Remembering this past summer calls up dozens of images of shimmering overheated days spent working on the details of the barn project. There were light fixtures and hardware to install. There were shelves and a deck to be built, and a floor to be put down.

I found myself growing accustomed to the intense heat, from being outside in it every day, and hardly ran the air conditioner at all, once back inside. When it was time to lay the floor, Jose and I pulled out all the dusty original boards that had been the barn floor since 1890, milled originally in my great grandfather’s saw mill. My friend and neighbor, Rodney Readling, a real Renaissance man who can make almost anything, agreed to plane the old barn boards for me and to serve as my floor supervisor.

Rodney sent me to an exterminator supply company for the appropriate chemicals for treating historic lumber, and I mixed it up and sprayed both sides of the newly planed boards. Once run through the planer their million worm holes showed up. The heartwood, full of 122 year old resin, was, of course, bug free, but the soft wood was riddled with tiny tunnels. It doesn’t matter how old heart pine is, when you sand it or plane it or cut it, it smells like wind blowing through a pine forest.

Rodney gave me a wonderful concise tutorial on how to lay this unconventional (today) material as a finished floor. He also showed me how to use a speed square in conjunction with my saw to get straight cuts. As a young girl I attempted to sign up for Industrial Arts at my school, was hauled into the principal’s office and told girls weren’t allowed in Industrial Arts. So every scrap of learning I’m able to get about the workings of wood and tools and metals is precious to me.

Jose, my helper, and I started off a little on the rough side, trying to understand the natural curvature of the wood, and its reluctance to butt tightly up against its neighbor. Our first couple of rows went slowly. But we persisted. Things got better when I realized that Jose knew more about carpentry than I’d suspected and that I should follow his lead. He learned that I could be trusted to measure and cut the wood accurately and we developed a floor team that was pretty professional by the time we got half way through the space.

Stewart came out to help me with the floor finishing, which involved hand sanding the wood. The job was complicated by our allergies, and by the boric acid which the wood had been treated with. The resins in the dense old wood also clogged and coated the sandpaper within seconds of contact. It was brutal. But Stewart stepped up to the plate and we took turns being beaten up by the very heavy , violent floor sander we were using. Rodney sent me to a wooden floor company to research finishes, and the varnish went down, revealing the beauty of the tiger striped heartwood.

Paul Hollar, recovering from his chemotherapy and radiation, agreed to be my shadetree foreman, and instruct me in how to get my deck built. He arrived with his folding chair, parked it under a big pecan tree, and proceeded to never sit in it. He showed us– the laborers, what had to be done, and usually moved in to do a lot of it himself. Like any job, I learned this summer, a rhythm develops as the job proceeds, among the people working on it. Paul, so sure of what he was doing, pretty much dismissed my help, and proceeded with Jose, to build the deck. I worried about his working in the heat, but it seemed that every day, as he worked, he forgot about being ill, and his spirit lightened a little. He would pick up his hammer and swing it with the grace of a true carpenter, from the whole body, not just the arm, in a way that seemed effortless.

Frank Cheney, the architect who made the space coherent and poetic, came back and drew the plan for finishing the entrances, and is advising me on a canopy for the front door. It’s almost time to warm this barn with a gathering of friends. I treasure the hard work, the talents, the altruism and kindness, the level of engagement each person has brought to the Cotton Barn project. It has been a labor of love, and for me of learning. My brother and I like to imagine our father and mother, our grandparents and great grandparents looking on the little barn with pleasure from some place, we hope, not too far away.

I love a good story about an old building, so I will have to hold myself back from making my Story of a Barn series into a nouvella.  Oh… maybe I should just give in to that impulse…

Once the big panel truck took Gordon and all his many possessions  to Brooklyn to live I still held out hope, for a while, that he might decide to come back home and finish the barn.  But, after a couple of years passed and he signed a five year lease, I realized the barn was going to remain a lumpish half done reminder if I didn’t take it on myself.  We negotiated the transfer of his project to me, and I hired some help.

Paul Nelson Hollar is a third generation carpenter.  His grandfather built the house I grew up in.  His father helped my father with the construction of our mountain house.  And Paul had helped me and my brother since we were all very young, with various jobs we undertook.  Paul had just finished rehabbing an old tenant farm house for my brother when I asked him if he’d help me put a floor in my barn.  He agreed and he and his wife Joan  showed up on consecutive Saturdays to work on the framework and  put down plywood.  We’d have lunch and laugh  a lot.  Joan could easily be a comedienne.  It was like potato chips– I couldn’t stop there.  After the plywood we decided to work on the siding, and on installing windows.

Paul knew the owner of the local sawmill and arranged for the wood to be cut, and hauled in.  He patiently worked with me, picking up second hand windows and doors, trying to keep the project on a budget I could afford.    Out of the attic came the wonderful turn of the century beveled, leaded glass window Paul’s father had given me 30 years before– just because I admired it.  I had driven by the Hollar’s house at sunset, and the west-facing window tacked into the shop out back caught the sunlight and refracted it like a thousand diamonds.  It was breathtaking.  Nelson removed it and gave it to me– because that’s the kind of people they are.  Paul and I picked a west-facing wall and figured out where to install it.

Paul is a cowboy and most of the people who work with him  are cowboys.  Lamont, who helped with the barn, also helped my brother train his beautiful American Paint/ Percheron to wear a bridle and pull a plow.  Paul and Joan have a business boarding and caring for horses on the grounds of their early 18th century home.   They come out of that culture– love of the land, love of the old ways, abject honesty, total integrity, and a strong belief in helping one’s neighbors.  Paul grew up on a gentle rise  in my rural community, on property that had been farmed by his family for generations.  Like many people in our community, all around him were cousins, aunts, and uncles.  And it’s still that way.  We used to love to get his Aunt Belle to tell us stories of the old days.  She told us how our grandfathers would all thresh together.  They would go from farm to farm, as a group, threshing.  And the womenfolk at whatever farm they were threshing would feed them all that day.  It was a competition to see who set the best table.  Our community is still known for its fine cooking .  It was rural, but it was interdependent– black or white, modest or well-off, everyone depending on the help of the others.  Even into our parents’ generation they still particpated in barn raisings, and assisted neighbors in need without a second thought.  So Paul, almost as an act of neighborly love, took on my project, and gave a lot of care to helping raise my barn.   Every Saturday, after he left I would take a photograph of what it looked like and email it to Brooklyn with the subject line “Today”.

All along Paul and Joan asked me “what are you going to do with this barn”.  At first I didn’t know.  I just knew I wanted to resolve the unfinished quality of it, and I knew that if I coexisted with it, time would tell me what to do.  With 10 foot louvered shutters discarded from the 1881 church in our community, I first planned a storage closet, with shutters for doors.  I would store tools in the space, and maybe have a covered workshop.  In that big expanse of wall I thought I might hang some of my extra paintings, so collectors could see them assembled.  But it was a vague plan, without much form.

Things ground to a halt when Paul told me he’d been diagnosed with throat cancer.   A cowboy doesn’t take much notice of things like that.  He just keeps right on going.  He was told it was totally curable, but there has been chemotherapy and radiation and a cure that’s worse than the disease.   And just for now, this big old cowboy’s hammer has been silenced.

It’s mid-week in mid-May and I have the good fortune to find myself on a little adventure.  After school I drove up to the mountains to the lovely, rambling house of friends.  They loaned me their mountain house so I could transact some business in the vicinity.  Lucky for me, it’s very cold so I’m sitting by a blazing, snapping fire with a glass of wine, and taking time to write in unfamiliar and friendly surroundings, far away from the rest of the world.

This house is built to accommodate four children, their spouses and fifteen grandchildren so it’s jolly even when it’s empty– echoes of optimism all around me.  The house sits on a hundred acres designated as Stewardship Forest and on the walls are hundreds of photographs of easy, happy family times, collections of arrowheads, wild turkey feathers and stone age tools.  It is a place that’s all about love of family and love of the land.

I’m tucked in amongst the books and the stonework, socked in by fog and toasted, on the front side at least, by my cozy fire.  What a luxury to be alone with one’s thoughts; to be removed from routine and exploring new places; to be alone on a mountaintop.  This big echoing house must be startled by its lone guest, accustomed as it is to a huge family that enjoys its time together.  Big and empty as it is, it’s doing its best to embrace me.

In the morning the house is still cold.  I have clearly not decoded the furnace.  So first thing I start a fire in the wood stove from last night’s coals.  In my robe, with a cup of coffee, I prop my feet in front of the fire.  Outside, the house is blanketed in a smoky white fog and the fire and fog trigger a favorite memory.

I am 20.  I have been camping at Linville Gorge near the falls with  my boyfriend.  We have spent a cold night sleeping on a 30 degree incline, deep in our down bags.  This is the boyfriend I let slip away, though he earnestly held a ruby engagement ring out to me in the front seat of a Toyota in city traffic.  Upon waking in Linville Gorge with the sound of the falls all around us on that long ago morning, we broke camp and drove away in search of some creature comforts.  We found a rustic restaurant with a hearth and a blazing fire, and early on that foggy mountain morning we gratefully ordered huge breakfasts and produced our own bottle of campsite-chilled champagne to go with it.

In memory there is laughter, firelight, bubbles and complete relaxed pleasure in the company of another.  How, I have asked myself many times, did I allow myself to discard that for the company of less joyful, more tortured souls?  Thousands of firelit mornings lie between this one and that.  But none so crystal clear, with a sense of wholeness and happiness.  I was accepted as I was.  I was encouraged to be more wholly myself that I ever had been.  I was truly loved by another joyous and playful soul.  In my innocence and ignorance I did not know the purity with which a boy first loves.  Instead, I presumed a good deal less.

But I have, as a kind of marker, that memory.  When I feel that whole and happy again I will recognize it and cherish it.  And should that not happen I will simply hold as dear as a blood red ruby in a small box the memory of that morning.  I believe the value of memories is as great as the pleasures of the moment, or the anticipation of the future.

The fog is lifting and I have my first sighting of what might lay beyond this porch.  It promises to be a ravishing day.

the cotton barn c. 1976

My son, Gordon, at about age 16, became deeply interested in graffiti as an artform.  He pleaded with me to allow him to cover the bare side of the cotton barn with OSB so he could have his own graffiti wall.  I relented, and for a time the barn, on three sides, was a rustic remnant, and on one side, an explosive artwork.

Gordon  was also becoming deeply interested in composing, performing and recording music around this same time.   He decided one day to make a sound booth in his room using his closet.  Clothes tossed out, he lined the walls  with soundproof foam.   I would look up from my chores to see an  unending stream of young people in various states of dress and body decoration carry their instruments up the stairs to spend a day in one of our closets.

Time came for Gordon to leave the south, and head to New York to college.  He hatched a new scheme: persuading  me that he should be allowed to rebuild the cotton barn as a recording studio.   I think I hoped it would draw him back home when he was finished with college.   I knew it made sense to allow some improvements to the crumbling ruin I had no time or money to bother with.

About this time, a new Gordon began to emerge.  This boy, with no knowledge whatsoever of  building, became a student of construction.  He turned to his father for advice and counsel.  He read.  He enlisted the help of a friend’s father who was a structural engineer.  And because he lacked better, I became a sometimes carpenter’s helper.

Often all I did was clean up the jobsite, or move things from the barn to another space.  Sometimes I removed nails from old weathered barnwood, or handed up the sheets of tin to reroof the building.  I came to relish the shared goal, the time spent watching Gordon’s spirit and imagination at work.  When he came home for breaks from college he would  work until the light was all gone,  sometimes with my help, growing faster as  he lost the light to try to propel the job as far forward as he could.  I began to sense that the barn project was one way in which Gordon could grasp with both hands his home, and do all he could to  set things right.  Lacking money, materials, and knowledge he gave it heart instead.

On the  last night before he would leave to return to New York, he would always  push himself into the night, dirty and tired, tucking things away.  I hold in memory one powerful image from those days.  It was late January, the last night of winter break.  We had worked so hard we didn’t feel the chill.  The  sun was setting in a cherry blaze behind the field across the road.  We both stopped to go look at it.  As we soaked it in  a hawk came from behind us, flying low toward the sunset.  A golden halo  formed around its silhouette.

Another scrap of memory I cherish– we were both stooped over at the foundation of the barn, just under the dripline from our new roof when, at my feet, I found the first arrowhead of my whole life.  ”Untouched for 5000 years” as my friend Frank Bragg would say.  I grabbed it and cherished it like a gemstone.  But after graduation, when Gordon filled a moving van and climbed into the cab to go live in Brooklyn, I gave it to him.  His is the native spirit, the hawk spirit, with whom it should always reside.

Chicken Coop Series #3

Last night I had three dreams about houses.  This is not uncommon.  I often dream about structures and cubic spaces and the things that go on in them.  One of my dreams was oppressive.  In another my mother appeared and I asked her for advice.  The last one delighted me so much that I was still flashing back to it over breakfast.  In it  I was standing in a room, looking through a big square window at the glint off the water and the trees outside, when the view began to move, and I realized it was a floating house,  floating away.  It left me with a great sense of freedom and adventure.

Lots of my time is occupied with buildings and rooms.  For much of my adult life I’ve been rehabbing my farmhouse. Lately I’ve been deconstructing my chicken coop and smokehouse, both of which had begun to droop and sag like giant organic forms.  Rather than have them knocked down by a bulldozer I, my sons, and our helper have been taking them apart board by board.   En route to the dump I began to recognize beauty in bits and pieces of the scrap.  I found little archeological fragments in the dirt of the foundations—bits of my grandmother’s everyday china, early pottery shards, toys my children dropped, hardware from jobs their father had tackled. This so intrigued me that I set up a screen for sifting the soil in order to capture what might be hiding there.

Concurrently I was teaching my Intro to Sculpture students about the trash collages of Kurt Schwitters in the years between the wars.  I recalled for them my first live exposure to one of his pieces.  I described for them how, at the Tate Modern,  I was surrounded by Rothkos and huge Pollocks.  A Water Lily hung there, and many other great iconic works, but what riveted me were the tiny playing card sized collages of Schwitters.  They were indescribably elegant.  Their composition locked together with complete certainty.   I still recall the surface texture and subtle coloration of those pieces. It finally occurred to me that I should allow myself to be inspired by Schwitter’s example and create some assemblages using my bits and pieces, charged as they were with their layers of meaning and history.  Thus was born the Chicken Coop Series.

For me, the sculpting experience is a bit like standing in a room that one suddenly realizes is moving—shifting from the 2-D work I’m so accustomed to, and into this formal exploration of three dimensionality.  It’s loaded with adventure.  I labored for days over the arrangement of the first piece, then more quickly put together the second and third and fourth.  When I set them up to study them, the weakest was that first tentative effort.  As I go forward they become more aggressive with space, and I hope, lock together in relationships that seem meant to be.

Best of all I like that some fragment of the past utility and dailiness of those two old structures is brought forward into the utility and dailiness of the life of the farm today.  The farm is no longer a place where hams are smoked and chickens are laying.  Instead, it is a place where art hovers always a bit above our heads, or lurks buried in the soil, or shows up in time for talk around the dinner table, or stands with us as a comfort  in times of confusion and loss.  When Stewart was about five he made a drawing for me.  It was of a boat, rocking on the ocean.  High up on its mast it flew a flag that said “Art Home”.

Christmas Morning

Several faithful readers have asked why I’ve grown silent lately.  Very unexpectedly my mother died, on January 3.  We found her at the end of a busy Monday when she didn’t answer her phone.  She had apparently died early in the morning, or in the night before.  The week before she had canceled her plans to drive her convertible six hours to her beach place because she was too busy throwing two cocktail parties back-to-back.  A couple of weeks later she planned to cruise to Belize.  But instead she was suddenly swept away from us all.

My brother and I sat with her body for a long time.  I was glad for the chance to hold her beautiful hands one more time.  This experience has silenced me.  I have lost my balance.  No need to write from such a place.  There is both too much to say and nothing to say.  But, to move forward, I will try to say a little.

First, in tribute to that brilliant spirit, none of us can separate her in memory from her hearty laugh.    Second, it fell into place as she would have wished it– a swift exit without a long stay in some holding cell of aging.   Third, of all the things she passed down to us, nothing is more precious than the closeness and caring she fostered between my brother and me, and her lesson of eternal optimism.  No matter how bitterly we whined about our fates, we’d always be reminded of our  good fortune in the great scheme of things, and the crushing misfortunes of  many others.

A few weeks before Mom died, my niece Sally gave birth to her third son, Zimmer.  Mama, never one to bother with babies, took special note and went to visit him, declaring him “beautiful”.  She even spent a long hour Christmas morning rocking him to sleep.

When I cleaned out the convertible I found a  book: Being Dead is No Excuse.  I had to laugh, standing there beside the car.  I rushed to read it.  It was a written in a  distinctly recognizable southern voice, about death rituals in the deep south.  My mother could have written it.  It was so full of things she had passed on to me:  southern taste, manners, priorities and peculiarities.  The irony and fun of it cracked me up.  I credit Mama with the sense of humor to leave that behind.

In some junk shop a decade ago she’d found a brass plaque intended for a coffin, engraved in gothic letters with the phrase “she hath done what she could”.  She hung it over the front door.   That was her mantra.  I think she hath done a whole lot more.  The rest is currently inexpressible.

There’s something about the Whitney that makes it my favorite museum in New York City.  Maybe I should credit the curators.  Every time I go there I see something I can’t forget.  I have some wonderful Whitney memories.  Maybe it’s that the size is just right and the organization is so clear.  I always take the stairs at the Whitney because I’m in love with the stairwell.  It’s heavily textured concrete that looks like it’s a product of rough week during the Ice Age.  That texture is combined with areas of smooth worn slate .  There is bronze colored metalwork , and a warm mahogany handrail.  The lighting is low and emphasizes the textures.  On at least one landing there’s a bench where you can rest  that looks vaguely oriental.

Once past the stairwell on this visit,  I found three floors of shows that fascinated me.  First flight up: Edward Hopper.  I am old enough to remember when parts of America still looked like that. Like my own paintings, Hopper’s are sparsely populated, if at all.  I like the loneliness of them, and the long shadows that wrap around forms.  I like that his paintings tell the story of a long love affair with his wife.  The work seems of a piece with the life he lived.

The second flight up was a show by Charles LeDray  called workworkworkworkwork. I can relate to that title.  Our family is riddled with people who love to work.  Especially the kind of hands-on crafted work this show evidenced.  It was a series of installations which included miniaturized clothing in miniaturized displays, as in a store, or miniature clothes used to make statements about identity.  A favorite was a blue collar workman’s jacket, with the name stitched on a label–” Charles”– the artist’s name, and inside dozens of tiny garments  hanging  from it by a thread.

There were vitrines of hundreds of tiny turned vessels.  I found myself absorbed by the infinite variety of them.  One vitrine had all white vessels, another all black and a third had vases in every color.

The most fascinating miniature work was made from bone.  The carving was stunning, even when some parts were the size of a human hair.  There was a tiny door with hinges, lying on its face, not much bigger than a playing card.  The bone had a beautiful warmth and grain, and the carving was masterful.

Next floor up, the mystical work of Paul Thek.  The Whitney has organized the first retrospective of Thek’s work in the United States.  Thek was not easily pigeonholed into the movements of his time .  Interestingly, he was a master draftsman, and I enjoyed his sketchbooks immensely.  He is important for his influence on the artists who came after him– most obviously Damien Hirst.  Thek created visceral pieces of meat from wax and paint, and placed them in plexiglass boxes.  He also created casts of his own body, and body parts, in wax and other materials which became musings on our physicality.  I was drawn especially to a hand, eerie in its verisimilitude, but decoratively bearing an abstract painting over much of its surface.  Hand as canvas.

The show was titled “Diver, A Retrospective”, referencing an image Thek painted of a nude male figure diving into water.  It was one of many paintings done with ephemeral materials like newspaper and tempera.  The diver seems to represent all of us as we screw up our courage to dive into the unknown stuff of life, and art.  This painting’s image was further explored in a cast figure created from Thek’s own body, around which fabric fish seemed to swim– their trajectory matching the diving figure’s.

In the Whitney, winding through the rooms, I would occasionally run across one of my sons, lost in their own thoughts.  We would blurt out to one another what we’d discovered, or go back to look at something the other recommended.  Maybe that’s why I love the Whitney.  It’s loaded not only with extraordinary art, but with great memories of shared experience.

Rodin

I’m just home from a true Cinderella week in Paris.  I love that metaphor because I’m literally cleaning the ashes out of the woodstove one day and sitting under 15 chandeliers in Paris having tea, the next.  My son Gordon had an exhibition which opened in Paris last week and I made the rash decision to take a week away from my students and be there.  Turns out it was a completely sound and life-expanding decision.  Everything conspired to make it magical and nourishing.

There was time to joke around with my son, and share the discoveries that are around every corner in such an amazing city.  There were many kind and considerate people to meet and be touched by.  And there was Paris.  It was hazy, and moody with clouds a lot of the time.  When the sun shone it had the long shadowed slant of fall.  There were lacquered doors and polished brasses.  There were pinks and golds against shining blacks, and the lovely flavors of herbs and cheeses.  It was artful and alive.

Using the Metro is fantastic for looking at people, and studying a population–the handbag of the working woman, the  young mother’s scarf, the cut of the career man’s jacket, the immigrant family’s jewelry, the shopping bags carried by the old gentleman, the curious, laughing face of the little one in the stroller.  One Metro station which I had the good fortune to land in twice had a seven piece gypsy band performing with edgy passion.  If I concentrate I can still hear it, and its powerful echoes.

We discovered a little restaurant in the neighborhood of our b&b that was remarkable.  We appeared there one night without a reservation and the proprietor found us a corner.  It was apparently a much touted place because another American couple told us they had traveled from the opposite side of Paris to dine there.  The proprietor took a pity on us when my fairly competent restaurant French failed us– the menu was that exotic. He came to our aid by extravagantly pantomiming the contents of all the dishes for us– which ranged from veal brain to skate.  We quickly fell under Giles’ spell and when we left we were all kissed goodbye.  Gordon went back again to invite him to the exhibition, and then spent his last night in Paris dining with Giles again.  We may have to go back to Paris just to see Giles whose dark eyes, booming voice and theatrical love of his business made him totally irresistible.

So, yes, we ate.  But we also went to museums.  I think I counted seven that I went to, as well as Versailles.  It was at a strange juncture in my career as an artist, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that it was planned this way by the spirit guardians of my work.  I had just emptied myself of my work and set forth to discover my future when I found myself in Paris with a museum pass.   Today, I came across  a wonderful summation in Traveler magazine, in an article by Andre Aciman: “Once again, through an unforeseen ascent of a hill, I’ve stumbled upon something perhaps far better than what I came looking for.  I find myself suspecting that the humbling, intruisive hand of Providence is arranging events which couldn’t seem more random.  I like the idea of a design behind my desulatory wanderings around Bordighera.  I like thinking that perhaps this is how we should always travel, without foresight or answers, adventitiously, with faith as our compass.”

What did I find?  Exquisite and mythical relationships between human figures in the Musee Rodin;  sculptures from New Guinea that towered over me and overwhelmed me with their mysticism and power;  a modest piece by Eva Hesse that made me think seriously about tapping into my desire to make sculptures.  And some huge panels painted by Vuillard, of domestic scenes, that held me in their grip by virtue of their scale and their charming oddness–more eccentric than I’v e come to expect from him.  Brancusi’s recreated studio made me hungry to get back to my tools.  Gauguin’s bas reliefs stopped me in my tracks.  Oddly, much of what was most compelling to me was three dimensional.  I will watch with interest to see what spins itself from my hands and mind after that intense week of schooling.  I hope it bears an echo of  moody, rich, and ordered Paris.

Early June is about as paradisical as North Carolina gets.  There are thousands of flowers around me– probably a hundred roses that I can see from my kitchen window.  The first tomatoes have just appeared in the garden.   There are glossy eggplants and cool cucumbers.  It’s steamy and overwhelming at midday, but gentle and ravishing at 7a.m.  I often end up planning a trip to somewhere else in June, and missing a portion of this time.  What bad planning I always end up telling myself.

The Ruin has reached a lovely state of maturity.  The rock walls I built last summer now mark the borders of a couple of painterly and colorful beds– one filled with organic and heirloom vegetables, and one with flowering plants.  I’m puttering with some antique sections of iron fencing, trying to give the Ruin  a sense of enclosure.  More and more my entertainments end up in the Ruin.  It has an irresistable pull.  A couple of weeks ago friends from Greensboro came for supper and we started there, evolving into the dining room, and finishing out the evening on the front porch.  I read an article about the guy who came up with the idea for The Moth, on public radio.  He had great memories of story telling on a screened porch in the south on summer evenings, and transplanted it to NYC and public radio.

I share those great memories, adults rocking in a half dozen big old oak rockers, while the children played leapfrog on the lawn and caught lightnin’ bugs (not “fireflies”– lightnin’ bugs ).  I decided to rededicate my front porch to story telling.  So I told my dinner guests to bring a story.  I’m finding we’re a bit rusty in the story telling department, but I intend to work on that.  You think up a great story and so will I.  And next time we’re sitting somewhere in the semi-darkness of a summer evening, let’s bring it out and try it on our friends.  Let’s keep all the good stories, and more importantly, the tradition of telling the stories, alive, whether we’re sitting in a roof garden in the city,  beside a campfire in the forest, or in a rocker on an old front porch.