The Veil was Torn from Side to Side

Rip at the Piano

I have a charming friend who is a stellar pianist, who lives part time in the Northeast Kingdom, and part time in sunny Chile. In order to have the means to feed body and soul, he – as did I – used to work for various computer magazines, writing articles, doing some freelance editing, sometimes translating, and occasionally taking on a big project, like a white paper, that we would work on together.

When he’s in the Kingdom, the Musician lives in an old hippie house, cobbled together out of used parts, loose stones, salvaged windows and doors, and anything that would fit in his car to make the trip down the dirt road and the next dirt road to his house in the old, overgrown field that’s situated between an ancient cemetery and a growing beaver pond. 

Back in the day, the house had running cold spring water, gravity fed via pipe and hose from a springhouse on the hill, an attached outhouse, and one giant room. One end served as a closet, the other as a kitchen (portable 2-burner Coleman stove and a giant insulated cooler regularly filled with bags of ice for cold storage). The middle of the house was a big room that was dining room, bedroom, sitting room, workroom and concert hall, as needed. For bathing purposes, a solar shower bag hung off the corner of the building near the loo, and next to it a shallow pit, straddled by an old-fashioned, footed, cast-iron roll-top bathtub. When the Musician wanted a bath, he filled the tub, started a fire in the pit, and after a couple of hours – hot tub! To put out the fire, he just pulled the plug.

 

 

This was back in the dark ages when a solar shower bag (black plastic – leave it in the sun and the water inside heats up, the on-off toggle lets you sploosh yourself with warm – sometimes very hot – water) was pretty high-tech. Solar panels existed, but didn’t work very well and were extraordinarily expensive. The Musician’s house was completely electricity-free, and the expensive propane alternatives were too expensive and hard to acquire for someone saving every extra penny for the annual winter trip to Chile’s summer and the services of a piano tuner who charged extra to travel to the back of nowhere to practice his craft.

The house was brilliant in summer, and I can attest, as I borrowed it for a few weeks one year, snug and comfortable in winter so long as you were willing to pack in and out, via sled and skis or snow shoes, your food, water, and trash, and also willing to share the building with the winter shrews who move in as soon as the Musician migrates south. In the Northeast Kingdom, for reasons I don’t know, there are very few mosquitoes, so doors and windows could be left wide open to gather summer breezes. 

Without the subtle hum of electric devices that we civilized folk have become so used to hearing that we don’t hear them anymore, the house was incredibly still, incredibly silent. When I spent long weekends there working with the Musician, we would work by the light of the sun all day on the manuscripts that provided our life’s booty, with no noises except the scratching of our pencils, and those of the birds, the mice, the squirrels and chipmunks, the occasional deer that visited the garden we grubbed out of the long grass one summer, and the ever-present chorale of crickets. Thunderstorms were monumental; nightfall was inevitable and eagerly awaited. 

When dusk drew the sun too low for us to continue work, we’d put away the pages and red pencils and various other hand-held writing devices, and ritually light the candles and oil lamps that chased the dark to the corners of the house and dimly illuminated the big room at night. The Musician preferred candles over oil lamps, because the smell of  kerosene or other lamp oil was intrusive; but they helped keep our fingers safe while we were chopping vegetables for the evening stir-fry and lighting the propane burners. 

Meal accomplished, the Musician would extinguish the oil lamps and rearrange the candles so he could see his music; and then he’d retire to the baby grand piano that took up most the space in the big room. The next four, or six, or eight hours would be devoted to practicing the classical music that he lives for and that comes alive under his fingers. I would take a book, or my works-in-progress, and crawl under the piano with pillows and a blanket to read, or write, or simply listen, until sleep spirited me elsewhere.

If you never have, take any opportunity that arises to sit under a piano when a musician is playing. The vibration of the strings and the resonance through the wood of the instrument will overwhelm your body, and sometimes your mind. You’ll find you’re experiencing the music in a way you never have, or could, before; it will master you, and make you its creature, and send you to realms you’ve never imagined. I believe it’s as close as those of us who aren’t musicians can get to entering the creative genius of the musician as she gives in to Muse. It’s similar to other creative spells, but different, because it’s so physical and fills the body, and the ears, and the entire mind, with something other than our usual experience.

One night, late in the evening, the Musician began a new piece. Something about it resonated with the beat of the blood in my veins, with the path of my breath through my cells; it picked me up and turned me inside out, and I was no longer me, except for a dimly-aware, tiny hard pebble deep in my mind. A veil was torn; I saw other worlds. I ran out into the night, into the field where the moon sailed high and shone on mysteries I’d never before imagined. The music followed me, having hooked a claw into my heart and gut, and was like a ribbon of mystery fueling my new sight: there, there were wildings in the long grasses and under the trees, there were wisps threading through the garden, and there were strange beings peering at me through the darkness. The Musician played on, and I watched myself, from up in the sky with the moon, grow feral, and sensitive, and strange, tethered to the earth by the ribbon of music that wound out from the open door and windows of the house. I could see it, like fireflies, lighting the way back and glittering brilliantly forward into my new realm; I could see, like fireflies, the energy of the music rising up the Musician’s spine, down his arms, into the keys.

My soul howled at the night sky; and then the Musician ended his practice, and the fireflies winked out, the heavens stopped spinning, I returned to myself. Over the years, every time I heard that particular piece, I was tossed back into the Other World. Even now, decades later, I can tell by the stirring in my heart and belly that the background music I was barely hearing has me by the heartstrings. My eyes open; the veil rips; I become Other.

The piece was Brahms’. I’m not telling which one.

Rip and Reinmar

All artwork by Deb Marshall.

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, April 29, 2017, as “Set Adrift on the Notes of Brahms",  in a slightly shorter form.

She Is Risen

Bear, Spring 2017, by Deb Marshall

I got home quite late Wednesday night, very close, in fact, to Thursday. On the way to put the car into the garage, I stopped first to put the bags of groceries that had been marinating in the car for hours onto the wart. Then, car garaged and after fiddling around with the odometer and mileage recordings to keep the tax man happy, and gathering up the remaining back-pack and bags of school stuff, I trudged to the wart loaded up like a pack animal to haul the grocery bags in, let the dogs out to pee, give all the critters their pills, and do a few must-be-done-before-bed chores.

The Husband hadn’t felt well and had gone to bed quite early, leaving behind a man-mess in the kitchen, so I slammed things around a bit and grumbled loudly about men who just assume someone else will take care of their messes as I put groceries away, wiped counters and stove top, cleaned the I-don’t-want-to-know-what out of the sink, and filled the bone-dry barkie boys’ water bowls. Just as I was getting started on the necessary computer chores, and I’d told one of the barkie boys he’d have to wait to go back out until I was finished, down the stairs Husband comes.

“There’s a giant bear on the kitchen wart,” he says, then stumbles back up to bed.

We have motion-detection lights that illuminate the wart, its stairs, and the path to the garage; the one over the kitchen door is always on low, and gets brighter when something’s moving about. I hurried into the kitchen to peer out the kitchen door window. Rats, forgot my glasses back by the computer; but, yup, there’s a fairly large, very black mass out there in the corner of the wart. 

Any progress I ever make towards the source of all good things – the kitchen – is inevitably made with at least one dog racing ahead of me. Fortunately, the louder, less sensible one was snoring away loudly at the far end of the house. “Abu,” I whispered to the underfoot barkie boy, “I don’t think you’re going to be able to go out again tonight. Let’s go get my glasses.”

Trek out of the kitchen to the computer; trek back to the kitchen with the glasses. Shut the kitchen lights off; shut the barkie boy up with a treat in the snoot. Peer out the window again. “Yup,” I tell the barkie boy, “you are definitely not going out again tonight. That’s either a wayward dementor out there, or a bear. And since it appears to be eating leftover bird seed, I’m guessing bear.” I flip the wart’s real light on. The black mass turns a not-quite as black face towards me, hesitates a moment, and goes back to her feast. I lock the kitchen door – just in case.

Trek back to the computer to turn it off. I’d not staying downstairs any longer than I need to, in case Bear – newly risen from her winter den and hungry enough to relish left-over bird seed – decides she’s going to test the kitchen door to see if she can get at the cat food on the counter. Nope. I’m not.

But I can’t stand it, and have to take one more look. Besides, I need snoot-treats to lure the barkie boys upstairs without a fight about a last, bedtime, pee, which is clearly not going to take place this night – they’re gonna have to hold it. Bear tolerates me watching her dine for a few minutes, then exits, not by the stairs, but through the bottom railing next to the stairs, taking out the rail and attached fairy lights, stomping all over a raised bed, and crushing its walls down in the process. 

Bears up close in the dark look like velvet shadows, very round, very silent, with pointy faces if they deign to look at you. Very, very large velvet shadows. Very, very strong velvet shadows.

Bear Feasting on Seeds from the Wart Railing, by Deb Marshall

By this time Catmandoo has arrived, and His Massiveness is way too interested in what’s happening on the other side of the door. I shoo him away from the kitchen, herd the dogs upstairs and lock them into the bedroom, then head back downstairs to hustle the Catman back to bed. I find him sitting in plain sight in the glass door in the Chapel, peering out into the full-moon yard and trying to pop the door open. Thank goodness doors have locks! I peered out, wondering if Bear has a cub or two with her, but saw nothing.

“You’d make an entirely too delicious fast-breaking feast,” I tell him, hefting him up to shoulder (20 pounds of heft) and climbing the stairs, shutting stair doors firmly behind me. “Get that critter out of your mind. You don’t need to investigate.” 

Then I take myself to bed, to wonder where Bear spends the winter, somewhere in the woods that run back of our house to out-back-naybah Eddie Bear’s house, or in his woods that run back to the road to Elkins. Is there a cave? A hollowed-out area beneath a big tree’s sheltering roots? A grubbed-out area in a hill amongst granite boulders? Inside a really big, rotten log?

How am I going to be able to put out the remaining bird seed without enticing Bear back to the wart? Will I get home some night and find I need to sleep in the car in the garage because Bear’s already on the wart? If I’d been just a bit later…or she’d been just a bit earlier…who’d be eating my groceries today?

In the morning, I discover that Bear managed to empty the one bird feeder I use without taking it down or breaking it – she left a fair amount of bear slobber all over it, however. She bent the metal pole that held the suet cage in half, removed the cage, pried it open, and made off with the remaining suet. The seeds were all gone. 

There was a red-breasted robin hopping along the newly snow-melted lawn, listening for worms. I can see the entire raised bed where the parsnips are over-wintering now, and I can actually get to it on bare ground; I’ll need to see if they can be pulled yet. I scattered more seed on the wart rails.

“Eat fast, birds,” I called. “There aren’t going to be too many more hand-outs this year. Bear has risen – the season has turned.”

The feeder’s coming in with me, tonight.

April 2017; for the blog alone.

 

Things I Covet

Turkey Gang, by Deb Marshall

I once rented an old farmhouse, back in the dark ages, simply because it had an entire room - with a window! - that was set up as a pantry. I could picture myself filling baskets with root vegetables, stacking pumpkins and winter squash under the table, keeping geraniums in pots on the window sill, while the cat curled up contentedly in a basket on a chair.  Fortunately, I came to my senses and got married, instead.

Still, sometimes other people have something I really, really want.

The Book Lady, for example, has three things I want:  an incredible front door that looks like it came out of a castle; a library room filled with actual, handsome stacks; and a herd of turkeys that visit every day at 4 pm looking for a hand-out. If she’s late hopping to it, the ballsy tom strides up to her French doors, glares in, and hammers on the door with his beak until they bring corn for him and his harem. I considered encouraging the local turkeys to see what they’d do at my house, but the few times they moseyed out of the woods to snack on winter sunflower seeds, Catmandoo, our generally benign, very large Lord of the Universe, was alarmed by their size, and the barkie boys had a great deal – a very great deal - to say about the invasion, repeatedly – so maybe not.

The Tall Dude also has rooms I want. He has a whole room filled with tables and counters and storage bins and shelves that he built to fit the exact needs of his many interests, and his chest freezer lives there, too. There’s custom storage for ski equipment, fencing equipment, canning gear, camping gear, and special counter space for his seed-starting set-up, ski waxing, and all manner of things – all perfectly designed. He also has a pantry room, with a sink in it – and off that, a root cellar. How often do you find a real root cellar, nowadays? I want it. And I want a few of the dozens of beautiful, elegant (and empty!) hornet’s nests that adorn his tall walls.

Hornet's Nest, by Deb Marshall

 There was a brass candlestick in my bedroom in the servant’s quarters, the college summer that I spent as the cook on an historic summer estate, that I really, really wanted. It was designed to adjust how much of the candle was lifted above the holder, and I was quite taken with the whole idea. Actually, I do have that candlestick…like I said, I was taken with it.

The Husband and I almost bought a house in Maine because it had a big room that surrounded its center chimney, with a clever, secret entrance. Artists had built the house, and it was a fair reproduction of an historic Cape, right down to not having a septic system. Well – technically it did: there was a buried VW Bug with the seats removed and the windows rolled slightly down that served the purpose, out back somewhere; the owners couldn’t quite remember where but we were sure to locate it sooner or later. The Husband wiped the fairy dust out of my eyes.

My best school friend’s house, built by her Grandpa, had a secret staircase that curled narrowly down from one of the bedrooms to the kitchen, where there was a door on the bottom stair making it look like a closet.  Her mom used the lowest stairs to store canned goods, and the kids used the whole stairway to spy on the adults. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Still do. 

In my Nana’s house, the window over the sink is split in the middle, and an old-fashioned latch holds the two sides together. In the summer, you can unlatch them and open the two sides out. I love that window; it reminds me of fairy princesses opening their windows to call out to people below, and of my Nana opening the window to call out to Brother and me as we passed beneath. There’s something much more elegant and lyrical about unlatching and pulling a window open, rather than shoving one up, or cranking one out. Mom (who now lives in Nan’s house) and I argue about whether she’s allowed to replace that window with a modern, energy-efficient one.

Eddie B., our out-back neighbor, had a whole house I wanted – and I could have had it, but he sold it recently. That house is like a magic box that opens into unexpected spaces, with multiple stairways and porches, little hidden rooms with unusual doorways, secret places for cat litter boxes, one stairway that looks like it’s taking you into a cave, big windows revealing lovely things outside, and a myriad of unusual details that only a builder with plenty of time and imagination could make for themselves. It is, absolutely, the most enchanting of houses.

But I have a house I love; and in the library live a banshee and a Chinese soldier that I’m quite attached to. So – sometimes, other people have something I really covet. But you don’t always get what you want…

Originally published in the Concord Monitor, April 15, 2017, as "Things I Covet."

Suspicious Comings and Goings

TimberDoodle in Snow: Cold Feet in April  by Deb Marshall

 It may be spring when you read this (Ha! Snowing again today!), and I may have had a parsimonious parsnip sighting (not yet!) and possibly even feasting, and the woodcock, or timberdoodle as we call it here, may be hopefully peeting for wives (he started last night – before the snow started), but as I’m writing the season has not yet turned, the weather gods just recently dumped a fresh two-foot-deep pile of snow on top of the dregs of the old, and I can only reflect on what a strange and disturbing winter it has been. The latest nor’easter was useful, in a way – it gave me a day off from work, time to finally get my seed orders sent out, so I now peer into the mail box daily, hoping for packages. 

I hadn’t seen a grey squirrel all winter, but very very early one morning – I was up because one of the barkie boys had had a restless night – I looked out and there was a great, fat, cocky one sitting on the wart railing, flicking its tail insolently and cramming in sunflower seeds as fast as he could. Catman was thrilled and dashed out after it, and it led him on a fair-thee-well chase over driveway and up snowbank, down bank and over pond, finally winning taunting rights after he’d dashed up a maple tree. Catmandoo never exerts His Massiveness to tree-climbing, having endured the humiliation of the erection of a ladder and ascent of a mere human to pry him off limb and carry him down ladder when he was still a pup: what goes up easily does not always come down easily or willingly (let’s all remember that truth of nature next time we vote). 

When I was a pup myself, my best friend, PowderPuff, figured out that if she climbed the ladder leaning against the house and sashayed along the narrow overhang that was 3 feet below the second story windows, she could sit just below my bedroom window and yowl to wake me up. ‘Twasn’t her problem to figure out how I was going to get her up the last 3 feet and through the window into my bedroom. It took three scary rescue excursions before the humans-in-charge thought that just maybe they should remove the ladder. What one puts up, does not always come down fast enough (ditto above).

Catmandoo Up a Tree: What Ascends On High Doesn't Like To Come Down  by Deb Marshall

We had several sightings of red squirrels through the winter, so the furries spent a number of very busy days patrolling the firewood stacks. It kept them occupied, not a bad thing when cabin fever and the news was taking its toll on man and beast, but the squirrels were always long gone before the furries  fully engaged. It takes awhile to rouse from a catnap in a basket near the woodstove, alert a human to let one out, then barrel out in hot pursuit; the object of the chase is usually high in a pine by the time one gets up to full speed, but hope springs eternal.

Last winter some critter chewed a small hole in the corner of the front screen door, which is just 9 feet from the railing where I set out winter bird seed. We wondered why the furries spent so much time lying in the cold hall, staring intently at the snowed-in front door. Come spring when we roused that door from its winter rest, we discovered why: a cascade of sunflower seeds poured into the hall when the inside door was opened, from the critter’s lovely between-doors nest and larder near the birdseed take-out joint. 

That door got fixed and the furries didn’t spend much time patrolling hall or cellar this winter - a nearly full-time job last winter. I had no sightings of any actual mice, though a lovely nest made up of dryer lint and grasses came in with one load of fire wood. I did find several mouse droppings atop the metal bins in which I store birdseed at the bottom of the cellar stairs, and lived in dread that one morning before I was fully awake I’d lift a lid to scoop seed, and scoop a malingering mouse as well.  I think the handsome red foxes we saw last spring and from time to time strolling up our long driveway all winter, and the funky critter who spent last summer in the compost bin, and the owls we hear hooting and occasionally see as a flash of white overhead in our headlights, have helped the furries reduce the Mouse Colony to a manageable, mostly external, population again. (Or, at least I did think so; this past week Beastreau and the Man have fetched four mice that I know of out of the cellar upstairs to the kitchen to chase and eventually eat – my personal illegal immigration controllers.)

 I have no malice towards mice in general, but one very late night Catman the Hunter decided it would be a good thing to bring me his latest – still very alive – catch, so I could play with it. At 3 am I proved unequal to the task, so he left it next to my bed and took off in a fluff of disgust. I spent most of the remains of the night wondering if I was going to be joined under the warm covers by a traumatized mouse. Two weeks later I found the dead mouse’s body entombed at the back of my sock drawer. As places to die go, it could have been worse, for the mouse and for me, but I’ve never been so pleased that we don’t heat the upstairs bedrooms.

Mouse with Seed, by Deb Marshall

We didn’t see trail or pawprint of the critter in the compost all winter, but it was such an odd winter of melting and blowing we might not have recognized any signs. Not knowing what the critter actually was, I don’t know if it moved on after the elections, was hibernating, or quite active but invisibly responsible for the reduced mouse and squirrel sightings. If it’s still around, we’ll probably know soon – the compost will soften, in spite of current weather indications, and spring cleaning of burrows is apt to happen anon.

Odd times lead to odd meetings. Last month a friend and I spent hours watching an opossum in a tree not far from her window, busily munching dried berries or rosy leaf buds. Possum stopped his meal briefly but didn’t retreat as some walkers and their dogs passed by, oblivious, and wasn’t bothered by windows flung open so humans could see better. 

Rarely seen and mostly active at night, this ‘possum turned its aversion to risk-taking upside down, inside out. Considering the whacky political climate, that might be a reasonable response. (I wonder if Possum is one of those many thousands of illegal voters NH supposedly hosts?)

Years ago, two raccoons made a barn roof in Elkins into their bedroom – another highly suspicious activity. Despite the numbers of folks who came by to peer at them – the roof was clear of all trees, so they were very unusually out in plain sight – the duo stayed curled up and conked out all day, and found the accommodations so fine, they repeated their public snooze next day. By the third day the raccoon pair was nowhere in sight – much like this winter’s Mouse Colony.

Maybe their visas were revoked.

For the blog alone: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com.     You’ll find me busy monitoring suspicious comings and goings.