Technical Writer

Saturday Flowers, July 11

These are the flowers that will refresh my sight whenever I look upon them on the kitchen table this week.  As the week progresses, I will change the water and trim the stems, and the flowers will remain beautiful. 

I took a morning walk a little later than usual today, and did not encounter the great blue heron.  I came upon smaller water fowl, such as this fine duck in Carroll Creek.  If I were a duck, I would pay careful attention to the inevitability of a meal swimming by, too.

I came upon other birds, too, out in a flock, running through Baker Park.  Scroll down to the earlier post to see.

Saturday Flowers, July 4; Great Uncle Frank

The flower shop owner decided to take a holiday on July 4, so I found some bonnie sunflowers at the farmers' market on Saturday to bring home with the produce.  Here they are upon the kitchen table, where they will preside over breakfast and supper, and the morning crossword puzzles all week long.  The sunflowers have independent ways.

I arranged them when I returned home from my new walking route through the cemetery at the south end of Frederick.  Mt. Olivet cemetery has a two mile loop around its perimeter, and it is one mile from my house.  I make the 4-mile round trip in just under an hour now. 

Dwelling on thoughts of flowers, and admiring the flowers on the graves of this very old cemetery, I thought about my great uncle Frank, whose memory is alive in my family.  Cpl. David Franklin Koogle died on October 2, 1918, of influenza at Camp Meade in Maryland. He was 21.

My mother was born a couple of years after her uncle's death, but in my family we do not forget our people.  My mother says that her mother, Hazel Rebecca Zimmerman, and her grandmother, Susan Charlotte Koogle, for whom she is named, hired a taxi to go see Frank, all the way from Middletown to Camp Meade about 60 miles away.  They were not allowed to bring him home with them, and my great grandmother believed all her life that if she could have cared for her boy at home, he would have lived.

The camp is where the first deaths occurred in this state, and it was the hardest hit place in the state.  According to the site http://1918.pandemicflu.gov/your_state/maryland.htm'

"As the death rate from influenza rose, military officials began equating influenza deaths with those on the battlefield. A memorial service for those who died during the pandemic at Camp Meade was held and the presiding officer read the names of each dead soldier. As each name was read, the Sergeant saluted and said "Died on the field of honor, sir."

The loop road around Mt. Olivet is quiet early in the morning.  The cemetery is peaceful, except for the bob-white who rushes me, tail feathers broadly displayed, and then disappears into the grass by the edge of the cemetery.  Frank is buried in the family plot in a graveyard closer to his family home, but I think all graveyards are the same country, for those interred.

Saturday Flowers June 27; Birds of Culler Lake

This immature night heron was fishing this morning by the edge of Culler Lake, about 20 feet from the security of his roost in the tall trees.  His siblings were spaced along the edge of the lake, those who weren't strolling nearby under their heronry.  They are wary city dwellers, but as long as I stay on the path and do not venture onto their territory, they seem content to fish and stroll, not too bothered by me.

Here is the great blue heron, which stabbed a small something a moment after I took this photo this morning.  He is fishing well downstream from Culler Lake, in Baker Park.  This must be a very good place for fishing, and I have shown photos of this handsome bird as well as an adult night heron fishing from this very spot.

Off the subject of birds, here is the bouquet of flowers I arranged yesterday on the kitchen table.  They will brighten the kitchen all week.

Saturday Flowers

I will change the water and trim the stems and these flowers will last the entire week on the kitchen table.  The roses will be gone in a few days, but by then the tight lily buds will open, and they will remain throughout the week. 

Here are the flowers from last week, and I have moved them, much reduced, to the dining room on the sideboard Franklin Rappold copied from a Hepplewhite piece.  The painting is by Paul Wilson and it reminds me of the wilds of New England, at dusk.

Saturday Flowers May 31; a Walk in the Park

Here is a picture of the flowers I arranged early Saturday morning for the kitchen table. The tablecloth is from a small village in Alsace where cloth has been made and printed since 1837 (with a cessation during World War I).  The manufacturer is Beauville, and the village is Ribeauville, of approximately 5,000 people.  The cloth manufacturer is on the outskirts of this compact village, at 21 Route de Ste Marie-aux-Mines, a quick walk from the village center.  http://www.beauville.com The village is one of the most beautiful in France, and I have been there many times.

_____

My morning walk today was most welcome because yesterday hard rain was falling and I did not go out in the wet. 

Here is Baker Park, one small view of it, at about 5:30 a.m. 

I came upon a family out for a stroll to Carroll Creek.  Madame still has all ten ducklings that I counted a few days ago.  She is doing rather well, because Baker Park is not without its perils.

Saturday Flowers May 23; no essay, just photo

Here are the flowers that will grace the kitchen table all week.   

The second photo is of the few remaining flowers this morning from the preceding week, actually 10 days ago.

Saturday Flowers May 16; Early Morning Walk

I am waiting for a little more light outside before I set off on the brisk morning walk that lately I have taken up.  I used to hike over hill and dale, but that was when I was living in rural isolation and my friends were whatever wildlife I could scare up in the woods or by the big pond on the other side of Stone mountain.  In those walks I have come upon deer, foxes, bear, moose, an otter or two, birds in size from the wren--little Druid bird, to the massive golden eagle, and once, a silent, Eastern coyote passed like a drift of smoke across the road just a few feet in front of me. I treasured every animal encounter on the mountain and felt particularly honored when its creatures allowed me to see their passage.

It is 37 degrees Fahrenheit outside, but I have the kitchen door open to the garden so I can hear the early morning birds in their second chorus.  The first occurs a good hour before dawn, and I missed it.  I have turned off the heat so the furnace doesn't clank to life on this May morning.  My husband is peacefully snoozing still, and I believe that he sleeps more soundly knowing that I am up and taking care of all matters.

I have written in months past about my life on Stone Mountain in the backwoods of New Hampshire, but I never discussed the kinship I experienced with the life of the mountain and the mountain itself.  It was on Stone Mountain that I learned to be in the woods in a non-disruptive way so that critters would not be too fearful of me upon encountering a human.

Another thing I learned while living alone for so long was how to project myself outside my body.  Let me tell you how its done.

After a period of silent meditation during which I called to myself the protection of all I honored--my fellow critters on Stone Mountain and the mountain itself, as well as the central figure of my faith, I would lie down on the floor with my arms and feet stretched out, and close my eyes. I would tell myself to feel my extremities, and then feel beyond them a few inches, then a few feet. Then I would tell myself to experience being outside the house, perhaps on the roof, or on the stone ridge near where the foxes lived, and see what I could see.  Mind you, I did this in incremental steps, over weeks, before I grew adventuresome in my travels.  The travels themselves will await another time to tell, but you can know that upon returning to my home, being my body on the floor, I always experienced a sideways jolt as if I were falling back inside myself, at an angle. It felt as if I had been upright before and suddenly found myself for that instant of reconnection inside a body that was lying on a different plane.  I got used to it.

It's time to go outside and take a walk through Frederick now.  The people I meet will be walking their dogs or running.  There is a nice camaraderie with these folks because we share the enjoyment of the fresh air and the quiet morning.

The flowers in the photo are Saturday's, and my walk is now.

Saturday Flowers, May 9

Refreshing, isn't this?  I get to look at this crock of flowers when I am in the kitchen, and I can see it now if I bend away from my grandfather's desk where I am writing, and look through the dining room into the sunny and bright kitchen.

My house was built in 1885 by a man who took a big risk in the housing market and built four row houses on East 4th St. that mirror each other inside and out. Totaling just under 1,000 square feet on two floors plus a basement, this is a tiny house by most standards of new construction, but I believe the popular aesthetic is moving away from large to small, and that many people would find this size house as perfect as do I.

What's not to like?  There is a library upstairs with a large drum table next to my husband's comfy leather reading chair.  The only one who can sit in this chair with impunity when the good professor is home is his little cat Tammietta.

There is a city garden, long and narrow, that is sun-dappled in the afternoon, and is planted in shade-loving perennials. There is a table and bench chairs by the house, and Adirondack chairs on a brick patio in the back of the garden. There are a few trees here and there in the adjoining gardens, and we have a silver maple, about 30 years old, that someday will tower over all, long after we are gone.

There is even a significant mystery beneath the garden's surface, a mystery shared by the neighboring house, and which we do not advertise.  Once upon a time, a neighbor was tilling a patch of ground to plant flowers and his hoe struck a rock beneath the soil surface. He scraped away the soil and found a small mound of stones, and pulling them away, he discovered larger pieces of slate and beneath that, a cross-hatch of railroad ties.  He did not uncover it all, just a few square feet, and a small aperture large enough that he could stick down the pole of the hoe, which swung free in the darkness. 

The neighbor called my husband to see what he had discovered, and between the two of them, they rustled up a 45-foot extension cord with a trouble light and poked it down the hole. The light was quickly overcome as they lowered it slowly down.  Lower and lower they dropped the extension cord, and they reached the end of the cord before they hit bottom.

The neighbor rigged up a camera on a board and lowered it down.  What we discovered was an old cistern built to take advantage of a natural cleft in the rock that formed one side of a 12-foot-in-diameter well, and at the bottom there is a tunnel, and in the mouth of that shaft, which leads east, there is a large, rusted piece of equipment.  We decided that there were too many neighbor children who would want to explore this discovery, which would be thrilling for 12-year old boys, and deadly.  The cistern probably has little oxygen at the bottom, and we do not know the condition of the walls, although they are dry. We replaced everything as we found it, and put a large stone on top of all, with pots of flowers to mark the spot. We sit out in the evenings, my husband with a cigar, the cat watching the squirrels, and I, pulling a few weeds and considering whether to transplant the hosta to a new location, and we think of the hole and its construction in the days when this end of East 4th St. had a livery stable and a blacksmith's shop where the houses now stand.

It is difficult to picture a world without me, but while I am not filled with Cleopatra's "immortal longings," I realize that someday in the distant future, my particular perspective will have given way to the sight and perception of others who will walk down my street and wander through my town, and I wonder what they will experience.  It is possible that two hundred years ago, others thought the same.

Saturday Flowers May 2 and Avon Breast Cancer Awareness in DC

Driving into Washington DC Saturday morning with Joe for his German class at the Goethe Institute,   I saw that today was the Avon Breast Cancer Awareness walk in the city, and snapped this picture on the way out of town. I saw hundreds of women (and a few men) walkers, a sea of pink T-shirts on a gray and drizzely day. Their men were route marshals, standing at street intersections in bright vests, and everywhere at the ready with first-aid supplies and water and a handy cell phone for emergencies.  It was rather touching to see brothers, husbands, fathers and sons participating in this way to support their loved ones.  Each woman raised at least $1,800 to walk.

  I came home and arranged the morning flowers for the kitchen table.  Here they are, a bright antidote to the rainy weather. As were the walkers.

What Will Susan Sing Next? & Saturday Flowers April 25

I read in the morning paper a piece about Susan Boyle, and the news is about hair and brows, and the meaning of putting on one's best, natural face.  I find no popular speculation, however, on what Susan might sing as she makes her way to the next stage of "Britain's Got Talent," in May.

It is important to take the long view of things.  The flowers I arrange on Saturday mornings for the kitchen table remind me that everywhere there are people composing their lives and steadying themselves for their rigors ahead.  Preparation may be a simple contemplative task or a patient examination of each step yet to unfold in a big work, so as to guide the unfolding progress to completion.  The smallest steps taken today on behalf of tomorrow put one living forward.

May I offer you a suggestion, Susan?  I believe that England, and all Britain would love to hear the hymn Jerusalem. The song captures love and ineffable longing for transformation, and it has become a patriotic anthem. I see no argument against singing a beloved song everyone in the live audience will know. The piece is a William Blake poem set to majestic music in 1916. The song is so popular that it has been adopted as the anthem of the rugby union. Here is one version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJRojmvlE6U

The William Blake who could explicate with a few words reality and transformation is a friend of mine.  Blake was a mystic, and I know that he believed in the potential present in every moment for sinlessness, but he also saw clearly present suffering.

Blake died in 1827, a few years before the Sadler Commission Hearings on child labor would in 1832  reveal to the larger world what he had understood with a poet's grace: the newly industrialized regions of England had been transformed by the time the poem was written in 1804 into dark Satanic mills of smokestacks and factories, and countryside where little children pushed coal carts through narrow, stifling tunnels deep in the mines. Susan will not sing about that. 

The world is awash in songs of suffering workers, and of people and lands despoiled by industrialization.  When the people of the British Isles migrated to the United States and found work in the coal mines of Appalachia, there arose amazing songs that chronicled their travails. I urge you to listen to this Web site: http://www.musicofcoal.com/music.htm  (Please see my note at the very bottom of this piece.)

Susan will sing a song, instead, which will unite the British in their longing for something better, and it will be a song that arises from their respect for poetry and the past and their identification with the opportunity of transformation inherent in music.

Here are the words of Jerusalem, a whale of a patriotic song.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire.

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

 

The ruggers would vote for Susan.

_______

It would be fitting, providing you as I am with a link to music of coal mining in the United States, to tell you that the link comes from an organization in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, the Lonesome Pine Office on Youth.  It is a public, non-profit agency to help kids.  www.lpoy.org

The music in the coal mining country of early industrial England and that of the Appalachia has striking differences that speaks to the strength of the people, but a book could be written about it, not a blog on Susan Boyle.

Saturday Flowers April 18

Until this morning, ivy had taken over a patch of the garden that belongs now to astilbe and columbine, and a silver leaf ground cover that I just planted by the stone path.  A few square feet of earth matter in my small city garden, and while I can't abide a stiff garden with plants and colors in marshal array, a more relaxed order that invites the eye to wander from one area to another is what I aim in the small space out back.

From where I am sitting to write where I can see both the rear of the garden through the french doors leading to it from the kitchen, and this morning's new bouquet of kitchen table flowers. There are fresh lily buds behind the roses, as there were in last Saturday's bouquet.  I trim the flowers during the week and change the water, and the flowers from last Saturday are these, in the dining room.

I have read that the late Duchess of Windsor used to have an enormous vase of fresh yellow roses replaced daily in her London apartment, and I always thought, what a shame.  Surely part of the pleasure of fresh flowers is watching them develop and mature over the space of days, and to work amid the stems to assure that what remains is always looking its best. With flowers, as with gardens, nothing is ever finished.

Saturday Flowers, April 11

Here is an arrangement that will be beautiful all week, and into the next.  

The tight green lily buds will open slowly and replace some of the other blossoms as they fade and are removed from the bouquet during the week.  By next Saturday, I'll move the lilies to another room, where in fact the lilies of eight days ago are still in full bloom in another vase.

A squirrel just landed on the outside table to nibble a few nuts I put out earlier this morning.  This year's squirrels are quite young, and Perry has not returned.  He is a bold fellow who last year would play games with Tammietta as she dozed in the sun on the porch.  He would dash right past her for a drink from the neighborhood water bowl by the back door, before returning the the fence post to discourse on the laziness of cats. I hope I see him this spring.

Here is a photo of a beautiful Easter egg made of chocolate, and hand carried to us from Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate.  I have kept it untouched for weeks until after Easter dinner, when we all broke it apart and ate it all up in one sitting. Out of respect.

I planted a few columbine and astilbe over the weekend, and some herbs in pots on the porch. With a few leaves of mint and basil, and some bergamont leaves that I pinched from plants growing elsewhere in the garden, I alternately inhaled their separate scents, and felt gratitude for spring.

Flowers April 4, Beating a Door to His Path

I had a swell martini at the art gallery last night, the classic kind from the 1930s, gin with a splash of vermouth. A drink scented with juniper berries appealed to me but I discovered that a little goes a very long way. 

Martini in hand, and discussing his own art with Karl, I learned that happiness in marriage has taken the desperate edge off his creativity, a trade he willingly made.  He thinks it would take three martinis to get into the clinical state of mind of his earliest years, when paint flowed freely.  I respect my inhibitions, and I put my unfinished drink back on the sidebar.   

I saw Karl on the street once in those early years sitting on a concrete step watching the passing scene.  A cigarette burned in one hand, and the other lay across his lap, pale arm in blue shadows. He was the quintessential artist, a little out of time and place. Today, he sells successful art (his own included) but the art that he collects is painted by artists on the edge of reason, where brush strokes are made from a deep well without direction from the ego.  He showed me some of his stuff in the back so I could see the difference between commercial art and what Van Gogh might have painted for others to discard.

Karl had framed for display two of his own items painted by Steve, who would be coming to the gallery, today, Saturday.  Steve is a sweet, good-natured man who, if you did not know his name, you would recognize (if you have been in Frederick) as the man with the long beard and psychedelic clown pants.  Sometimes Steve sets up an easel and turns out small pieces that he sells for $5 when he needs money.  Steve's art, Karl explained, arises from an intelligent and schooled mind that now paints to express his awareness of a rich and self-effacing understanding of the forms and colors of life.  

Karl framed two pieces of Steve's art and placed them in the gallery show.  I overheard people admiring the man's work, and it is interesting how a frame can domesticate abstraction and make it accessable to all.

Michelle's Flower Shop

As keeper of a small flower shop, Michelle has more than a few bouquets to sell, day in and day out.  Since inheriting the shop from her father, she has kept the aesthetic ambiance of a downtown Frederick store that remains what it has always been, a place where fresh flowers and greens mix with old art and antiques, and where her customers can say, as I overheard a woman exclaim, "This is my happy place."  Who wouldn't want to sit in the leather wing back chair by the antique wooden sales counter awaiting one's turn in a busy shop after browsing the shop, always lovely? 

I took these photos in the flower shop two weeks ago.  The shop retains its original name, Flowers by Jim.  There are two rooms, separated by the wooden sales counter. Rather than show the shop itself, here are a few images that represent the whole.

Isn't this a beautiful painting?  The word insouciant comes to mind. The little painting is modern, although antique paintings are also for sale. Here is a handsome couple. I hope they lived their lives well. 

Michelle has composed altar flowers that she will deliver later in the day, and this small bouquet is for someone's birthday party. 

My own Saturday flowers boast a bold white hydrangea. My flowers come wrapped in colored, waxed tissue paper, and I arrange them myself, less artfully than the shop owner would.  My flower arranging time is always an opportunity to put the world right side up for myself.

 

Saturday Flowers March 7

If three of the bright red tulips seem a little too boom-boom-boom, it's because they are.   As the days pass, the other tulips will droop while continuing to grow, and in a few days I'll change the water and trim the ends so they will last the week.  Michelle Blank, the owner of Flowers by Jim in Frederick, will look at this and think, "What Horror!" but then she has to please her many customers who want their arrangements to look beautiful and professionally composed, in their Sunday or wedding-day best so to speak. I'm after informality on my kitchen table.

Michelle's shop this morning was fresh and sparkling, and the back work room was filled with stately and gorgeous wedding arrangements.  Next Saturday, I might ask her if I may snap a few pictures of the shop to show you the art on the walls.  She has pieces collected over many years, and they are worth examining. If Michelle has flowers on her counter top in the sales room, I'll show you those, too.  The counter is dark wood, and antique, and on it she keeps single-color blossoms in a small vase. Those flowers are past their sell-by freshness but remain lovely and arresting nonetheless.

Here is what remains of last Saturday's flowers.    

Michelle added a single lily bud nearly hidden in the blooms, and the lily opened yesterday.

Saturday Flowers 2.28

I took the photo of yesterday's fresh flowers this morning after breakfast was cleared away.  Perhaps empty oatmeal bowls and mugs of Typhoo tea would be interesting, but my focus is flowers and as you can see, the Sunday papers. The economic news is dire, and reading it I feel washed in the negative zeitgeist of our time.  Bright yellow roses and tulips, larkspur and bells of Ireland that are the scent of heaven itself help keep me steady and disbelieving that negativity is truth.  Negativity comes in many forms.

I was beset recently by a woman bearing a tract, which in her context had only one meaning. To prevent the conversation that was bearing down on me like a Mack truck would have taken a bit of rudeness on my part because I haven't figured a way to prevent except by avoidance being accosted by one bearing the opportunity for salvation.   Do you know the sound of a person in full grasp of her certainty, the warmth and conviction that announces in other words, "Run!" ? At that moment however, the god of benevolence and good humor intervened for my attention.

It is so easy to become ensnared by our convictions that we forget to see the universe of those whose paths are lit by other lamps casting the same broad light.  Look into any crowd and see all the people for what they are, the representatives of what they believe to be true.  It helps to see indisputable beauty first, second, and always, and this helps define all other sightings. 

Saturday Flowers Feb. 21

Here is this morning's bouquet.  The crock belonged to my great-grandmother who probably kept pickles in it.  I keep the lid in my grandfather's arts and crafts desk, the desk with the slant top and the secret hiding place only I know how to find and open.  My grandfather was a book seller, and he kept the books in every room of the house, lining every wall either on shelves or in stacks.  My grandparents' kitchen was a bit mysterious because there was a back staircase that led to a forbidden back room, which was my grandfather's office.  I used to dream that he hid a trove of rubies behind a brick in the fireplace upstairs especially for me and so convinced myself that even now, 50 years after his death, I still eye brick walls, searching for the loose brick.

My Valentine's Day flowers from last Saturday have lost their red roses, but the lilies are in full flower.  I have moved this bouquet to another crock, in the dining room.

Saturday Flowers on Valentine's Day

On Valentine’s Day evening, and two glasses of a Piper Heidsieck to the good, let me tell you a truth about men.  This is a truth known to my four sisters, and passed down to their own girls.  The fact that there are two boys (now men) in that younger generation has not diluted the truth and they, the beneficiaries of the knowledge imparted since their youth at the gatherings of their mothers, are potentially better mates themselves because they have been initiated into the great secret: 

Men are helpless creatures without women. Utterly helpless and unable to set one foot before the other but for the lanterns we their wives hold high before them to light their way, and they forget this at their doom.

Of course it becomes complicated quickly, but the interaction brings zest to life and life to good poetry. 

Poetry is not all, of course, and while you can't tell that to a Scotsman--he dare not believe you lest his life staked on the thin soil of Lewisian gneiss be washed away by one good storm--there are men who understand that the rough edges of life are where growth occurs.   

Happy Valentine's Day to my own good husband, who hunts and breaks trail and shelters me against himself in the storm.  He knows what's good for him. 

Saturday Flowers, mid-week

The bouquet does not look like the one I arranged on Saturday, does it?  Some flowers (larkspur) have faded and have been removed, and others are opening. I changed the water and trimmed the ends, and these will be beautiful until Saturday, when new ones replace them.

There is heather in the pot. It's buried deep, and forms the base through which the other flowers are arranged.   It blooms twice a year, first in early summer, then in autumn until the late frost.  I have always loved heather, and I get mine from the florist in Maryland.  A vase of the humble heather is especially fine for Burns Night celebrations, January 24. I have been to a few in my life, and an evening spent celebrating Robert Burns by reading his poetry, toasting each other, and drinking fine scotch whisky is an evening to remember always. 

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion."

Heather really looks like this on the hillsides of Scotland.

Saturday Flowers 2/7

Fresh flowers and the Sunday newspapers, Ah! I waited until Sunday to take these pictures to give the flowers some resting time and opportunity to open a bit more.  Later in the week when the roses are fading, the lilies will be open and a bright orange.  Mid-week I will change the water and trim the stems to prolong the beauty of the bouquet, which is a constant refreshment for me.  Another thing that will refresh me is to get outside with a rake and gather all the leaves from last fall that remain on the ground in a sodden mat.  I have the paper bags to dump them in, and Frederick has a periodic yard waste collection.

I long for a bit more adventure in my life, but not along the lines of Burn Notice. I saw that TV show a few weeks ago for the one and only time.  For leaden and predictable dialog, this program wins the prize.  The fluid action of the program is really good, and camera angles and sequencing are excellent, but the unimaginative story and dialog threaten to make this series a single season or two event. If you would like to waste a precious hour of your life, turn Burn Notice on and see what I mean.  You'll be able to speak the characters' lines before they do within a few minutes.  By the program's mid-point, any dialog you come up with will be better than the script.

Apparently vicarious adventure is not in the cards, so I must make my own. Travel is always full of adventure, but you have to go there to get it.  Adventure is always at home, or close by for those who have the eyes to find it.  I'll be on the lookout today and let you know what I find.

A Yorkshire Lass

The morning’s fresh flowers were in their crock on the kitchen table, and the rest of the world just had to manage as it might. Saturday afternoon, I decided to take a walk.

As I walked, I considered the book I had finished at 3:45 a.m., how structure and subject had supported each other, and how with a less poised pen its authorial device would have strangled the living story of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

The book turns on a series of letters written in 1946 between an author, her publisher friend, and a number of the inhabitants of the crown dependency of the bailiwick of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands, which were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans in World War Two.  There is darkness and great sorrow in the story, but there is also the depiction of moral (and sometimes fey) substance among rural island people, who display enough outlier characteristics inherent in any isolated, small population to drive the story forward.  By the end I was thinking, “Hurray for the steadfast pig farmer!”

On the way home on this chilly day, I stopped for a cup of hot tea at Michael’s Café Anglais on North Market St., and stayed for a chapter of a parallel book on the war.

The tea room was active.  The young waitresses were cooing over an old black dog who was taking a drink from a water bowl placed before her on the wooden floor next to a table occupied by two women, obviously mother and daughter, for the one was elderly enough not to be out on her own.  The slender old woman had white hair pulled back from her face by a hair band.  She was dressed as Katharine Hepburn would have approved.  Her name is Helen, and she is 97. She and her daughter were reading the morning papers and having tea and scones with clotted cream and jam.

When the daughter went elsewhere in the tearoom, Helen herself came to my table and told me  how she met her husband. 

Some seventy years ago, she ran away from her parent’s home in Yorkshire and joined the RAF.  As she was riding her bicycle home from town after work one evening, she was driven into an air raid shelter by the sirens warning the approach of the enemy.  She met an American soldier in the shelter, and they talked.  When the all-clear sounded, the soldier walked her home, and carried her bike the four miles.  The next morning at her RAF headquarters, an office mate announced the arrival of a Yank, looking for Helen. 

He had decided overnight that she was the girl for him, and he came to announce his intentions. 

Helen stood up at my table and broke into a little song popular at that time,

"I’m going to get me a Yorkshire lass, and we’ll have a love to last."

She and her soldier married, he brought her home with him, and she bore him six children.   She named her children, and told me that all she ever seemed to do then was knit their sweaters, and feed and diaper them.  She remains an active knitter, and she showed me her blue wool scarf, a bow tie design, being narrow behind the neck, and broad at the tails to warm the front.

 “I live here,” she said, and as she crossed both hands over her chest, “but I am a Yorkshire girl. Next summer I’ll go visit my cousins; I don’t need the children to take me, do I?”  I agreed that she could manage nicely on her own.

Saturday Flowers #8

Roses and brush have a decidedly autumn flair, don't you think?  This will be the last bouquet from my florist until I return from Germany just before Christmas, and I leave this week.  I've been learning just enough German from my husband that I can negotiate important transactions such as, "Do you have flowers?"

I read a clumsily written book a few months ago that I couldn't put down because it was so lacking in artfulness.  I just had to see how it was constructed, to the end.  The author is popular, and you would know his name if you saw it here.  Reading his name here, however, might also be the signal that knowing this author, you might have declined his book, no matter that there was a dog on the cover, and it was a story about a very good dog indeed. I had an extra bill in my pocket, and I bought the book.  I have since given it away; I left it in a public place for a passer-by to pick up and enjoy.  There was one interesting scene in the book.

The protagonist, an artist, is sketching her beloved dog.  Over and over she draws the dog, narrowing her focus to the soulfulness of the eyes.   She is attempting to capture an ineffable quality that is somehow the most important quality.  She draws portrait after portrait quickly and in an abstract state, and the hours pass.  In what is nearly a trance she hears fluttering and rustling as she nears completion of the very best image she can capture of the beloved dog's spirit shining through the eyes.  What she actually creates is a portal for angelic intervention in a bad situation.  The author understands the transcendence of love and how love uses what is given over to it to work its way in the world.

Saturday Flowers #7

The single stem of dark red yarrow is in the bouquet for drama. 

The front-page, above-the-fold photographs of The New York Times are frequently works of art in composition and meaningful expression, but today the Journal trumps the Times.

I must admit, however, that I am enjoying the Journal less and less these days.

A few minutes ago, my brother-in-law called to ask me to recommend a few books on grammar and language for his student daughter.  I turned my gaze to my nearby shelf of language books and my first recommendation was Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.  In my opinion, this is the quintessential English language reference book.  You may get yourself a used copy for a couple of dollars and have a handy paperback that explains the elementary rules of usage such as

"1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's.  Follow this rule whatever the final consonant.  Thus write,

Charles's friend

Burns's poems

the witch's malice"

(Notice that the authors neither begin the phrase the witch's malice with a capital t nor end the final example with a period. One learns so much more than what is expressly stated.) 

Read this book for an excellent grounding in sensible expression and use that will hold you steady in any linguistic head wind, and then trim your sails as need arises with any of the other manuals of style, such as The Associated Press Stylebook, or the MLS guide, and my favorite, The Chicago Manual of Style.With the precepts of Strunk and White clear in mind, you may learn the alternative styles that have developed for the print media, for different schools of academic use, for government and business, and recognize them as variations.

Saturday Flowers #6

Here are the most recent flowers on the kitchen table, my Saturday Flowers #6.  As the week progresses, the lilies will open. The smaller bouquet is of the remnants of last week's flowers, now elsewhere in the house.  I am fond of the little mustard jar, which came out of my great aunt's house when her estate was settled.  Actually, the mustard jar was a gift from my sister Yvonne, who saved it from the dump pile when Auntie's possessions were being dispersed.  Auntie died at 95, peacefully, in her sleep.  Her name was Anna Kate Koogle and she loved flowers, too.  Her claim to fame, however, was that she is the one who taught Claire McCardell how to sew.

When I was a child and visiting my grandmother, frequently Auntie would be visiting as well.  She'd be working at the treadle Singer sewing machine in the upstairs middle room, and the sewing machine was in front of an east-facing window.   

The sewing machine was bought by her mother in 1895, when as a young newlywed, Mokkin set up housekeeping. 

In those days a young bride took into the marriage linens that she would have made and kept for her new life.  I have a dozen lovely, white linen napkins that Mokkin hand sewed from a bolt of damask. I use them rarely, and only when there are people who would appreciate them, whether or not they know that the napkins are now 113 years old.  If someone admires them, and the napkins are admirable, being large, 22 inches square and as soft as can be, then I tell them the story of the young wife preparing her trousseau in 1895.

My great-aunt Anna Kate was one of her two daughters.  A son, Frank, died at the end of World War I, on a cot at Camp Meade, in Maryland, of influenza. His sisters both lived well into old age.

I'll add to this post more about Auntie, my grandmother's sister, later.

Saturday Flowers #5

Today is dark and gloomy at late morning.  In fact it is pouring rain outside.  Flowers brighten any room, and reflect their colors in the mood of the observer.  Here are today's flowers. The lilies will open as the week progresses and as the white roses fade and are removed from the bouquet.  I enjoy tending the flowers and every other day or so I change the water and trim the stems of the flowers that remain fresh. 

Here is a picture this morning of last Saturday's flowers (#4).  The flowers are cut down considerably and have been moved to a smaller crock on a small sideboard in the dining room.  The smaller crock belonged to my mother's grandmother, known forever as Mockin because that was what my mother's older sister Jane could lisp as a child.  My sisters and I never knew Mockin, but we cherish her recipe for Christmas cake made with applesauce and raisins, and plenty of rum. We have our different ways with this cake, and Yvonne's version is the best.

Saturday Flowers #4

Whatever I am doing, as soon as my eyes rest on flowers on the kitchen table, I relax and have a moment of pure happiness.

Saturday Flowers #3

What is especially nice about this week's bouquet is the broom grass in the background, mixed in the zebra grass and the fragrant purple stock, which smells like cinnamon. 

Looking at the news, I imagine that this financial turmoil has scotched any notion of privatizing Social Security.  The verb to "scotch" means to crush, or stamp out, to refute conclusively. 

I moved last week's flowers, much reduced but a few still bright, to the dining room table with a bowl of fruit and vegetables to free up the kitchen counter. The morning sun through the north window caught  them just so.

Saturday Flowers, Oct. 4

I intend to post my Saturday flowers so I can relive their beauty while anticipating the next bouquet.  This is number 2 in my series.

It is important to be surrounded by beauty.

Fresh Flowers Every Week

Every wife should have a husband who, like mine, brings her flowers every Saturday of the world, even when we are overseas.  One of my favorite bouquets was the bunch of of bright red tulips that he found in the flower market near our Canal House hotel in Amsterdam.  I readied the vase in our quarters to receive the tulips, and when I took them from his hands I couldn't help but notice as I unwrapped them that they were the most perfect silk flowers one could imagine. They had fooled even him, wrapped as they were.  When we left the hotel, the beautiful tulips remained behind to amuse other guests. 

Here are this morning's flowers, before the day is quite light.  We are having tea in the kitchen before breakfast. The news is always grim, but flowers always restore my confidence in the world. The flowers come from a shop a few blocks from home, and we have paid the same price every week for the 16 years of our marriage; there has been no increase, despite our protests. The flower shop owner died last year, but his daughter carries on the shop, and now she is the one who bundles up the flowers that she chooses for us every week from the buckets and pails in the workroom in the back.