Turn, Turn, Turn

Partial Eclipse of the Sun; Deb Marshall artwork

The world turns, the seasons turn, the garden turns, and memory turns.

Today was the solar eclipse – only part of it here, and the Husband and I were outside, looking at the shadows the sun threw through a colander’s holes when our peak was at its peak. It was possible to see the cover of the moon in the colander shadows, but it wasn’t very exciting, and in fact, the whole thing wasn’t very exciting – it sort of looked like 5 pm at 2:45 pm, which isn’t very different at this time of year. The critters didn’t even notice. I had a headache that didn’t go away until after the eclipse resolved, but that may have been coincidence. The Tall Dude showed up at about 3 pm with his welding helmet (rated 10 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and a piece of something square and black from another gadget (rated 6 on the won’t burn your eyes scale) and we put on the helmet and held the black square up in front of our eyes inside the helmet and had a look at the bite out of the sun that the moon took – that was a little more exciting – then the moon moved over, and  the world turned.

Last week I found the first red leaf – the season turned, and you can see it in the late afternoon shadows, hear it in the crickets’ chorus and in the birdsong, feel it in the coolness of the breeze when the day’s hot. This week there are several branches of swamp maple blazing red, visible from the wart. The winter squashes have suddenly gotten big; the green, yellow and purple beans have finally stopped producing flowers and I’ve begun to pull the plants as I divest them of their last pods. The shell beans  are thickening up, and Buzzy Boy, the hummingbird, is very, very busy protecting the scarlet runner flowers and his feeders from all invaders. Most importantly, our decade-plus old peach tree produced an amazing crop of fruit for the first time ever this summer, and the peaches got ripe this week. If you stand under the tree, your head becomes filled with the perfume of peaches; and there are two baskets of peaches on the dining room table waiting for us to eat or freeze them. We’ve had peaches to eat every day for the week, sweet peaches with juice that runs down the arm and tastes like the end of summer. 

The biggest garden surprise this summer is that my seckel pear tree has produced one perfect pear – a first for it, also, and especially surprising because I don’t have a second pear tree with which it may share pollen. Morning glories are finally and beautifully covering the gardem fence, the sunflowers have dropped their heads and are busily turning flower to seed, the potato plants died back and onions, too, so I’ve been digging and plucking those, and the garden has that special quality about it that only happens in late summer, when everything is at its fullest and the heart swells and nearly breaks with the bitter-sweetness of it all. There are moments of pure perfection, fleeting and tender. The garden turns.

The Historian came by a few days ago with a box of apples from his trees, and a long answer to a couple of questions I’d asked him about incidents in my own family history that I was too young to understand clearly when they happened, and that I didn’t think to get explanations about before my grandparents and father died. This is one of the wonderful things about living in a small town, where pretty much everyone knows or knows about everyone else, and there are long-time residents who are repositories of all the history of the area. 

Love Lies Bleeding and Sunflower; Deb Marshall photo

Last year when I was working on the Plastic Bin Project, I became curious about a murder that happened when I was quite young. My father’s cousin, and her children and her husband’s children from his first marriage were murdered one day by her husband/their father. I was young enough when it happened that I wasn’t told all the details of the murder, and picked up only a few more details when I was a little older, but it wasn’t something the family discussed in front of children when it happened, or at all, years later. It had nearly slid out of my memory until I started working on a family tree and going through my Nana’s bin of family stuff; I was  surprised that amongst all the obituaries and other newspaper clippings she’d kept about family members, there wasn’t a single item about the murder. 
This struck me as odd, especially since, carefully preserved, there was a long clipping about the death of my grandfather's younger brother, who burned to death as a child. Was the lack of news about the murder not because of the fat of horrible death, but that the means was murder rather than fire? Then a few weeks ago I found a photo my father had taken of what appears to be the five coffins lined up in one grave – but no explanation written anywhere,  just a date. The Niece and I had both searched on the Internet for old newspaper stories about the murder, and found only a couple of short, slightly contradictory pieces – one of them from a newspaper in California! 

It’s a curious thing to look back into family history and discover that there is more than one mystery, and some were within reach of being solvable had I – or someone – known to ask the right questions when the people who knew the answers were still living! I vaguely remember my first cousin once removed, and one of my second cousins who were murdered – but he was a boy, and we were young enough that we didn’t really play together and the other kids were either enough older or enough younger to be of no interest to me, and his mom was an adult and so mostly out of the sphere of a kid my age at the time. But now – memory turns. Enter The Historian.

As I read his recounting of what he remembers about the murder, I found myself realizing that some of it was stuff I knew, once; and some of it’s brand new. There are now more questions than before. 

Written for the blog, 21 August 2017

Wowie - this is a sunflower! Deb Marshall photo

Old, and Wicked Cosmopolitan

Portsmouth Fence; Charley Freiberg photo

The British Car Gal and I went on our late-summer adventure last weekend, and this year we went to the coast. The coast is a lot flatter than the mountains, and a lot more crowded; but the weather was just about perfect – warm enough during the day, but not too warm; and brisk enough at night that an open window cooled the  room we shared nicely. Country girls that we are, we had to shut the window and turn on the A/C to sleep: the sounds that drifted in from the hotel parking lot weren’t at all like the sound of crickets and gentle breezes that we’re used to.

The BCG grew up in The Big City, and I marveled at how well she kept track of where we were and which direction we needed to go in to get to our next destination. Even a small city like Portsmouth can be too much for my tiny-village-bred mind; half the time I can’t locate the street signs before we’ve gone through the intersection, and if I can’t see the ocean, like as not I’m not sure where it is. There are none of the big rocks and old trees and half-fallen barns I’m used to using to site my location by, and all the streets seem more or less the same. In an old city like Portsmouth, at least there are a lot of old buildings that mean something to my location-locator brain – much friendlier than most city buildings. Still, the BCG is a much better city street navigator – and parker - than I.

Old buildings were mostly what was on our minds. The BCG and I enjoy peering into other people’s houses and lives, and Portsmouth and environs are packed with historical houses. It being the oldest city in the state of NH, and a major trading port in the long ago long ago, there are some governor’s and rich businessmen’s mansions, some fascinating really old homes (which often started out as dock-side warehouses and grew, room by room, ell by ell, into quite large homes – sometimes resembling complicated rabbit warrens with multiple stairways and halls and strange little cubby holes), and some enclosed gardens worth strolling through. Stuff grows on the coast that we can only dream of growing inland – the season’s longer and warmer, so it’s kind of like being in a different country altogether.

Gate in Portsmouth; Charley Freiberg photo

The oddest living space we visited was a retired submarine – claustrophobic, stinky, hot, airless and a total curiousity. How grown men managed to live and sleep and work in such tight quarters – how they even managed to get into and out of some of the bunks – strains the imagination. Whatever position they landed in as they wedged themselves into unbelievably tight spaces would be the position they slept in, because there wasn’t room to roll over, sit up, or do anything but slither back out the way they got in. I didn’t see a chiropractor’s office on board, but I’m thinking it would have been a valuable addition. It reminded me a lot of those caves and passages we crawled through last summer on our mountain adventure, and I bumped my head just about the same number of times.

We also toured an old church, and the New Castle lighthouse. The BCG is fascinated with lighthouses, pretty certain that she’s a reincarnation of a lighthouse keeper or his daughter. I’d never been up in a lighthouse before, but it closely resembles climbing up into one of the fire towers that are situated on many mountains and tall hills – except that instead of looking down onto an expanse of green broken up by little lakes and ponds, and watching a raptor float silently by as it hunts for small mammals, one looks down onto a vast expanse of blue broken up by patches of green islands and boats of all kinds, and one watches seagulls flap by, hunting for fish or tourist lunch leftovers to snag. Instead of that big topographical map that fire wardens have in the middle of their aerie, there’s a giant light smack in the middle of the high room – and little bitty doorways through which a lighthouse keeper can crawl to access a narrow outdoors deck that circles the lighthouse, for replacing or cleaning windows so the light can shine clearly. Definitely not a place to be walking during a gale.

I think how curious it must be to live, as many people in that area do, cheek by jowl next to one of the old, old houses; or even inside one. Some of the old historic places rent an ell to keep some income coming in year-round to help with upkeep – and, I reckon, so that the old buildings aren’t totally deserted during the cold months of the year. Downtown, many old, old houses are owned and lived in by just regular people. Some have pocket-handkerchief-sized tiny gardens in front, and narrow alleys that lead to a tiny back yard; many of the houses sit just a few feet from the road, and so close to the next house that one could open a window and reach across with a cup of sugar when the neighbor asks to borrow one. 

Portsmouth, House and Garden; Charley Freiberg photo

 

Walking the old streets, meandering through the reconstructed gardens, peering into all the rooms in a very old house, we’re struck by how differently folks lived. There’s an aura of timelessness – as though we  were walking through today’s sun, and shadows from a hundred, and two hundred, and longer years ago. The dust in those old places stirs and we breathe some of it – we take in motes from a once-vibrant present, and I wonder if those motes hold a memory that melds with my living cells. We missed the evening ghost tour, but I wonder – had we taken it, would we have seen or sensed something unusual, or something that was, somehow, oddly familiar?

Sitting now in my small library room, I ponder some of the tiny rooms we wondered about – how could a bedroom be so small? But this room I sit in is barely bigger than those; and my own bedroom is not a whole lot larger; and the 20^th-century submarine bunks were infinitesimally smaller. My own rooms seem larger because I have the handiness of living in them – I know where to step, even in the dark, I know where to set down my cup, where to leave my slippers, where to hang my bathrobe, how to open a closet door without moving all the furniture, first. Familiarity can cause time and space to expand; familiarity can make what seems Other- Strange- Alien to seem Similar, Comfortable, Understandable. 

Iron Fence, Portsmouth; Charley Freiberg photo

 The BCG and I wandered in and out of new and old territory, new and old thoughts, new and old imaginings: how would it feel to be a lighthouse keeper? How would it feel to be a servant or slave in the highest room in this old house? How would it feel to swish in long dresses through this garden? What would it be like to know better than I know my own home, what living in another country was like? What would we think, what would matter most to us? If we had been at one moment a British or French or African citizen, and in the next become a new and undefined US dweller – how would our lives have changed? What would we think about?

House and Garden, Portsmouth; Charley Freiberg photo

What’s unfamiliar and new is alluring; it calls to us, and experiencing it in itself becomes a vacation. The BCG and I even ate all around the world during our adventure: Mexican, Irish, Himalayan, Beach Shack – a richness in sights and sounds, flavors and smells, thoughts and considerations – a smorgasbord of Different From Us. 

Different, when embraced, is invigorating and exciting; and what’s old and different reminds us that things change, often in unimaginable, wondrous ways. 

And, mostly, we’re fascinated. And, mostly, we always should be.

For the blog, September 1, 2017

Windowboxes, Portsmouth; Charley Freiberg photo