Writing Up A Storm

Let the Winter Storms Begin

There is an old quote I have often seen used to usher in the inclement season of the year:

"When all is safely gathered in, let the winter storms begin."

As soon as the cloudier, rainier, colder weather begins, I think of these old words. I even searched for the author. It might be Henry Alford, 1810-1871:

Come, ye thankful people, come;
Raise the song of harvest home.
All is safely gathered in 

Ere the winter storms begin.

On second thought, however, this is perhaps too universal an experience for anyone to lay claim to these words. Although I have never spent my summers "putting up" fruit and vegetables for the coming winter, I do gather my own harvest every autumn: leaves, leaves, and more leaves.

We no longer rake our own yard. We have opted to let our leaves stay where they fall, but we have neighbors who rake theirs, and, in particular, a very nice neighbor who lives across the alley from us.

He puts all of his leaves in large brown leaf sacks and sets them out in the alley beside his back gate. We drag his leaf sacks across the alley and through our back gate into our backyard and use them all year long in our compost bins.

This year, so far, we have acquired nearly a dozen sacks of leaves, and there is definitely the sense of a harvest that has been safely gathered in. I'm afraid I start coveting his leaves in September, hoping no one else will get them before we do.

Here is our largest compost pile at the back fence line. It is kept in place by a roll of chicken wire. I love coming here during the day or the early evening to bury vegetable and fruit scraps beneath these leaves, or just to stand in silence in this sacred place.

It lies between the alley and an old brick barbecue pit, just behind a little shed, with an ancient peach tree on one side and a stand of fig trees on the other. You get to it by way of a little path, and if you keep following the path, ducking under the fig trees, you come out into our side yard.

It is a very secret place. "The Secret Compost." Not quite as alluring as "The Secret Garden," but perhaps I should put it into a story anyway.

 

A Thanksgiving Painting

I've been saving this painting by Oleta for Thanksgiving, for it seems to speak all by itself for this time of year and this particular holiday. The old man feeding a chipmunk and the glowing golden color make such a lovely autumnal image, and, of course, it is the sharing of food that is at the heart of drawing everyone to the table on Thanksgiving Day to celebrate thankfulness.

The holidays are difficult times for many people, and not just those who are homeless or alone but also those with enormous Texas-size families that include grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. In the United States we have our two major holidays back to back, way too close together for comfort, and right smack in the middle of my favorite season of the year.

I really do like to turn away from the great hustle and bustle of the world into the quietness of this painting, for here Thanksgiving has been distilled into its essence, and, truly, I cannot think of one single word that I could add to this extraordinarily beautiful painting. It speaks so perfectly for itself.

 

My husband and his mother Oleta and myself will spend Thanksgiving together. We'll eat at a round wooden table in our kitchen by the window that looks into our backyard. And after we have eaten, we'll take a little tour of the backyard to view the progress of a brick path that is being laid down there, with old bricks slowly gathered from here and from there. The path is a winding path, and it is more than half-way now to one of its destinations: the back gate.

We'll look at the wild roses that grow on our back fence to see how they are doing. These roses all came from cuttings that Oleta gave us that she got from here and from there. Our little world is filling up with bits and pieces of the outside world. 

We'll look at our garden which is in a very sad state, but I have high hopes for it for next year, and we'll gather pecans, if we can. This is the year for pecans, for we have a crop every other year, but the summer was so dry for so long, we are not sure if there will be very many this year.

And we will be thankful for our own list of blessings. Amid all the great bounty of this world, it is sometimes the very tiniest of blessings that are the most precious, the most poignant.

Thank you, Oleta, for this wonderful painting which captures one of those most precious of blessings. Happy Thanksgiving to all! And I will be back again after the holidays.

(Courtesy of Phil Armitage, Glacier National Park, USA)

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The Backyard

 

Speaking of memories, as I have been doing of late, The Backyard is a very powerful children's picture book by John Collier that conjures up some very powerful memories. Alas, it is no longer in print, but the Austin Public Library has five copies which I think is a good sign that other libraries may have it, too, and there are used copies available online.

The paintings are stunningly beautiful.

The book itself is fiction about history, about the present, the near past, the distant past, and the creation of the world.

It starts with a boy playing ball in his backyard, and goes back, back, back in time, to when the boy's house was first being built, and then farther back. It takes the boy and the reader to long ago events that happened right there in the boy's backyard, to something as dark as a cowboy who died there, to Indian braves and maidens who loved there, and Indian chiefs who fought battles there, all the way to something as large as the dinosaurs who walked there.

And then it goes back farther still.

It takes the boy back to the time when "hydrogen and darkness and the hand of God moved"  in the boy's backyard. I love the last painting of a child's swing set with the swings flying in the tumult of a great wind. It gives the impression that all the fierce energy that started the universe is still right there at work in the boy's own backyard.

"All in my backyard" is the repeating phrase that holds all the events together, but the words are the author's, not the boy's.

The setting seems to be some wide-open prairie land. I can easily see this as a Texas setting, especially with the mention of the cowboys who "sang lonesome songs and died on cold plains."

This book is not for every family, but if you feel it is right for your child, it is a very powerful way in which to imagine one's own backyard.

I often think to myself that just one hundred years ago my little neighborhood was on the outskirts of Austin, and a very much wilder place back then, a land of mesquite trees and dirt roads and wild grasses. And once you start thinking about the early 1900s, you're just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the whole of history.

Is history still taking place all around us, I wonder sometimes. If so, I must be passing the little old lady who used to live in my house a hundred times a day as she and I hurry back and forth through these rooms.

But now I must go into the backyard and see what awaits me there. Have a wonderful weekend exploring your own backyard!

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A Kitchen Table & Sweet Potatoes

I really should tell you about the time I lived under the kitchen table, since it is an "autumn" memory. I don't remember if it took place in autumn, but it is part and parcel of sweet potatoes, and sweet potatoes are autumnal to me. Here is what happened.

I had just rented a garage apartment only three or four blocks west of The University of Texas. I was about 24 years old. The garage apartment would not be ready for another few days, but the girl who had rented the big house that went with the garage said I could stay there until I could move in. Ahhhh, well. It turned out that "staying there" meant sleeping under her kitchen table, for her house was over-crowded with young people who were already staying there. It was the heyday of the 60s, you see.

She had dragged a mattress or a pallet of some sort under her large old wood table, the kind of table I call a "farm table," although I'm not sure if that is a type of table. And, yes, it was in her kitchen. It came with a longish tablecloth, too, and was very much like sleeping in a canopied bed, come to think of it.

I must re-create the scene with fabric someday, but for now all I have are photos of sweet potatoes.

The sweet potatoes are here because the first morning that I woke up in my little hideaway under the kitchen table, I found myself surrounded by four bare feet and two voices whispering, whispering, and the oh-so-quiet muffled rattle of a wooden spoon here, a mixing bowl there, paper bags being opened, knives slicing through things, the refrigerator light flashing on and off.

Two people were cooking up a little storm in the kitchen.

Later I would find out that they were making a sweet potato pie. But I was not to know that for a couple of hours. Meanwhile, I could only get a glimpse here and there of one or the other from under my kitchen tablecloth canopy.

He was Jack Sprat, and she was Jack Sprat's wife. And I can't help but wonder if they have a memory of a very shy girl with long brown hair who must have eventually emerged from under the tablecloth and said hello.

All I was ever to know about them was that they had come from Appalachia and were on their way to California, a kind of 1960s "California or Bust" sort of story. They were the very jolliest couple, as down-home as you can get, and with a backwoods language that needed a translator to be understood.

At the time I thought they were older than the rest of us, but looking back, I think now that they were probably only in their twenties, too.

I have never made a sweet potato pie myself. I can tell you that theirs was delicious, and that it was not made from a recipe, but was thrown together from some ancestral memory that these two souls were invoking in this particular kitchen on this particular day, so long ago now.

My husband is the one who cooks these days, and really, neither one of us cooks very much, but on the weekends he likes to whip up a country breakfast, and sometimes this means he fries some sweet potato slices in an iron skillet. He dips the slices in milk, and then flour, and then fries them in a quarter-inch of canola oil. Salt and pepper to taste.

And they fill our kitchen like incense.

Sweet potatoes do have the loveliest aroma. They fill a house with memories of good old comfort food, of home, of the gatherings of people under one roof for shelter, nourishment, and companionship. I find that gingerbread will do the same thing.

 

As we approach Thanksgiving Day in the United States, I hope I can hold on to my memory of living under a kitchen table and eating sweet potato pie with the most amazing assortment of people. I will never be that footloose and fancy free again, but I wish might.

Cracked Sidewalk

Many of the sidewalks where I live are cracked like this one, which has the lovely crackle effect of an old painting. These sidewalks, some upheaved over the years by tree roots, others shattered by winter freezes and by the weight of passing feet, are the reason people tend to walk in the streets instead. I wonder if we skirt these delicate stretches of concrete because of a reverence for them? I myself find them to be worthy of hanging beside the most beautiful works of art. Even the Mona Lisa cannot boast of having had children's bare feet and their bicycles, too, running across her as these sidewalks can.

One summer a number of years ago I took a train from Austin to the little town in northern Illinois where I was born. While I was there, I made a pilgrimage to my grandmother's old house and paced up and down her sidewalk and even ventured down the old driveway, the very same driveway that I played upon as a child. It was as cracked into jigsaw puzzle pieces as the above photo.

So I knelt down and captured two small pieces and hid them in my pocket and brought them back to Texas with me. I can hold them in the cup of my hand like worry stones. Or more like memory stones.

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Roses Out of the Blue

A year ago when I was in the middle of being very ill, a thud came upon my porch. It was a long slender box, and inside were roses. Not a dozen roses, but two dozen roses, and not roses yet, but rosebuds. From the high mountains of Ecuador. They were in autumnal colors: russet, gold, copper, vermilion, coral, yellow. And they opened up in a day or two into full-blown petite roses.

They were a gift from a dear friend of mine, Siu-yung.

Roses from out of the blue. I had found myself in such a dark place, and here roses arrived like a flowering torch to light the darkness. This unexpected gift seemed to say that miracles lie in wait, everywhere.

I did not have my camera back then, but these roses above by Renoir come very close to the colors of my roses from Siu-yung. His painting even comes with a blue curtain to go with my "roses out of the blue."

This photo above shows what remains of the roses today, all the dried rosettes and petals, a few still rich enough in color to be jewel-like.

And I should tell you a little bit about how I know Siu-yung. She was one of a lovely group of women with whom I had the great good fortune to work when I was getting my footing in the world after ten years on the loose, when I was writing short stories and trying to learn how to be a graphic artist and studying to get my Master's in Education.

The stars had brought us all together in one of the many continuing education departments under the large umbrella of The University of Texas at Austin. We were an unexpected group of women, interested in astrology, literature, the arts, the theatre, the home, poetry, music, meditation, nutrition, everything from Shakespeare to Country Western to New Age.

Siu-yung was our Chinese poetess. And if I remember correctly, she came to our country by way of Hong Kong. And when she walked into our lives in that very star-charmed work place, she cast spells that made magic begin . . .

Here is a 19th century painting of "Roses Lying on Gold Velvet," an oil on canvas by Martin Johnson Heade.

This painting does not capture the autumnal colors of my surprise roses, but I love these red ones against a faded golden cloth, and the simplicity of this painting, the warm dark background, the folds in the velvet, the mixture of full-blown roses with rosebuds and leaves and stems.

It is a year later, and of course, I no longer have these roses in their bloom, but I have almost all of the dried rosettes, a few rosebuds, and all of the petals. I never let go of a rose. I always save the petals.

To try to mirror the Heade painting, I laid my dried roses on an old tapestry of my grandmother's in front of a black cardboard background.

Ahhhh, I thought it would be so easy to take photos of a still-life. I thought that photographing people is what would be hard. But I am finding out that there is a very high art to all those photographs in "house and garden" magazines that look so perfectly beautiful. An art that I have not yet mastered!

This is one little part of the tapestry. I don't remember where it hung in my grandmother's house. I have a feeling it draped either over the piano or over a library table in her lovely, long parlor. I keep it in a trunk, I'm afraid. I love its golden colors with touches of olive green and rusty red. It is very threadbare in places, and I love that, too.

If you look closely, you will see a figure, a woman holding a fan in her right hand, and pointing with her left hand. She is wearing an elaborate robe, and I love how the tapestry itself becomes her robe, so that she is wearing a little piece of the tapestry. Maybe that fan is the back of a mirror, for she does seem to be gazing into it as if she were looking at herself.

But that pointing finger ~ she seems to be trying to tell us something. I wonder what it is?

I am going to think to myself that the lady in the tapestry represents all of us who come together in some star-influenced time, looking into the universe, finding, sometimes not finding, but always searching for the answers to the mysteries of the world.

The rose petals live here now, in a glass vase in the jumble that is our kitchen, on a little island table in the middle of the kitchen, almost hidden amongst a caddy for mugs and two tomatoes and my little pumpkin, and dwarfed by yet another glass vase, an enormous one, which holds many very tall-stemmed silk sunflowers.

Every time I brush past this little island table, I brush past the memory of being surprised by a dear friend with roses out of the blue, and then I remember all of those lovely women from those years from the past, and all our long-ago conversations, which are still on-going . . .

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A Ruined House

I love this children's picture book, A Ruined House, by Mick Manning. On the first page the author writes: "This is my favorite house. I like it because it has gone to rack and ruin." For some reason, words like these capture me every time. I suppose I really should delve into why things that are falling apart at the seams enchant me so much.

Even the cover on this book is made to look like strips of torn paper. Or maybe it is torn paper!

I love the way in which this book tells exactly how an old house falls into rack and ruin, how the rain, the frost, the heavy snows slowly over the years trickled down, loosened the stones, collapsed the roof. I remember, when I first stepped into the condemned house that I talked about last week, how the whole house smelled so waterlogged, like a fishing pier, for the rain had dampened the insides. Here is the same thing from A Ruined House:

"First the rain dripped down the chimney. Everything turned damp. Fungus spread over the woodwork, and all the rooms began to smell of mold."

The house is a deserted farmhouse in a quiet valley in England. You have to cross "boggy fields" to get to it. You have to climb a fence. It's a stone house that dates back to the 16th century, and no one has lived in it now for a hundred years. 

As Mick Manning quietly takes you into what is left of this old house, you find out that someone does live here after all. Many someones!

There are creepy-crawlies everywhere, fungi, nettles, butterflies, barn owls, swallows, and bats. One page imagines the people who lived here once, telling stories around a fire, but instead of ghosts, there are owls in the old fireplace now.

I love the quietness of this book. And many of the pages are like pages out of a journal, with pencil drawings of little creatures and penciled notes curving around the drawings. The illustrations are watercolor and pencil, and they capture the ethereal quality of a house that is slowly disintegrating.

There is a lovely reverence in this book for things that are old and disappearing and how new life simply carries on inside all the cracks and crevices.

This book is out of print, but there are four copies available in the Austin Public Library, so I am hoping you might be able to find it in your own library or find second-hand copies online.

It is published by Candlewick Press, and I am noticing that I love a lot of their children's picture books: The Last Train and The Big Big Sea, among others.

I seem to fall in love with books that are out of print ~ what is that all about?

I must get myself to the library to find brand-new children's books to tell you about before they are out of print, for if I happen to love them, I fear for their shelf-life. I always seem to reach for something that lies outside looking in, for the child who hangs back all alone on the playground, or the child who pulls his T-shirt over his head in class and sits there all hidden from view like a little ghost, or the house that has gone to rack and ruin.

To the library, then! And may you have a wonderful weekend finding whatever it is that you love the most!

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Stars and Clouds

I drew "Stars and Clouds" during this same period, about 1979, when I was very much interested in M.C. Escher and also anything in a black silhouette. This was originally drawn in black ink and later printed as a card in brown ink.

I loved trying to trick the eye with this sleight of hand, an enormous billowing world of both stars and clouds above this tiny little house, with its two tall cemetery pine trees and its swirls of art nouveau smoke, its little fence and mailbox on some lonesome landscape, where a falling star has landed like a space ship.

A friend of mine used this image for her wedding card (in blue ink) and I was so touched and so surprised, too, for I had not once thought of this as a wedding, but she made me look at those stars and clouds and that little house in a different way.

Here is one image that I was studying so intently in 1979: "Sky and Water" by Escher. Oh, how I loved how the silhouettes of the geese become more and more defined as they rise up to the sky above the fish in the water, the whole of evolution, our lifting off into flight, and the interlocking, inter-dependence of our world, the oneness of it all, and more, all captured in this one woodcut.

As the white fish ascend, they become the white sky, and as the black geese descend, they become the black water. This one incredible drawing made my mind go round and round, for it seemed to me to be a visual poem without end, one thing becoming the element in which the other lived, and vice versa.

And again it had that jigsaw puzzle element that was beginning to take hold in my mind: my growing desire to lift the pieces of a drawing off the page with my fingertips and move the pieces around at will. This was when I first began to cut things out of Canson black art paper.

The black paper led me to all the colored art papers, some with textures. Soon, I began cutting into gift-wrapping paper, but it would be about 15 more years before I would suddenly reach for a piece of fabric and think to myself, "Wait! I could cut a miniature dress out of fabric and hang it on a clothesline ~ like this!" 

In writing this post, I went looking through WikiCommons, searching for a painting of a lone house sitting beneath a big sky. And I found this painting and got stopped in my tracks. It was painted before 1917 by Serhiy Vasylkivskiy, a Ukrainian artist. I haven't been able to find out anything more about the painter or the painting, so I'm not quite sure what it is.

I see a windmill in some vast hinterland, with the hint of other windmills far away, disappearing at the horizon line the way ships disappear as they float over the curve of the earth, passing out of our sight. I think I like my oceanic interpretation of this painting and how these windmill ships remind me of the ships that dared to cross the ocean in search of the East but finding the Americas instead. How brave those men were!

How brave are those who go to war in search of peace and those who don't go to war in search of peace. And so, from stars and clouds, to sky and water, to windmills and ships, I find myself brought round and round and round from a greeting card I made in 1979 to Veteran's Day in 2009.

All of a sudden, I am sitting here with bowed head before all the men and women who have given up their lives to make the world safe, and I hope for the day when such sacrifices will never be asked of anyone again, when humankind will have found a peaceful way to solves all its differences, for we are as interlocked inside this universe as an Escher drawing, and surely, surely, we can find a way to see inside each other's hearts, being so entwined as we are.

I might rename my old drawing: "the falling of the stars in the clouds of war and peace."

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The Musicians

Curiously, because I am wanting to delve into frayed edges and torn paper and loose threads and all things raggedy and tattered, I find myself looking at my old pen and ink drawings instead, to see where I was thirty years ago in order to understand where I am going next, perhaps.

I loved omitting the instruments here, and the shoes, too. Trying to let the barefooted essence of something have its place, I suppose. I copied these horizontal lines from a piece of blank sheet music, using my makeshift light table, and somehow the lines became the stringed instruments themselves. Honestly, I don't really understand my drawing, except in feeling that I have "deepened the mystery," as Francis Bacon says it is the job of the artist to do. Maybe it's a visual haiku:

Two musicians
making the sounds of music
without a sound.

When I was looking up everything gypsy for my guardian gypsy post, I came across a piece of music called "Wraggle, Taggle Gypsies, O!" You should be able to hear it if you click on the title (above). I very much love this little piece of music. It seems to link my barefooted and yet so stylized and spellbound musicians of 1979 with my lifelong longings for tattered and torn rags blowing in the wind.

I wonder if the almost mathematical precision that I tried to apply to these pen and ink drawings came about because I was trying so hard to set my feet upon steadfast ground after my ten years of wandering hither and yon and back again.

Wait. I do remember now that I sometimes saw my two musicians as a couple making their own private music together without the need of instruments or notes or sound . . .

Two people
making the sounds of harmony
soundlessly.

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Rabbit

My first forays into art were with pen and ink. "Rabbit" was among my first creations, and I did love drawing this rabbit in an impossible position among my books, candle, salt-and-pepper shakers, cup, and bottle of flowers. The original is in black and white, but this is a little card I had printed in brown ink. The white of these old cards has faded after some 30 years have passed, and the edges look singed with fire.

I have set this old card against a piece of fabric with an autumnal print. Those falling leaves and the apparition of a rabbit seem to go together. I find this time of year mystical beyond words, full of hauntings and ghosts. I love to walk in these cloudier, rainier, colder days we are having. This weekend there was an early morning fog ~ lovely, lovely!

My first pen-and-ink drawings were all extremely stylized, very prim and proper. I drew them all in pencil and then copied them in ink with a light-table that I had made by using an old dish drainer filled with nightlight bulbs and covered with a clear plastic cutting board ~ very makeshift, but it works and I still use it sometimes.

It was from my desire to manipulate the pieces of my drawings with my fingers, to lift the candle on this shelf and put it at the other end, rearrange the salt-and-pepper shakers, move things around like pieces of a puzzle, that I first began to think about cutting everything out of paper instead of using ink.

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Home Place, Crescent Dragonwagon

Home Place by Crescent Dragonwagon and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney is a lovely mystery about a home that isn't there anymore. A girl and her parents go hiking into a woods where they find the remnants of a house and of the life that was once lived in that house. A half-standing chimney, a stone foundation, a blue glass marble, nail, horseshoe, piece of a plate, small yellow bottle, and a china doll's arm. All artifacts of another family from long ago.

The girl begins to imagine that family.

The text is prose-poetry, with the lines on each page written in poem form rather than in paragraphs. This way of writing out the text makes the reader slow down to savor each phrase of each sentence. And the watercolor illustrations capture completely the poetry of the text.

I noticed, also, that when the text refers to the present-day girl in the woods, the illustrations go all the way to the edge of the paper, but when the text is about the family from long ago, the illustrations are set in frames as if we are looking through a window into the past.

Here (below) is a part that I particularly love, just to give you an idea of the poetry in this children's picture book and of how the text is placed upon each page. In imagining the people who lived in this house long ago, the girl sees the mother and father watching a rainstorm in the middle of the night. In a flash of lightning, the mother in a white nightgown almost looks like a ghost.

"And now she is a ghost, and we
can only see her
if we try. We're not sure
if we're making her up, or if
we really can see her, imagining
the home place as it might have been, or was, before
the house burned down, or everyone moved away
and the woods moved in."

I love the quiet mystery of this book, a little girl in the present day in a woods with her own mother and father, conjuring up the past.

This is the back cover. Throughout the book, these greens and browns and yellows and sparks of red capture both the woods that have grown up where the house used to be and dreamy past that was once lived there.

I did notice that one of the reviewers caught an error which I did not see at all, I am so clueless about my flora and fauna. But there is a page in which the text is about "a honeysuckled-vined chimney" and the illustration shows a chimney entwined with morning glories. Ahhhhhh. We have honeysuckles on our back fence and morning glories in our garden, and I should know the difference . . .  

I seem to be drawn to children's picture books that are no longer available, but I checked on this one and I am quite sure that it is still in print. I do hope so, it is such a beautiful story. And I love it that the little girl is white and that she imagines a black family in the house. It gives such a wonderful extra dimension to this book, showing with what tenderness people really do reach out to try to understand one another.

And so, I, too, reach out to you, and wish you a lovely, and perhaps mysterious, autumn weekend!

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Condemned House: Fire

Continuing from Monday and Tuesday: As November grew colder, and since our main source of warmth was fire, we began to forage in the wild yard behind the condemned house for firewood, of which there seemed to be plenty at first, with so many fallen branches lying about.

There was a wonderful fireplace in the living room of this old condemned house that we were living in, with two built-in benches on either side. These benches had seats that lifted for the storage of firewood, and they had wooden backs, too, so tall and straight against the wall they seemed like pews in a church.

I loved going out to the backyard to gather firewood. There was great peace to be found beneath that roof of treetops, wading through those piles of leaves, and standing in the silence that such a place seems to find a way to sustain, no matter how loud the rush of traffic passing by. 

There was a garage that stood at the far edge of the backyard along the alley which was to be torn down at some future date. It listed to one side, and had that plaited-look of old houses that you see in the countryside whose roofs are so porous they look like loosely-woven basketry.

Here is a Carl Larsson painting, "The Last Sun Rays," of an old country place that does not quite yet match the ruins of our old garage. I love the old woman here, sitting in the last of the sun, peeling potatoes, perhaps. It reminds me of all the times when I went out the back door at sundown to gather branches to make a fire inside our very cold old house.

The alley side of the garage had a host of fallen and loose boards and a broken door that had long ago fallen off its hinges, and so we began to burn these, too.

We started our fires with wads of wallpaper. The walls of the old house had all been wallpapered with an old-fashioned brown-rose flowered and striped paper. It was so old now that it shattered at the touch and drifted everywhere on the floor like windfall leaves. We tore it off the walls, and first we dragged it all out to the garage, and then we brought it all back in again, to burn as a kind of kindling.

The paper above is a piece of gift-wrapping paper that I salvaged from twenty years ago. It is a little similar to the wallpaper, but way too bright.

Here is another piece of gift-wrapping paper, without the stripes but a little closer to the faded look of the wallpaper whose pattern I remember and yet don't quite remember.  Still, it stays so much on my mind, I think, because of my memory of burning it in the fireplace.

I tried to recreate the way it must have looked back then.

But I found I could not put the shreds of paper in the hot coals with one hand and snap the photo with the other hand quickly enough ~ the flames rose up and consumed the paper in a flash.

If you look very closely, though, you will see two tiny little fragments of the gift-wrapping paper here, at the forefront, just a split second before the flames devoured them.

Here is "Dame Wiggins of Lee," a poem by Mary E. Sharpe and John Ruskin, from My Book House, with all her cats before her cheerful fire. Show me a fire in a fireplace, and I will start remembering a multitude of fireplaces in my life, but none is more special to me than the fireplace in the condemned house.

Just before winter set in, we managed to procure the last of the documents needed to have this house released from its condemned status and restored to city code again. And, yes, it was wonderful to have gas heaters in every room, a gas stove and refrigerator fully functioning in the kitchen, running water from every tap, electric lights everywhere.

But my memory of all of us gathered around our fireplace in the dark, burning wallpaper and branches, looms much larger in my mind. We were all in our twenties back then, but not everyone who lived in that old house with us lived to be thirty-years-old, and so the future casts a shadow back over those light-hearted times.

The house is no longer there, but it was not torn down. Not too long after we lived there, it was carted away in the middle of the night to start a new life in a little town not far from Austin. All of the little houses on its block are gone, and towering condos stand where all those trees once towered.

Oh, I would love to find that old house again some day and put my hand upon its heart, in remembrance.

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Condemned House: Electricity

Continuing from yesterday's post: Just as autumn takes me back, back, back to the condemned house I lived in long ago, the image of someone reading or writing or working by lamplight and surrounded by darkness always takes me right back there, too. This 19th century painting by Karl Müller is titled in German: Lesende junge Frau an einem Tisch beim Licht der Petroleumlampe. I think it means "young woman reading at a table by the light of an oil lamp." Or something very close to that.

We did not have any oil lamps inside our house, but we had a couple of electric lamps, flashlights, candles, and the tiny light bulb on a sewing machine. Just as we ran a garden hose from the house next door, we also ran an endlessly-long, heavy-duty extension cord, from which other extension cords were attached. The heavy duty cord came in through the dining room window, and we covered it in leaves, too, to hide its pathway between the two houses.

We were not sure, you see, if siphoning off utilities from one house to another was legal, however much in agreement both parties were to the arrangement. We were all in our twenties, and this was a very high adventure in living on a shoestring . . .

Here is a recreation of living by lamplight in the condemned house. That rug would have been there, for it is one of several that came to me from my grandmother. And those two books would certainly have been there: The black one on the bottom is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee, and the yellow book on top is The I Ching. I have spent a lifetime delving into Agee's book just to savour the pure poetry of his writing, and there was a time when I use to "throw the I Ching," the phrase I had heard being used back then.

For the whole year of living in this house, in fact, the toss of the coins to see which reading I would get in The I Ching invariably took me to "Ku/Work on What Has Been Spoiled."  It did seem a most appropriate reading as we worked to bring this old house back up to city code again. At the back of my mind, however, I always felt this reading was much more personal, and had to do with choices I was making that were taking me farther and farther off the beaten path.

The electrical cord had its own built-in ramifications. With three or four people in our house, and four or five people in the house next door, between us we managed to blow the fuses every few days, it seemed. Then someone (not me) would trudge out to the fuse box to set things right again.

And here is how it would have looked mending an apron on my sewing machine by the light of my sewing machine on top of a suitcase for a table. The sewing machine was my grandmother's, as was the old blue pitcher from yesterday's post, and all the furniture and lamps and cookware that eventually ended up inside this wonderful old house.

There was many a night when I read or wrote in my writing books by the light of my sewing machine. The front of this house faced a busy street, with a little postcard of a yard, but the sides and all of the back were nothing but trees and vines, so it was always dark inside, even during daytime. I remember its insides as a deep attic darkness lit by little pools of warm yellow light, and flooded with music, for one of the extension cords led to a record player which was housed in an old victrola cabinet.

 

I found this painting by Carl Larsson, "Light Interior at Mora," which is very different from other Larsson paintings. This one is more impressionistic, its soft colors flowing into one another, a figure in dark bent over the pool of light on a table. This is how I remember that year in the condemned house, with all the edges of my memories blurred like watercolors awash upon a page.

As September turned into October, and October turned into November, we began to blow the fuses much more frequently, what with electric heaters being turned on both inside our house and inside the house next door in the early morning cold.

And suddenly keeping warm became an ongoing dilemma. Tomorrow I will tell you about the misadventures of keeping warm by fire.

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Condemned House: Water

This painting of "Autumn Morning" by Grigorij Grigorjewitsch Mjassojedow, who lived from 1834–1911, according to Wikipedia, makes me think of the time when I lived in a condemned house during one autumn long ago. Autumn itself reminds me of this time in my life.

The house sat on a busy street near The University of Texas, but because it had been abandoned and had been officially "condemned" by the city, it also sat in its own little woods of trees and fallen limbs and brambles and leaves piled up every which way, droves of leaves, some of them wind-driven onto the porch and barricading the front door.

Three or four of us found the house, all empty and echoing, and then we found the landlord and struck a bargain with him: he would let us live in the house for free for a year, if, with our own resources, we brought the house back up to code again.

We did bring it back up to code and we did live in it for a year, but the landlord did not know that during those two or three months when we were working on the house, we were all living inside it. A little band of twenty-year-olds living in a house without running water and without electricity, for the city would not turn these utilities on until the house had passed inspection.

This is how we did it.

The old-fashioned watering can played a part in making this possible, or, in our case, my grandmother's old metal pitcher, which had a spout rather than a spray nozzle. I love this 1912 painting by Daniel Ridgway Knight, "Watering the Garden," because it captures the reverie that I feel when I remember bits and pieces of this particular time ~ I like how sometimes we can find a way to remember only the brightest moments of an experience and put the darker ones aside.

The main reason we were able to live in the condemned house without utilities is that we didn't live there without utilities. It turned out that we had the great good fortune to find ourselves next door to another rental house which housed a group of university students who needed help paying all the bills. So we offered to pay their water and electricity bills if they would let us run one hose and one extension cord from their house to our house.

Instant water and electricity! Hose water, of course, but still drinkable.

We ran a very long garden hose across the backyard, covering it with leaves all the way, to a spot just outside our one bathroom, up the wall, in through the window, and down into the tub.

We filled the tub with hose water. It was an old-fashioned four-footed tub, very similar to the one in this Carl Larsson painting, "Lisbeth Prepares a Bath," and equally as full of water. By dipping into the tub of water with my grandmother's old metal pitcher, we could fill the back of the toilet and flush the toilet, fill the sink and wash our faces, pour water over our heads at the sink and wash our hair, wash dishes in the sink, brush our teeth. We could take very cold baths or run next door for showers.

I wonder about those days now in a kind of amazement.

Sometimes I shake my head and think that I should have lived my life very differently. But a woman I know asked me once: if I could, would I really choose to not have those years? And when I think about having just this one year in this one house ever taken away from me, I have to accept that, no, I would not want to give up this otherworldly stretch of time in my life.

Here is the very pitcher itself. It is what I think is called vintage blue-speckled enameled metalware. I see it often in pioneer cookware and utensils. Mine is a battered old thing, about 12 inches high. It holds more water than I can carry nowadays, but I was stronger back then.

This old blue pitcher has moved with me all over the country. I don't know what my grandmother used it for. She was a tiny little person, and I can't see her carrying it full of water. I keep blue silk hydrangeas in it or sunflowers or dried autumnal grasses. Once it was full to the top with eucalyptus nuts. Sometimes I gather kindling in it for our chimenea and then I feel like a real pioneer lady myself.

The little matter of electricity in the condemned house proved to be more problematic. I will tell you about that tomorrow.

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