The Great Outdoors

My great-aunt Gwen and my grandma Jean up North at the family cabin.

 

 

When the frenzy of the planned part of Christmas has subsided and quiet sets in, one of my favorite things to do is look through old family albums and letters and knit together stories of old times.

 

This Christmas I was most thrilled to find a bunch of outdoorsy photos from throughout my grandmother's childhood. My heart is bursting to share the lot, but I've managed to select a few representative shots to evoke the spirit of the rest for now.

 

 

My grandma around 3 and 18 years old.

 

 

Growing up, I loved listening to my grandmother (b. 1912) recall tales from her childhood. She told stories as if she were reliving them, with color and laughter that transported me to the scene. The 20's and 30's were already a fascinating time to me, when the characters of the world seemed particularly full of, well, character. There is a brightness to the faces in these photographs that makes me yearn to time travel and experience one of their rambunctious gatherings- the energy is tactile (and the clothing alone makes me giddy).

 

My grandma's immediate family migrated everywhere from Winnipeg to Des Moines to Spokane to Racine, so adventures were captured in all those places. Think of how much time it might have taken to gather a crew from Canada to meet in Spokane, without the benefit of Priceline and Gmail. Hehe:

"Our gang picnicking at Shore Acres" (Lake Michigan methinks. Grandma is up front on the left).

 

"Sit still and we'll push" (Mr. & Mrs. Ellis, great-great-grandma Bears, great-great aunt Mona standing- the moxie!!!, great-aunt Gwen, grandma Jean and great-great grandma Witmer at the cabin up North).

 

 

"neath the old pine" at the cabin. What a great shot!

 

"One of our picnics." (Location uncertain)

Washington? My great-great grandfather Witmer always had a pipe!

 

 

 "Up at the top of Mt. Spokane- tired but happy."

 

"The Winnipeg bunch at a picnic." Look at those shades!

Life moves so quickly and so much is easily forgotten. But in these pictures, it seems all are enjoying the moment in a way I shall eternally strive for and the lessons they send me from afar of relishing human connection and the great outdoors are lovely reminders indeed. :)

 

First Snow

I wandered tonight in the first snow of the season, setting out from my little cottage in the woods to our small downtown. Although I had worried throughout the day about a questionable commute home, once there and bundled up my trepidation turned to elation.

The world reversed out, snowy trees lit by streetlamps, white on black, on 1800's streets, everywhere looked like an old photograph. Few cars were on the road, and no pedestrians- the middle of the blanketed streets were mine to crunch, my footsteps creating a percussive heartbeat for the blacktop below. Inhaling the slightly metallic scent of newly frozen air, I bent my face toward the black skies and let the descending flakes collect on my eyelashes, my cheeks reddened from exertion meeting ice, feeling like a time traveler.

How beautiful to wander back down my lonely road, only the sound of my steps echoing across the newly fallen plane, and all the branches overhead hanging low with icing like gingerbread eaves.  

The Unbearable Lightness

 

Last night, in what now seems like a hazy half-dreamt memory, I had the good fortune of delighting in many hours of transformative conversation with a handsome Colombian. Maybe someday he'll read this and smile (I hope so). Or maybe our paths will veer in other directions. But my day has been filled with that slightly bittersweet tug that follows an anticipated-then-completed meeting of dear hearts and minds.

 

By comparison, the realities today were challenging. Dizzying layers of questions, details, noises and responsibilities tightened my chest like wound rope, even as I kept my calm and pushed through. This evening, between wiping down pudding covered hair, attempting to answer an urgent email with spotty internet, and eating some increasingly cooling dinner, moments of the night before blinked through my mind like fireflies, and helped remind me to pay attention to what was most beautiful and fleeting- pudding hair.

 

It can be so easy to get caught up. And it's so important to sometimes make voluntary, the involuntary action of breathing.

 

Lovely Weekend On The Farm

This weekend my brother and sister-in-law invited a houseful of young friends from the city down to our old family farm. The farm house has stood vacant for a decade-- furniture, piles of old books and dishes sitting unused, mirrors reflecting only the shifting sunlight. The sudden hurrah must have been an alarming and hopeful breath of life for the lonely place-- the ecstatic promise of a new thread for an ancient ghost, tired of it's own memories.

For my brother and I there were lots of happy things to rediscover: old mugs serving their purpose again by offering steamy Brazilian coffee up to whiskey-weary young mouths, the aluminum tumblers that kept drinks extra cold in our little hands once again quenching sweaty heads with sips of well water, the tiny plastic cup we used as toddlers now held by my own little ones, the old cuckoo clock in the den still standing watch over it's old territory.

 

 

Then there were new memories made: friends laughing and congregating in all the forgotten spaces, lazing in the rolling lawns and around grills and campfires, napping in the hammock, filling porches and gardens with stories and camaraderie, playing music to fill the sleepy walls with new energy, gobbling heaps of amazing food made together, happy puppies lazing about.



 

 

 

 

What a beautiful thing to reinvigorate an old home, to honor an old friend by allowing them to come alive again. I'm certain our grandparents were watching from afar, laughing along with us and delighting in all the fun. I can't wait for all the lovely times to come!  

 



 

 

 

 

Mechanical, Astrological & Geological Explanations For All That Ails You

xoxoxo

Mechanical

 

Rollercoasters were invented in 1784 or 1817

after Russian Mountains of ice slides,

then wheeled carts on tracks

for more security and higher speeds.

Rollercoasters are controlled by gravity (you must be this tall).

Caution. Beware. Warning. Danger.

They are not meant for extending riding.

 

Astrological

 

Mercury in Retrograde

Retrograde motion of this planet is an illusion of backward motion associated with confusion, delay, frustration, high intuition, extraordinary coincidences, miscommunications, turbulence, disruption, fractal shifts, disagreements, scrambled thoughts, loss of control, pandemonium, indecision and other unfortunate effects on earth's inhabitants.

This is a good time for relaxation and reflection.

 

Geological

 

Tectonic shifts are the movements of the plates that make up the earth's crust (eurasion, juan de fuca, north american, caribbean, phillipine, south american, eurasian, scotia, african, indo-australian, pacific nazca, cocos, antarctic). The earth is in a constant state of change, like a cracked shell rolled in a trembling hand, interior radioactivity causing a push and pull of the pieces, like a broken beautiful dance in convergent arcs, colliding, repelling, making it difficult to walk surefooted.

The Calling Card

My dad found this treasure somewhere amongst old family letters and photographs. Here is the backstory as I imagine it (Nicholas Sparks, what's your offer? :) 

 



 

 

The Calling Card

A splinter lodged into her soft white finger like a stick in a snowman, as she hurriedly stuffed the envelope into the crack of the bunkhouse door. How like life to present such a bittersweet whirlwind on the eve of her return home. When he finally awoke after their adventure, he would find the embossed greeting, a desperate token of fleeting affection from a singular moment of youthful camaraderie:

Envelope:

M. Bellinger

Grace Lammie

Enclosure:

Eagle 1858

When time shall have made deep furrows in thy brow remember where you first met

Grace

***

Black and red specks swam in her clenched lids, as the August sun crawled down through the shimmering birch branches that hung like chandeliers over the black water. When she opened her eyes, the world looked foreign and vibrant- a layer of familiarity peeled back and a newborn world allowed its first breath. Her copper hair swirled in a thousand tentacles and stirred the glassy surface of the pond for the hundredth and last time this summer. Grace wanted to float like this infinitely, a white petal in a black pool in the middle of nowhere- weightless, anonymous.

Fairy giggles shattered the spell and Grace gulped a mouthful of earthy liquid as she scrambled to conceal herself under the surface of the broken stillness. Two little farm boys scampered away through the woods with hollered whoops and twirled her boots by their laces while they set sail with her new paisley dress above their heads. They disappeared like a train and its whistle, chugging through brush, their sirens becoming distant, as Grace clambered to the bank of the pond. She was a mile from the guest house and meant to be on a train the next morning back to Chicago.

Her father had once again sent to her to the countryside for summer, a local housemaid, cook and companion hired to look after her and get her out of his way, while he set out to chart prospective routes for the Milwaukee Road to expand west. He was as hungry as everyone for progress, and as his fortune grew, so did his appetite. To appease her of these annual banishments, nothing was denied his daughter. Grace grew into her teenage years surrounded by and belonging to Chicago’s best. In this moment however, the teenage grudge Grace felt for her father bloomed.

Thick air closed around her body as she left the water. She began a defiant trudge in the direction of the house, determined to shock the God who allowed this immodest walk to befall her. Frogs and birds sang out a dissonant processional as her atmosphere darkened. Burrs and thorns occasionally streaked her pale skin with long red trails, and welts from late summer bugs popped up like drumbeats as she approached the edge of the forest.

***

Matthew had worked for Hinkley the last 3 summers- he searched the surrounding fields for cobblestones, dug and hauled them to the house’s building site and piled them in long lines. The work seemed futile but was steady, and Matthew was determined to finally join his brothers in San Francisco before the great boom was over and done with. He was a little late in all things, born nearly three weeks after he was expected, the last of 8 children, his voice like a choirboy until 16, and presently stuck in the field until dusk.

The neighboring boys erupted into the far side of the field with halloos like coyotes under a full moon. They stopped short when he called out, dropped their spoils and took off toward the farm. The brats had ruined his summer, stealing the bread and jam Mrs. Hinkley so lovingly wrapped up in a linen hanky each morning as he set out, to keep him going.

He dropped his digging tools and started the muddy trudge across the field to pick up what the rascals had abandoned. The summer heat broke slightly as the sun descended to the horizon. It was a welcome respite. As he bent to pick up the mound of fine cloth that blanketed the tall grass, a ghostly figure burst into the clearing with an unearthly shriek. Before he could turn he was knocked cold to the ground by a flying stone.

Red and black specks swam in his vision as Matthew came to, the ghost replaced by a madwoman with tangled red hair struggling to fasten the discarded dress with scraped fingers, feet caked with mud and leaves, profaning like a Milwaukee and St. Paul station agent. As he began to move, the ghost woman whirled around and searched the ground for another cobblestone. Matthew stilled her with hands up, but began to laugh at the sight of this wreck of a lily-white city girl.

“What’s your name?” he offered, recovering.

The girl began to answer, then stopped, her eyes filling, as hysterical laughter began to spill out like rain from a thunderhead. “Grace,” she finally managed.

U.S.M.S. "Western World"

Life occasionally overwhelms me with anxiety and uncertainty so much that I can't see the ground beneath my feet. This was one such weekend, but I had several reminders of how little myself or my troubles matter at all in the grand scheme of things. One day I sat at a table amidst 4,000 utter strangers, milling around the building I spend most of my days in, not seeing one familiar face, realizing that all have similar worries and wonders, but that I will never know them at all...and these were people in my own familiar space- what about the millions outside the door and beyond? At these times I feel most centered by the love of my family- past, present and future.

One happily distracting moment this weekend therefore was looking through a scrapbook my great aunt created for my great-grandfather after his 1934 journey to South America aboard the U.S.M.S. "Western World," sailing from NY on Feb, 17th, 1934 through Bermuda-Rio de Janeiro-Santos Montevideo-Buenos Aires.

It appears that my great-grandfather was an avid collector (maybe something I've inherited), as the scrapbook is brimming with menus, maps, schedules, handwritten notes, postcards, photographs (a large majority of naked natives, but I suppose that was quite exhilarating), and entertainment programs.

Some of the photographs and postcards are so beautiful to me:

 

"Neptune's Court" a theatrical production put on by passengers

 

 



Photos and postcards of adventures and wildlife

 

 

Postcard of a "gaucho"

 

"Bolivian Silver"

 



I wish I could chat with him about his journey and how exciting (and maybe exhausting) travelling to such a foreign place might have been for him. There are so many pictures of people, buildings, ships and notes, I feel like he must have been hungry to take in as much as possible, giddy at all of the beauty and wonder of the world. He was travelling when he was in his late 50's or early 60's- maybe he wondered if this was his last hurrah. His daughter pieced everything together with such care and pride, she must have known how much the journey meant to him, and have been excited to preserve it for her father and maybe even for all of us yet-unseen twinkles.

So, maybe we all matter a little bit. At least for a little while. :)

Night Walking

Strolling around at night is one of my favorite things. I love the quiet of the empty streets, the secrecy and anonymity of the solitude and darkness and the opportunity to see the place I inhabit from a different perspective. Tonight I walked giddily home from a night out, the entire way strolling down the very middle of the streets and never meeting a car, skipping up and hitting low-hanging catalpa beans with my fingers and poking patterns in the icy top layer of the snow along the curbside. I came across the intersection pictured below, where when I was 10 or 11 years old on a bike ride with my dad, he took a sharp right turn at the last second and I was so paralyzed with indecision that I careened straight into the street sign, causing it to lean as pictured. I wonder if anyone else knows how that came to be. 

 

Largo

I got a little lost today with addictive kindle bubble popping games and later decided I should practice piano in order to try to repair any damage I may have caused my soul. Hehe!

 

Growing up, I practiced on the very same ancient Baldwin that now sits in my home. From the time I was eight years old until graduation, I played it for hours almost every afternoon in my grandparent's dining room at the farm.

 

My grandparents had a range of attentiveness. They sometimes sat in the dining room with me and listened with closed eyes (my music-loving grandfather's favorite was Offenbach's "Barcarolle" and my grandmother loved Grieg or anything that "sounded like waterfalls"). Other times they cranked up the volume on Jeopardy or Days of Our Lives (usually when I was very emotionally connected to something and thought they were sharing a moment).

 

Today I remembered how frustrated I occasionally got when assigned a piece that I either found boring, that included a key that was dead on the old piano, or had some tricky embellishment that drove me insane. Handel's "Largo" from the opera Xerxes was one of the pieces that bored me to tears in my youth (listen to the symphonic version here).

 

Today however, it triggered tears for a different reason. The massive chords caused me to miss my beautiful grandparents with an abyssal depth, recall the pristine solemnity of the passing of time and rejoice in the restorative reflection that music can trigger.