Thoughts About Home by Deborah

In the Midst of Celebration

The ghosts of January are close upon me. They fill my dreams, stop me mid-stride in crowded spaces, blur my vision with sudden tears, reminding me in these days of stillness how much I loved them, how much I still do love them, and what longing after all these years, what longing they can still provoke.

This past Saturday, David and I had a few members of an extended New Orleans clan for dinner. Quite by chance, our paths have crossed with theirs, those few who have ended up, for the moment, living in Louisville, by way of North Carolina, Paris, France, and Nebraska. Upon inviting each of them, I said I wanted a little of their New Orleans family madness to warm my winter dining room.

They talked about Sunday suppers at the table of their maternal grandmother, a formidable woman who had birthed eleven children. The cousins, their parents and all the ghosts would gather to accommodate the aging matriarch. Everyone knew but no one really said anything about Uncle Reggie who had left his wife Ida and their four children for a woman named Edna. Edna and Uncle Reggie lived in a warehouse down by the docks in one room with a bed, a hot plate and a small refrigerator. The rest of the warehouse was filled with Uncle Reggie’s dream, a boat that would take Edna and him around the world. He built it by hand. It was beautiful. They did sail around the world while Ida and the children languished in New Orleans. One of those children has become famous and spurned his father’s recent attempt at reconciliation.

Our dear friend, Charlotte, whose mother was one of the eleven, remembered her mother picking her up from elementary school and whisking her off to the nearest Catholic Church just in time for communion. Charlotte’s mother, Ivy, went to communion every day of the week. Charlotte, as one of the younger of seven, found herself often accompanying her mother. Before the evening was over, Charlotte told me in mock horror, she hoped I realized I was going straight to Hell (because I am not Catholic). I ignored her. Charlotte has been telling me this since the day I met her. In the meantime she and David and I have walked the streets of her beloved Paris together, listening to her perfect French and wonderful stories. Such is the friendship between us.

But what hung over dinner for me was not the memory of Paris, but the absence of our youngest guest. Charlotte’s cousin, David, is a pediatric resident at Kosair Children’s Hospital here in Louisville. His current rotation is in intensive care. When I invited David, he said he had to work all day Friday and until noon on Saturday, but he would be with us for dinner on Saturday night. What he could not have anticipated was that by then he would have gone thirty hours without sleep and lost three patients, one of whom was a twenty year old he’d spoken with only minutes before her sudden death.

I call it hazing by death. Charlotte assured me he’d be okay.  This young man, not yet out of his twenties himself, was eleven when he was diagnosed with cancer and his mother told him she and his father were taking him to St Jude’s where he would get well. He did just that, despite, as he told me at dinner on Christmas Eve,” I wasn’t expected to live through the weekend.”  When I asked him why he had lived, he said his doctor at St Jude’s chose the right course of treatment.

With all of this in mind, I took a walk this morning. It was cold. I pulled my hat well down over my forehead to shield my eyes from the wind.  My coat and skirt were long, my gloves lined with rabbit fur, my stockings were wool and I was warm. St James and Central Park were empty except for the skittering squirrels and on Belgravia the tree men were out raising the canopy of our larger trees. As I walked I thought of our grandson’s tapered fingers as he nimbly opened a band aid recently, how even at three he knew to pinch the tip end of the casing before carefully peeling it away to free the bandage itself. I’ve seen his great grandfather repeat that exact action a hundred times. He was a physician and it was amazing to me to see his hands again, all these years beyond his departure from us, once again in such caring and precise action.

A winter dining room, a winter walk, the ghosts of January and my grandson’s eyes as he sat thinking in the midst of celebration.

Mid-summer's Recollections of Home

All in a moment the evening sky went dark. Thunder terrified our dog, Missouri, and lightning glared over all of us. The rain took its time. Then, just as suddenly as the sky had gone dark, the rain flooded gutters, rushed through trees and pebbled the rooftops.

Sunday night in the city where the gaslights flicker even as we stuff certain window sills with towels to keep the water from seeping into the plaster walls below.

Upon waking this morning, the air is still and heavy. Today’s high is 96 degrees. It is, after all, summer.  It’s supposed to be hot and muggy. I take comfort in that.

In my childhood there was no air conditioning.  My mother rose before dawn to iron.  I wore shorts and halters. My favorite halter top had fluted straps that rose over my child’s shoulders and they made me feel pretty.

In those days we practiced our most difficult spelling words out loud as we took turns swinging on the neighborhood’s single swing set. D-i-f-f-e-r-e-n-c-e…..we were eight years old and we pumped our legs hard so we could swing high. E-l-o-q-u-e-n-c-e….

Our blind neighbor, Mrs. Pebbles, had a Seeing Eye dog who was allowed outside from time to time. He’d show up with a mouth filled with rocks which he would deposit at your feet with a look of keen expectation. You’d stop swinging long enough to scoop up one wet rock and throw it as far as you could, knowing he’d be back soon drooling the same rock.  We’d do this over and over, chanting spelling words and swinging in the hot days of summer.

Mrs. Pebbles had a music box that she would let me carefully lift the lid and watch the pop-up ballerina pirouette before a tiny mirror.  I opened and shut the lid over and over until I sensed it might be polite to say thank you and leave.

When we weren’t swimming or climbing on the swing set, we were running. We had imaginary wars, battles over what I can’t quite recall. Sometimes we played “Gunsmoke.” My best friend, Diane, always got to be “Miss Kitty” because Diane had a mole on her face and so did Miss Kitty. Diane called it her beauty mark and my mother assured me I was pretty enough without a mole on my face.

Up the way was a farmhouse where Virginia, Diane’s housekeeper, lived with her daughter Francis Arlene. Frances Arlene was a lot older than we were but we knew Virginia wanted more children. She told us about her “miscarriages.” She never mentioned a man which of course, at eight, made perfect sense to us.

Diane’s grandfather owned the farm and the house and the barns.  Out front of the house there were tall pear trees that sent down the sweetest fruit. You had to be careful of wasps, but the pears were worth it.

There was a large field near the barns and a horse named “Gypsy.” We had to get a step ladder out of the shed in order to mount her but once on her shiny black back, we would hold onto her mane as she walked around the circumference of the field. I would lay my face against her and if my head hurt as it sometimes did when I was a child, the pain would leave when I rode Gypsy. Up there high above the earth, I could feel the easy sway of her muscles beneath me as she ambled around that summer field.

Way off in the distance, beyond roads I was forbidden to cross, stood a tall brick house facing a road that no longer existed. If it had been up to me, Gypsy and I would have thundered right over those forbidden roads to that old house. I loved that old house. I would never have the chance to enter it before it was gone, but the love I felt was real and I have carried it into every old house I’ve entered since.

When it rained, we played in Diane’s playhouse which was stored in her daddy’s garage. He was never home. Diane lived with her grandparents next door.  Diane was allowed to see her mother once a year, but that’s another story.

It’s summer and if we slow way, way down, the living feels easy.

(Picture above is an abandoned home in Bourbon County, KY. Photograph by Deborah Stewart)

 

 

 

Flickering Candles

   

 And so we talk, deep into the evening on our small back deck, with candles flickering in their glass baskets. It is May, the month of our marriage and in a few days we will celebrate our 36 years together as man and wife, father and mother, Granddaddy and Amma.

 We share a bottle of chilled white wine. The evening is perfect, no air conditioner compressor, no mosquitoes, just the cool presence of early spring with the night birds calling to one another and the occasional siren in the distance to remind us of the city in which we now live.

     Together we have buried parents, witnessed births, faced difficult financial times, weathered illness, celebrated graduations and marriages. Sometimes, I confide, I wake in the middle of the night in a panic certain of the tasks that lay before me: waking Kate early so she can review for a test, reminding David to practice piano for his evening recital, fold the clothes still in the dryer, schedule dental appointments, shop for the week (Mom, there’s never anything to eat in this house…i.e. no chips, dips, soft drinks or sweets of all kinds etc). Then I open my eyes to the renewed awareness that Kate is now married, in her own home with her husband, Craig, and if she needs to get up early she sees to that.

 David is probably cradling his sleepy son who sometimes wakes in the night for a drink or to snuggle between David and his wife, Karen. At two, Dave the 4^th aka Baby D, states solemnly that it’s mommy’s bed, not daddy’s bed, proving once more that the Oedipal complex is alive and well among the two year olds of the world.

“If we were at the farm,” my husband says, “We’d be listening to the whippoorwills and the owls.”

“If we were in Paris," I say, "we'd be out walking until dawn, maybe stopping in at that tiny jazz bar just down the street from our room. Remember?"

“If we were in Monterey," he says, "we'd be walking the beach, listening to the rush of the sea and the snores of the seals."

“If we were there,” I say, “we’d have just finished dinner in that Greek restaurant which was, do you recall, smothered in fog that night. It was like walking in a dream.”

“If we were there,” he says, “I’d build you a fire in our bedroom fireplace and it would burn all through the night.”

“Yes,” I reply. “That was when I was afraid of the dark.”

“But,” he reminds me, taking a sip of his wine, “you’re not afraid anymore.”

“No.” I raise my glass to a toast. “You’ve been strong and kept me safe for a long time now. I’m not afraid anymore.”

“We’ve been strong together,” he says.

On our actual anniversary, we would celebrate with dinner at Lilly’s where the food and wine were exquisite. But, it’s that brief moment in the candlelit darkness of our back deck that held for me the true celebration of our marriage.

Cheers!

 

Finding a Way Back

  My father’s woods are laced with redbud and dogwood. The iris down near the first pond are in bloom and deep in the lane I know just where to look for the sweet William hovering like blue butterflies in the new shade. The peepers have made themselves known for weeks now in the pond out beyond the horse barn, the same pond where the cattails are coming back along the steep and muddy banks.

There are calves that shyly watch my approach as I walk into the midst of my brother’s herd. I sing old hymns to the cows and they seem to like it. None of them moves as I sing and walk through their congregation. At night I sit on the side porch and listen to their lowing in the dark.

I rarely sleep in when I’m out in the country. A cup of hot coffee never tastes better than in the cool mists of early morning out on my father’s farm. A blue bird has nested in the side of the farmhouse and my mother has decided to let her stay. Mother walks me to her flower beds and introduces me to her plants, Mama’s old fashioned pink, Mrs. Sheely’s daylily, the bleeding heart she thought she’d lost to last winter’s frigid January temperatures, the rose my father gave her the last summer of his life, the wood ferns she brought to the base of the sugar maple from the woods last year. It is a ritual with us. I’ve met the flowers in years past but this is the first year she has ever added, I want you to know where everything is so when I’m gone you can enjoy them.

I listen and remember. Then I tell her about a new tree I’ve noticed for the first time, down near the lake. It’s in bloom and I have no idea what it is. I describe the delicate blossoms and sweet fragrance. She nods and we walk on.

Last year David and I helped deliver a calf on a hillside (up near the old pear trees) in a swift cold wind. With phoned assistance from the vet, we eased this animal into life and then stood back and watched as the mother did the rest. After a while, the calf wobbled to its feet and stood next to its mother. The other cattle kept a polite distance but nothing escaped their notice. When the time was right, the herd closed in around them and everyone moved on out into the fields.

I’m not sure I want to be too specific about why going to my father’s farm is such a comfort to me. It’s a home like no other. I’m not ready to live there, but every time I leave, I always know I’ll find my way back.

Together

            I planted pansies this morning. Rain is due by noon so this morning I dug in the dirt, felt winter’s chill still in the spring soil, and then swept the courtyard clear of old leaves and magnolia pods. Our dog, Souri, accompanied my every move with a curious nose and then a loud bark of protest when she was shut in the courtyard and our white cat, Lydia, slipped through the rungs of the old iron gate to join me out under the tulip magnolia where I planted the pansies.

There is a brisk, warm breeze and the luxurious swish of cypress and magnolia. The wind chimes are alive and I pretend I am near the sea and the rush of wind overhead is the shore just beyond my walled courtyard. The UPS jet high overhead becomes a surging surf in my mind and all that’s missing is the smell of salt water on the breeze.

I have stretched the wood pile’s tarp over the porch railing to dry in time to store before the rain comes. It blows free, catching against the trunk of our holly tree which stands three stories tall and has a straight, flat trunk that shimmers when the rain comes and courses the trunk like tears. In my fantasy, the tarp flapping against the holly’s trunk becomes the main sail slapping against the sail boat’s stanchion which stands nearly as tall in memory as the holly does in the present.

GeorgiaFort Lauderdale Before we had children, David and I used to sail. We’d pack a sail bag with old jeans, bathing suits, deck shoes and sun-block and drive all night from our home in Georgia to Ft. Lauderdale where we’d catch a small plane out the Abacos and one of Judy’s charter boats. We’d live on our borrowed sail boat for days, cooking in the narrow galley, sleeping in the forward berth and showering in the tiny head, careful all the while to conserve our precious water.

Those were wonderful days to learn about one another. One night I woke with a start to the sudden rush of a spherical hum which wrapped our entire world deep in the night. I was afraid and it was David who reassured me there was nothing to fear. It was only the wind in the rigging creating the high pitched whine. Only wind in the rigging.

Now, on this spring morning in land-locked Kentucky, all these years later, the wind in the trees takes me back to such sweet memories of our home on the sea where we first understood what it was to be alone together in the midst of this wide wonderful world.

The Opportunity for Slow Growth

     What I love about winter is the opportunity for slow growth. Whether it’s reviewing and pruning my client files in anticipation of a busy spring and summer or settling in by the fire with Tolstoy’s biography, I do not feel rushed as I would in other seasons.

On a recent Saturday I decided to clean this old house in a way I haven’t since late September. With a soft rag in hand, I dusted the tall baseboards. I took time to notice that most dust collected in the front hall, near the cold air return. In the dining room I drew close enough to one of the large windows to feel the cold air seeping in around the window’s edge.

This winter I’ve learned the particular nature of each of our fireplaces. The living room’s is a little deeper but more narrow. The library fireplace smokes unless you build the fire close to the back in which case it draws just fine. Our bedroom fireplace is the least trouble. It draws well and has a slightly larger firebox so it is easier to fit odd sized logs in there.

Winter’s first light comes in the broad bay of the library on the northeast corner of our house. I love watching the light shift quietly from morning to dusk. It alters the color of the room, the pale yellow walls shifting from nearly white to a deeper, almost burnished gold depending entirely on the light of the moment.

This is a house for candles after dark. Late each day I light a fat, squat candle in one of Ama’s (David’s great grandmother) lovely butter dishes taken from the farmhouse in Wilmore, KY where routinely 13 sat down to the long dining room table for meals. So I light this candle in the fading light of a winter’s day and feel somehow closer to the women who’ve weathered the long hard winters of the past and I am reassured.

The flickering light carries me into night with the sure knowledge that winter will not last forever and my house will have fresh secrets to share in the spring. In the meantime, I am content to snuggle in and wait. Winter teaches us endurance, patience.

My house is now in its 106th winter. I can only hope I will age as gracefully.

(Picture: "Winter Road" - Wallpaper by CloudEight)

Lessons Remembered.

It was cold even in the kitchen with our small electric heater on high next to my chair. I told myself to think warm thoughts…attics in the heat of a summer’s afternoon; walking the dogs down to the park, careful to stick to the shady side of the street; the taste of a sweating glass of iced tea in the heat of the afternoon; perspiration trickling down my back as I write in the morning on our small enclosed deck; how David and I leave the back door open so the dogs can come and go while we have supper outside, swatting at the mosquitoes in the gathering dusk; how even on the hottest days I can feel a breeze spiriting through the trees at the highest point of the farm if I am still. Although my hands typing this letter are cold, my mind wanders deep into the warmth of summer and I forget the chill.

Despite dire reports about the economy, I know for sure that the ice will melt, the days will grow longer and the seasons will change. There’s a reassurance in that one I sometimes forget surrounded as I am by reports of everything from global warming to recession to yet another wonder drug that turns out to be just the opposite of it promise.

It’s then that we escape for a weekend to our farm where smoke rises from the two old chimneys, split wood fills the shed roof barn out back where the stalls now hold firewood instead of horses. The dogs run free and we bundle up for walks down the ridge in the moonlight beneath that age old canopy of the Milky Way. We’re surrounded by the promise of tomorrow. Light will return, a bit at a time, until the vague shapes in the distance become clearly the patience of bare trees ready and waiting for the cues of spring.

During times of seeming crisis our Uncle George used to say, “This, too, shall pass.” And I believe that. Markets will steadily rise once more, houses will sell and life will resume a less fearful pace. These are the trying times that keep us awake at night. They will pass and we’ll be busy with so many opportunities that we’ll hardly have time to remember the threats of today.

A Christmas Beacon

This is one of my old, old stories. But I love it still. Allow me to share it with you.

December 1993

Just tonight I left a light on in a house for the weary new owners who were traveling by car from

New York City. I also left some food, but it’s the light that warmed the house as I looked back from my car in the gathering darkness.

  “The Lord will make a way somehow. Well, there’s a sweet relief in knowing the Lord will make a way somehow. I say to my soul, take courage. He will take away the sorrow. The Lord will make a way somehow.”

  I can hear my grandmother singing that song in her farmhouse out on Pea Ridge near Shelbyville, Kentucky.

  She’s the one who taught me about leaving on a light for the absent loved ones, expected home after dark. I always knew there’d be a light in the front window to show the way.

   When I decided to take a job that would earn some extra money in the mid eighties, it was that image of a light in the window that spoke to me. I had always loved houses and so decided to try and make a living helping others buy and sell their homes.

  I now live in an old farmhouse at the foot of Frankfort Avenue just before it merges with Story Avenue. Our house was built in 1802. It once oversaw two thousand acres of river bottomland. Today we have less than an acre left, but the Linden trees for which the house is named (Linden Hill) still loom and if you drive by our way, you’ll recognize our house by the lights in all the windows. They burn the year round but seem to glow especially bright in these nights that precede the birth of Jesus.

  These days I sit by my kitchen fireplace and marvel at how fortunate I am to live in a place I love as much as I do this house. My first view is of the east and the return of the light after the darkness.

  Merry Christmas and the most blessed of New Years.

 

Frost On a Four-Dog Night

We arrived at The Farm on Wednesday night. It was nearly dark and the air was balmy. After unpacking, we took a walk before supper. The sky was amazing, roiling first with dark clouds full of rain which blew right over us to leave the fair sky spinning with white fluffy drift that moved so fast you could watch them like flying carpets on their way to a mysterious land. All of this was overseen by a luminous nearly full moon.

The world always seems immense out here. I have been in some of the largest cities on the globe and this planet never seems as infinite as it does in the country under the evening sky or right after a summer’s dawn. Life goes on out here without rush or much intensity. Morning turns to mid-day as late afternoon dips into early evening and the gloaming arrives before dark. You can sit in one place or walk for miles. Nature doesn’t much care. It has its task in hand and it does it well. Perfection on a daily basis.

Thursday morning I awoke to delicious aromas drifting up the staircase from the kitchen. I slid the covers up a little closer to my neck, closed my eyes and set the moment sweetly in my memory.

David had awakened earlier to put the turkey in the oven and walk the four dogs; Missouri, our 13 year old hound mix whose large almond brown eyes would melt the heart of the dourest soul around; Jude, our two year old pup, a husky-lab mix whose black coat gleams and whose bark skitters from a deep threat to a puppy’s scratchy soprano, depending on what he wants; Noah, our daughter’s orphan dog who is as loyal as the hills but who would rip the throat out of anyone who threatened Kate; and then Guinness, the other pup, a Belgian Tervuren who captured Kate and her husband Craig’s heart when he was small enough to hold in the palms of their hands. It’s a lovable pack and good company on a chill Kentucky morning’s first walk.

It is my husband’s chilled face I feel against my own as he bends to urge me out of the warm bed. “Time’s a wastin’ darlin’,” I hear him say as I look at the alarm clock that indicates I’ve slept plenty. I rise, dress and head down stairs to a kitchen full of wonderful smells and three cooks. Our daughter, Kate, David and my mother, Kay, scrunch around one another as they whip up cakes, oyster dressing, sweet potato casserole, green beans, cranberry salad, and mashed potatoes. All the while my mother is fretting over whether or not we will have enough food. She won’t rest easy until the guests all settle down with plates overflowing and the buffet shows plenty for seconds and thirds.

Much later when all the dishes have been washed and placed in their proper stacks, the leftovers covered with foil, the candles flicker against the encroaching darkness. I sit down before the fire with my soft house slippers on my aching feet propped before me near the warmth of the hearth and I read while the men sit at the other end of the room rooting for their preferred football team.

Another American Thanksgiving is about to end. Football has replaced hog butchering which Grandmother Tad said always occurred on the Thanksgivings of her childhood because that day usually marked the first really cold days, so perfect for killing hogs.

I don’t know the first thing about hog killing, but I do know that last night before I shut the lights off and climbed up to bed, the temperature was 22 degrees outside of this house that is heated entirely by wood. I was the last one up. It was nearly three a.m. and time to fill the stove with another load of wood and chunk on a last few night logs in the fireplace.

Before climbing the steps to bed, I looked into the still night and saw frost covering everything like a sheet of fine snow gleaming in the cool light of a full moon.

Moonlight & Lilies

White lilies on the breakfast table have scented our kitchen for just over a week now. I bought them in a blue
mood and ever since they’ve cheered me with new blossoms, tightly held green buds lightening to a paler green relaxing ever so slightly as the white tips open a bit at a time. First the orange stamens fully laden with rust colored pollen and then deep in the night, perhaps bathed in the moon’s light, the lily completes its birth and blossoms fully into a wholly released, fully formed lily.

While contemplating the lilies I am reminded how like my life becoming a lily is. “All in good time,” my doctor father-in-law would say. “All in good time.” My own father used to tell me that my persistently scraped knees of childhood would heal. “When they start itching,” he’d say, “It means they’ve started to heal.” And sure enough, they were both right. Eventually my body released my babies and my childhood scars faded and healed completely.

There’s a refrain I repeat silently to myself on days when I am pressured by work. I want to spend the day in my study, writing among my books. I want to watch the light of August become the light of October and take note how the gold leaves flutter toward earth. I want to sit undisturbed while this other person rises slowly beside me from the rush of life. This other me who is capable of a deep calm is always with me but I rarely acknowledge her with my full, undivided attention.

The refrain is this. “It will be okay.” Take time for work and be fully present in those moments for those who are counting on you to help them buy or sell a home. Strategize, imagine, pray and I guarantee something will happen.

When work is done, I can climb the steps to my study and sit alone among the books and set myself free among the magnolia leaves, the wispy fronds of the spruce tree and recall the lilies down in the kitchen.

I’m too old to suffer the relentless pressures of self-criticism. I do the best I can and then I rest. I read. I write. I let go. It’s a much healthier way to sell homes, breathe in the day and know the lilies are blooming in the night all around me.