Twenty First Century Writing
This is the cottage at the entrance to The Crane Estate in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The colors in the roof tiles, the curve of the wrought iron entwined with the ivy and the gnarled trees in the winter sky all remind me of a faded photograph from another time, even though I took this today.
Days like today remind us why we endure New England’s long winters. There’s nothing like a morning in which the snow is so white it reflects the bluest sky. Later on it will be warm enough for a walk, but for now, it’s time grab the coffee, pull the chair up to the window, and open the solar panels in our heads. Recharge.
There’s nothing better than when people make a little extra effort to do the right thing. This is the sign in front of the new Police HQ in Littleton, Massachusetts, and it stands on the site of a former farm stand, Stan’s Big Acres. Owned by the late John “Stan” Paskiewicz, the stand – a small red shack with a screen porch and a hand painted white sign with red writing – had a greeting painted on it “If You Can’t Stop, Wave.” Whenever we gave people directions to our house when we moved from the city, Stan’s sign was the landmark that reassured them they were not indeed lost and were, in fact, close to their destination (the other landmark was Bob’s Bait & Tackle – alas, it is gone also). Guests often arrived with cider or apples from Stan’s (no one ever arrived with bait from Bob’s – go figure) and even when I driving past alone I found myself raising a hand to Stan. When Stan’s closed the shack stood empty for a number of years, falling into disrepair, the sign still outside. We kept waving anyway. When Littleton decided to use the site for the Police station (and a beautiful one at that) some civic-minded person or group preserved Stan’s greeting on the new sign.
So, Stan’s is a Police station and Bob’s is a yarn shop. There are still signs of the agricultural life along the way home – farm stands, horse farms, fields of sheep and produce – but nothing quite like Stan’s, save for the red house directly across the street (below) that echoes his stand in it’s waning days; the future on one side the road, the past on the other. If you can’t stop, wave. Okay, then.
It just occurred to me that I have a penchant of taking photos of people talking on cell phones in places where it seems a little incongruous (see Can You Hear Me Now). The Cemetery is on Main Street in Concord, MA – and the two empty parking spaces just might be the most unusual things in the picture.
This window is at the top corner of the Haines House in Concord, Massachusetts. Built in 1813, it has shutters are made to work and most likely has layers of paint thicker than the walls of most modern houses. Below is the front door to the same house (currently an academic administration building at Concord Academy), where the wiring for the light had to be routed on the outside. The way all the exterior lines and shapes in these old structures can fit together into a coherent whole fascinates me – in modern times that approach doesn’t seem to work nearly as well, and yet here, it does. Are we more forgiving of older architecture just because it’s old or did they get something right that we don’t? I admit that I am more enamored of such places from the outside looking in – once inside, they tend to be dark and cramped and have a kind of slanted fun house quality because everything has settled unevenly over the centuries (and that funky wiring goes from quaint to dangerous).
Falling Colors
It’s November
We have used up
Our allotment of color for this year;
The pigment wells have run dry
Colors are draining from the landscape.
Inexorable fading
Among the maples after a drunken Halloween binge
The reds wither in unpicked apples or
Go into hiding –
Submerged as cranberries or
Crouching in the holly
Yellows and greens
Have more stamina but even they
Are sinking quickly, visibly, into the soil.
On a warm day
The blue sky
Is tepid and wan
And my energy filters
Down through my numb, wiggling toes
Chasing the colors
Flexing in hopes of priming the pump
Even as I succumb to the unfulfilled promise
Of a long winter’s nap.
November 2009
This apple orchard has been left to its own devices for several and it looks as if the gnarled old trees are emerging from the ground in a Tim Burton-esque quest for revenge. Who knows what arsenic-laden secrets lay beneath, but they seem to be aching to tell a story no one is ready to hear.
There aren’t any sidewalks in our area of town – people walk on the side of the road, and because New England roads are ridiculously narrow, I usually get a good look at the pedestrians I try not to hit. One person in particular catches my eye more often than others. G. wears a baseball cap and a windbreaker with a logo on it, a weathered look to go with his smile and nod as I drive by. His graying hair curls out from under the cap, a little longish, his mustache, too, a little full. When I first knew him fifteen years ago G. had a fresh from the barber haircut and clipped mustache, starched button down shirts, blazer and a late model Volvo.
G. is not a victim of hard times, but then again maybe he is. He is a respected professional who surrendered his license for ethics violations – hubris and nemesis as writ in the early 21st century. I am nosy; I read the public file on the case. He was never indicted so it is impossible to say for certain whether he was guilty of poor judgment or something worse, but he made decisions that permitted illegal, sometimes dangerous activities. It didn’t surprise me completely; he had always seemed bizarrely flip and distant. He gave strangely vague answers to specific questions: “What time should the kids be home?” “Whenever you get tired of them just send them back.” Things like that. It rankled me enough to tell my own children that they could only go to his home to play if his wife was there. He didn’t come off as creepy, just as a distracted eccentric.
His sartorial evolution from professional class to working class reminds me that no life has a steady upward trajectory. I empathize with him even though I am fairly sure he is oblivious to what anyone has ever thought about him. His peaks and valleys are plain to see, but we all have them and we all try to spin them or hide them in one way or another as best we can. Some people have the luxury of keeping their travails private, but like G., we cannot – we have a child with a disability, and in order to get him what he needs, we need to tell people more than we want to about our challenges. It is maddening to have to sit across the table month after month and ask people to lower, raise and rework expectations for a mercurial child; to know that they think you can do better but that they are reluctant to do anything differently on their end. They probably think I am a distracted eccentric. The expression of fear mixed with pity is enough to send you to bed for a week.
But G. didn’t go to bed and neither have I. He found something else to do with his life, and so have I. Sometimes it means fielding looks from people who will never understand, but sometimes it also means wearing more comfortable clothes.
Each season I visit this cemetery to record the quiet majesty of old stones and ancient trees. Today I was there with friends to bury someone so stalwart it is impossible to imagine she has left us. Next week we will have a new cemetery to visit and a beautiful young woman to comfort. She lost her father in the space of a moment. Maybe we all do. It’s just a matter of which moment we realize it.
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