The Ruffed Grouse.

On a sunny, bitterly cold day in Vermont, the snowpack depths grew deeper as springtime approached. It flowed in soft routes around and over tree trunks, boulders, streams, farm fields and well-worn hillsides.

Beautiful as ever, it was, to all of us.

Our daughter had come home from college for spring break and we had decided to spend the time together, retreating into winter’s encore and greeting spring from the tops of Vermont’s ski mountains.

*****

The daylight flashed sparks of winter’s last light, beckoning us to come walking in the woods, just before sunset on our first day in Vermont. We packed up some appetizers with cold beers and traveled only a couple of miles deep into the forest where we made a campfire and sat, feeling how cold it still was and how glorious a campfire will always be. We had arrived, again, to a second-to-last day of winter. Over the years, the last days of winter had taken us to the world’s most beautiful snowcapped mountaintops. I arrive at those summits, ancient. Yet in all my lifetimes, never have I, nor never shall I, conquer the mountaintop. I am destroyed by the sublime magnificence of being there, every time. My tears barely drop, before the high-alpine air changes them into snowflakes that take flight. I follow them. Some I catch. Some disappear forever.

One of those timeless snowflakes flew from the top of Rendezvous Bowl in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where so many years ago, my daughter and I skied through deep powder snow that buried her strong little body. She had to go potty, now, and the potty was all the way at the bottom of the mountain, 4,000 vertical feel away. “I can wait till I ski down the mountain, Mommy,” she said. I followed her rainbow-shining trail of snowflakes, and have continued to do so, through the stratosphere of times gone by, and into the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of our lives together, today.

A mother slips into such memories, whenever she is spending time with her children.

Our campfire blazed heat, but the sun was setting fast with no moonlight to guide our way out. It was time to break our spare snow camp, and leave the forest. We walked until the trees, blackened, weaved paths to the stars through teal-flavored blues, glowing beyond.

Turning from the sunset, there was Jupiter, though we weren’t sure what we saw. It was a dazzling light acting like the most gigantic snowflake that ever hesitated to fall from the sky. We were lucky. Our feet left the ground at the sight of it and we soared, tumbling and gliding through the final hurrahs of the day.

*****

Every season has its last call. When I sense it’s coming, it makes me anxious. I never get enough and will wave my arms at the heavens, shouting out to, and pleading with, the Great Bartender in the Sky:

One more round!

Winter’s sun moves, the light comes up, and I am at last kicked out of one season and left to go in search of the next.

I nurse the long goodbyes, the indulgent farewells. Like time spent with our dearly beloveds, time within New England’s seasons is a joyful, focused existence for anyone fortunate enough to live a long life traveling through spring to summer to fall to winter.

Nowadays, I awaken to the sun bouncing along the eastern horizon like a white ball pointing out lyrics to a song. Bird song, frog song, flower song. It has been moving from the right to the left, every day, making leaps one-whole-sun-circle width wide. I can’t stop it. Spring is here.

The signs are everywhere.

*****

Of course, one sign of spring is the annoying chirp of grouchy New Englanders. They are sick of snow, ice, cold and dark days. I’m not from New England. But I’ve lived here for a long time, almost forty years. When I first moved to New England, from the sunny southwestern Mexican/American borderlands of Arizona, I noticed that the natives weren’t the friendliest pickles in the barrel. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are just unhappy about the weather.

There was a pond on the campus of my university where I went on winter mornings with a pair of ice skates. I went there to feel happy. As alone as a seed cast by wintry winds to nowhere, I skated around my own private au natural ice rink. Next, I thought it would be fun to learn how to ski.

Winter was a long season—as long as all the rest, but colder and darker. It was too long of a season to give over to feelings of dissatisfaction. Furthermore, I made an acute observation about winter in the modern world—we have the technology to be outside in wintertime all day long. High-tech gear suits us up like bold adventurers traveling into outer space—and protects us while we cavort and gavotte—down mountains, through woodlands, and over icy lakes and ponds.

There is a poem by William Carlos Williams. Danse Russe. After I found the poem, I often thought of it while twirling around New England in search of people who knew how to enjoy wintertime. One year, I won the spring skiing mogul competition on Outer Limits at Killington. I was a novice skier and a woman, competing against guys. We revisited those old playground ski trails on the first day of spring with my daughter. I asked my husband to tell it to me straight—had I won the mogul competition because I was the best skier or was it because I skied topless like the guys?

*****

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

*****

Or had I won the competition, as a happy, lonely genius, in my dreams?

I am only kidding about skiing topless. And I’ve never entered any skiing competitions.

But our family does have a tradition for engaging in friendly forms of competition when we are out and about outside. We hand out Rusticator of the Day awards to anyone who earns them. The awards are named after the Rusticators of Acadia National Park, who seized the great outdoors while wearing suits and ties and petticoats.

Our competitions are wide open and there aren’t any rules. You never know if you will earn a Rusticator of the Day Award. It is merely an atta boy or atta girl bestowed upon anyone who carpe diems the rest of us when we least expect it.

My daughter is a great competitor for Rusticator of the Day awards. She is a natural source for magic and creative fun.

*****

As I have gone through the last days of this historic winter season in the Boston area, letting it go, muttering prayers of gratitude for such an epic experience of endless snowstorms, I have considered the scorn such a beautiful season, filled with so many surprises, arouses in people. Another William Carlos Williams poem comes to mind, The Last Words of My English Grandmother. Here follows last lines from the poem, about his grandmother nearing the end of her life, while in an ambulance heading for the hospital:

What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

I hope to never lose my reverence for the power of life in all its forms.

*****

On the very last day of winter, we were riding the chairlift together, when my daughter pointed to a fat, feathered beast in a grove of trees. “What is that?” She laughed. Everyone’s eyes grew wide with wonder.

Her father said it must be a grouse.

A what?

A grouse. A Ruffed Grouse.

We have lived, camped, hiked, and biked in the woodlands of New England for all of her twenty years. And it has taken her this long to spot a grouse, hiding out.

She earned the Rusticator of the Day award. I’d never seen one, either. When you see something you’ve never seen before, it feels magical.

Which makes me think of the words Hokusai, one of my favorite artists, said before he died:

“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”

But back to the Ruffed Grouse we saw. They are shy birds and they hide in the snow. Their lives often end in violence, because they hold a vulnerable and valuable position in the food chain. The males create an interesting drumming sound with their wings. In wintertime, they grow projections from the sides of their feet which might be a form of seasonal snowshoe. And, Aldo Leopold wrote this about them: “The autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a Ruffed Grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre, yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”

*****

In terms of conventional time, my life represents the tip of a blip of a snowflake, in the blizzards of one Solar System’s infinite winter storms, melting in the warmth of a spring breeze.

The thought of it makes me hope to never subtract a day from any that belong to all the seasons of my life, because every one of them is a possible harbinger of unexpected magic.

Magic like the rare sighting of a Ruffed Grouse, emerging from a big New England winter, ready for spring.

Work. Skiing. Roses.

The Aloha Rose. Fragrant. Velvety petals. Blooms all summer, till frost.

*****

Two weeks ago, I wrote about weather in the Mad River Valley of Vermont. This past weekend, we skied through some of the toughest weather in years—a lively combination of snow, wind, pea-soup fog, and dangerously cold temperatures. It’s a lot of work to arrive at the summit of a mountain being battered by weather and to ski back to Earth from that summit. The work is worth it—you get the trails all to yourself, you get to exist as part of a storm, and you get to collapse, later, brand new.

We went to dinner with a nice group of old and new friends. Some are still working, others are retired. The question What do you do for work? blessedly, never made it all the way around the table to where I sat, with my glass of wine and my ideas for an answer. There are so many things I do for work.

I love work.

*****

Oh, work—if thou were a rose, indeed, thou would grow the sharpest, most plentiful thorns along lengthy, overarching, invasive, multi-branched stems. Beneath thy bowers would accumulate the crumpled forms of bloodied, harassed little beings, hissing and cursing and writhing about. Trapped in your web of jammed and twisted traffic routes, ladders to the top, and paths to recognition, the hard workers would brag about how bloody you caused them to become, how unfairly you paid them, and how cruelly you blocked the ways to, and beyond, the summits of joy.

Furthermore, though your rosebuds unfurl, casting heavenly scents to sweeten neglected happiness—your brambles, it seems, remain consistently smeared with the bloodied bodies, plugged up noses and blinded eyes of grumblers.

They were never able to stop and notice the soft touch of your rose petals, falling to the ground, brushing away tears and smoothing out wounds.

******

I grow roses.

I planted them in my gardens without knowing much about them. They stabbed me. Ensnared my hair. Bloodied my days with wounds that throbbed to the pulse of my heart muscle.

I like to collect rose petals and arrange them into luxurious shapes.

I cook the rose petals until they are transformed into botanical clay and then I roll the clay into beads.

I make tea with rose hips. I dry the rose hips and save them to study or to use in fairy house construction.

I make sure to leave rose hips on the plants for wildlife treats in wintertime.

I make rose water, distilling the fragrance from the petals. It makes my entire house smell rosy.

Roses are a lot of work.

I’m not paid to work with roses. I’ll never become famous because I like roses in my gardens, or because I like to visit them in other gardens of the world, or because I love to read about them and hear songs about them and see artwork that honors them.

Roses can be a bad-boy kind of thing to fall in love with.

*****

I work hard to grow rosebushes near the front porch where I keep a small bistro table with two chairs. You can place onto that table the nicest glasses of wine from the most prestigious vineyards of the world. Next to the wine, you can set out a plate of artisan-baked bread, with cheese—artfully produced in Vermont or France or Italy. The wine maker, the bread baker, and the cheese maker will all be there—in spirit—their hard work appreciated, revered, savored.

I can rely on the promise that a breeze, religiously drifting forth into this romantic setting, will find my roses and rustle them gently. The breeze will rise up, travel some more, and push away the bouquet of the wine, the musk of the bread, and the stink of the cheese. All dressed up in the sensational perfume formed by a once-in-a-lifetime blend of faraway winds, swirled up with sunshine, soil, and my roses—that genteel, sweet breeze will make anyone feel brand new.

One of my roses grew like a heart.

*****

Graham Rose, who was a gardener and a writer, and a correspondent for the London Sunday Times, wrote that the gardener “contrives to make us ignore the world outside and believe that the impossible is readily attainable. The very best of them can take a miserable yard and, by clever construction and planting, lead us down an enchanting track to the idyllic corner of Arcadia, while blinding us to eyesores beyond and suppressing our awareness of noisy neighbors or the rumbling trucks that throng the road outside its walls.”

Graham Rose also wrote that gardeners are romantics and romancers who enjoy connecting themselves to extravagant fictions—remote from ordinary life.

Skiing inside a raging snowstorm feels, to me, like existing inside an extravagant fiction, remote from ordinary life.

Gardening and growing roses, too, is work I do to find and create fantasy lands where anyone can go to escape what is ordinary and become inspired to believe in what might be impossible.

I’ve worked to grow gardens on a miserable acre of land in Massachusetts for a long time. Trucks rumble by every day.

What do I do for work?

I was glad the question never made it around the apres-ski table to where I was sitting—

with my glass of wine

and a bouquet of roses

in the middle of a raging snowstorm.

Gypsy Pole Dancing.

A neat woman I know asked about my artwork. She linked me to other neat women she knows who have developed slick businesses selling their artwork.

A song runs through my head. It’s the White Stripes I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself.

I’m feeling discouraged, so I pull the song up on youtube. There’s Kate Moss, pole dancing to the song. It is very funny. That’s me. Squirming around with a vacant look in my eyes. But it’s not me, because I don’t know how to market my afflictions.

Distraction.

I watch Kate Moss and begin to wonder about pole dancing. It looks so dumb. But, whatever. People do it. I watch it some more. Laugh, laugh, laugh. I lose patience with my own dumb self.

And then I think: why do people dance with a pole when there’s tango? Once, I went to Argentina. My niece, who was studying abroad in Buenos Aires, took us to a tango parlor in a shifty warehouse in a shifty part of the city—though just about every part of Buenos Aires is shifty. As we fell deeper and deeper into the night, and drank more and more of the house wine, musicians and dancers began to arrive. After midnight, guitar and harp players showed up and sat arranged in an arc near the generous dance floor. They filled the old, abandoned space with the music of lustful desire. Every note of passion hung in the air the way the sultry sweat of lovers, on a hot summer’s night, drips from every petal on every flower in a meadow where they sway, kissing and dancing to the sounds of insects seeking mates.

The real deal tango dancers emerged from the darkened perimeters of the warehouse as the night ran away from the world. They stood so still, until they could feel the music. And then, the musicians led the men, who led the women, who wrapped their bodies all around the men, to the beat of every life that ever wanted to live free.

So anyone who likes pole dancing, should go to Argentina and watch the people dance the tango. A pole is so dumb. But a man and a woman and a group of musicians, that’s the kind of public display, group sex that doesn’t leave anyone out. You can watch, or you can join in.

After watching Kate Moss ruin I Just Don’t Know What to do With Myself, (original by Burt Bacharach and Hal David; there’s a youtube video of Tommy Hunt singing it with the big-band, bluesy woosey sound that will smear a salve of solace over any artist’s distracted soul), I tried to find a video of the tango. I got distracted and found Ode to Tango instead, which includes pole dancing, with some mighty big poles. If you watch it to the end, you will see why pole dancing is dangerous. Being your most corny woman self, on the other hand, is really fun:

*****

Dancing around the pole of distraction has not ever earned me an audience. In fact, it often caused me to be sent from the classroom to stand out in the hall until I stopped dancing. The meanest teachers would send you out to the hall and make you stand, facing the wall. I can still smell the cinder block, commingling with my sighs, the heat of my shame boiling the condensation of my breath into a stench that—

Distracted me. What if my exhalations came out in colors? I dreamed of painting the hallways with my puffs of color and making them prettier.

*****

E.B. White wrote in Here is New York, “…creation is in part merely the business of forgoing the great and small distractions.”

I’m cursed. I cannot forgo neither great nor—worst of all—small distractions. E.B. says, though, that creation is only in part the forgoing of distraction.

I will say that when the neat woman I know asked about my artwork, and suggested that I do something with it, I sent a reply that read: “I don’t know why I can’t figure out what to do with my art. It drives me so crazy, that sometimes I want to steal every bottle of Ritalin and Adderall out of every school backpack in America.”

This morning, I was standing up with my cup of tea staring out the window. I saw a delicate droop of last summer’s bloom, covered in dewdrops, on the smokebush:

It made me do this:

And then I did this:

I drank some more of my tea. And then I did this:

And then this:

*****

I don’t know how to balance the pole of distraction over the fulcrum of the heart. Our culture has developed an impressive selection of drugs to quell the spells of distraction, and it leaves all of us dancing around with vacant eyes, playing games of Russian roulette with corporate marketing, medical research, misguided expectations, and one unique human being’s chaotic destiny. Would drugs make me fit in with more successful human beings? Students? Money makers?

I am capable of paying attention and drawing, as exactly as possible, what God has created and the teacher wants me to see:

Even when I’m distracted by the beauty of a dried-up sunflower leaf, I can concentrate long enough to draw it:

But God gave us our own brains. If we are fortunate enough to live a long life, we become creators, too. It’s fun. I found the following, unfinished drawing from another class. It’s some kind of seed head:

Everyone else had completed their drawings. But, I had been distracted by a pattern I saw:

After I saw the pattern, I started to daydream and play around with the seed head, and stare at it, instead of just putting it down and starting to draw it. As a kid, this was the moment when the teacher zeroed in on me, and wanted to know what I was doing. “I don’t know.” I would say, which was a little bit of the truth.

Last weekend, my husband had some friends over for a music jam. I was upstairs in my studio painting. The keyboard player led the jam with a tune I’d never heard before and I was distracted by it. It made me paint this:

Before bed, I looked up the video of the song they played–Lonely Boy, by the Black Keys.

I think I’m a combination of the joyful spirit of the girl in Ode to Tango and the improvisational spirit of the lip-synching dude in the Lonely Boy video by the Black Keys. This video inspires me to keep dancing my lonely girl groove around the teeter totter pole of distraction—in the kitchen with my tea, in the studio, and out in the garden—wherever the spirit moves me and whenever I just don’t know what to do with myself.

Oh, oh oh—I got a love that keeps me waiting.

A love for art.

Rock out, pole dancers. Here’s a link to distract you:

Gypsy Art Show.

If a writer

is also an artist

is also a designer

(of gardens and homes and journeys)

is also a lover

is also loose loosey in the brain

and is,

most ALSO of all

a mother–

there comes a day,

it’s sunny

it’s Friday

when she is supposed to be doing some things

but ends up doing some other things.

Looks at abandoned sketch books

years and years of scribbled remembrances

and thinks

I like it.

*****

I pulled sketch books off one shelf: (There are more, on more shelves, and in more drawers.)

And picked a sketch book to look at.

It was a long time ago when I did these drawings. I carried sketch books wherever I went and committed fast drawings to the papers hoping to return to them someday.

What a pleasure, to arrive at a time and place when my own artwork is making me smile. For that reason alone, I think it’s worthwhile to carry a sketch book and draw–even if you are always busy tending to other people and other things.

I consistently failed at most kinds of conventional schooling. The voices of teachers “speaking to me” and memories of their eyes rolling into convulsions over my wiggly butt, have kept me out on my own, trying to learn what I can, with the brain I was born with.

The voice of the critics can be so loud. Beware of it. I have no trouble engaging in the practice of drawing, but after I draw, I do have trouble learning to like what I’ve done.

I’m not a scholar. But there is a “call to artists” for work depicting plants and I’m hoping to mine my piles of sketches and put together some things to submit.

Here are the naked sketches:

Look carefully at this next sketch. It’s kind of cool–it’s trees in a sort of hedge? I don’t know. Inside the trees grow my ideas for designs:

Here follows a sketch of one day in spring when I was wandering through the garden and spied a fledgling cowering on the lower branches of a tree. I called my son to come and see and we stood there together laughing at the poor little bird–its feathers were scraggly and unkempt. I have watched so many fledglings in my gardens, I have watched their parents frantically bringing them food, I’ve watched the crows circling, and every season, I worry about all of them!

I don’t know what this next drawing is. But I do know that whenever I was caught drawing these kinds of mind relaxers during class, I got into trouble. In the last couple of years, these same kinds of drawings, elicit similar suggestions from odd ducks who might be sitting next to me in a lecture–have you considered what a psychologist would say about your doodles:

SELF PORTRAIT!

I think this must have been drawn when I was thinking of garden arbors:

Dried milkweed pods in the meadows where I walk most days:

More garden design-y brain work:

A windy day when the plants get blown over and onto my walking paths:

A rose is a rose is only a rose is necessary, necessary, necessary:

SELF PORTRAIT!

And then, after I sketch and sketch and sketch, one day I go into my studio and, without looking at any of my sketches, I start painting. After I painted this zinnia, I didn’t like it. But today, I do. That’s Friday for you!

Here’s a painting I did after a week-long outdoor sketching class in Provincetown. On the horizon, are the sand dunes with little trails. The green part is the marsh as the tide is draining the sea away:

NOW–look at the same painting in sepia tones! It looks like a cool map. I love maps.

Art is inside everyone.

I really believe that.

Over-Fifty Shades of Starry Starry Love.

Oh the great expectations of Valentine’s Day.

Here are mine: Arousal.

Dreams–that are normal.

Disappointment, assuaged.

Plan A: Ocean-view room in deserted Bar Harbor, Maine where I planned to take my valentine for a weekend of cross-country skiing and snowshoeing in Acadia National Park. We would have found a brew pub. The town library. Might have shoveled out the fire pits on the coast in Southwest Harbor and created a big, hot-burning blaze. Crazy love.

But the romantic cuddle-huddle against the cold and snow-blinding love won’t happen in that setting, because another blizzard is coming through. The timing isn’t great. Nor are the temperatures, which promise to have wind-chill factors even hardy New Englanders, like us, know we ought to fear. I cancelled the reservation this morning.

What is Plan B?

There’s been a lot of talk about a long-anticipated, must-see movie in the theaters: Not much of a plot. The main character is a crazy eccentric. He grunts, snarls, roars. Neglects women. Sexually harasses them. I hear there’s a scene where he is lashed to a ship’s mast in a snowstorm!

I have to see it. It will get me all excited.

The movie is Mike Leigh’s, “Mr Turner”, about the English Romantic painter, J.M.W. Turner–a man who lived to obsess over capturing the power of the sea and the majesty of light, with paint. Watching the film will inspire an imaginary excursion for my valentine and me into Victorian England, because one of the most romantic escapes we ever enjoyed was a trip to York, England. We arrived late at night when the medieval, walled city glowed by the light of a moon that rose above the York Minster and cast serene shadows of history into every snickleway. A light rain moved in, the moon disappeared, and so did we–into the pubs, into the Roman ruins, into the medieval chambers of dark lives, into the Victorian gloominess of slave trading histories, poverty, and the sumptuous brilliance of ordinary people.

Ordinary people! I love people who are ordinary and self-taught.

After we see the movie, we’ll find a place to have a drink and discuss. I’ll remember college and my first art history teacher–a short woman with hair spun into drifts onto the top of her head. She swayed like a drunken schoolmarm the day she began to talk about J.M.W. Turner. Listening to her, I feared the hair tower would come crashing off her head and, like a woman at a Jim Morrison concert, she might remove all her clothes, climb onto the stage of her desk, and leap right through the screen on the wall where she flashed slides of Turner’s paintings. I left class that day energized: “How can I get art to do that for me?”

My valentine and I will stare into each other’s ordinary eyes over our drinks and tell more stories and prattle on about how ordinary we are. We love to do this–go see great works of art and then come crashing down to earth together, like falling stars, over how ordinary we are.

A few weeks ago, we were at MoMA to see a Matisse show. After that show, we went to visit, in another gallery, everyone’s favorite: Van Gogh’s The Starry Night: I get as close as I can to these kinds of passionate paintings. I want to roll around in every brush stroke. It’s so arousing. I practically want to lick the painting. Only when I’m tied up and handcuffed is it safe for me to continue moving through the galleries. It’s best to put a gag over my mouth, too, and perhaps a leash on me. But–I’ll struggle if anyone tries to cover my eyes. I have anxiety issues and can’t deal with being blindfolded.

*****

The over-50 crowd, the born-to-be ordinary people, (like my valentine and me), can become desperate with the expectations of Valentine’s Day. Some of us have been married forever. To the same person. More than twenty five years of being married to the same person. AND–before we got married, some of us dated forever.

How does anyone get aroused on Valentine’s Day with a lover you’ve had forever and ever? Books? Movies? Excursions to the edges of society, the underworlds of desire, the forbidden behaviors of good Catholics?

We’ll keep holding hands in the art museums and sitting close together at the movies. (BIG screen, letting the full effect of the film seduce us.)

Then return to our ordinary house. Where our own starry, starry love story lives.

We’ll stand next to it, roll around in it, lick it.

And let every brilliant, dreamy part consume us.

Brave Irene and Life’s Snow Days.

How can something so white, create such dark scorn? The snow falls; New England groans. I think snowstorms are beautiful, but unless I want to be scooped up by a snowplow and dumped into a parking-lot snow mountain at Walmart, I best keep this dysfunctional happiness to myself.

One of my favorite heroines is Brave Irene, by the brilliant William Steig. Irene Bobbin was her mother’s dumpling, cupcake, and pudding pie and she was brave. I used to read the story with my children even if it wasn’t a snow day. But—whenever a snow day came along, then we really got into it. Brave Irene was on a mission to deliver a dress her mother had made for the duchess, in time for the ball. It was the most beautiful dress in the world. But her journey would take her over the hills and far away, and there was a snow storm coming. Brave Irene says:

“I can get it there!”

And, “But I love snow!”

She goes on to battle the snowy winds, clinging to the big box with the dress inside.

And, of course, she becomes worn down just before disaster strikes.

But Brave Irene persists, even with a broken heart.

In the end, the duchess sends Brave Irene home in a sleigh, with ginger cake covered in white icing, some oranges and a pineapple, and spice candy of many flavors.

After reading the story on snow days with my children and after playing outside in the horrible cold winds, we ate ginger cakes and oranges and spice candies–or our own versions of such unfettered decadence.

And, of course, the days did come when we found ourselves challenged by true and terrible snow squalls while skiing on scary mountainsides. It would be so snowy, with fog as thick as a grumpy New Englander’s scorn for snow, that we couldn’t see each other. But—at least we could hear each other’s voices, woven in with the howls of the relentless winds:

“Go home!” the wind squalled. “Irene….go hooooooome…”

And no matter where we were, and no matter what storm had blown in to bury us, we became Brave Irene.

We pressed our backs to the wind and snapped, “We will do no such thing you wicked wind!”

*****

I talked my kids through the deepest snows and down the biggest mountains and out of the most frightening storms with Brave Irene.

The storms kept raging and we all kept growing up, and one day the winds shifted and I began to hear my children reminding me to plow on, keep moving, even when there is no one around to advise you.

Brave Irene’s strength comes from visions of her mother and a warm house—any warm house. Also, her yearning to be in the arms of someone special helps her make it through the storm.

Today, in my warm house, I’ll make lunch for my husband who is a little bit grumpy about more cancelled meetings. I, too, had another meeting cancelled for tonight.

But we will be in each other’s arms and we will be warm.

And I don’t make homemade soup and chicken salad, with cakes and spice candies, on just any old day.

Snowflakes.

Snowflakes, by Emily Dickinson

Snow flakes.

I counted till they danced so

Their slippers leaped the town,

And then I took a pencil

To note the rebels down.

And then they grew so jolly

I did resign the prig,

And ten of my once stately toes

Are marshaled for a jig!

*****

Today is the day before my husband’s birthday. He’s a January boy, he loves to ski, and this year a perfect snowstorm arrived in time to help me decorate the house and prepare for his birthday.

Many years ago, when my son was a grammar school boy, the fourth graders had an event called Business Hour. I think they had it once a month or so. During Business Hour, the kids traded arts and crafts or services or baked goods. They earned a form of wampum through completed homework, which they could use to buy anything during Business Hour, or they could just work out their own barter deals. I used to volunteer during Business Hour and ended up shopping most of the time because the kids created things that thrilled my soul.

I have always been a big fan of Kid Art. When you have Kid Art hanging in your house, the prig is constantly reminded to chill and the toes are kept loose for jigs, and the rebel spirit of kid confidence reminds me to infuse a little snowday joy into the times of my life.

All those years ago, I acquired a collection of hand-cut snowflakes from one of my son’s classmates at a Business Hour classroom trade show. Ever since, I have used the treasured collection to decorate the house for my husband’s birthday. I tape each snowflake, delicately, to the bay window near our winter dining area which looks out onto a snowy expanse of gardens where I love being distracted by the comings and goings of robins roosting in the juniper tree to eat the berries. We have a view of our barn, too, when we sit down to share our meals.

*****

Snowflakes. Harbingers of the happy dance. Here are some from my prized collection:

And here they are arranged in compositions on the window for our dining pleasure:

My Lady Mother Nature.

There is not another like Her. She reigns as the only Supreme Queen.

All powerful, all knowing, all gorgeous and wonderful. She can cuddle, punish, and make something out of nothing in all the best, and all the most horrible ways.

She does not limit Herself with rules. Even as others try to find Her patterns, copy Her techniques, pull apart Her process, name Her works of art. She is not knowable. Nor does She ever want to become a brand or establish a school of thought or teach Her methods of success or gather up disciples to be coached.

The intellectuals will proclaim that She can’t be loved, because She is nothing. Yet they obsess over knowing Her as much as I obsess over loving Her.

She combines colors without a color wheel. Textures, shapes–She sculpts without a guide. She follows no one. Using wind, water–time–She is a master at the melodies of waiting. She moves, one snowflake at a time. One frozen droplet. One swish of the bumble bee’s wing.

She gives everything and takes everything away. She is The One Mother Nature.

Today, in my part of the universe, She is in full command. She has stopped the frantic world. I will watch Her in flight, all day. I’ll go out into the fury of Her work, strapping on my snowshoes and packing my body into layers of clothing.

I will marvel at the extremes of all Her details. I will think of a prayer, and say it.

But Mother Nature hears no prayers.

She sends every snowflake from the heavens without a flight pattern, without radar, without a map. There are no trip leaders. No GPS, no cell phone, no pinterest, or instagram.

She will create Her artwork–Her sculpted snow drifts and iced ponds and starry nights and sun shining sparkly snowfields–

Without ever leaning on a prayer.

Gypsy Love.

The moon was out all day. A restless wind howled in the distance and I waited while it made its way toward me. Over the far hills it rushed, bending the poor birch trees already hard at work, holding snow in such pretty clumps of white on its branches. Cold, cold air made me stiff and tense. I waited. When the wind finally swirled around me, twisting my hair into tangles and lashing at my face, it was as terrible as cold could be. I peeked at the moon. The sun didn’t matter that day.

My telephone rang last night. It was a friend asking if she could come over to show me something she’d written seven years ago. I lit the fire and waited for her.

When she arrived we hugged each other, our soft bellies squished up between us.

“I could not have written this,” she said. It was a work of prose poetry and it was about her son’s descent into the living hells of bipolar disorder, drug abuse, and his failed quests to achieve recovery. He died, almost nine years ago, by his own hand.

Had I been all alone after reading the poem, I would have sat still, stunned, unable to think or speak–not wanting to do either, anyway. I only wanted to cry for the rest of my life. It’s true that the work has added power for me, because I knew her son and because I know her and because I know her husband and I know her youngest son, who was very good friends with my son when they were young boys. After I read the prose poem, I handed it to my husband who left the room to read it. When he returned, there weren’t just three of us sitting around the fire–there were four. My friend’s son settled in, too–his spirit freed. Though we knew a lot about his life and the circumstances of his death, now we knew more.

My friend is sure her son is channeling her. She believes she is being called, by him, to help families as they try everything to save loved ones who suffer with mental disorders and addictions. My friend tried everything to help her son.

“Is the writing good enough?” My friend asked. “Do you think I can use this to help people.”

And I answered her, not as a writer, but as a mother. I told her what she already knows, that her relationship with her son has evolved to a place she hoped and hoped for, a place where the darkest days of anguish would be finished. It didn’t happen the way we all wanted it to happen–no mother wants to have a relationship with a child from beyond the grave–but she is now in a place to help others, and her son is joining her. They are working together from a world of deeply spiritual love that only a mother and a child can know.

“I don’t know if I can do this.” My friend said. “But he won’t leave me alone. He keeps encouraging me. My mind races and races and won’t stop.”

I reminded her that she has been practicing and walking through the motions for a long time–she forgets how she has spent the last several years–stopping by my house, walking through my gardens, telling me everything. Each year, the remembered pain of her son’s life does not abate, and her self-criticism over what else she could have done to save him remains the glimmer of hope that inspires her to reach out and perhaps save another family.

I discovered, a long time ago, the point of WHAT ELSE in life. After the counselors, the prescription drugs, the treatment centers, the retreats, the priests–after all of that doesn’t work, what else is there to do? Sometimes, there is nothing else. The pain is so insurmountable, the disease is so toxic, the injury is so grave–there is only the grace of death.

But sometimes, the what else is the unprofessional, un-clinical, unscientific, imperfect, untrained, nonjudgmental, unrestrained excursion into the heart of another human being. My friend knows how judgmental she used to be. It makes her heartsick to recall how she denied the depth of her son’s despair and dangerous behaviors. I could only nod my head, recalling all the things I believed until my own experiences changed–and continue to change–the ways I process and interpret the confusions of what it means to be human.

I began this week talking with another friend whose son took his own life almost three years ago. I am thinking of a friend today who is in court battling to keep her young daughter safe from a father dangerously addicted to alcohol. Not many of us avoid adversity.

“So you think the writing is good enough.” My friend said, holding the papers inscribed with the holy poem. “I just don’t know if I could tell the story and get through reading this to people who need to hear it.”

“Then call me.” I said. “I’ll go with you, whenever and wherever you are led to help other families.”

My friend’s face lit up. “You will?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go, too.” My husband said.

The last times my husband and I visited with my friend’s son, he was doing some painting work for us. Every now and then he’d take a break with my husband for a few guitar lessons. He was a brilliant, beautiful boy then, almost in high school. Just a boy.

After my friend left, my husband and I cried for the rest of the night–not even in our dreams was our shared grief spared.

The Found Art of Dancing.

Friday night and company rolled into camp for the weekend. It was my husband’s sister and she is as much as fun as he is–always game for an adventure that promises a good time.

Gypsies like to dance so we invited our guest to a dance lesson at our dance studio where we are taking lessons, followed by a dance party where we could practice whatever we learned. The featured dance lesson that night was The Swing. Using all my powers of concentration, I moved my feet in the demonstrated patterns. I practiced a few rounds on my own. I practiced with a dance partner. I tried putting it all together with music.

It was great. We were all having a good time with a lot of laughs.

But then came the transition that used to make me pop out my eyeballs and drop my head onto the desk when I was a kid in school–it’s that moment when you’ve figured out how to add two plus two AND you’re good enough to get it to equal four, AND you’re satisfied–ready for recess. But the dang teacher waltzes over to your desk, puts his or her hands on your shoulders (tells you to pick your eyeballs up off the floor) and starts leading you further and further onto the dance floor. He or she wants you to find unknown values for x, y, and z using mathematical slices of pi.

You’re ready for this! The great educator smiles.

NO. You want to say. Can’t you see I’m in a happy place? Can’t you see I want to grow up and be a professional doodler?

If only I could learn how to mete out my powers of concentration, instead of using up everything I’ve got from the start.

After the dance instructor taught us the basics of bopping and swinging on the dance floor, he stopped the music and said the next thing we were going to learn how to do, was underarm turns. Turn is such a tame word because we weren’t turning, we were spinning. And, there wasn’t just one spin, there were three. I felt like a ballerina-school flunk-out spinning in a music box owned by Sid on Toy Story.

But I knew I just needed to regroup my powers of concentration, and see if I could get two plus two, to equal four plus four, to equal eight plus eight. I needed to figure out the dance pattern, learn how to count the pattern with the timing of the music, and do it all without looking at my feet. Grade-school never promised me that if I learned math, I would be able to dance. Actually, math is important if you ever want to learn anything that has to do with music. In fact, if all I ever did in grade school was learn how to play the great music of the world, using all the great musical instruments of the world, along with learning all the steps, to all the great dances of the world–well, there you have it: another one of my plans for education that would save the world.

After our dance lesson, it was time for the dance party. I’m too old to act silly, so I kept it to myself that all I wanted to do was throw not only my head, but my entire body out the window. I’m an introvert, too, so I’d rather stand in the corner and watch. And doodle. Honestly, dancing not only works out your brain, but you are expected to get your body in on the action, too. There are leaders and followers and it doesn’t happen in the safe, sedate world of cyberspace with a little thumb action–it happens in real time, with real brains and bodies grooving to music. There were waltzes, foxtrots, tangos, rumbas, cha chas, and other dances going on that did not look easy. It’s one thing to jump into the lake when you don’t know how to swim–you can thrash around on your own. It’s quite another thing to be thrown onto the dance floor, and find yourself thrashing in the arms of a stranger with twinkle toes that have been lovingly placed into a pair of official dancing shoes.

The polite dancers smile at you, tell you what to do, and after a few trips around the dance floor, they say: You’re ready for this!

*****

For the past several months, I’ve drawn a few doodles on the dance floor with my feet. I’ve filled my brain with counting patterns and steps. In between, there’s my body. My whole body. Every part of it can move to the music, with a partner. I’m the follower. And, oh, the places I go through the music of the world and the dances of the world.

There’s a lot of following going on in the world nowadays. Dancing is my kind of following–I get to meet the people I follow and together we perform the dances that used to bring people together in real time, for shared enjoyment and pleasure.

Anyone can learn to dance and begin traveling across dance floors close to home. The next thing you know, you and your dance partner will be lighting up the dance floors of the world.

But you have to know how to count!

*****

Buenos Aires. Our niece took us to a tango parlor, where the musicians and dancers cast a spell on us.

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Art Appreciation

The Ruffed Grouse.

Work. Skiing. Roses.

Gypsy Pole Dancing.

Gypsy Art Show.

Over-Fifty Shades of Starry Starry Love.

Brave Irene and Life’s Snow Days.

Snowflakes.

My Lady Mother Nature.

Gypsy Love.

The Found Art of Dancing.