A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

It was a hot August day, midsummer, when just before sunset a big bug (our motorhome) landed in a meadow at the edge of an enchanted forest somewhere along the Hudson River.

The bug’s roomy belly contained sleeping quarters for human beings.

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The big bug didn’t make a sound after landing, even as the insects in the meadow sang the loudest love song of all time,

Is Anybody Out There?

In spite of the noise going on in the meadow, and a dream that left me dancing with the saints, I fell fast asleep within the big bug’s belly.

The next morning, a brilliant sunrise awakened me.

I put on a dress and went leaping into a field of flowers. Filled with wonder, I gathered up the edges of my dress and offered a prayerful bow to the Meadow Makers. It was a heartfelt, and—the deeper I dipped—dizzying curtsy. Oh! I winced—for I felt the world taking the curves a little too fast—my poor fragile mind! Perhaps I am still a little bit drunk!

Upon righting myself among the flowers, and swatting away the stars flashing like fireflies over the surface of my eyeballs, a smile blossomed from the corners of my lips all the way up to where raindrops, no matter what the season, begin life as snowflakes. I pinched myself.

Methinks I’ve been bewitched, said I.

And after I said it, the flowers in the meadows swayed.

********

It all started at sunset the night before when a merry troupe of wandering musicians, summoned to tease and tantalize tango dancers of the Hudson Valley, sprang from behind the trees in the enchanted forest. Tadpoles in nearby ponds reacted to the fairy-dust-spangled revelry by tucking their tails inside their ears and covering their eyes with each the other’s tongue. Squirrels ran down rabbit holes and rabbits ate the beards off frightened hobbits. Roosters barked, birds honked, and plump woodchucks dangled upside down inside hickory nuts.

Tango dancers emerged from hideouts throughout the valley, ready to follow the merry wanderers to a tent in the heart of the enchanted forest. The tent sparkled with stained glass and gleaming chandeliers. Golden fringe hung from red velvet walls and ceilings. Glossy wooden dance floors shimmered.

Indeed, the shimmy to come would shatter the traditions of tango.

The elite society of tango dancers donned their special shoes, lowered their sexy eyes, and parted their lips just enough to capture herds of forest dust mites, cast aswirl by the rising heat. Then, writhing around inside their sweaty bodies, the dancers slumped up against each other—squeezing the life out of their very own dreams—preparing to dance the way they’ve always danced, the way they were taught, the way everyone expected them to dribble their toes across the floor.

Until the troupe of merry wanderers began to play.

The goblins and elves and leprechauns on stage, snake charmed their harmonicas, pianos, violins, stand-up basses, guitars, and drums. Their joyful music-making answered all the insects, in all the meadows, in all the world.

Is anybody out there?

The replies kept coming in melodious, mesmerizing doses. Hypnotic states of joy ensued and the dancers felt their hearts being rescued from sheltered cages. They watched as every willing heart was set afloat on the midsummer night’s breeze. Their spirits liberated, the dancers tangoed like freshly-kissed toads in the arms of legendary lovers.

The merry wanderers had done it.

And when the merry wanderers flew from the stage, the dancers—a little boozed up and overly excited—tried to make the merry wanderers stay forever.

But it was all a dream.

The troupe had never played together before, some had never played tango, and they had only come upon each other that very night in the enchanted forest.

In fact, they barely had a moment to enjoy a bite to eat in the belly of the big bug before they disappeared into the woods.

********

Later in the evening, a dancer discovered that I might have been the mother of one of the merry wanderers. She said, “You must have been a wonderful mother! They are all so talented and they play so well together and I hear they didn’t even have a chance to rehearse!”

Sometimes I was and sometimes I wasn’t a wonderful mother.

But if there’s one thing all wonderful mothers know, it is this: when you have a child, you give birth to dreams. But your dreams aren’t the ones that come to life.

Wonderful mothers learn that trying to trap lightning in a jar is a waste of energy.

Once, my merry wandering child dreamed that he could make people feel happy, inspired, and brand new by playing music. He dedicated his heart and soul and body and mind to the quest.

On a midsummer’s night, I experienced his dreams coming true.

It felt wonderful to be his mother.

The Slow Art of Finding Peace and True North.

Sebastian Smee is an art critic. He writes for the Boston Globe and he has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

In the Boston Globe this week, there was an article written by Smee about the Maine Art Museum Trail. I looked forward to reading it, but by the end of the opening paragraph, I found myself terribly concerned for all the people who might read the same first lines and decide to anchor themselves forever to southerly, and most-convenient-to-Boston, regions of New England.

Smee had written: “There are two museums on the Maine Art Museum Trail that have so far eluded me: The University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor and the Monhegan Museum of Art and History. The first—sorry Bangor—is too far north of Boston. The second is on an island—and that’s just inconvenient.”

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THROW OFF THE BOWLINES! SAIL AWAY FROM THE SAFE HARBOR! (Mark Twain, I think.)

********

Bangor is not too far north. I promise. There is, as mentioned in Smee’s article, The University of Maine Art Museum to see up there. But there’s more. For instance, if you want to visit many of the places that inspired the art all along The Maine Art Museum Trail, keep driving down east to the coastline beyond Bangor. You’ll find Acadia National Park plus a culturally distinct region of the world.

All you have to do is turn off the GPS and follow your nose. The scent of the sea, or at least the marvelous stink of a dramatically displaced low tide, will lead you to unexpected life-changing experiences such as the pleasures of being a spectator for the Women’s Skillet Toss at the Blue Hill Fair. This rowdy event fills the grandstands and it’s authentic Maine through and through, so even though you risk getting walloped upside the head by an errant iron skillet, you are not required to wear a helmet in order to attend the show. Women competitors are classified as Kittens and Cougars. They fling iron skillets as far, and as straight, as possible. Some of them can send those old iron workhorses sailing further than a soldier’s dream for a home-cooked meal! The Blue Hill Fair pleased E.B. White so much, it inspired many of the story lines and settings for one of the world’s (and my family’s) all-time favorite books, Charlotte’s Web.

As for Smee claiming Monhegan Island is just too inconvenient to visit, allow me to transform the idea of such a journey into something desirable, convenient, and perhaps necessary to your passage through life here on Earth.

********

Let’s start with a time warp…the year is 2007…Labor Day weekend…I am Mother to a 15-year-old son beginning his junior year in high school and a 12-year-old daughter ready for college instead of middle school…both children are willful, independent rapscallions…we are bound for a campout on the coast of Maine and plan to take a day trip to Monhegan Island…Raffi music in the camper has been taken over by Hendrix…it is painfully inconvenient for my husband and me to travel with our teenagers…it is more painfully inconvenient for said teenagers to travel with us.

Places like Monhegan Island help counterbalance the laws of nature and the laws of technology in our tense and complicated modern world. You might not be suffering through the throes of parenting (or any other situation of nature-determined, unconditional love), but perhaps you are afflicted with the side effects of Blindsided-TechAlien Abduction. In other words, there’s a chance you’ve been abducted by technology aliens and don’t know it. The aliens are so charming and so invisible, you haven’t noticed how conveniently they have settled into your life. They eat with you, sleep with you, make decisions for you, and then they steal your identity, your attention span, your creative impulses, your freedom, and your ability to look UP and OUT.

Monhegan Island is small—only about one mile from end to end and side to side. There are no paved roads and not many cars. You ride a ferry boat to get there. Travel by foot prevails once you are upon the island.

Here’s what happened when our modern family went to Monhegan Island, as recorded–by hand–in my unedited travel journals:

Sunday, September 2, 2007. En route to Monhegan Island. At last. We won’t have a lot of time there. Two porpoises leapt along our port side as we left Boothbay Harbor. Best snack in the pack today was made by the kids: graham crackers with nutella, peanut butter, and 2 squares of Hershey’s. I read Checkhov’s short story, The Lady with the Dog, during the ferry cruise.

We made landfall at 11:05. Our crossing cut through calm seas under outrageous summery-blue skies. Stopped at The Barnacle after getting off the boat to find out what the local shop had to eat. We got two cups of clam chowder (with extra crackers) and one blueberry scone.

We sat under a stand of sunflowers to eat the chowder while bees flew orbital patterns around and around and around.

We set out walking. Burnthead Trail to Cliff Trail and then lost our way a bit to Cathedral Pines. Breathtaking views. You can see all the way out to where the water falls off the edge of the earth. The perches on this little island’s cliffs are not so little. I don’t know how high up we were, but it was high enough–rugged and rocky–and I didn’t like when the kids chose to stand close to the edges. They are hiking barefooted. I read the warning in the Visitor’s Guide out loud to my family. It sounded more like a work of dramatic fiction or an ancient myth, though. Rather than encouraging caution, I think my reading inspired a heroic contest of becoming a sole survivor:

“Don’t try to swim or wade at Lobster Cove or any area on the back side of the island. Undertows there are unpredictable and dangerous, and high surf can sweep you away if you’re too close to the seas. No one has been saved who has gone overboard on the south or east sides of the island. Always keep a bulwark between you and the sea whenever viewing the surf.”

Picnicked in a stunning setting where the world could not be more scenic, nor life more idyllic. This is true even for a family filled with angst that can barely talk to each other.

I was happy to move away from the cliffs and enter the safe and soundless pretty moss woods at the Cathedral Pines trail. The moss must have felt dreamy to my barefooted hikers. Christmas trees adorn the trail as do the infamous neighborhoods of fairy houses constructed throughout the woodlands. We stopped to admire the imaginative handwork. Some houses had tables set with dinner in acorn bowls.

We walked on and on until we found ourselves busily pressing little sticks into the ground and balancing dried leaves atop them. My daughter built a fairy house next to a stream. My son built a fairy house perched perfectly in the crooks of roots at the base of a big tree. I built a small hut in between the two. My husband traveled from house to house to help with the fun. We concentrated intently and quietly at our works of art for a long time in the cool and bug-free forest.

After we were satisfied with our fairylands, we walked back to the wharf, passing the island schoolhouse where there is a peace pole with the words, May Peace Prevail on Earth, written in several languages. A big wish from such a small island.

Before the loud blast from the ferry sounded a warning for departure, we had time for one more stop at The Barnacle. We got root beer, ice cream, and a fruit smoothie.

Returned to camp by 7PM. Both kids were good and dirty from hiking barefoot all day. Everyone cleaned up for the campfire. My husband and my son played guitar. Before bed, another camper stopped by our site to thank us for the music. She said it reminded her of her father and how he used to play guitar during her childhood campouts.

********

One way to get to Monhegan Island is to take the ferry from Boothbay Harbor, Maine. A great place to stay is Southport Island, which is just beyond Boothbay Harbor, over a swing bridge. If you want to camp, there’s a campground there called Gray Homestead. If you want to rent a cottage, I recommend “An Tigin”, which you can find on VRBO or HomeAway. “Cheerful Southport Island Waterfront Cottage” might come up in an Internet search for “An Tigin.” The cottage is quaint and clean with good vibes of hard-working history and devoted love.

The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens are nearby for another day trip. The best children’s garden is there–it is designed to encourage fascinating and fabulous fun. It succeeds famously.

Just down the road from the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, there is another swing bridge at the Trevett Country Store and Post Office. This swing bridge is operated by hand! According to my husband, the Trevett Country Store has the best lobster rolls. Southport Island has a country store, too, and their lobster rolls are good. So are their cupcakes! They also have a good selection of wine.

The Southport Public Library has a pretty cool butterfly collection. And the Hendrick’s House Museum has a letter written in perfect penmanship by a woman to her husband while he was serving in the Civil War. Not only did he receive the letter, but the letter survived the war. The survival of perfect penmanship has not fared so well.

Nevertheless, the slow art of finding peace does survive in places like Monhegan Island where leaving behind the conveniences of life—the car, the technology, the scheduled activities—isn’t inconvenient at all.

In fact, it’s restorative.

Slow days bring us one step closer to finding, and believing in, our own true norths.

********

Shining Island Nights.

I am alone in a cottage on Southport Island, Maine.

The tide is up, the sun has gone down, and the moon is growing full.

I arrived a day ago amid surly, stormy winds that pushed my car into drunken-man swaggers making it impossible for me to drive a straight line along the center lane of the Maine turnpike. Though the wind came in bold bursts, the rain did not. It fell with vertical and horizontal determination, saturating the airspace between Heaven and Earth in the surround sound of snapping patter that was never accompanied by pitter. Temperatures stayed in the 50’s—chilly enough to get a fire going in the wood stove of the little cottage I’ve rented for one week.

I am here to immerse myself in the studies of Myth, Magic, and Medicinals at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. My one-week course is entitled: Drawing and Painting Medicinal Plants of the Physic Garden. Every summer, I pack up my books, pencils, pens, paintbrushes and pads of paper, and retreat to summer school, somewhere. This year, I am pretending to be a monk with a little stall in a cathedral that overlooks gardens I am in charge of tending, studying, and drawing for the rest of my life.

On my way to this summer’s brain and body summer camp, I stopped in Brunswick, Maine to view the Bowdoin Art Museum’s new show, Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art 1860-1960. The show opened as I was driving by and runs through October. Such indulgent moodiness possessed me as I dashed through the gloomy rain, descended into the basement of the museum, and commenced falling under the spells of American artists who were crazy, brilliant, multi-talented, hard working, and passionate.

Night Vision is superb. It leads the psyche, via art, through darkness, illumination, electricity, romance, and altered perceptions. The range of featured artists and media is stellar. The history is broadly and surprisingly revelatory. This will probably be my favorite art show of the year and for anyone motoring back and forth on Coastal Route 1 in Maine this summer, a stop to see the show will be a highlight (or bright nightlight!) of summer. Free admission for non-stop thrills and chills and fainting spells.

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It is now twilight, as I write, after my first day of summer school and I should have studied and practiced what I learned in class today. But summer’s sun composed symphonies upon the sea and inside the forests all around me, and I found myself out walking instead.

There was a wooden bridge at the end of my street beckoning me.

There were charming gardens beside the cottage begging for admiration.

And, of course, I noticed how well suited I am for sitting still in the final light of summer’s last Monday in June. There was something else on my mind, too—three years ago on this date, my beloved father-in-law died. Thirty years ago, he would have awakened us at dawn, filled the thermos with hot coffee, revved up the motorboats, and off we would have gone to prowl the lakes of Maine for fish. I didn’t care so much about catching fish. It was enough to catch the break of day, and the quiet that ushers it in, with him and my husband and Uncle Herb and cousin Mark. We liked letting the first thoughts of the day commingle with the soft lapping of lake water rocking up against our boats. Aunt Margie and Mom Bertz welcomed us back to shore and the rest of the day was given over to talk about how great it was to be together, in Maine.

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Moonlit tranquility is arising at last to finish off day one of my summer school. The gentle drones of a distant foghorn sound like sighs of romance as I prepare to go to bed and sink my head into the pillow. But for anyone sleeping alone in a small cottage by the sea in Maine, a foghorn, before long, takes on the sounds of a moaning madman. The neighborhood, soon after, becomes Stephen King’s. And the doors—are they locked?

And the sweet little cottage, does it have a basement?

Louder, louder, louder groans the foghorn. Redrum. Redrum. REDRUM.

And the gardens around the cottage—the hedges—is the moon bright enough?

For the art-class-lady to ever find her way out?

Will she ever learn to draw and paint and name every plant on Earth?

I already like my teacher. She told me that if all I do, all week, is spend time learning how to draw a leaf, then that’s just fine. I can be a crazy leaf lady. She also said that when you are drawing, both hands must be at work advancing the cause of art—as soon as she sees one hand being used to cradle a slumping head, she comes in for a rescue.

And before we can begin to draw any plant, we have to write about the plant’s history and its healing properties. We have to write about how and where the plant grows. We have to write and write and write, using any words at all that come to our own minds, about every part of the plant, in every possible way.

I am so bewitched by the shine of my midsummer night’s dreams.

My cauldron boil-eth over.

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Views from my cottage and a wooden bridge.

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Ralph Albert Blakelock’s A Waterfall, Moonlight 1886

On display in the show at the Bowdoin Art Museum, Night Vision

Blakelock was a self-taught original. He studied the styles of the Hudson River School. A madman, a genius—some saw him as a prophet of the styles of abstraction to come. This painting was one of my favorites in the show, borrowed from the MET in New York.

AND LOOK WHAT HAPPENED in my very own little cove of the world the next night!!!

Myth, magic, and the medicinal madness of island nights.

Gypsy.

I am going to Alabama. My husband has sent a deposit of faith and cash to a man in Montgomery who is selling a used motor home we would like to buy. We’ll arrive by airplane, exchange pleasantries, and then, if everything is as it should be, we’ll toss our bags into that particular recreational vehicle, climb aboard, and drive home to New England.

We plan to stop in Atlanta to see friends. Then mosey on down the road to Asheville, to see Asheville. And after that, we’ll share 900 miles of come what may.

I texted my son and daughter: We are going to Alabama. Dad bought a luxury motor home. An adventure! Like the first time we got one. I’m sure there will be room in the compartments for your tents and boogie boards. The road is my home.

*****

When I was a ninth-grader in Arizona, I took a school bus Monday through Friday from the foothills of the Santa Rita Mountains, just north of the Mexican border, to my regional high school, just south of Tucson. The commute was one hour, each way, no AC. On a typical non-winter’s day in the Sonoran Desert, the interior temp of the bus, at rest under the unobstructed rays of the sun, could rise to over 120 degrees. Once we got going, though, hot air blasted through the open windows and cooled our ride to a blessed 115 degrees. It was one, big, yellow convection oven.

Our bus driver was a large Italian man, who learned about patience in New York City where he had lived until he retired with his family to the borderland boondocks of Arizona. No funny stuff on his bus. After the godfather of bus drivers delivered us to school and drove out of sight, I’d walk with a few friends back to the highway—a major trucking route. There, we’d space ourselves out along the breakdown lane, and hitchhike to Tucson. We didn’t have cell phones in our pockets, only our doled out lunch money which we used to buy Big Gulps all day, chasing them back with strips of beef jerky.

We’d hitchhike back to school in time to ride the school bus to nowheresville again, our bodily fluids replenished for the sweltering journey home.

Once, a big truck stopped to give me a ride. I felt all Janis Joplin, as if my once-in-a-lifetime chance to light out for the territories had arrived. I was ready to put flowers in my hair, embroider peace signs onto my bell-bottomed hip huggers, learn how to sing the blues, and proclaim the road as my home.

I was fourteen. Old enough.

Eventually, I got nabbed for chronic truancy and was sentenced to the wastelands of after-school detention where my drifter/dreamer habits of mind were to begin the long process of reformation.

It was too late. I’d arrived in Arizona from Indiana in a convoy of two station wagons with one break down in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

I loved America and I wanted to be a cowboy.

******

I’m supposed to be packing up some things we might need for our road trip from Alabama to New England and it’s making me think about my honeymoon almost 30 years ago. We packed some things back then—a tent and sleeping bags at least—and flew to New Mexico where we got a car and drove around Colorado, Utah, Arizona and back to New Mexico. Everything we needed fit into the trunk of our rental car.

Monument Valley, circa 1988, and our first road house.

This time we don’t need the tent, or the compact backpack stove. And it’s rattling my brain—the way driving on a pot-holed, frost-heaved highway rattles my brain—to know we need cell phones, computers, chargers, and some money.

So far, I’ve purchased a brand new, big, clumsy-paged Rand-McNally Road Atlas. Published and printed in the U.S.A.

Every page in that grand picture book looks to me like a slice of my brain.

*******

The motor home lifestyle was always my husband’s big idea. He presented the plan to me when our children were toddlers and they used to crawl all over us in our tent, all night long, on every camping trip.

I didn’t really know anything about motor homes.

But after we got one, our weekends together as a family began to last forever. Time slowed down. There was live music and storytelling and great food and crackling campfires. Life smelled like fresh-cooked bacon and damp books and bug spray.

American and Canadian blacktops became strewn with flower petals,

as our windshield got smattered with bug guts.

We called our rig the family camper and gave the kids their own tents when they could throw an axe, with precision, while blindfolded, through the center of a television screen.

Indeed, after I texted the kids about the motor home, my son sent a text: That’s badass! Hopefully you got one with a lot of exterior tvs.

My reply: Of course. And the satellite dish converts to a hot tub.

This one looks to me like it might be a Las Vegas Lounge Glamper.

But I am crazy for the driver because he is fun, so I’m on board with whatever he wants to do

and wherever we end up going.

********

The last family road house, circa 2012, Lime Rock Race Park

The dad on the roof, watching the son learn how to be a race car driver.

Rich Man.

Plan: Depart after chores on Saturday morning, motoring 160-ish miles southwest for an overnight in the Hudson River Valley.

Chosen villages: Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown, New York.

Opt for one afternoon activity on Saturday, agreeable to all two of us.

Sunday already figured out: First to the Bronx, for the New York Botanical Garden’s show, Frida Kahlo – Art. Garden. Life. After that: A Sunday afternoon street fair in Soho where our son would be performing with a band.

Since the Frida Kahlo excursion was something I wanted to do, it was only fair to balance Saturday with a visit to something my husband would want to see. We chose the Beaux-Arts bling of John D. Rockefeller’s estate Kykuit. Pronounced, “Kye-cut”, as in cut a check.

At Kykuit, our tour guide, (a perky opera singer), directed us through the interior living spaces, the art galleries, the carriage barn, and the grand gardens. She told neat and tidy stories about the Rockefeller family. Everyone was polite and listened well, but many of us had read or heard other stories about the family, too. Soon, whispered remarks with smirks and sighs spiced up the lonely settings of JDR’s Gilded Age otherworld—now at rest like an unblemished ghost town, encased in a crystal bubble. The gardens are so meticulously manicured and carefully preserved, that not even with a worthy breeze blowing in from the shores of one of the most romantic rivers, would one leaf or one fragrant flower petal dare to take flight.

Nor would one weed dare to trespass.

Nor were there any pathways for a visitor to choose, instead.

Walking the grounds, I felt as though I’d slipped between the covers of a sumptuous art history book, without marginalia or dog-eared pages, where everything came to life off the pages.

How famously our culture preserves the legends of wealth and legacy.

As an enthusiast of the phenomenons of human nature, I like traveling to the monuments, museums, and palaces where the booty of human fortunes is displayed. It’s thought provoking and interesting to visit the fairylands of rich Americans because many of them used their wealth to hire rockstar architects, designers, and artists to create their utopias.

When rich people die, they leave a trail of art history, decorative arts history, and garden design history loaded with ideas for us do-it-yourselfers whose garages are cluttered with monuments to frustration—like the drill with as much power as a hamster’s electric toothbrush or the bags of Grub-B-Gone that were as useful as the empty wallet they drained dry.

Whatever stories have been silenced by time in the empty interiors of historic homes or buried in the gardens surrounding them, the settings that remain still tap the imagination. It’s one thing to view a painting in a typical museum. It’s quite another charming thing to walk through gardens and landscapes growing more and more palatial, long past the days when their first admirers sat with a cup of tea underneath a newly-planted allee, without a computer, or a cell phone, or an income tax.

I journey to the sites, primed to be inspired with ideas and prepared to fall under the spells of several emotional extremes: I am convinced I could have been a happy tycoon. I am convinced I could have been a happy, married-to-wealth, lady of the manor. I am convinced I could have been a happy caretaker of noble gardens, living in a stone cottage nearby, writing poetry. I am convinced I could have been the go-to designer of the times, hired to create the most impressive works of art for the most insatiable rich people in the world. I am convinced I could have been the darling first born, given over to the greatest educators in the greatest schools, coddled and cuddled and mentored by the most ruthless businessmen and women. I am convinced I could have been the beloved philanthropist who saves the world.

All the money in the world, whether it is controlled by one person or one family or one government, will never save the world.

I came to a couple of conclusions after touring Kykuit. First, I have lived my life without ever having a brand new car, and, after walking through the carriage barn at Kykuit, I realized I have never wanted a brand new car. I want horse-drawn carriages and I want the rest of the world to want them, too. Gas-powered, horseless carriages have wrecked the world. Secondly, if I had an art collection like Nelson Rockefeller’s—including the Picasso Tapestries he commissioned a woman in France to weave by hand, in cahoots with Pablo himself—I would never display my collection in a cramped, subterranean man cave on some of the most prime real estate in New York State.

Thanks to Nelson Rockefeller, the art and cultural history of Kykuit has been preserved. Up until his storied reign over the Rockefeller kingdoms, all Rockefeller residences had been demolished, by family decree. For instance, in Maine, you can tour the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Gardens in Seal Harbor (by reservation only), but the house where she summered with her husband, JDR, Jr., is gone with the Atlantic winds. After touring Kykuit, a second-hand store shopaholic can only wince at thoughts of what became of the contents and components of all other Rockefeller residences.

*****

We had dinner later in the evening, after our Kykuit Grand Tour, in Tarrytown at Bistro 12. The restaurant is run by the artful energy of the owners, who are from Madeira, Portugal. I think the chef is from Italy. Therefore, European dining reigns. The owners work the floor and the bar. Just when we were sad to sense that the evening was coming to a end, the owner arrived with a complimentary cordial. He also revealed himself as the painter of all the artwork hanging on the walls. There was a ukulele on the bar. We asked about it. The owner played it for us. He proudly, and gently, told us that we were all wrong about the ukulele. Though it might have stolen our hearts in Hawaii, the instrument arrived there in the late 1800’s, and was brought by immigrants from Madeira, Portugal who had gone to Hawaii to work in the sugar cane fields.

*****

On Sunday we went to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul, her home with gardens in Mexico, as interpreted by the New York Botanical Gardens. It’s not the first time New York City has hosted stories from the life of Frida Kahlo. In 1934, her husband Diego Rivera experienced a bitter battle of ideals with Nelson Rockefeller who had commissioned Rivera to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center. The mural included the face of Lenin and Rivera refused to change the artwork he was commissioned to create. Rivera was dismissed, his artwork destroyed.

Our visits to Kykuit and the New York Botanical Gardens stimulated plenty of conversations:

The designers of Kykuit were guided by European artistic styles.

—Frida Kahlo wanted to rid herself and her culture of the trappings of European culture.

Kykuit was loaded with copies of existing art.

—Frida Kahlo was an original.

Kykuit represented comfort and joyful excess, with heartbreak and adversity subdued.

—Casa Azul housed a lifetime of physical and mental suffering, documented through Kahlo’s works of art.

Nelson Rockefeller’s art collection is squished into a musty underground corridor.

—And at the New York Botanical Gardens, original, rarely exhibited Frida Kahlo paintings were squished into a small gallery in a huge building that required a cramped elevator ride in order to view the wonderful work.

Both excursions to view art and study art history wended us through stunning late-spring gardens.

Our final excursion to Soho, on the other hand, to see our son perform in a band at a street fair was not as calming—we got stuck in horseless carriage gridlock, New York City style, all the way from the Bronx.

After the street fair, we had time for one beer with our son and his band mates out on the patio at his place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. While my husband and the devoted musicians passed around a guitar, I noticed Morning Glories, Nasturtiums, and Zinnias, all planted by my son, growing in his urban gardens—the richest green legacies from his youthful summertime days out in the country.

Here’s where to go to find original art NOW: It’s happening TONIGHT, June 10th, at Cake Shop in NYC. (As in, “Let them eat cake.”) One of NYC’s best venues for music. My son and his band mates are putting on a show FOR THE PEOPLE!

http://www.teethpeople.bandcamp.com

Find the Rich Man disc under discography—

First song on the link: RICH MAN.

*****

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Rich art. Original. For the people. Happening now.

Rich Man disc @

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Block Island Day Trip. From Here to Eternity.

We sailed on the early ferry

crossing through bright fog

to glacial remnants of cobble stones and sand.

We rode our bicycles to a beach where seagulls sat on their nests

watching us arrive.

I didn’t bring anything to read.

Fabled seascapes,

—the settings from thirty-five years of our yesterdays—

glowed in the haze.

Guess where we are, I said to my husband,

pretend we’re shipwrecked.

He guessed Hawaiian waters

rocky Maine coast

Tahitian princess.

Then he closed his eyes for a long rest.

I watched a seagull snap a stranded crab from the foam at the edge of the sea.

It hammered at the wriggling crustacean, drilled into it

until another seagull swooped down, to battle for leftovers

and won.

Satisfied, the intruder cleaned up in the surf.

We rode our bicycles through pasturelands, to walking trails, and found more beaches

where the ocean rolled onto the shore and over the rocks

Eternity’s loudest lullaby!

At the end of the day, a downhill dash

on a curvy road

spilled us back into the harbor town.

We cruised full speed—

sunburned, sunbathed, and sunstruck,

then stopped for frozen margaritas on a summertime porch.

I said,

When I was riding down the hill so fast, I felt twenty years old.

He said,

You look eighteen.

Long live the salty love story!

Adrift, in the mists of memory.

*****

Corn Neck Road to the end and a walk from Settler’s Rock out to the North Lighthouse and beach before later ferries, with more people, arrive on the island.

*****

The drama of everyday heartbreak in the gull-nesting areas.

*****

Clay Head Trail on bluffs with a rope-assisted climb down to the beach.

*****

The infamous Mohegan Bluffs.

Last bikes on the racks.

The Analyst’s Couch is My Rock.

A traveler scans the horizon, sees an island, and says to the wind, take me there. The wind loops a breeze through the traveler’s wish and then the wind does what the wind has been doing since the first falling stars soared from the heavens and through the solar systems, lighting up all the storms of life.

The wind sways; it bends; it flutters. It enlivens the traveler’s lungs with oxygen and sucks away sighs of the moody blues. Sometimes the wind lifts the traveler onto swooning heaps of happiness. Sometimes, terrible howlings shred the harmonies of all good dreams.

The traveler calls to the wind that she is feeling so done with the insane world. She has been made so crazy by the insame-ity of humanity. Take me there, she says again, her eyes fixed on the distant horizon where an island she needs is floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

The wind spirits the traveler ashore, delivering her, (with three companions), to a notable nowhere in the civilized world—Mount Desert Island, Maine—where the traveler notices her cell phone has no signal. She ignites a bonfire, in celebration, and dances all around it. The traveler flings her cell phone to a hungry seagull passing overhead. The bird snags it out of thin air and the traveler watches as the bird flies up, up, up and lets the cell phone go, go, go. It drops from the bird’s beak, like an unfortunate clam, and cracks apart on a salted, granite boulder nestled in mounds of slippery seaweed.

Both the bird and the traveler see that the cell phone has no meat.

The gull glides away, laughing.

*****

The traveler and her companions, (husband, daughter, daughter’s boyfriend), settle into their island cottage and begin preparing the arrival dinner, a feast of fish that will be paired with wines and vegetables and fresh breads.

The tide recedes, the table is set.

A sandpiper prances along exposed seabeds, probing the muck for sustenance. The animal moves to rhythms of the hunt played out in an orchestra of beautifully-evolved long legs attached to a feathered body where a lean neck with a beady-eyed head controls the stealth baton of a stabbing beak.

Everyone watches the sandpiper.

Thus passes the early evening’s happy hours.

It is late in the month of May. The travelers will depart for their first sleep on the island into a cold night.

The moon is a crescent; the stars are bright.

When morning comes, the sea will still be present, swaying over the edge of every horizon.

*****

Mount Desert Island and Acadia National Park float in the Atlantic Ocean three hundred driving miles away from where I live. I keep a pass to the park in my car. If I need a session with my island-spirit analysts, or if I just want to give my heart a romantic work out, I take the road trip down east to one of Maine’s most treasured islands where exposed granite cliffs and mountaintops rise out of Christmastree-scented forests. Heart stopping views put everything in its place—the sky, the sea, and the mountain. The molecule of oxygen, the droplet of water, the grain of sand. The winners, the losers. The lovers, the haters. The jiggle-butts, the hard bodies. The brilliant idiots, the dumb-dumb suckers. The sorry fools, the happy fools. The found, the lost. I am all of it and none of it and when my brain short circuits over some human-scaled source of anxiety, or my gypsy head won’t stop spinning around on my shoulders—I head for the hills.

By the time I’m splayed out on rock, I don’t have anything left to say to my quiet analyst. The granite has heard it all before, so have the heavens and the seas. Indeed, the permanent record of deep thoughts and lousy secrets that bang around inside my hiking boots, remain on the trails which, over all the years of human existence, have become worn and worthy places of pilgrimage—

leading to the most spectacular sites

for partaking in the holiest of all communion feasts—

the venerable and adorable, hand-prepared picnic.

*****

Here are some activities for a weekend excursion on Mount Desert Island, Maine in springtime:

On one day:

Bike the 11-mile Around the Mountain carriage road loop. Start at the Jordan Pond House and get there early or you won’t get a parking place. Stop along the ride to hike down and under the stone bridges and look back up at how little everyone is. Listen to the waterfalls, especially the one at the double-arched Deer Brook Bridge, which, if you are lucky enough to be there alone, will sound like a gentle rain.

Pack lunch for a picnic overlooking Somes Sound. Bring water! At the conclusion of the ride, settle in for wine, beer, crabmeat dip with crackers, lobster stew, and popovers at the Jordan Pond House. It doesn’t all go together, but be sure to only order the popovers with butter and jam–that goes together. The Jordan Pond House lemonade is good.

Take an early evening stroll through Asticou Terrace gardens and climb up to the Thuya Lodge and gardens—taking the route overlooking Northeast Harbor. Thuya Lodge is my dream house.

On another day:

Hike The Beehive. This perilous climb will clear your head and turn your stomach inside out. Go early or you will be seared to the side of the cliff by the sun and slimed by the sweat of a million other over-cooked hikers. You will need a wingspan from fingertip to toe tip of about seven feet and those toes and fingers should be strong enough to yank your body type and BMI up and over narrow ledges without safety nets or bungee cords attached to your earlobes. The views are worth your life. If you are like me, you will climb The Beehive once, completely satisfied with how tremendously you scared yourself. You will call what you’ve done one of your life’s greatest success stories. If you are like my daughter, you will hike The Beehive over and over again in spite of your fears, whenever you bring people to Acadia, because authentic person to person contact with cliffs and death-drop airspaces, creates the mental and physical thrills of bonding with other human beings and nature in real time. Such experiences are endangered—the habitats where they are nurtured are being destroyed by the invasive technologies of social media.

Climb down to The Bowl after The Beehive and go for a swim. Keep moving in the water and stay away from the shore—there are leeches. Last summer, I spied an eagle perched on a log.

What to do if you don’t want to hike The Beehive:

Climb to the top of Dorr Mountain via the newly-restored historic trail, Homan’s Path. The trail features hundreds of stone steps with a few alleyways that pass under stone blocks. Lean in. Some of the ascents are very vertical. The Earth loves you so much, it is constantly pulling you down as you are constantly hauling yourself up to new summits. Pray for the wind—to cool your sweat and to move the black flies out to sea. If you ever wonder what people did before they were tethered to email and instagrain pixels of nonsense, consider the jolly challenges of shoving big rocks into nice compositions on steep trails. Follow and admire the historic cairns and never assume that just because Acadia was created by Gilded Age rich people, you won’t get lost.

When you arrive at the top of Dorr Mountain, the second highest in Acadia, you’ll get the feeling you are being watched. Look one mountain over to Cadillac—the highest mountain on the East Coast. On the ridge, a line of people will be staring down at you like a gathering of angry Indians in a John Ford western.

Lay down on the rocky surface of the summit. Trap all of your brain activity in the tension of gravity, tides, winds, bogus black flies and the blazing energy of the sun. Now let it go.

Walk from the top of Dorr Mountain all the way to Bar Harbor, via the Jessup Trail, passing through the quiet colors of spring and into the busy collections of human beings doing exactly everything you want to do. The designs of the paths in Acadia were inspired by European walking paths and gardens. There are junctions with signposts, but I’ve yet to find kissing gates like the ones in England’s way-too-wicked-charming countrysides. Not everything is perfectly marked, but at least there aren’t any bears to worry about.

After the crush of festive humanity and a powerful boost of ice cream in Bar Harbor, go to Cooksey Drive in Seal Harbor, where a sort of secret little path, leads to the edges of jagged cliffs that drop directly into the Atlantic.

On the last day:

Hike Acadia Mountain, near Echo Lake. Scramble over cobbled steps; shimmy up and down rock crevices. At the summit, you will walk through some of God’s most perfectly designed wild gardens and bathe in what are perhaps the most gorgeous views of Somes Sound. Spring leaves unfurl in flowery shapes on the trees. Blueberry bushes bloom. Take out a map and find out where you are, where you’ve been, and all the places you still want to go.

*****

It was time to go home.

We headed for Mother’s Kitchen for the best meatloaf sandwich in New England. (Made only in Maine with grass-fed, free-range beef lobsters.) But it was closed. So we tried Trenton Bridge and sat outside eating crab sandwiches and lobster sandwiches.

All was good.

*****

Lobster bake with grilled baby bokchoy.

An old-fashioned self-timer of the old timers.

We left our walking sticks on the trail for you.

A Modern Sunday Morning Breakfast.

On Sundays in spring when a cheerful breeze can be felt bringing the sun’s warmth for an all-day stay to my country hideout, gratitude begins with breakfast. There are two of us up early and ready to get to work fussing over our little estate and our charmed lives. But first, we want something to eat.

The breakfast should be hearty enough to sustain us only through the morning’s work, because we don’t want to miss out on feeling hungry for a good lunch.

I set the table with spring flowers received from a friend and a small jar of Maine blueberry jam. (Meant to hold us over until I make fresh jams again when the strawberries bloom. And the blueberries, raspberries, peaches, and pears.) A stoneware pitcher contains stirred-up orange, pineapple, and strawberry juices.

There is always a candle on the breakfast table, too. On this particular Sunday, a day when our breakfast conversation will be about planning a trip to France, the candlelight shines dreams of fairy tale escapes to small villages in the French countryside, where I am inside a stone church, because we have gone for a walk to find fresh bread, but have come upon a church on the way. The church is deserted, filled only with sunlight and the musk of centuries of fervent desires, damp, absorbed by the stone. No prayer is ever wasted.

The same friend bearing the bouquet of spring flowers, which smelled heavenly because of some sweet Hyacinth, delivered a collection of perfect eggs from her hens, in an egg carton she decorated just for me. The eggs will be the main course for our modern Sunday breakfast.

*****

These flowers and eggs were all part of a birthday gift to me and I immediately thought back to a day at the end of last summer when I sat with my friend on her grand back porch and watched the hens running around in her gardens, free as love at age 14, hiding, causing us to worry about them, then showing up again without any concern for our worries. We drove around my friend’s country estate on a garden tractor together—I was at the wheel (for my friend had a broken leg)—visiting all her gardens and stopping to admire a lush patch of beautiful gourds rambling, (free as love over age 55!), through her pig pen. She’d had some pigs, but they had gone to slaughter. I should have come to see them as cute baby pigs, but I think pigs are very smart and they would have seen their fate in my eyes. I chose a colorful collection of gourds from the vines that day and piled them into the garden tractor, but when it was time to go home, I forgot to fetch my treasures from the tractor. My friend was so pleased with her gourds, I am sure she will grow them again this year and I will get another chance to pick the ones I like. If my luck holds out, I won’t forget to bring them home.

*****

I was excited to have the fresh eggs from my friend because fresh eggs to me are forever York, England—a place where my true love and I drove after we abandoned our last baby at Oxford College for a summer study program. She was only fifteen years old and it all seemed so exciting until we arrived to drop her off and then had to leave her. She didn’t have a friend, nor was the study program connected to any familiar school with familiar teachers.

In York, we stayed at a bed and breakfast just beyond the magnificent medieval walls. The youthful innkeepers served eggs fresh from the countryside, delivered by a woman well past eighty years old, still working hard taking care of her hens and delivering eggs to her customers. The eggs had rich coloring to the yolks, not pale or faded. After we ate them, we embarked on charming walks into the city of York, through gardens well tended amid ancient Roman ruins. York, England was the outermost reach of the Roman empire. For a little girl living in the times of Rome’s expansive empires, there was little chance of ever finding out about foreign lands. And for her mother, little anxiety that her daughter might wish to leave home, at a young age, to test the limits of distant horizons and a mother’s fragile heart.

*****

For our Sunday morning breakfast: I sautéed chopped, sweet onion in olive oil to flavor the olive oil. I scooped out the onion and set it aside. Next, I slipped two eggs into the heated olive oil (one for each of us), careful to keep the yolks unbroken. Then, sea salt and cracked peppercorn medley. (Black peppercorns, coriander, pink peppercorns, white peppercorns, allspice, and green peppercorns.)

Then comes the gentle folding over of the eggs, easy. Fresh bread, or whatever is in the house, is toasted and olive oil is drizzled over the toast. The egg is layered on top of that with the onion and some capers. While preparing the eggs, I had strips of prosciutto cooking under the broiler in the oven, not for long, just enough to crisp it up like bacon.

*****

After breakfast, I went to work in the garden. How my creative and hungry soul winced when I spied the parsley in the herb garden, barely making it up and out of the earth. Why didn’t I check for it sooner? And not far from the parsley spiked the chives, brilliant green! I could have placed the freshest, sweetest, teeniest brand new leaves of parsley on my exquisite eggs or fancied them up with a few circles of chopped chives! I remember, as I arranged the plate, feeling a restless urge to add some color, either the red of a tomato or a pepper, or the green of fresh herbs.

But, it was time for church in our little cathedral and my true love was bound for the airport and a business trip. I didn’t have all morning to obsess over the eggs. We sat down to share our Sunday breakfast and knew everything was perfect as it was. We had flowers and eggs from a friend, memories, new flavors, and, as always, our prayers of gratitude and one of hope—that the next time we sit down for a Sunday breakfast, we will be heading into the gardens, together, to work all day—building our appetites for dinner!

Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.

In the year 1958, Katharine S. White, an amateur gardener, began to write a gardening column, Onward and Upward in the Garden. She was an editor at The New Yorker and she was married to E.B. White.

She also tended her own garden in Maine and nurtured a fun little hobby she was sure was not hers alone–the pleasurable escape of reading garden catalogues.

Thank goodness she had enough time left over in her life, in those days, to begin writing about what she read in the flimsy pages of the catalogues. She joined in with the community of quirky, and seriously devoted, garden-writing stylists whose work existed in an exclusive, sumptuous, and untrammeled green forum.

It didn’t hurt that the garden catalogues, composed with fantastical flower, fruit, and veggie pictures, were delivered though the U.S. mail at a time of the year when Katharine S. White was probably cold, tired of snow, and, at times, weary of her job as an editor with its attendant frustrations over the puzzling art of poetry.

E.B. White documented one of his wife’s earnest pleas, directed at poets, in his essay, Poetry, from his book One Man’s Meat:

“I wish poets could be clearer,” shouted my wife angrily from the next room. Hers is a universal longing. We would all like it if the bards would make themselves plain, or we think we would. The poets however, are not easily diverted from their high mysterious ways. A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer; he approaches lucid ground warily, like a mariner who is determined not to scrape his bottom on anything solid. A poet’s pleasure is to withhold a little of his meaning, to intensify by mystification. He unzips the veil from beauty but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.

White’s essay continues to ruminate about poetry. He injects a little humor: “I think Americans, perhaps more than any other people, are impressed by what they don’t understand and poets take advantage of this.” He also writes that he is jealous of poets and wishes, more than anything else, to be a poet.

Well, harumph to the days of sitting around dazed and confused about poetry, thumbs available for twiddling. Haha freakin harumph. How I long for them! I think Americans, nowadays, are impressed by how busy and preoccupied and stupendous their multiple electronic gadgets make them appear to be. Or, at least it started out that way. Now, now, they seem willfully seduced by all things glowing Google. They are so smitten, they claim they can’t help it. They’ve devoured every marshmallow of self-restraint on the researcher’s table and slept with every sexy plate of pasta tweeted by the Food Gurus. They are busier than Sheryl Sandberg leaning up against my front door, while giving birth, and running a meeting on her laptop, and having a happy marriage, and trying to sell me her book.

I think I am supposed to be feeling sorry for the busy people, because it’s not their fault. I watch them raise their syrupy eyes every now and then to make sure everyone else is wearing their favorite pair of fat busypants. Oooh. They’re so comfortable. The electronic wizards croon. I make a note to find out where I can purchase a pair.

But. The truth is. I drink alone.

Because there’s no one in the bar anymore. First, they took away the cigarettes. Then, they took away the band. They allowed phones on every table, computers too, and all other kinds of screens and toys that I am urged to swipe my fingers over. That’s gross.

I am drowning in mugs of beer gone stale because no one could sit still long enough to finish theirs.

God knows I am depending on Him to reserve a place in paradise for the poets and garden writers.

Because this hellish fad of busy buzzings is a damn bore. Or maybe I am just a big bore. And, I’m not even sure God exists or that the poets and gardeners will make it to His paradise if He does.

What if this is it?

I head for the woods.

*****

It’s springtime.

Upon the surface of the forest’s vernal pools floats the reflection of the cloud--an ugly crust of emails, downloaded photos, saved documents. I step in, sloshing about—sinking—getting all muddy and slicked over. It scares the salamanders, at work breeding the old-fashioned way, but ending up with extra toes, tails, and spots. And too many emails.

If you go to Starbucks, you can’t buy CD’s with your coffee anymore. I should have taken better care of mine. I have only been inside a Starbucks once in my life.

Someday, they’ll say we have to do everything we can to save the strange-spotted, toeful, double-tailed salamander. And the researchers will ask for donations to the Salve the Salamanders Project, which will fund safe, water-soluble forms of Xanax for vernal pools so the creatures can deal, gently, with all those emails, extra toes, tails, and spots.

I don’t understand literature or poetry. Or French. Or Russian. Or Chinese. Not even Spanish.

I don’t know how to use punctuation and I don’t know grammatical parts of speech. When I write, in English, which is the language of my youth, I am wriggling around, panting, laughing.

I will never catch up! I wasted my childhood playing, when I might-should-have-been reading and studying and obsessing over something I could do–and do like a champion–forever.

It snowed so much this winter, I wondered about the plants in my garden instead of my periods and commas and quotation marks.

The snow has melted and my Hellebores look wasted. They’re a colorless, dull black and they are limp–splayed flat out in the garden. But there’s some hope in there. The little green buds.

The Hellebores look like I feel because after I read about Starbuck’s, I read that the Apple watch will soon be strapped around the wrists of my countrymen. They will strap them around their chests and foreheads, too. Boomp, pa, boom. Boomp, pa, boom. Click. Click. Hummm.

What keeps you alive?

After a long walk in the woods, I stroll my garden. It looks like hell alright. There are cracked and dropped branches. Lots of prostrate, spent, plant debris begging me to bend over and get to work. A woodpile still needs to be stacked. It’s a security blanket. I’ll wrap myself up in that work on a day when I think about something else I read in the newspaper–that no one wants a garden anymore. It’s too much work and everyone is too busy. I know it’s true.

I only received three garden catalogues in the mail this year. I don’t want to look at them on line. I want to read them and hold them in my hands and smell them. Like my Weekly Reader back in grade school. Something fun, delivered. I want to dog-ear the pages that have all my dreams four-color-separated onto them.

*****

I’m going to wait for my Hellebores to get it together. But I saw some pictures in one garden catalogue that got me all two-stepping about ordering new ones. The pictures have been spread out across my desk for many days now. I’ve never ordered a plant nor seeds from any garden catalogue.

They look like so much fun! Next follows a picture of something I might buy from another catalogue I got from a place called Logee’s in Danielson, Connecticut. I took an excursion to their greenhouses in wintertime. It was like walking through the hollow of a tree, in a hidden forest, into a flowerscape of foliage and blooming weirdness. I felt like a bug, crawling around, smelling, dodging, getting lost, not caring if anything stepped on me or ate me.

What will happen if I grow this tropical freak-out in my New England garden! It will remind me of the first time I went to Hawaii. My children were so little. We didn’t allow electronic games in our household. Not much television, either.

My babies in Hawaii!

*****

Come May, my Hellebores will be thriving again. I will float them in crystal bowls filled with water.

*****

Katharine S. White’s garden writing included recommendations for hand-held, real books. She wrote about The World of the Japanese Garden, from Chinese Origins to Modern Landscape Art, by Loraine Kuck: “This unusual book is my nomination for the most beautiful of the big, expensive garden books…”

She goes on to make a claim about the book’s photographs: “Takeji Iwamiya is Japan’s leading color photographer and his color plates are bright and airy, or cool and dark, and all of them are haunting.”

I bought the book. Seduced by all things Eden–I can’t help it–I have already begun to swipe my tongue across the pages.

I’m going to order Elephant Ear, “Thai Giant”, Colocasia gigantic, too.

I have some seed packages and I hope to get more for Mother’s Day.

My green thumbs are twitching like crazy.

But I’m a garden geek.

No matter how busy I get,

I will always long to remain immersed,

in this poetry of confusion called life.

An Eccentric Easter Excursion.

For a brief time in spring, beginning with the week before Easter, a sentimental tradition of floral joy appears at what is now known as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

Nasturtium vines spill from third floor balconies, draping the walls of an interior courtyard with jeweled, painterly impressions of summer. The Venetian palace that hosts this happy display, known as Fenway Court when Mrs. Gardner built it in 1903, is a sanctuary for romantics. Gallery after gallery keeps precious the treasures of art that comforted one woman’s grieving soul. The treasures were arranged by that very soul. Think whatever you want to think about them. There are no labels or titles accompanying the art. Decide for yourself if you like it. Or not.

Sitting under archways in cloisters surrounding the courtyard, gentle, percussive patterings of garden fountains are meant to relax the visitor. Yet there is no rest for anyone who likes to grow things. The mind leaps, onto several paths, every one of them bound for another dream garden waiting to be realized. One season, I planted Nasturtiums in flower boxes so that they would cascade from one level of our deck, down to the next level, a la Isabella G. The simple plants, grown from fat seeds, accomplished so much in just a few months!

*****

Isabella Stewart Gardner had a reputation—an easy thing for any unconventional woman in Boston to acquire. Gossip girls and boys followed her relentlessly, trying to figure her out and judge her. They still do. She is an intriguing personality.

I have always zeroed in on the defining tragedy of her life—the death of her only son, from pneumonia, when he was not yet two years old. After his death, Mrs. Gardner suffered a miscarriage. For two years, grief, depression, and illness consumed her. In a state of despair, she and her husband retreated for a year to travel the lands of Europe where she was encouraged to pursue her passions for art. Mrs. Gardner returned to America when her husband’s brother, a widower, died. He left three sons. Mr. and Mrs. Gardner adopted their nephews. History speculates that the beloved boys were gay, and that the oldest committed suicide at age 25 when he fell in love with another man who rejected his amorous affection.

Mrs. Gardner, to me, was a woman on a quest to fill the voids in her life. Voids that could never be filled.

She sought solace for relentless heartache.

*****

In the Spanish Cloister gallery on the first floor, a painting by John Singer Sargent, El Jaleo, gives moody homage to the human quest to feel happiness, without reservation or guilt. The painting depicts the experience of escaping into the music, dance, and dress of idealized Gypsy freedoms. The year it was painted, 1882, was a time when Gypsies were scorned by polite society because polite society judged the nomadic, exotic culture as one that believed in false magic and superstitions. Polite society honored magic and superstition only if it was wrapped up in the confines of organized religion—and called such things by other names: miracles, prayers, devotionals, sacraments.

From El Jaleo, Mrs. Gardner leads us into deeply intimate and personal journeys. Religious art abounds. The quest for faith, the search for happiness, and the desire for immortality are human struggles we are never sure of. The soul never stops seeking communion with the spirit of a true, supreme being.

*****

Since it is Easter season, I take interest in the Stations of the Cross, carved into stone, displayed near the tranquil courtyard.

I want the story of the resurrection to be true.

I want to be reunited with all the loved ones I’ve lost.

I seek a triumphant end to all the suffering my fellow human beings have endured.

I like Mrs. Gardner. She left all the doors, to all the rooms of her own, open. Her rooms are churches, sanctuaries, galleries, studios, dance halls, performance halls, dinner halls, salons, and quiet study halls.

She is the high priestess of the collection and she wants to share how art saved her.

She inscribed, upon a plaque for the museum: “C’est mon plaisir.”

It is my pleasure.

She wants art to save us, too.

*****

I walk upstairs from the courtyard and enter the Raphael Room. There, a little painting facing a chair and a desk, near a window, perpendicular to the room, captivates me. The painting is delicate in size. It is Raphael’s bittersweet Pieta. And, I have breezed past it on every other visit to the museum.

Mary and Saint John cradle the body of her dead son, Jesus, as Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who removed him from the cross, are present, prepared to assist in his final burial. Mary Magdalene kneels and kisses the feet of the adored Jesus.

Next to the painting, on the desk, is a vase holding stems of dried Teasel. The Teasel’s sharp points evoke the Crown of Thorns used to humiliate Jesus.

I think of how Mrs. Gardner must have chosen to sit, in the little chair near the window with this painting, during intense experiences of mourning. The painting might have soothed her into hoping for an afterlife. On other days, perhaps the painting assuaged her own despair, as she transferred some of her pain to Mary, another woman bearing the unfathomable pain of losing a beloved child.

*****

From the Raphael Room, I walked into the Tapestry Room and stood in the darkened, atmospheric space near a painting of the Assumption of Mary and a horrid sculpture of painted lindenwold representing the head of Christ, crucified. The backlit greens and oranges of Nasturtium flowers and their circular leaves, hung past an open balcony, like a veil I wished to wrap all around me. I live in a modern world, where the savage torture of human beings continues. My shoulders slumped at the thought of a contemporary Christ, how his crucifixion would be broadcast through social media.

I left the Tapestry Room and walked through the elevator passage, stopping to admire the Asian art within it, and ascended the stairs to the third floor. One of my favorite rooms, the dark and sexy, leathery and lacy, Veronese Room led to the Titian Room where you can study the simple set up for the bountiful Nasturtiums. Pots with carefully-tended, planted vines are elevated on overturned pots and arranged in rows of three on wooden benches. Light streams into this room.

I have reached a pinnacle.

This is the gallery featuring Titian’s grand Europa. The painting is powerful and I engage in a spiritual conversation with Mrs. Gardner about her placement of the painting, in line with another small desk and chair, near a window, with a vase of fresh flowers, with another painting on the desk, Christ Carrying the Cross. I sit in the chair (in my mind), and consider the line up.

Human passion, ecstasy, seduction, loss, transformation, control, surrender, cruelty, deliverance, redemption, tragedy, triumph. Resurrection. Peace.

Where—and to whom—or to what—do we commend our spirit?

How do we fill the voids?

I am sure Mrs. Gardner sat here, numb, many hours. Never coming away with any answers.

Grateful for art.

What is more true than art?

*****

My impromptu Easter excursion continued as I stepped from the Titian Room into the Long Gallery. This is a fun part of the museum where cases filled with memorabilia are covered with cloths that can be lifted for personal exploration. There is a case with James McNeill Whistler’s walking stick, also known as his wand, which he gave to Mrs. Gardner in 1886. Underneath the walking stick is a letter he wrote to her, including wonderfully incorrect spelling and punctuation:

“The masterpiece should appear as the flower to the painter—perfect in it’s bud as in it’s bloom. With no reason to explain it’s presence—no mission to fulfil—a joy to the artist—a delusion to the philanthropist—a puzzle to the botanist—an accident of sentiment and alliteration to the literary man.”

At one end of the Long Gallery there is a charming terra-cotta sculpture, Virgin Adoring Child. But I think it looks more like Mary teaching her little son Jesus how to pray.

The other end of the Long Gallery is anchored by Mrs. Gardner’s personal chapel with French Gothic stained glass, carved saints, Italian choir stalls from the 16th century, and a prayer desk I wish I owned. There are two places to kneel here, facing the stained glass, and after walking all through the museum, this becomes a perfect respite. Kneeling, there is time to tip the eyes up and all around, admiring all of Mrs. Gardner’s spiritual nook. The stained glass transported me to Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the most beautiful and magical cathedral, built to house the Passion Relics, especially the Crown of Thorns.

*****

Before leaving the Gardner Museum, I stop into the MacKnight Room, a most intimate room of Mrs. Gardner’s own. There’s a bottle of collected sand from a trip to see the pyramids in Egypt. And, there is a reproduction of a watercolor, Mrs. Gardner in White, painted by her friend John Singer Sargent after she suffered a stroke. The iconic, scandalous portrait of a more youthful Isabella Stewart Gardner that hangs in the Gothic Room—the one that caused a great deal of vicious gossip in Boston— (and was never again exhibited until after her death), gives way to an intensely personal portrait of a woman who seems to have arrived at a state of peaceful acceptance with her own life.

*****

In the end, Mrs. Gardner was not ashamed of how she had lived, nor how she looked. Art sustained her and helped her recapture a dramatic zest for life. She wraps herself up in a white shroud and sits for a final portrait.

She was buried between her husband and her son at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Because it is Easter, I prefer to believe she is with her husband and all of her lost children, including her nephews, in a paradise where there is no suffering,

in a kingdom without end.

*****

Excursions

The Gypsy Apprentice

Category Archives: Travel

A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Slow Art of Finding Peace and True North.

Shining Island Nights.

Gypsy.

Rich Man.

Block Island Day Trip. From Here to Eternity.

The Analyst’s Couch is My Rock.

A Modern Sunday Morning Breakfast.

Hellebores and Hell’s a Bore.

An Eccentric Easter Excursion.