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.

For a while I have been silent, watching myself try a new kind of life, observing what emerged, not sure what to say. Finally in the last couple of weeks things have settled enough for me to write about this part of my passage.

For the first time in many years, when the school year began I was not there. I was, instead, on the beach, drenched in bright light, wrapped in blue water, eating local shrimp. A few weeks later I realized I have not retired; I have resigned from my teaching job and gone to work full time as an artist.

For a long time I didn’t paint. I did chores. I worked on farm buildings. I tried to refind myself. A week long study session at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, initially, just further confused me. In that intense week, paid for by the National Endowment for the Arts, I lived in a beautiful small apartment in the buzzing, humming hub of Chicago, walking daily to my studio behind the museum.

Once there, I would internally rebel. I don’t work well in an urban studio, cut off from nature. This stuff doesn’t come out of my head. It comes out of a dance with the natural world. And since the death of my mother I had not painted. So, with the sole assignment of feeding my soul for a week, and exploring art, I would jump up from my easel and go look at something in the museum for a while, then go back and kick it around.

Finally, one morning I walked down the street to a strange storefront where dusty fabrics were sold. Amid the bronze satins and leopard prints I found a transluscent fabric, dotted with tiny spots– like stippled painted marks. I took it back to the studio. In my overnight kit there was one of those traveling sewing kits with needles and thread. I started creating a fabric sculpture.

For some reason, I wanted this to describe my re-emergence– a piece about my mother, found dead, too soon, and unexpectedly. I recreated her hand, as I found it in death, and remembered it in life. Very soft. Beautiful. Turned in upon itself. Passing from materiality to immateriality. In the hour in which I sat with her body I studied and held her hand. That hand I know so well. I can’t remember so many things about my father, dead now for 37 years, but I can see his hands with perfect clarity. Once I complained to Mom that my hands were so ugly, but, she said, they can do anything. Always hers were beautiful.

So I made this piece. I avoided painting. Finally, as the week drew to a close I realized I had kept myself from taking any benefit from a brilliant painting exploration by obsessing instead over this sculpture. So I asked my instructor to look at some images of my work from the last couple of years and talk to me. He was a brilliantly fluid young man. He could spin out a rapid fire line of discourse about the work that was as evanescent as champagne bubbles. I tried to capture, in my notes, the essence of what he said. Like he was channeling some spirit from the other side, he was almost unconscious of the content of what he was saying. I asked him to repeat something and he looked shocked, saying he had no idea what he’d said… it was already gone. But I dutifully did the best I could to write it down against a time when I might be able to use it.

When I returned home to my own studio I struggled with the words of advice he’d given me. First, I recognized that both my instructors made work I didn’t understand or particularly appreciate. They had MFA seals of approval from vaunted institutions. One made all gray minimalist paintings, for which he had airtight arguments. The other revered the work of Jacques-Louis David, and did reiterations of David in hot pink. These two facts were sufficient to cause me to take their advice with a grain of salt. How relevant could it be to me, a naturalist who loves to render. But, beyond what they themselves made, there was some serious wisdom.

It took me three months to find the central message I most needed to hear in all the notes I took. The message was– do what makes you different and do it a lot. So that is what I have been testing. In the last couple of weeks I have discovered that time-freedom allows me to get lost in a piece and give it the kind of obsessive attention that feels right to me. There is no deadline. There is no schedule. There is just me, paint and discovery. Suddenly I am in love with working again.

The new pieces are small and experimental. Until I find my sea legs there is no need to shout my message on a large scale. I had piles of small stretchers made so I can explore. The background music is often the French Suites by Bach, played so many times it’s starting to take on the familiarity of pop music. And lots of Latin Jazz. These intricate musical pieces parallel what’s happening on the surface of my canvas. There is point and counterpoint. There is intricate afro-latin rhythm. It’s all pixilated, stippled, dappled light and shadow. It is time to say what I can say, in the clearest voice I can muster, and to do what makes me different and do it a lot.

With Paul Hollar recuperating , Andy Knox  agreed to take over the completion of the barn interior.  His crew moved quickly to bring things together.  Over time the vision for what the space should do became clearer– it would be a sculpture studio, and a summer painting studio for large scale work, and on its walls I would hang paintings.  It would also store all the tools I’ve collected over time.

Just before work on the interior  began I was introduced to an eminent architect– Frank Cheney. Frank has had an illustrious career, working for I.M.Pei and Charles W. Moore, as well as Cambridge Seven and Associates.  In grad school at Yale he was Teaching Assistant to Vincent Scully. Now he heads his own firm in Greensboro.

Frank asked to see the barn I’d told him so much about, so I invited him down for dinner and a look.  It was his first visit to the farm, so we walked around the place, the garden and the studio, and then stepped into the barn.  I told him about my plans for the space’s layout and he suggested that there might be a better way to structure the interior spaces.  While I put the finishing touches on dinner, Frank sat down at my desk. Without  a second look at the structure he drew a plan, freehand, in  perfect proportion, incorporating his new ideas.

My first stubborn reaction was to cling to my old notions, but sanity ruled and very quickly I  released them and yielded to the genius of Frank’s plan.    In a couple of days I was ordering more windows and  revisiting everything with the builder.  The humble cotton barn, wracked with age, rescued by a 17 year old, bearing second hand windows, was about to enter a new phase.  It was moving toward clarity and functionality.  But best of all, it was moving toward the divine.

Through my friendship with the sculptor Tom Sachs I’d become intrigued with the idea of the studio as a sacred space.  Tom put out an amazing film called Working to Code. It’s an instructional video for his studio assistants which is both tongue-in-cheek and very serious.  In it he refers to the studio as sacred space.  The film’s illustration  of sacred space is three women waiting on the curb for a Muslim counterfeit handbag salesman , who is  kneeling on the sidewalk on a scrap of cardboard, occupied with his prayers.   At our first meeting a couple of years ago the first thing Tom and I discussed was the way work was a conduit to the divine.  He quoted, at the time, the Benedictine maxim “to work is to pray”.

Frank and I never discussed this, but from his intuitive and experiential wisdom he invoked the sacred space archetypes in this humble barn.  He urged me to admit the light from the north and east by adding more windows high up on the walls.   He redesigned the storage so it emphasized the verticality of the space and created a focal point for the room. The 130 year old church shutters moved to this focal point, where I’ve been wrestling to make their 378 moving parts (I counted) line up and act right.

On a brief visit a couple of weeks ago to the Turchin Center at Appalachian I saw an exhibition based on research about sacred spaces. The wall text asserted that there were three characteristics shared by nearly all sacred spaces. A sacred space is:
-a place where an individual finds solace.
-a space free from distraction which allows inward reflection.
-a place of rejuvenation and inspiration.
I know that now, since Frank’s plans have been made real. When I am in the barn I do not want to go back to the house. And when I am in the house I want to get back out to the barn. It has become the most compelling space in several thousand square feet of spaces. It is where I can go to greet my truest and best self.

Thank you, Mr. Cheney.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.