too scary to stick out my foot in case I get too warm.

The Orr felt and blanket company and Pendleton started making blankets in the 19th century, and during World War II both made hundreds of thousands of drab green army blankets for soldiers. I picture them not being able to get quite warm enough under one thin wool army blanket on cold winter nights, and that's no fairy tale.



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more inspiration, antiques, oddities and a memory

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I am not immune to the pleasure of treasure hunting, even though my husband is the king. But after years decades of antiquing, flea marketing and garage sale-ing I don't have the drive for the hunt any more. Neither do we have room for more things.

However there is one store that will get me out of the Aveo even on the hottest of days (like Sunday/Father's Day this week) for a dose of inspiration. In our little resort town of Saugatuck (two hours away), gorgeously seated on the Kalamazoo River close to Lake Michigan - resembling Hyannis or Yarmouth on Cape Cod - is Amsterdam Antiques & Oddities on an acre of land that erupts with beauteous artifacts both new and old.





Modes of display inspire with surprise and simplicity - like these new cups nestled in a wire basket at least 50 years old. Many displays are outdoors under a porch roof.

New items are extremely inexpensive - like teacups and saucers imported from England that run $8 for service for 12 - while vintage ones are pricey, but probably still well below market value. (I didn't find a price on the cups above, or these sweet pitchers overflowing from drawers in what looks like might be an old post office or general store cabinet. I'm guessing a mere $3.)



I have found innovative serving platters for less than $10 in the past, like this one for serving pesto.



Inside one of two Amsterdam buildings (the other has mostly new goods), there are more antiques and novelties. I never had pompons on my ice skates like these, but I thought they looked fetching on my sister's twirling skates. You have to skate well to wear pompons, or you look ridiculous. (Loring, did you iceskate downtown G.L. on the ice-covered baseball diamond under the bridge by the river, at night under lights to Petula Clark singing "Downtown" over loudspeakers? If you did, I'm guessing you didn't wear pompons either, and in fact maybe you were with the boys behind the rope playing that dreaded hockey? Somehow I don't picture that, though. And did we circle each other, not having met? Or was that you who pulled off my 5-foot-long trailing stocking cap??)



Oh! Look who I found entering stage right out of the theater pillars, Hamlet's ghost! Oh, no it's Don. Phew. We managed to leave without purchasing this set (didn't see the price, but I'm guessing around $1500), or anything else, but we both left with fresh inspiration for designing the farm wedding.



I leave you with sexy Petula Clark singing "Downtown" in 1964. From this awesome video I'm pretty sure of two things: 1) The male dancers are wearing pompons on their shoes; and 2) Mike Myers studied this video for his Austin Powers choreography. If you miss the first couple of seconds, please rewind and start it again. But there will be more to come in the short two minutes.

a stop on the Silk Road

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This isn't another ode to turquoise - but it could be.

You know those guys who threaded along the Silk Route with tin pots and trinkets clanging from their shoulders - from Chang'an to the Caspian Sea? I'm pretty sure Don was one of them in a former life. Lucky us we got to stay overnight in a caravansaray near Izmir, Turkey - one of the lodges for travelers on the Silk Road. I must say we felt very much at home there with the simple, modest furnishings, and was it ever something to look out our room's window like looking out a horizontal well through four feet of stone. As for me, maybe I trekked with Gurdjieff in a former life while he offered repairs of small machinery in the tiny villages of those mountain passes through the Ural Mountains. I had to get all my hyper-self-examination from someplace. Oh, and have you been to one of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project concerts? I love how he promotes budding young artists from the U.S. and Asia in order to connect the world's neighborhoods through the arts.

Even before I met Don, back in the mid-1970s when he worked the night shift, he went yardsale-ing with his mom on Fridays. There are still little affectionate grudges over who got to what treasure first. "See that Victorian rocker [in Mom's family room]? I spied it first across a table, but Mom nabbed it before I could get to it."

He has since proven again and again that he has an eye for the treasure in the junk. I have slid down out of view in the passenger seat when he stopped the car to curb pick through other people's cast-offs. At home, after the humiliation subsides, I am always pleased with his "purchases."

So a couple of Saturdays ago when I was planting flowers and mentally preparing the yard for the upcoming wedding here at the farm, Don announced he was leaving his veggie beds for a break and heading into town where he'd seen yard sale signs the day before. I asked him to look out for vessels for flowers to be placed among seating arrangements where people will visit during appetizers and the reception on Farm Wedding Day.

He returned with what you see in the three tiered photos upper left, and more. All of it - in toto - cost $5. The turquoise vintage metal chair alone goes for $20-40 on eBay.

So picture the canning jars and containers filled with sunflowers on long reception tables under the tent and on makeshift hay bale tables between old wooden chairs around the yard for wedding guests to relax and enjoy.





Years ago I found this chap on the right at an antique store, who now carries his load on our guest room wall. I can definitely see a resemblance to Don.













And this is my mountain trekking partner in a former life, G.I. Gurdjieff



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sewing box

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After posting about the Fauchon coffee tins, I got to thinking about this sewing tin I inherited from my mom.

As a teenager, if I needed to replace a button or repair a hem, I'd go into my parents' cool second floor bedroom to find needle and thread. Shaded by an old maple tree on our Michigan town street, the chair by the window where Mom did her mending was the repository for the sewing tin, or else the floor right next to it. I'd lift the loose lid and dig for the right color thread and a needle from her soft round red pincushion. My eyes were good then, and I could thread the needle with ease. Mom taught me to double the thread and knot the end with a lick and a twist.



When we eight children cleaned out our parents' big three-storey house and judiciously distributed their belongings, the dining table was spread with a miscellany of items that had little or no monetary value, and we each took what was of personal value. What was left got tossed. By then, I was sick and tired of STUFF after spending weeks sorting and digging through 50+ years of accumulation, and I was disinterested in the dining table assortment. But Don, bless him, nabbed a few pieces he thought were cool. As time marches on, I am more and more appreciative of what he took for me that day. Every passing year I turn more often to my parents for guidance and connection, for what it means to be human in this world.



Any number of people would have tossed this tin, rusted and misshapen as it was, and impossible to get the lid on tight.

Maybe it originally came filled with cookies - a gift to my mother, or grandmother. Did Grandma Olive empty cookie crumbs, wipe it out and turn it into a sewing tin, and then Mom took it from her New Jersey house when Grandma died in 1960? Had Mom as a girl gone to her mother Olive's sunny bedroom overlooking the garden by the New York Bay and dug for thread and a needle, or a button?



And did she too find comfort?

I keep my sewing tin on the floor under my dresser, or on the sewing machine in the den. I've seen it this week with new eyes and noticed for the first time that Degas' ballerinas at the bar would need the same color thread to repair their tutus as Bonheur's horse rider's jacket: blue ice.

rescued glass

Since our sweet Lesley and Brian are getting married here at the farm this summer, Don and I are into the details of spiffing up the scene for the event. We both love this special excuse to tend to the farm, which will be a nice setting for the vintage-rustic-elegance Lesley envisions. Believe me, it looks a little too rustic right now, if you know what I mean.

Les has always shopped at thrift stores, and so it seems fitting to use previously used or borrowed things in the "something old" and "something borrowed" categories in the old British wedding custom for the bride:

Something old, something new
Something borrowed, something blue
And a silver sixpence in her shoe.

On freecycle Don found a lady who sorts clear glass at a local recycling center and couldn't bear letting these gorgeous bottles get ground up for the next piece of glass. So she gently loaded them in boxes to give away. In fact, she had a few boxes on her porch being picked up by freecyclers. (I got inspired for these photos by Artsy T at flickr. How cool!)

Lesley envisions sunflowers in these bottles on the dinner tables.

We have ordered sunflower seeds by the hundreds. Besides standing in bottles and canning jars, they will also be a backdrop for the ceremony and punctuation around the farm. I hope they'll bloom right when we need them to, but if they don't, the green leafy stalks will be pretty anyway.

In the whorl of Life that is continually recycling, sunflower seeds fall to the ground, germinate and grow into tall new plants the following season. There's really nothing new under the sun, like this tender new love, fresh and bright, that is part of a very old human cycle. How amazing!