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From Place to Words and Back Again

From Place to Words and Back Again

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I learned from the “Writer’s Almanac” that today is the birthday of Sarah Orne Jewett, born 1849 in South Berwick, Maine. A descendent of doctors and sea captains, Jewett wrote poetry and historical fiction but is best known for her short stories.

She is a rare writer for me, one I came to know through her home rather than her work. I had yet to read Jewett’s stories when I wrote an article on historic homes of New England that took me to her house in South Berwick.

I’ve never forgotten the upstairs writing room, what it was like to look out those thick glass windows, imagining the world Jewett knew, the New England shipbuilding culture that was vanishing as quickly as she could describe it.

It’s a funny thing, meeting a writer first in her house. It’s not unlike the acquaintances you form when traveling on a train or airplane, seat-mate confidences. There’s a quick and easy intimacy that flows from the place that then lingers when you read the words.

After that trip, I read what many consider Jewett’s masterpiece, the story collection Country of the Pointed Firs. And there it was again, the place I had seen, the lowered light of that northern clime, the herbs, the dark firs. From place to words and back to place again.


(Photos: The house now and then, courtesy Historic New England)

Open House

Open House

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Common sense tells me to turn on the air conditioning. It will be in the low nineties today, high humidity. But another impulse keeps it off, a desire to be one with the summer, to feel the heat, to be cooled by fans and not refrigerated air.

And I think the house likes it, too. The wood swells, the plants thrive. Paper softens and curls. Deck doors are thrown open so the outside comes in.

A breeze flows through from back to front. A chorus of cicada song rises and falls, and because the windows are open I can hear it.

Summer is best in an open house.

Picture Window

Picture Window

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I saw them on walks in Lexington, what we had when I was growing up, what I see in older houses still, but not as much anymore.

The picture window provides an unbroken look at the out-of-doors. No parceled glimpses of street or flower or tree. The picture window is open and unbroken.

Or at least mine was. It was the way I first looked out at the world, and I wonder if it accounts for the fact that I like to be out in it now.

Picture windows, I read, are non-opening windows that allow light into a room. Ah yes, that’s right. That window didn’t open.

What strikes me now about the picture window is its name, which doesn’t refer to panes or light but to framing. The picture window frames what it sees and presents it to us brightly and tidily.

The world in a frame. Almost.

Open Door

Open Door

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Other topics were rattling around in my head this morning. But then I turned to look behind me, through the tidier than usual expanse of the living room, and saw this.

The front door open with just the storm door closed. Light pouring into the house from the east. Morning light that blots out the landscape, the bleeding heart, the azalea, the forget-me-nots, the lone tulip. (What happened to the others? I suspect deer!)

With the door open, the hall elongates and the floor shines. The world lies waiting, resplendent. All the promise of a May morning.

The outside comes in, not in its unique particulate form (not the way I see it now, for instance), but in a blur of possibilities, a smudging of light.

Tale of Two Railings

Tale of Two Railings

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Yesterday’s snow meant business. Right from the start, the flakes flying only briefly before they touched and stuck. And unlike recent, more iffy snows, this one light, dry, easier to shovel and scrape.

It piled up slowly but inexorably, and by late afternoon, snow on the deck railing looked about three to four inches. After several more hours of steady precipitation (minus a little from the blowing), this morning’s total looks closer to six. And if today’s temperature is any indication (3 degrees F), it will be with us for a few days.

Gee, I guess it’s winter or something. It hasn’t been for a years, so we’re out of practice.

Decluttering the Nest

Decluttering the Nest

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It often attacks me this time of year, the organization bug, as if I’m seeing the house for the first time.

Why is this basement bookshelf filled with children’s books? The children have grown up. Do I still need that (fill in the blank) jacket, lamp, stack of magazines? Wouldn’t life be easier if there was a place for everything and everything in its place?

When this impulse strikes I try to seize on it immediately. It usually doesn’t last for long. Let’s just say I’m hoping for a bumper crop of trash on Monday…

Christmas Itself

Christmas Itself

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A week till the big day, and there is still much to do. Gifts that need buying. Cookies that need baking. Cards that need mailing. Packages that need wrapping.

It’s easy to get caught up in seasonal hysteria.

But then I look at our tree and remember how pleasant it was to trim it this year. I think of dear ones here and far away. I see the dog biscuit the UPS man has left on top of the packages by our door, a funny peace offering to the canine who drives him crazy.

I take my time on the cookies, the notes, the ribbons and bows.

These aren’t way stations on the road to Christmas. They are Christmas itself.

Wreathed Whimsy

Wreathed Whimsy

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Some people put wreaths on their car; they deck the wheels instead of the halls. There was a time in my life — the “Carpool Years” — when that would have made sense.

For the most part, it makes sense to wreathe a stationary object — a door, a window, a lamppost.

The other day on my way to work I noticed a tall, dead tree with an equally dead branch all decked out with a, well, dead wreath.  Dead only in the sense that it was fashioned of clipped boughs. It was still fresh and green. And it made me smile at 7 a.m.

Here on our street a neighbor has wreathed her mailbox. At night it glows.

Wreathed whimsy — ’tis the season.

Needlework

Needlework

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The other day I sat in on a preview of a Supreme Court oral argument, a job perk as unique as the program it represents. I’m bound by confidentiality to say nothing of what I heard — but that’s not what I want to write about anyway.

I want to write about needlework. I want to write about the woman who sat beside me for two hours, and as complex legal arguments flew across the room — a room designed to look exactly
like the real Supreme Court, right down to the color of the drapes, the
style of the clock and the pattern of the carpet — her fingers flew, too.

She was knitting a sweater of warm burgundy wool, cable stitch. And every time my eyes would glaze over with strategies and counter-strategies, I would glance down at her hands, the surety of every knit and perl. I watched the sweater as it grew. Work of the hands, not of the head.

It was precious time for the petitioner, taking his strategies out for a test drive just days before facing the black-robed justices themselves. But it was precious time for the knitter, too, for the sweater that advanced several rows that morning — and for the person who will be wearing it soon.

House Keeper

House Keeper

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To be alone in a house that once was full is to feel tender toward it, to show it greater care than usual. So you scrub the floor of the pantry closet and purge its contents. The kitchen faucet is now shiny and spotless, and the bedrooms are freshened by clean linens. This is not their usual state.

You are hoping that this is not the way you’ll always be. You’d like to have some of that old devil-may-care attitude, the one that helped you shrug off the untidiness and the disorganization. The years of toys ankle deep in the dining playroom, the piles of shoes by the front door.

Not the toys and the shoes themselves, mind you, just the ability to forgive them for standing between order and disorder.

It struck me yesterday that I am a house keeper. Not a housekeeper. The word break is crucial. I’m not a professional. I’m an amateur, one who comes to the task not from duty but from love.