A Suitable Halloween Companion

joined me at Green's View

The Lady Who Used to Live Here

in the house down the driveway was, with one daughter, kind to a first-cousin, who devotedly continued to visit her (sometimes twice, always once a year) for a very long time after leaving College, always bringing her dog, welcome as she was too in the house. Several times, I joined my cousin and the lady who used to live here for tea (I brought the scones) and spent a delightful hour listening to her old stories and my cousin's, and on leaving once I banged into the wrought-iron gate lightly, not bending anything but sort of smearing black on my car, a sign of her long kindness to my cousin. The house, I think, is now empty, she having moved to a place for older folks in Nashville and her children having gone through and sorted and disposed of things, some in moving vans, others probably simply removed. The University owns the house where the lady used to live, which now sits empty, but the stone and wrought iron fence and mailbox on which her name still faintly appears remind me of her and her kindness to my first-cousin every time I walk by, including today near the end of my walk. 

I wish them all well.

Today's Rhetorical Question

What could be more beautiful than this shiny Fiat 500?

Haptic Learning

Before my cashier could look up the item code, the one next to us provided it. She said, "It's always better to ask. You'll remember the codes faster that way."

She wasn't with a customer, so I asked her, "Why?"

"I learn by listening," she said. "I learned all the codes within a couple of weeks."

"Aha! I'm a teacher, so I know what you mean. Some folks are natural auditory learners."

My cashier said, "That's not me. I learn best just by trying to do something."

"Right, me too," I said. "That's haptic learning: just do it till you figure it out." 

Later, at the lake, I stumbled across the HDR option in my long camera menu (I was looking for something else, of course), but I saw it, so I chose it. I gave it go. After checking a  photo or two, I quickly discovered that I had better shoot at higher ISO. I also realized I needed to shoot at the limited option (a macro lens to begin with wasn't ideal for leaf reflections, but so what?). At home, I looked at the photos and then realized I had met the limits of my learning. A quick glance at the directions proved fruitful: shoot in Auto. Duh.

I could sure use an auditory GX8 guide beside me just like the young woman at The Pig. Until then, . . . .

Whirligigging Time

Jump!

Press button, hold, release to contact campus police.

Unless you're this guy, who lives on and inside the emergency call box.

What the Wildlife Won't Eat

hangs around, from the crabapple branches and under the black walnut, where I no longer park.

At least, the fruit makes for a colorful photo on the way to rot.

Letter from the Season

Nothing much inside, but oh the letter box itself. More joy.

Believe Me

I long for the lengthened sense of seasonal time in childhood. But I can't, so I plan to make the most of the primary color days before winter gray sets in.

Errand Interrupted

Twenty minutes down the mountain to the vet's office, flea meds purchased at 9:37, home by 10. That's what I planned.

Then this happened.

Strong light on primary colors: they kill me single dadgum every time.

Home just before noon.

(Does this happen to everybody?)

Local Color

So startled by red towers
like exclamation marks
cresting the hill that I blurted
"What the heck are those?"
Closer, I answered myself,
"Just stacked plastic crates."
But so much more than just:
exclaiming sky, clouds, bushes,
dry grass, bluebirds,
so many bluebirds
wheeling in
perching, staring
zipping to ground
then back up --
blurred dashes
ellipses
virgules
before twilight.

October Thoughts

Beersheba Springs' Armfield Cemetery, established in 1871, holds a small number of graves, including the one for John Armfield himself. A partner in a large pre-Civil War slave trading business responsible for the sale of some 8,000 slaves, Armfield was also one of the founders of the University of the South and after the war owned the Beersheba Springs Hotel, which today is a Methodist Assembly.

Like the season itself -- of fallen leaves and shifting seasons, the cemetery might be viewed as a solemn and dark place, celebrating as it does the life of a man who sold people, but also a respectful memorial to the man committed to education of young men.

He, though, isn't what held me long in the cemetery. This did: a memorial of six joined hands.

I read the names of those remembered in stone (Bess T. Cason, Sue T. Gibson, Boneda T. Merritt, Robert W. Turner, Robert W. Turner Jr., Sally Wright Turner), but I do not know their life stories beyond their being family. 

I do know this: love lasts beyond the grave as long as a family member or friend lives, as long as their descendants live, even if in ignorance of the persons in their own direct and extended family tree.

This memorial reminds me of what I've lost, the family members now gone (one in October some years ago), but also of the connectedness we still share. I've seen no more touching marker.

Cornered

In one block, this.

On the next, that.

Old buildings, old glass, one old problem still haunting us.

Doubleness

I keep seeing what's inside and what's outside. In a firehouse door or in a person. Inside I'm the same person I was at 16 or 35, but outside I'm older than my mother ever was. Even the outside of my face isn't a true reflection of me since surgery altered its structure some years ago.

Reading too is an act of doubleness, once for the first time (and perhaps other readings) and thinking (in the act and again and again afterwards). Donald Hall's essay "Double Solitude," published recently in The New Yorker, is a reflection of another kind altogether. And it is beautiful.

At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975, Kate died at ninety-seven, and I took over. Forty-odd years later, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the horse. I look at a tulip; I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair, I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. I also watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the enormous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I refuse them, preserving my continuous silence. Linda comes two nights a week. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week, Carole does my laundry and counts my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves. Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

Born in 1928, I was an only child. During the Great Depression, there were many of us, and Spring Glen Elementary School was eight grades of children without siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later, I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade, there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety. Most of the time, I liked staying alone after school, sitting in the shadowy living room. My mother was shopping or playing bridge with friends; my father added figures in his office; I daydreamed.

In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather, on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holsteins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich—a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. I’ve told about this sandwich before.

At fifteen, I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I hated it—five hundred identical boys living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night, the rest of the school sat in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.

At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years, I lived in one bedroom crowded with everything I owned. During my senior year, I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At Oxford, I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife–people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three–I settled in Ann Arbor, teaching English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or reading aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room, working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room.We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.

After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.

For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t.

Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.

For almost twenty years,I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was the second floor in the rear, beside Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning. We had lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without speaking to each other. Afterward, we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.

For several hours afterward, I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon, I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors”twice, the Old Testament,William Faulkner, more Henry James, seventeenth-century poets. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a delicious dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom-and-garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from the bed across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we talked about our separate days.

Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond, on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun, tanning, while I read books in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then, we would dive into the pond. Sometimes, for an early supper, we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty years of our remarkable marriage, living and writing together in double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven, on April 22, 1995.

Now it is April 22, 2016, and Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year, at eighty-seven,I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. I was sick and thought I was dying. Every day of her dying, I stayed by her side—a year and a half. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last January I grieved again, this time that she would not sit beside me as I died. 

Sometimes the smallest object

says it all,
and that's enough.

Fall Color ABCedarian: Z

ZOMBIE GREEN

Fall Color ABCedarian: Y

YELLOW AND YELLOW-ORANGE

Fall Color ABCedarian: X

XANADU

Fall Color ABCedarian: W

WHITE
WINDSOR TAN
WOOD BROWN

Fall Color ABCedarian: V

VIVID BURGUNDY AND VIOLET BLUE

Fall Color ABCedarian: U

UMBER AND UNITED NATIONS BLUE

Fall Color ABCedarian: T

TURQUOISE AND TUSCAN BROWN

Fall Color ABCedarian: S

SUNRAY, SUNGLOW, STRAW, SPANISH BLUE

Fall Color ABCedarian: R

RED

Fall Color ABCedarian: Q

QUICKSILVER

Fall Color ABCedarian: P

PERSIMMON

Fall Color ABCedarian: O

OCHRE AND OLIVE

Fall Color ABCedarian: N

NICKEL

Fall Color ABCedarian: M

MILK AND MOCHA

Fall Color ABCedarian: L

LIME

Fall Color ABCedarian: K

KOMBU GREEN