Quiet colors

Ah, a good book

Apple time

"It's apple time again," a young farmer said,
as he unloaded a crate of Macintosh apples at
his stand at the Union Square Greenmarket.
"Nothing better."

At just after sunrise that morning, the farmers' trucks
pulled in, from farms around the Hudson, upstate New
York, and Vermont. I love to watch as this square in
the city transforms into a market, as it has for the
last 30 years.

All day people bustled around in search of tomatoes
and squash flowers, spinach, green peppers and late
season corn. They bought bunches of lavender gathered
in twine and apple-pear crumble crisp just baked in an
upstate oven the night before.  

A Half Hour and a Dime

                                       


                                      


I like the notion of small steps

and where they can take us.

I was thinking of something Ray Bradbury said in an interview with Dana Gioia about writing his novel, Fahrenheit 451. Bradbury lived in a lively house with abundant noise thanks to two small children and life - the way it teems all around us.

Bradbury told Gioia he had a story he wanted to get down on paper about why the world needs books and the ideas that live in them. He couldn’t afford to rent an office but one day he happened upon the typing rooms in the basement of the UCLA library.

For 10 cents a half hour, he could type away. He created a society where books were burned, a character named Montag, a fireman who burned those books, and a young girl named Clarisse who liked to taste the rain and question things, a young person who would make Montag think and bring about change.

He had his idea, a series of days and a bag full of dimes.

I like to picture it: each morning, he stepped down into that basement, enveloped in the clacking of keys, popping another dime into the coin slot, nurturing his idea until it became a novel.

Those last days of summer ~

The playgrounds have grown quiet;

the beaches hushed. 

As summer dances off for another year,

a wistfulness washes in.  

Behind that wall

When I was small I would have conjured up a whole world
that existed beyond that stone wall. 
What magic lived beyond those burnished red grates? 
I still like to wonder.

Brio

We were visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art when we happened upon this young woman talking about a painting I'd always liked. It’s called “The Horse Fair” by Rosa Bonheur, a French painter who lived and worked in the mid and late 1800’s.

The energy in the painting was palpable. Everything seemed to move, the muscular legs of the horses, the arms of the one of the men as he pulled taut on the reins, the darkening clouds in the sky. It took up much of the wall as if to say,  “Stand here; take a long look.”

  

The Met’s gallery label said that “for a year and a half (Bonheur) made sketches twice a week in the horse market in Paris, on the boulevard del’Hopital, dressing as a man in order to attract less attention from horse dealers and buyers.” How daring of her to be there on her own terms, to spend that much time preparing to create her painting, to get it that right.  

If that said “brio,” so did the lecturer. I paused for a few moments to hear her. She was utterly swept up in the work. I had visited with this painting many times but hadn’t seen all the nuances she saw. Her exuberance charmed us; we leaned in to listen some more. 

A Hoot

In interviews she called herself "a life of the party type."
Is there anything better?
What a way to careen through life, laughing at yourself and the world, creating your very own signature laugh, kind of a cackle-guffaw and letting us all chuckle along too.

Phyllis Diller.
Crazy wigged, eyebrows arched, dolled up in fashions that tended toward train wreck, tossing off her one-liners about her fictitious husband Fang and about herself.  ("When I told Fang I was going to have my face lifted, he said, 'Who'd steal it?'" and the favorite of women everywhere: "Housework can't kill you, but why take a chance?")

Though her act revolved around how she "buried the laundry in the backyard" and couldn't cook to save her life, she was a gourmet, an accomplished pianist and a painter, someone her friends described as utterly kind and generous. Perhaps what I loved best was that she told the Associated Press it took reading the book The Magic of Believing to give her "the courage" or that nudge she needed to step up on a stage at 37 and try out her act.

Mostly, she was a hoot, a gal who, like anybody else, had her own bundle of troubles but she chose to laugh. And her manager said that she died peacefully in her sleep with a smile on her face.

The Smithsonian says it has  50,000 of her jokes, each typed up on an index card, a lovely thing to leave us.

Swingin'

                                                 

         He was swinging on the swings, so high it seemed his sneakers might just scrape the sky. The wind was soft and the sky stretched on and on above us.  

      “Do you like to hum?” he asked. He’s seven and he always poses the kinds of questions that bring wonder back to ordinary things.  

         I hadn’t really thought about it, couldn’t quite remember the last time I’d hummed. “Sure,” I said.

     “Well, I love it,” he said. “I can hum any song!” He started humming away and pretty soon I did too. And there we were, an aunt and her nephew swinging on the swings, humming some tunes, 
all of it good.  

Art, For One Day

     She was at work on her patch of street in Florence early in the morning and she kept at her art late into the afternoon. She worked from an image on paper, but the bright blue of the backdrop, the intent gaze of the eyes, the garland of flowers, all of it was of her own making. She shaded a cheekbone; she touched up a strand of hair. I stood and marveled, not only over the beauty of her work but more so that her canvas was the road and that she worked in chalk and pastels. An evening's rainfall, the morning dew, a street cleaner, many passing feet would undo what she had created. Still, she picked up a pale yellow and let her work unfold before us, if only for a day.

A Soft Night Begins to Fall  

Vines

     I have a whole tangle of vinca vines and ivy on the back deck and the front porch and in places in the house. They seem to grow down and up, that they dangle and intertwine. Sometimes, on our kitchen window ledge they interfere with the dishes I am washing or even stubbornly try to burrow their way into the wall. But they are pretty and  they mix and mingle and so they stay.

     They call to mind a moment from Barbara Kingsolver's The Bean Trees. The main character, Taylor, uses a plant to try to explain something to her adopted daughter, Turtle. She speaks about wisteria and about the community they had become part of and helped to create, this odd little patchwork of folk. Kingsolver writes, "Wisteria vines, like other legumes, often thrive in poor soil...Their secret is something called rhizobia. These are microscopic bugs that live underground in little knots on the roots. They suck nitrogen gas right out of the soil and turn it into fertilizer for the plant.  "It's like this," I told Turtle. "There's a whole invisible system for helping out the plant that you'd never guess was there. It's just the same as with people. The way Edna has Virgie and Virgie has Edna and Sandi has Kid Central Station and everyone has Mattie" (Kingsolver 212).

     I smile looking at the plants that frame the window and think of the invisible systems that prop me up.  Their roots, though slender, run deep.

   

To Slow Time 

 

We had a Cousin Night the other night and it was a feast of wings and pizza and talk. We wandered down to the park before a wild thunderstorm rolled in and one of my nephews did some pull ups on the basketball hoop.

I thought then about just how little he once was, how tiny they all were, tooth fairy small, when a handful of quarters and nickles and dimes celebrated a missing front left tooth.

Now:  iphones and texting and pull-ups on the hoop bars.
I wanted to take time and slow it. Put everything on pause.

Wherever we roam,
whatever small town or city we travel to,
we always wind up at a bookstore.

Lincoln from this angle gave me much to think about.
I felt the weight that must have settled in around
his shoulders.
A weariness,
and then a strength summoned up from somewhere deep,
and movement forward.

In Washington D.C. for four days, we had to stop to
see him twice.