Where a mind of winter resides

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The woods near Arcadia, Michigan; that blue haze at the horizon is Lake Michigan

I hope you can put up with winter a little longer.

I loved being with my raven sister on the weekend, up in our part of the world, the place we went as kids on vacation in the northwest finger of the mitt of Michigan. We took down Christmas ornaments and lights in the lodge. It’s her hobby to decorate, and I helped her de-decorate. I wound thousands of white lights into balls, for hours while she wrapped 1,500 glass ornaments into boxes. I don’t care about decorating any more, but I got to be with her and watch her in her glorious element. And we watched the Oscars in her cozy condo in the hundred-year-old lodge.

 The Anniversary Ball in November at the Inn

Beach Lodge, one of the buildings at Portage Point Inn

Outdoors I got to breathe, walk and listen to the "nothing" of winter in that great north country, among spruces, pines, and birches on the hills around frozen Portage Lake and up on the bluff at Arcadia looking out over Lake Michigan. In winter, these contoured hills, coned trees, and white and green clapboard buildings of the lodge are quiet, unlike in summer when tourists swarm to the aqua waters of northwest Michigan. Only a few lodgers spent the night under neighboring roofs. Hardly a vehicle passed as we parked on the shoulder of M-22 and crossed to climb the lookout over Lake Michigan. Snow quiets and slows everything, even up the road where skiers were shushing down the hills.

Across Lake Michigan, to the right, is Wisconsin, about 60 miles away;
elsewhere Lake Michigan gets to 118 miles across

I claim this quiet northern winter, though I have never lived there. I spent two weeks of summer vacation with my family at a cottage up the road for just a few years, half of which are prior to my memory. A few weeks’ making, and this terrain is mine. I don’t know if I will ever move to another state. (I have done so previously, even to another country.) I drove four and a half hours to be there Saturday and four and a half hours back again Monday. It was worth it, but how could I move even farther away?

Before winter is over, I have to post the winter poem: The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens.

The Snow Man

by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; . . .

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter . . .

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves, . . .

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place . . .

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Portage Point Inn

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Stormy

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Snow clogs the air, ominously and thrillingly. It neutralizes time and blows into mind the Big Blizzard of ‘67 when I was smaller by a drift or two.

You were already a windswept woman in 1967, my raven sister, fruited in a peach twinset and slim wool pants, accentuating your hourglass. By the fire you styled my adolescent hair like Twiggy’s. You, a lover of storms. I could feel your excitement in the comb and clicking scissors as the skies emptied themselves, like feathers falling from seam-ripped pillows around the black oak trees outside our windows. My head was safe in your hands. You took such care with me.

You were wild. Like a restless, exotic bird, kept indoors. Not angry, though once in a while you cried out -– your energy misunderstood, sometimes dark, as complex and giving as thunderhead clouds -- sky-filling, gleaming, powerful and beautiful. But we of the minister’s clan must be quiet, controlled, stable. You were a little dangerous and unpredictable, with an immense, soft, roiling heart. Romantic, impassioned, with boundless vigor for design and fun that had to be somehow channeled through the church: Youth Group parties, bridal showers, champagneless-danceless weddings!

On that day in ‘67 it was as if you required a storm in your flesh, its turbulence a counterweight to restore and calm what bled in you like a red sky. You needed it. You greeted it, unafraid. When Mom said we were out of milk, it was your chance! You escaped the house-pocketed air for a staple from the grocery store, miles away, on foot. We barely understood, and you were gone! -- slogging with booted piston feet in knee-deep drifts, black hair flying like a crow leaning into the wind and stinging seeds of snow. You needed the storm’s blinding fury to temper and protect your wildness.

How could I know if you’d return? So many hours the blizzard howled on. I distracted myself with games of Sorry, Scrabble, Chinese Checkers. Lunch. Lying face first on the bamboo toboggan skimming down the hill between scores of oaks on the way to the iced lake. More games and staring into orange fireplace flames. On the snow fell. The light changed, the sky grew gray around black tree branches that bordered the deep, empty driveway.

Before nightfall, your stomping feet at the back door! Your crimson face as saturated as a morning sky -- Warning! The raven woman is back, and her black hair is shining blue! She carries milk in her brown paper bag -- triumphant! I wanted to dance a wild dance, like birds among the oak branches, the sky dumping confetti all around!

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So what?

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-Luxembourg Garden's Medici Fountain in May 2006

with face sculpture by Swedish artist Lotta Hannerz;

read my Paris Deconstructed blog post 
about being a woman alone in Paris that day here

Isn't this woman utterly amazing? All she does is breathe. I truly love and admire her. What a meditation she is. "So what?" she seems to whisper-breathe. "I am in Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens Medici Fountain, commissioned by Catherine de Medici . . . but . . . So what?"

The question So what? was a weed of rudeness in the field of my life growing up, a thistle you didn't want to touch, best to leave it alone to grow by itself, prickly and ugly. Mouths got slapped for saying such things. I didn't even think it, because it stood up and declared persistent insolence, superiority, rebellion, put-down. These were not in my floral repertoire.

Fast forward to the year of the door into freedom -- Paris 1997 when I'm 40 (nine years before these photos).

Two things.

One. I found thistle weeds in the luxurious flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens. Was there some mistake? Thistles -- weeds -- in one of the grands jardins of the most elegant city in the world. But there was no mistake, they had been planned and planted. Tall, regal purple Scottish thistles were designed among snapdragons and I don't remember what else. I stood there dumbfounded, trying to comprehend many things at once: How did a garden designer understand how beautiful they are, and worthy of formal beds? How had I scorned them? Why do things in Paris look so frickin' beautiful? They're weeds! for heaven's sake . . . and then from the splashing water of the Medici fountain under the plane trees I seemed to hear someone whisper: Et alors? So what?

Two. I went to a jazz club called Petit Journal with my sister, across Boulevard Saint-Michel from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was my first time sitting for a prolonged mutual welcome of jazz. Our mother was freshly gone two months before, she who left behind New York jazz for a life of church music in the Midwest. Now with my sister in Paris: a door, a spiral stair down to a tiny, wall-lit, cave-like cellar. A female vocalist just on the other side of that table, no stage, who looks like Dianne Wiest with a voice like Etta James'. A quartet packed tight, playing loose -- bass, piano, drums, horn. Hours of So what interpretations of standards, and a little improvisation.

Today, almost fourteen years later, I'm still a baby in jazz, listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane play So What. But all these years since the freedom door, I've been practicing (as in, practicing to get better at it) So what. What does that statement (more than a question) mean to me, now? It means letting go, like thistles that let wind carry away their down. It means being unbounded by clocks, ought-tos, appearances, fears, expectations, shame, regret, jealousy, tidiness, judgment, offense, binary choices (and lists!). It means seeing beauty in the of-course lovely, and also in the untamed, thorny, worn, shabby, discarded, muddy, unknown and mixed-up ordinary-sometimes-even-ugly beautiful. I probably still wouldn't say So What? to anyone out loud, because spoken it just sounds bratty. But I say it to myself, and to Inge, when we get too serious and need to lighten up!

Et alors? So what?

How about by way of reply, a 1959 live recording in New York of a jazz musician who loved Paris and felt more welcome there as a black performer than in his own backyard -- Miles Davis, with John Coltrane in a gorgeous, untamed but highly cultivated field of So What? (Great article about Miles and his long love affair with Paris here.) Listen, view the video (also with members of the Gil Evans orchestra and Jimmy Cobb on drums) at full resolution, and feel the heart in Miles' eyes. Then, at about minute 4:29, when Miles and Trane (don't I sound hip, baby?) start blowing So what behind Wynton Kelly's piano playing, see if your fetters haven't come untied.

The video is followed by more photographs of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, from my solo trip in 2006, not the year of the thistles, for sadly, I have no photos of those. But really, So what?

Newsflash: I need orange has offered her beautiful thistle photo, from the Luxembourg Gardens!

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-Does the chap in glasses not look like he is saying, "Et Alors . . ." ?

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lost-and-found trick-or-treater

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With the help of friends, owners of a house in our current town carve 100 jack-o-lanterns every Halloween

I don't know how the olfactory organ manages it - the blessed nose - the way it skips decades like a stone on the surface of water and brings back October thirty-firsts from forty years ago in a nanosecond. I just know it works.

On the drive home from the university this week in the early evening dusk, if I smell burning leaves from someone's yard, instantly I am walking fast in that I-will-not-be-overly-excited-and-run walk that trick-or-treaters commence from their own porch into a dark but streetlit Halloween night (unless you're my husband as a boy and you just full out run door to door, pillow case slung over your shoulder to be stuffed with as much candy as you can carry, go home, dump it out on the living room floor, and go back out again, running).

For blocks and blocks my small town neighborhood angled off in rows of sidewalks covered in crispy brown leaves, lined with beacons: porch lights inviting me and hundreds of other kids to walk up to a friend's or a stranger's door, reach a hand into a big Melmac bowl and help ourselves to candy - politely take one, or impolitely grab a handful - to what I hoped would be Snickers, Reese's peanut butter cups or sour apple bubble gum, but please no Tootsie Rolls or apples.

We were little fishermen docking for a few seconds at ports of call, lit like lighthouses, where we filled our nets with what the neighborhood sea had stocked.

One Halloween, I was lost at sea.

Little Ruthie got invited to go trick-or-treating with a grown up friend of an older sister. Was it the year Nancy sewed me an 18th century Martha Washington costume complete with black lace mask, shawl and fingerless gloves, white wig dotted with blue satin rosebuds, and lovely draped blue satin garniture hanging from the waist? Impossibly, I managed to go off with Charlene and have a blast without either of us informing my parents. Have you ever seen a police car parked in front of your house, complete with spinning red and white lights? Whatever fun you were just having disappears like a wave seeping into sand.

But no doubt, the catch I emptied onto the carpet, sorted into piles of keepers and undesirables, then eaten a few a day, mollified my guilt into mid-November.
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Enjoy the good

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It takes all of us to make a balanced world. But silly me I fight battles where there aren't any, usually little skirmishes inside my head and heart. I can tell someone not to compare themselves with anyone else, but I'm not as good at believing it for myself.

Prepping for Farm Wedding day right here where we live, I've watched my sister scrape, sand and paint the porch and deck four days straight. I've watched my niece weed the veggie and flower beds and paint the studio roof in the hot sun for hours on end. I've watched Don build a fence, straighten the barns and a dozen other tasks. I've watched Peter dig dirt, haul pea gravel, design a stoop for l'atelier and paint roofs. Me? I've watched myself float from laundry line to flower beds to the stove and the sink, all things I enjoy. I compare tasks, and mine come up short.

But by the end of the second day when my dear, weary hard working family was eating a meal outside that I had loved fixing, and we sat there in that perfect evening light with a breeze touching the outside of us while warm food and wine touched the inside - I got it - and actually felt a little proud.

My sister loves to paint, making everything fresh. My niece loves to weed and see what she accomplished. My husband loves to piddle in his barns and garden. I love to plant flowers, hang laundry, cook, organize and clean. Carrying a tray of farm glasses outside full of cold well water to the troops makes me happy, and so does chopping garlic and an hour later smelling its musk on my fingers. Just as there is a time to work and a time to rest, different people are good at different things and have different roles. I had to remind myself of my Christmas post.

And as my sister later said, she'd rather work 8 hours scraping, sanding and painting than spending one hour in the kitchen cooking.

No, I didn't bake this chocolate torte, but it sure was good. I did make the savory spaghetti from scratch. It was the perfect balance.



Ecclesiastes 3

¹To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

²A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

³A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

⁴A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

⁵A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

⁶A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

⁷A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

⁸A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. . . .

. . .

¹³And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God. . . .

. . .

²⁰All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

Listen to Pete Seeger, and members of The Byrds - Chris Hillman, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby talk about Pete Seeger's song "Turn, Turn, Turn" that he wrote in 1959 pretty much word for word Ecclesiastes 3. Of course Seeger added that last line to verse 8, as well as the refrain "turn, turn, turn":

A time to love, a time to hate
A time of peace, I swear it's not too late!

8 random facts/habits

I was tagged by Vicki at Faint Heart Art to post eight random facts or habits about myself. Thanks for tagging me, this was fun to think about! It contains more memories than current habits.

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1. I'm 52, and I have never ridden a horse, which is probably a good thing, if you consider #2.

2. I was run over by a school bus when I was 4. It's not as bad as it sounds, but it's a bit shocking, right? My brother Bennett was driving it around the dirt lot by our church. He was learning to drive, so he practiced in the school bus our church used to pick kids up for Sunday School, and I was playing train conductor, jumping up and down off the steps. Nothing broke. But there were tread marks on my rump. (This is why we have rumps. Why is there no good word for "rump"? Buttocks. Butt. Arse. Back end. Backside. Behind. Bottom. Bum. Derriere. Seat. Hiney. A**. Rear. Fanny. Cheeks. Posterior. Gluteus maximus. Haunches. Hindquarters. I don't like any of 'em. Well, maybe arse is ok. Oh and my sister's word was "buckets.") Bennett and I always loved each other, but after that we were bonded for life, which ended for him in 1996 at age 47.

3. I dressed up as Martha Washington (George's wifee) for Halloween in 4th grade. My sister Nancy (10 years older than I - same sister as per "buckets" in #2) made the entire costume, including white wig with ribbons and black lace gloves, shawl and lace trimmed eye-mask. It was an extraordinary costume, so was I stunned when my teacher Mrs. Woodworth recognized and greeted me "Good morning, Ruthie"!

4. When I am afraid of flying I do a meditation that includes picturing the plane inside me, and I stop feeling afraid.

5. Around the same time as the bus incident in #2, I learned to read on my siblings' laps during daily evening devotions when everyone took turns reading the Bible.

6. When I was 12 Nancy cut my hair like Twiggy's. Wow, I just realized I had my own personal stylist in my sister.

7. When Don and I were first married, and I was a waitress, I waited on John Houseman in little Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, when he was on a book tour. I was the only waitress who knew who he was, which was what the manager guessed and seated him in my section. Was I shocked when I tonged ice cubes into his glass while recognizing that face I loved from the movie "The Paper Chase"! Of course the British actor asked for prime rib, which we had run out of. So I recommended filet mignon. "Fine," he said drolly. "Do you have any English mustuhd?" "But of course!" said I. Only we didn't, and someone had to run to the grocery store for Grey Poupon (there weren't any Rolls Royces around as in the TV ad). Mr. Houseman never smiled once. I would have been disappointed if he had, very disappointed.

8. I dream about babies, a lot.