Out on the very edge of North Carolina, where it touches the sea, I greeted the new year.

Some wind must have blown there from the islands, it was so gentle and warm.

The colors out at the edge of North Carolina in deep winter tend toward white. There is a huge expanse of sky constantly color shifting, and brilliant oblique sunlight. The ocean, so stirred, sends out foamy fringes, white and lacy, like the shells on the oysters at supper.

This afternoon I was torn– should I take a nap, or maybe work in the studio, or grab a last perfect warm day to go out in my kayak. I’m so grateful my sense of adventure called out to me and I loaded up the kayak. It’s Indian Summer here. Seventy degree days, and forty-ish nights. A few lovely colored leaves, but mostly green. Winter is slipping up on us, behind our backs.

I wore layers, and took only a camera, a sketchbook and an apple. Once there– at Mountain Island Lake, the boat slipped easily into the water, and I set off at a leisurely pace, shucking some layers to bask. The light lured me–its extremes of bright and dark. The shadows were bluer and the sunlight yellower than normal. I took a few easy strokes and let the currents drive me into my favorite cove.

Nobody except two other kayakers seemed to be on the whole immense lake, and we were all bent on the same thing– the zen paddle. One paddler had her dog trained to stand on the back deck of her kayak, and they toured the opposite bank. Another appeared to be napping in the middle of the lake. Like them, I didn’t go for an upper body workout, or for some competitive need to reach Australia. I went to drift. I like to feel the water move through the thin skin of the kayak. I go for the silence–and I practice making my strokes soundless and invisible. I like to think of myself as some latter day native American, sneaking up on the woods. This behavior has its rewards. As soon as I hit the edge of that cove the world opened up and the act of being alive on that day in that place became the whole point.

First I scared up a small duck who flew deeper into the cove to evade me. Then I found myself, the water clear as clean glass, looking down on some huge fishes. The were the size of a man’s forearm, and just as muscular, arching in S formations, and when they’d gotten enough of me, they muddied the shallow water to throw me off. A kayak will continue moving forward in only a few inches of water, so I can go all the way to the back of that cove, and always do. Sometimes, back there,I can look down and see the tracks left by a wading heron printed into the undisturbed mud.

A little turtle the size of a silver dollar jumped off the limb he was sitting on and hid in the water as soon as he realized I was there. The water’s surface was patterned with the first fallen autumn leaves. Some were long and narrow shapes that curled up at one end. And when the wind blew they moved across the surface of the water like little gondolas headed for shore.

I took perhaps 75 photographs, and never drew. I didn’t want to stop long enough to concentrate on a drawing. But I did stop, in the middle of the quiet cove, to put my feet up on the deck and just BE. Floating into the sunlight of a clearing the air would wrap around my bare arms like a warm sweater, then a few seconds later it would gently cool. The little duck, wary of my presence at the back of the cove, flew in the other direction.

Over and over I thought to myself about what a blessing this afternoon was. I thought of my friend Beth, who once went kayaking with me, much to her delight, and has now left this earth. I thanked God for allowing me this day. I reminded myself to do this again and again. I told myself it probably didn’t take 100 calories to make this afternoon happen and that tiny expenditure took me to the head table at the Feast. When the sun dropped almost behind the high banks I paddled back to shore, and headed for home. And when I got there I left the kayak in the back of the truck to tip the scale in favor of waking up in the morning and going right back.

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.

10-10-10 It’s 8:15 a.m. and I’m facing east, sitting on the beach.  The beach is completely serene and satiny in this light.   The sound of waves as they dissipate has a long sheen to it as well.  The beach has few people, no clutter of human furnishings– just pelicans on their long horizontal flight path. That’s what I love about this beach– the depth and wideness of it, and the emptiness.  So, in words I save this moment, sewing it into a bag I will carry with me into winter, early darkness, repelling chill, small spaces.  I will take out the bag and open it to breathe back in the missing pieces of the 360 degrees of my life.

In the liminal space between summer and fall, in the margin between darkness and dawn, I like to get up and go to the open window.  The night crickets and frog sounds are combined with the early bird sounds.  The air has a bit of cool damp attached to it.  The traffic is still.  I imagine all the drivers asleep.

Sometimes in that space I will go out to the hammock on the porch.  I think there must be something like womb memory that overtakes me in the hammock because once in it, I immediately fall into a thick and healing sleep.

Some mornings, waking up early, closer to fall,  I open the windows and the air that enters the house has a bit of chill to it– mountain stream chill.  This time it’s  just past the full moon.  Last night the moon rose late, and was the color of a persimmon.  Getting up, there were forty shades of darkness in the landscape, but my attention was grabbed by the white distorted disks  of flowers on the Rose of Sharon, floating like apparitions in the darkness.

I took the time to name the colors around the shrub.  The distant trees were black, the land black-yellow-green, the near trees black-turquoise.  To make sure I seized that moment, without turning on any lights, I climbed into a hot bath in the dark and watched the light change toward dawn, sitting there.

Looking through some old drawings in my journal the other day I came across a little sketch I did after sleeping on the sugar beach of a five acre atoll in the Caribbean.  Full moon.  Huge palms casting deep shadows.  Bright sand.  I wrapped myself in a white sheet which the wind played with like a sail, like the distorted disks of the Rose of Sharon, dancing in the darkness.

Call me corny and predictable, but I’m a huge devotee of Monet.  I know, there are a thousand bathrooms in a five mile radius where a Monet poster hangs.  I know.  But I fell in love at 13, and I never recovered.

My parents took me to NYC that summer.  We went to the Met.  The way I remember it, and the way I describe it to my 14, 15 and 16  year old students is:  coming around a corner in the museum, my eyes glazed over from Masterpieces,  I saw my first live Monet.  All my synapses fired.  I went into shock.  The way I remember it, it was a small painting, with color like a bucket of jewels.  I’d never seen color act as a participant in a painting like that before.  That was what it was ABOUT.

I know– color is the easiest way into  a work of art.  Everyone, except for possibly the color blind, can be touched by color, regardless of their insensitivity to the other aspects of a work.  But, in my soul, I am a colorist, and that little painting was screaming in my language.

On my last trip to France, five years ago, I had some pilgrimage duties planned.  I went way out of my way to visit Giverny.  And I planned to end the trip at L’Orangerie.  I was devastated to discover that the restoration of L’Orangerie was still ongoing and it was closed.  So, on this trip to France, I set aside one afternoon to make up for that missed opportunity.  I had seen isolated pieces of Les Nymphaes at various museums all over the world, and I’d seen studies for them.  But I had never seen them as Monet intended them to be seen,  all together.

I felt a real rush of empathy when I saw the sign at the mouth of the gallery  ”Silence”.  Indeed.  I wanted to allow my soul to drop down into wordlessness and to float into this work.  Nobody else seemed to have that impulse, however.  I kept wishing I had a special pass to come after hours and stand in that space alone, and allow it to subsume my field of vision and sweep me up.  It had to do that in spite of elbows and voices and cameras and other folks with a more relaxed interest.

Over the years I’ve read a lot about this particular work– the work of Monet that I’m most interested in.  I’ve read that it moves toward abstraction possibly because he was quite elderly and his vision was failing.  But seeing  the ensemble live I was shocked at  the explosiveness of the abstraction.   In my journal I wrote that they were “more wildly and vigorously abstract than I’d expected– as violently flung down as a Pollock or a de Kooning .”  They had a topography that surprised me as well.  Encrusted and multi-layered.  Thought and rethought.  I took photographs of abstract details.  But at a distance the work locked together like the dials on a safe.  They were definitely not the work of an artist whose vision had failed.  They were infintely sure-footed and wise.

I sat down and found myself settling deeply into the trunk of  a reflected willow tree.  It held me for an inexplicably long time– not billiantly colored, simply a dark textured vertical.  It was sinewy, rope-like, male and archetypal.  There was more in this shrine to nature and art than I had expected .

How nice to still find surprises in one of my oldest relationships.

Before I settle down to a summer’s work it’s good to do a little gypsy roaming.  I just had a great break from my routine, exploring Provence.  At first I enjoyed the companionship of wonderful friends at Le Beaucet in a delightful country home. We saw the sights, enjoyed the regional foods and wines, and were expertly guided, tended and fed by Mary James and Xavier (www.maryjames.net) .

In my journal I made a list of sounds and sights and smells that were especially vivid.  And of course, tastes.  There were many.  It was a sensual feast from morning until night.  Lavendar and garlic in the markets, wild thyme disturbed by my feet on a hike up the hill,  patinas that were rich and complex, cicadas in the heat, a tomato reduction dressing an eggplant that I will not soon forget.

The second week of my journey I took off by myself with my tent and sleeping bag to explore more unknown territory.  Mary James equipped me with a giant map that I’d stop and consult about 40 times a day.  Thank goodness France’s signage is very logical and finding one’s way is made simple.  The un-simple thing is navigating a 10th century road in a car if anyone else decides to come from the opposite direction.

I circumnavigated Mont Ventoux and walked the streets of more hilltowns than I can recount.  I also took some afternoons to sit beside swimming pools in the intense heat.  I chose campgrounds with pools that had splendid views so I could swim and paint and rest all at the same time. I’d paint a while, then fall asleep in the heat, water  sounds lulling me.  Then I’d wake up and paint some more.  Camping allows for a lot of intimacy with the nature of a place.  I loved going to sleep to the sounds of the cicadas, and waking to the dawn birdsong.  Or seeing the moon through my tent’s little window.  In the hotel  at the airport all sound was muffled in thick carpet, and all moonlight masked by drapery.

What did I bring back?  Recognition of how I love to sit by water.  Recognition that French food is wonderful, but in the same way that North Carolina food, or any food grown and prepared with love is wonderful.  I brought back a fascination with the textures of ancient surfaces– the way a thousand year old piece of cypress used as a supporting beam gets eaten away, but stays strong;  the surface of stucco when it chips and peels and changes color;  the immense shade cast by trees when they’re allowed to grow as tall as they want without being cut down for “progress”;  the elegance of women who listen to their own inner voices instead of enslaving themselves to some kind of commercial standard of beauty and rightness; the energy,  imagination and wildness of Cezanne’s landscapes, which made me feel timid by comparison;  the brilliant engineering of the Romans, seen up close and still functional;  the logic of good national road planning;  the kindness of strangers;  a few new words added to the vocabulary;  a newfound love for the afternoon glass of French rose– if you’d told me I’d love it six months ago I wouldn’t have believed you.

But waking up this morning, thinking I was still in France, I realized I took away something else.  Because I traveled alone, in the absence of conversation–in silence– I took into my body a group of  kinesthetic impressions from the hundreds of miles speeding by under my car, the arcs of the many roundabouts, the textures under my feet, the buzz and  hum of the life around me, the cyclical movement of the sun and moon.

Because I stopped each day to paint the place where I was, to examine it with care and attempt to represent the feeling of it, I brought it deeply into my consciousness.  There was a kind of oneness that occurred between me and that lovely place  that went deeper than tourism.  This all came to me in a rush, before I’d really opened my eyes to the day, believing I was still in France .  Swinging my feet out of bed  I  felt the smooth texture of my bedroom’s heart pine floor and that texture told  my body I was not in France.  Returning from a camping trip when he was 3 years old , my youngest son Stewart announced “I miss my tent”.  I know exactly what he meant.

yum

Tonight my brother called and invited me to pick my own strawberries.  His patch has reached the point where it’s scantily filled and not worth hiring labor to pick it.  So, at dusk I went to take a look.  He told me that the end of season berries are the best.  He was telling the truth.  I ate the first strawberry I picked and it was the best  I had ever tasted.  His fruit has the added benefit of being organic, making the flavor even more intense.

I picked until it grew so dark I couldn’t tell which ones were spoiled.  Kim handed me a gallon of their wonderful milk, and told me where to find the fresh squash.  On the walk home I found a few squash that still had their blossoms clinging.  A friend told me one afternoon, after a particularly tough teaching day, to “go home and make yourself a squash casserole and pour yourself a glass of wine”.  Sounded like a good southern girl’s prescription for a return to sanity.

The walk home was  in the quickly deepening darkness.  Looking up I noticed the lopsided waxing moon, crisp and white against the sky.  At that moment the sky was light blue, but dusky, in that indescribable passage that is so hard to capture in a painting.  By the time I crossed the road darkness had taken over.  Strawberries and milk before bedtime.  Windows open with their screens in place– healthy bug and frog sounds to attend my sleep.

Last night John Borden Evans opened at the Christa Faut Gallery. It was great to see his newest work in the company of his many friends and fans here in the area. His work always has a strong resonance for me, because we have both chosen rural lifestyles and our environments have much in common.

John often creates diptychs. I recall one from a show several years ago that was immense, and divided in two parts so it could be transported. In this exhibition he had one diptych that was a small work on paper, and another that was midsized. It amused me that it hung next to a painting that was on a single canvas, but split in half by the black line of a tree trunk, so it read like a diptych as well.

This work had John’s usual wonderful quirkiness and intense sense of texture. There were paintings with his own iconography I’ve come to expect– the stars and their auras, abstracted in this show to look like jewels. There were animals arranged in pastures. But there was also a new thing going on– a quieter, more serene and restrained approach to the land in several of the paintings. They were empty of animal life, and focused on balance: of verticals and horizontals, of  smooth with rough, of darkness and light. A favorite was a snow day painting, as usual, abstracted with abandon, but all the same, reading with the truth I recognize as a student of the landscape. It conveyed the way the snow peaks out and exposes the contours of the forest floor normally hidden in the grayness of a thousand bare tree limbs. The texture he created to describe the trees in the foreground was perversely horizontal, when the obvious direction for them to have been painted would be vertical or diagonal. It married serenity and intensity,  smooth and rough, white snow sky and darkened forest,truth and the myth.  All were suspended in  quiet equilibrium.

I would never have predicted that the Party of the Season would be tonight–with my family– in “the deep midwinter”.  But it was.

My brother and sister in law, Grier and Kim, threw a party tonight on their farm, while my family was all gathered for the funeral of my dear aunt,Betty.  It was a party full of good will, humor,and reminiscence.  I don’t expect to see its match for a long time– until we are all gathered again.  Tonight would have been the 50th birthday of my cousin Homer Harris Ragan– Hobey.  He died at 48 of lung cancer.  I remember the wonderful party when he turned 30.  Tonight we celebrated him again.  What a commingling of sadness and gratitude for good fortune.  With a lot of laughter, over a variety of carefully prepared  southern food and drink , we toasted to our memories of both my aunt and my cousin.  As the evening passed  many stories of grandparents, aunts and uncles, siblings and cousins were pulled out for sharing–especially the funny ones.

There was lovely delicate she-crab soup, and catfish stew, as well as barbecue.  Tracey, Hobey’s true love, brought wonderful green beans.  When we asked for the recipe she said you “just cook the fool out of them”.  There were  babies, and little boys lost in wonder at the stars hanging over the bonfire.   We wrapped up, two or three to the blanket, for the hayride, bundled against the fierce cold, seeing the farm all blue, black and gray under that clear sky. 

There was shared wisdom about the next generation of cousins we are raising.  There was a lot of humor over the bar, set up in the workshop out back, alongside the woodstove and hundreds of tools.  My precious young first cousins–once removed– Hobey’s beautiful daughters– shared their  wit and humor.  I got to see their enthusiasms and their talents.  Their father and grandmother would be so proud– with good reason.  What miracles of grace and warmth they are.

It occured to me, in our serious mutual enthusiasm for tonight’s gathering, how lucky we are.  We are about the business of setting in motion the future trajectory of our family.  We are establishing the bedrock of comfort and strength, love and respect.  We will  see one another into the new times to come with the same love, loyalty, and connectedness that was given to us by our flawed but open-hearted parents.  I hope our open hearts trump our flaws as well, and that we are no less human and  no less funny than our predecessors.