This morning I awoke to the house at rest, a house that somehow held 22 people for a sit-down Thanksgiving dinner yesterday.
An outside table was pulled in, borrowed chairs were tucked under it, and the best china was pulled from its sleeves, dusted off and actually used.
Today, I could do some Black Friday shopping, I could catch up with classwork …. or, I could do what I most want to do, which is to look out my office window at clouds scudding across the sky.
It’s 9 on a Thanksgiving morning and for once I remembered to turn on the TV in time to catch the parade from the beginning. It will be on in the background as the dust flies, the turkey roasts and the potatoes boil.
But the big story for most of us this year will not be on a screen. It will be in living rooms and family rooms and kitchens across the nation.
It will be when we rub shoulders, click glasses and — dare I say it? — hug each person who enters our home. For the big story this Thanksgiving is that we’re celebrating it together.
Only time for a short walk yesterday, but I had a destination in mind: the Scott Hotel, once owned by my grandfather and great uncle. Mom and her family lived at the hotel intermittently through the years, sharing quarters with the horsemen and the tobacco farmers in to sell their crops.
The hotel was right across from the Southern Railway Depot, a natural place to stay for a night or two if you were in Lexington on business.
It was a less likely place to house three young daughters and a son. But these were different times, harder in some ways, easier in others.
The hotel is abandoned now, has been for years. It stands in mute testimony to those long-ago lives.
As a walker in the suburbs I write very little about sitting. But sitting has become my bane. It is such a necessary part of modern existence, especially when one is mostly working on a laptop, which, by its very definition requires sitting. But I’ve done far too much of it through the years and my body is letting me know it’s displeased.
Of course, I can stand up when I write, edit or read — and I try to put my standing desk through its paces as often as I can. But when I really need to pull out all the stops with the gray matter, I need either to be walking or sitting.
And lately … I’ve been sitting.
(A good place to sit if you have to!)
I learned through weekend wanderings that famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted once turned his attention to my hometown.
He and his brother, as the marker explains, had a hand in designing Transylvania Park, where the lovely Lexington Library once reigned; Ashland Park, where I spotted this sign; and Woodland Park, one of my favorite haunts.
It doesn’t surprise me. These places may not be the Chicago World’s Fair or Central Park (two of Olmsted’s more well-known accomplishments), but in them the built and natural environments work together. They have a beauty and a presence — a sense of having always been there.
A walk this morning before the rain moved in: tall grasses swaying, leaf piles growing. I love to walk in Lexington because, at least where I stroll, no two houses are alike.
Chinquapin oak leaves litter brick sidewalks, and a ground cover I’m not familiar with froths around the base of a tree.
The variations are a feast for the eye and a balm for the brain.
I drove to Kentucky yesterday, following the new route through the mountains. For the first few hours, I took in the late-fall color on the gleaming hillsides. But by early afternoon, I had driven into the predicted cold front.
Dark clouds gathered above the huge windmills, and strong gusts sent leaves swirling and scudding across the highway. The rain started when I was at about 3,000 feet, lightly at first, then heavier by the time I reached the interstate.
It was not the bucolic drive I had in August, when I stopped to admire the mountain views. This was a no-nonsense-just-get-me-there kind of trip.
And it worked. I pulled into the driveway just as the last light was draining from the sky.
The Kwanzan cherry tree puts on quite a show in the spring. It’s not the earliest bloomer; it waits until the soil has warmed and the forsythia and dogwood have paved the way. But when it finally gets going, it draws the eye to its big-fisted blossoms, its pink petals exploding from narrow stems.
What I’ve only started to appreciate is the show it puts on in autumn. Once again, it bides its time. Other leaves have changed, dried and blown away. But the leaves of the Kwanzan cherry have waited patiently — and this is their time.
They light up the late fall landscape, shimmering in dawns and dusks. They flutter in the breeze, brave flags waving. They gladden my heart each time I see them.
Vincent Van Gogh
The Van Gogh immersive experience begins as soon as you walk in the door and are greeted with a wall of sunflowers, or, I should say, a larger-than-life Van Gogh-like depiction of them. A few steps away is a bust of the painter that morphs from black and gray shadows to the swirled blues and lavenders of his flowers.
You pass a re-creation of the room at Arles, complete down to the washstand and window and hat hanging from a peg on the wall. Take a photo of the room and you’ve created a masterpiece.
There are videos on the artist’s life, his hospitalization, self-mutilation and eventual suicide. And there is music: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, something by Debussy, others I couldn’t place, all soaring and emotive.
But the best is saved for last, when you walk into the final gallery and find yourself a part of the paintings. You stand or sit or recline on the floor while the art comes alive around you, pages slide off easels, stars explode in the night, and a hundred sunflowers bloom against a lapis lazuli sky.
I read this morning of the return of 26 pieces of history from France to Benin. The return was celebrated with dancing and singing and general merriment. There were thrones, statues and other artifacts, all taken by France from what was then its colony of Dahomey, all of them finally home after more than a century of exile.
Since some of my family hail from Benin, this is big news. And since I’ve been to that wonderful country, I have a small sense of what it must have been like to see the big truck pull up, the decorated horses and riders escorting it to the presidential palace, the jubilation of the people.
There are plenty more looted treasures to be returned, and it sounds as if Benin is fighting for those, too. But for now, for one small country tucked between the Sahel and the sea, there is dancing in the streets.
(At the Voodoo Festival in Benin, January 2015)