You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Pointing my cursor to the WordPress icon on my desktop, I once again read the rest of the slogan as “Get a free hug here.”
Hug? Not blog? Does anyone else ever misread it that way? Or am I the only one?
I have to admit, some days your comments and postings feel like hugs from afar.
Somewhere along the way of drafting Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider, I began imagining living in the top of a traditional textiles mill tower. Once I moved to New England, where the 19th century mills had proliferated, I soon discovered that the towers basically housed worker stairwells, even when topped with a big bell, elaborate clocks, or impressive weather vanes. Even so, my fantasy of dwelling with a view over the millyard and its surroundings kept growing.
You should realize I’m something of an ascetic – and I like open views, rather than curtains – so the idea of living in a small space such as that holds a romantic appeal. It’s rather like a forest lookout, actually – the kind Kerouac, Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, Welch, and other writers once occupied. Naturally, it’s not the kind of bedroom where you’d do elaborate entertaining, either. Anything would have to be intimate.
But what happens through the nights in the empty rooms below? To follow the developments, click here.
I look at the covers assembled and think, This is my life.
Turn by twist by turn, introduction by introduction.
All that didn’t happen, too, or was cut short.
Do I cry? Or laugh?
Are you with me?
~*~
See what’s available at Smashwords and Thistle/Flinch.
One late October afternoon, after most of the foliage had fallen, Randy Kezar and I simultaneously looked up from our pathway and beheld a large red maple fully aflame in sunlight as we strolled through the burial ground behind our Quaker meetinghouse. It was the embodiment of the single detail that says everything, the flash of perfection; this individual tree expressed the season as much as all of the previous color change and shifting light we had savored in the previous weeks. “I suppose if we were Japanese, we’d sit down and write a haiku on the spot, in celebration,” he said. Later, I took up the challenge and came up with a few lines I hope come close:
Somehow each New England autumn
comes down to boughs in a graveyard
– a common of stone and bone –
But my provocation and observations kept ranging wider, invoking a calendar not just of the place across a year but also the epochs that fill what went from a boneyard and burial ground to a Victorian cemetery to the present, as well.
The poems that resulted have one foot in Portsmouth and Dover, New Hampshire, and another in Portsmouth and Newport, Rhode Island, where I quote from the 1664 will of Alice Shotten Cowland and some of the activities of her son-in-law, Robert Hodgson – sometimes spelled Hodson, as well as Hutchin. (I detail what is known of their lives in my genealogy blog, The Orphan George Chronicles.) She was part of the early dissent against Puritan authority, first with Samuel Gorton and then as one of the first Quakers in the New World. I love Robert’s memorial minute, which calls him “an ancient traveler in the Truth.” He arrived in America on the historic voyage of the tiny Woodhouse, causing turmoil in Manhattan and Long Island before heading on to Boston. As far as I can determine, he was no relation to my line, no matter how much many have tried to find the link.
~*~
To see more, click here.
In many communities across the Northeast, the once neglected mills along the running waters have found new life as commercial real estate. Often, high-tech firms and other startups find them to be flexible incubators. Other times, floors are occupied by stylish residential condos or office suites.
The small city where I live proves that, three decades after the boarded up windows were once again open the light and the spaces within refurbished. The new tenants were the key to a revitalized downtown, especially.
Before relocating to New Hampshire, though, I envisioned something similar while drafting my novel, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider. Actually, I had no idea that was about the same time the mills were being restored one by one by developers like Joseph Sawtelle. Not that he was anything like Bill’s mysterious Boss.
Oh, how I love the mills – even before we get to the intrigue in my novel.
Last weekend, we got away to the Northwest corner of Vermont for a lovely, make that magical, gallivant enhanced by a Friend’s gracious hospitality.
The jaunt began with a long overdue stop at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire. Admittedly, sculpture – especially public statuary – has taken a lower rung on my visual awareness to painting, drawing, and printmaking. Let me say simply that this visit to the home – originally summer residence – of the American genius Augustus Saint-Gaudens was a revelation. The National Park Service has done a remarkable job in preserving not just his house and studio but in displaying his studies and castings of his memorable monuments. The glade devoted to the “Shaw Memorial” alone was worth the visit. And, let me add, the floral displays in the gardens at this time of year, when relatively little is blooming, were delightful. As for his work designing American currency, at the invitation of Teddy Roosevelt? The short take is we’re ready to return, soon.
That was followed by a late afternoon jaunt across the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge spanning the woefully low Connecticut River, due to an ongoing drought, into Vermont and eventually through the Green Mountains, taking a questionable route our host suggested through Rochester Gap and Middlebury Gap, one I doubt we would have found via GPS but altogether perfect. This was the real Vermont, not just twee but also working-class hanging in there, apparently happily so. We’re still wondering how many of these folks get to work through the winter.
Not much later we were sitting on his deck, sipping hard cider we’d brought from the Granite State and munching some amazing cheese from his locale. Oh, yes, while watching a feathery sunset stretching toward us from the New York State’s jagged Adirondack mountain range. Does life get any better than this?
The next morning brought my reason for being here, a committee meeting an hour to the north, and the first of two breath-taking mornings with a drive that included Adirondacks in the distance on one side of the highland farm country I traversed (with its seemingly contented dairy cows and huge barns), and the Green Mountains, a wall on the other side, along with glimpses of long Lake Champlain far below to the west.
Still, we weren’t seeing what we’d anticipated: signs of frost. Not all that long ago, northern New England – especially this far north – would have had a killing frost by mid-September. Instead, where we live, we’ve been able to get to the end of October with an occasional throwing blankets over the garden. In other words, global warming is real. And that frost, by tradition, is essential to the famed New England fall foliage.
Leap to Sunday morning, when we ventured off to Appalachian Gap in a second crisp, dewy morning with the mountains veiled in a haze – breathlessly, as it were. What surprised us the most was how quickly some trees were already in prime foliage, albeit surrounded by green. The color comes in waves, actually, and much of the glory depends on the ephemeral angle and quality of light more than the leaves themselves. So the autumn foliage was beginning to arrive. Just like that.
In the week since, it’s starting to appear where we live, too. And, to heighten our awareness, we know all too well what will follow, just a month hence.
~*~
My essays and photographic slide shows on New England autumn foliage are available in the archives of my Chicken Farmer I Still Love You blog. Take a peek!
Spending a week this time of year in this cabin gave me a taste of Thoreau at Walden. Some of the nights were quite icy, even with a wood fire beside me.
Simplicity = enough = balance.
Or we could start with an unbalanced state, where many if not most of us seem to be, and work backward. How much is enough, after all? And so you simplify.
I also like the aesthetic equation (when it’s all in balance):
Elegance = simplicity = beauty.
It all adds up. Satisfaction.
When you’re ready.
The seed was planted back when I lived along the Susquehanna River and was introduced to the trail that twisted through a wooded strip between the water and the freeway.
The site included a bridge now closed to vehicular traffic and a low dam that once diverted water to power cigar factories along the shore. The mill trace remained, filling with moody water after a heavy rainfall.
As I imagined the vanished mills as they might have been in their prime, Big Inca Versus a New Pony Express Rider began to take shape. The town where I lived, after all, was in economic decline and would have welcomed an infusion of investment.
That wasn’t a singular site, even along that particular river. As I would later observe, the opportunity was repeated throughout the Northeast – and many of the communities still had the old buildings, usually in boarded up condition.
As the intervening decades have demonstrated, I wasn’t completely off-mark.
Come along, then, and see where it leads. Just click here.
As I said at the time …
From those last surviving aunts, piece together what you can from what memories, photos, and documents you can collect. Maternal sides, especially, can fade from sight, even within the recent past. These personal histories can be far more revealing than those of public figures we usually hear. Especially important is recording the negative findings, as well as the positive.
Look, too, for medical markers. The depression, for example, could arise in genetics or social patterning. For what it’s worth, I suspect there’s a strand of it in my Dunker ancestry. The Hodgson/Hodson/Hodgin males, meanwhile, seem to die largely of heart diseases, probably a consequence of a high cholesterol North Carolina-style diet.
The past lives on, one way or another. It helps to discern its presence in defining your own values and actions.
Jnana's Red Barn 