Quiet House: Two Authors Record a Storm

Now we were creeping ahead, groping our way through a blinding blizzard. At times we could see no more than a few car lengths before us. All the highway signs were obliterated by snow. So we advanced for ten miles, twenty miles...

It took us nearly half an hour to creep those last six miles. All the time the blizzard closed tighter around us. Once, in the very heart of the gale, I glimpsed for an instant a crow hurtling on the wind across the highway and into the woods.

Edwin Way Teale, Wandering Through Winter (1966)


Some black ducks
were shrugged up
on the shore.
It was snowing

hard, from the east,
and the sea
was in disorder.
Then some sanderlings,

five inches long
with beaks like wire,
flew in,
snowflakes on their backs,

and settled
in a row
behind the ducks --
whose backs were also

covered with snow --
so close
they were all but touching,
they were all but under

the roof of the ducks' tails,
so the wind, pretty much,
blew over them.
They stayed that way, motionless,

for maybe an hour,
then the sanderlings,
each a handful of feathers,
shifted, and were blown away

out over the water
which was still raging...

Mary Oliver, "In the Storm" from Thirst (2006)

Our Revels Now Are Ended

Cobblestone Chimney

Your childhood home should have some magic about it.



In the best of all possible worlds, it looks like something out of a children's book in the library. The landscape sprouts boy-size and girl-size gates and walls and gables. Weather rolls over it and hovers beside it, presses on windows and makes you glad you're inside.

When your dad makes magical things happen in your life, the house itself can be more modest. When your mom weaves tales at bedtime and then clicks off the light, you are ready for dreams that are sure to come to you as you burrow under the covers.

Sometimes you get to grow up in a fun house. Sometimes you just get to imagine it for years and years to come.

January

Some photographs tumble through years and years and land at your steps.

Nameless, she can be a patron saint for this month of January.

Out of a silence too deep to fathom, she looks. The oval frame is lost, the glass broken. Flowers may once have stood in water in a vase beside this portrait.

Someone's daughter, she may have been her father's pride. Someone's mother, her younger face may have seemed a pattern for her daughter's.

Sometimes all that you need is a reminder of a time when there was no serious question of someone's not always being around.

1-1-11, 11:11 AM

Stand-in Father

Yesterday I visited a cemetery near the home I had sold two Christmases back. During my eight years as a resident in the neighborhood, I probably walked through that cemetery at least once a month. Even in winter months, sometimes under falling snow, I paced the pathways.

When my father died at age 90 in his New Orleans home, I returned from his burial to a New England fall and winter.

In my upbringing I had gotten to watch my mother grieve the death of her own mother. The drives to the New Orleans cemetery with my parents had been almost weekly at first. I received lessons in what people looked like when all they could do was place their hands on the mausoleum wall and whisper, "Mama..." I learned that rhythm and sound of grieving from the French Louisiana culture in which I grew up.

What would I do after the death of my New Orleans father if I was fifteen-hundred miles away from the cemetery where he was buried?

I found a grave to visit in that New England cemetery.


Yesterday I drove again to the grave where I had mourned my father in 2001 and 2002. I parked the car and rolled down the window as I had done that first winter. Fresh cold air on my face again, I recalled the determination with which I had focused on this man's gravestone back then. Deceased in 1964, he has no wife buried beside him. When Easter came in 2002, I put a pot of daffodils by his stone. I sometimes wonder if there was family that had come while the flowers were there, puzzled at this gesture by someone unknown.

What my sudden visit to this cemetery accomplished for me yesterday was a calming at the close of the year. It brought a reminder of the earnest pleading for guidance I had made on these walkways over the years. It was important to experience again within this landscape the affirmation I had found for the journeys I keep undertaking in my life.

And it is good to have a father nearby.

Two Mothers

Let me say it starkly – I had two mothers. None of my brothers would have a notion what I mean. The December sun had to remind me of the truth this morning.


When my twin brother and I were born, our mother had already been the owner for fifteen years of a mantle set of Roseville Pottery. The cornucopia vase on the left in the cabinet is an example of what antique dealers identify as the blue apple blossom pattern. No water or flower ever touched this or its companion vase. A wedding present, they were display pieces in my parents’ home, resting on a pair of gilded sconces flanking a framed sofa mirror.

House pride was a besetting sin of my mother. She purchased a mahogany dining room set and breakfront when I was in high school. No meal was ever eaten on that table until one of my nieces inherited the set five years ago. My eye, meanwhile, had been on the Roseville Pottery, nothing extravagantly valuable these days but evocative for me of an era of dark woodwork and sheer curtain panels pulled taut over glass-paned doors.

How we looked, how we sounded when my mother told stories of my brothers and me to relatives and visitors and hospital nurses and emergency room doctors mattered to her.

When my mother reached her late fifties, I entered seminary (a good story for her to tell to lots of people). What my mother did not realize was that a woman even older than she would begin to pay me a particular kind of attention.

Eighty years old, Katie had been a member of a religious congregation for fifty years when I met her. Meeting at Mass sometimes, we enjoyed the kind of conversations we kept having. It became a custom to arrange an occasional afternoon over convent china and to sit across from one another on cane-back furniture. She asked about my family and my training, about my experience with daily prayer and retreats. We would sometimes walk under the crepe-myrtle trees lining the walkways on the convent grounds. I heard about her family in Columbus, Ohio, and the discernment that had led her to convert and to embark upon her long, productive years in the convent.

When her sister died and her Ohio home was sold, Katie was sent some early photographs of herself. The pictures show a Katie before she entered religious life – earnest, soulful, intelligent. In a comment she had written to a family member on the back of one of the pictures, she poked fun at the seriousness of her expression.

One day Katie gave me two of those photographs. They would end up lost in the province archives if they were still in her room at her death, she confided in me. Katie seemed to want to acknowledge the kind of friendship we had enjoyed. They have gone with me wherever I have lived for the past thirty-five years.


The sun this morning hit the cabinet in my apartment as I sat reading the opening chapters of The Red and the Black. On this day off from work at the end of a momentous year, I was ready for the different world of bourgeois society in post-Napoleonic France.

Alert to the look of my home and alert to the transforming power of good questions, I was ready to nod in gratitude to my two mothers as well.

2010 Ornament: The Nest

When I decorated a tree on Christmas Eve, I had no hesitation about the first ornament. It needed to be something I had received from a friend a few hours earlier. That friend understood that "The Nest" would be the theme for Christmas in a new home.

City in Winter

Walking through the Old Port section of Portland this week, I recalled a photograph I had taken two summers back. It was an image I had been proud of capturing -- the balance, the morning light, the peaceful surface of the water. A picture like that explains why I used to sit there some mornings when I was visiting friends in the area. I would sip my coffee from nearby Standard Bakery and indulge in slow reverie, tasting a mood reminiscent of retreats I have made in years past.

Want to see a contrast?


Not a Chamber of Commerce shot, is it? Not an image around which to create a visitor campaign with an eye to local development and tourist dollars. But when does the way we spend our days in real life have to do that?

On the other hand, the picture actually fits the mood of some retreats. Some of us manage to take time out during the winter months and choose to stand under grey skies and feel cold winds off the water. With nothing merely picturesque to distract us, we get closer to feeling what our lives are like -- or what they could be. We yearn for lives that do not close down when the circumstances in which we lead them touch on grief and loss and economic uncertainty.


Briefly freed from the routines of holiday hospitality, I gave my eyes permission to see things that no tour guide would point out. I discovered myself across the street from a building that looks to have been at one time a confident addition to a busy portside neighborhood. The five windows on its second storey surprised me and encouraged me to keep my eyes open for architecture that may have had something to say in years past.




I kept my eyes open that day and I recorded what I saw. Time visiting with friends sometimes feels like it has to be filled up with outings and amusements. I ventured to presume on the better instincts of friendship and earlier today in a gesture of holiday sharing showed these pictures within an early draft of the post. I even asked to hear the first paragraph read aloud.

Gifts look so many different ways. I liked the way they looked this morning.

City Evening Snow