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.

One of many full moon paintings inspired by this place. This one: "Full Moon with Cedars" 2005

It’s a new day in a new year, beginning a new decade.  I’m grateful for that.  We talked today, at Kim and Grier’s table, over blackeyed peas and collard greens, about how we all, in our own ways, managed to miss the clock turning over.  But I think we all felt keenly this invitation to newness and change.

I marked the close of last year by writing out my intentions for the coming year.  This is much more productive than making resolutions.  I’m bad at resolution-keeping.  But if I name an intention it rides around in  my unconscious all the time, and often  has a way of making itself reality.  Looking at last year’s intentions, they seemed a bit vague, though I did notice that most of them had happened.    This year’s are very concrete.  I celebrated them with a brandy and dark chocolates that Carla had brought me.    Then I called Rodney– my friend since college days, and we tripped over one another’s sentences, talking for an hour about past, present and future.

This morning, to celebrate the newness, I could only think of taking a walk back into the woods.  Lacking tractors and chainsaws I often resort to third world techniques for getting a job done.  With my machete, bought in Central America for $1.50, and sharpened by my sons, I cut the briars out of my path, finding my way to the back of my little farm.  It was warm and the woods were a hundred soft grays.  All the recent rain had made the  mosses brilliant and lush.  I found a little spring-fed creek I’d never seen before.   After lunch I could only think to go back to the woods.  This time I brought back a sapling that had fallen and developed beautiful lichens.  Tonight, on this first night of the new year I noticed it took darkness a little longer to arrive, and when it did the white disk of the moon rose slowly up behind the bare branched trees as it has hundreds of times in my life here.  It was so beautiful it brought  tears along with thoughts of dear friends scattered and far away, and my never-ending deep gratitude for this earthly home.

A snow day in the balmy North Carolina of global warming times is a rarity.  I have always loved this experience.  The highway grows quiet.  The woodstove snaps and pops and talks back, baking one end of the den.  The cat sleeps the whole day.  Crystals are on all five million tiny tree branches.  Black crows come out to bring some contrast.  If I’m up early, the sky throws in some color– pink and yellow.  This year it’s happening just before Christmas.

In North Carolina these rare snowfalls are considered excuse enough to retreat and give in to hot chocolate and fireside sitting.  One of my favorite memories is being on the farm with three little boys, the power  having been knocked out by a terrible ice storm.  We had no water, but we had the woodstove to cook on and sit beside.  At night,  we lit the pair of antique candleabra from a time when people counted on candlelight.  Ten candles is sufficient to read by, I learned, so I read to my boys until bedtime.  My nineteenth century house seemed made for the lack of electricity.

I have grown bored with my over-decorated Frazier Firs for Christmas, so for the last couple of years I have harvested a bare branched sapling from my woods and brought it inside, hung a couple of glass icicles and crystal raindrops from it’s branches, perched a bird’s nest from my extensive collection in it, and called it the Christmas tree.  It’s an abstraction of the intense loveliness  I see out my window this morning.

Merry, cozy, beauty-filled Christmas to us all.

The grandfather oak

Driving by my house on the way from school to an appointment I was shocked to see that the oldest tree in my yard had come down in Wednesday’s hard winds.  The trunk still stands, but the yard is filled with the top,  limbs larger than most mature trees. 

This oak had been struck by lightning 40 years ago, and hit squarely by a truck in the late 70’s, in a brutal accident that killed the driver.   It had survived Hurricane Hugo eighteen years ago, losing a giant limb, but it stood otherwise intact.  Its six ancient  companion oaks had all toppled over the years, unexpectedly, striking blows  like earthquakes . 

Under this tree we had built snowmen.  My sons remember shooting their bows at a target balanced against its trunk.  We had thrown a big party beneath it to celebrate my brother’s marriage.  I had stood in its shade in my own wedding gown, as had my aunt before me.  

I had come to watch its canopy obsessively, looking for signs of sickness, and dreaded the day I knew would come.  Its canopy had been lush this past year, and it cast so many acorns on the lawn it’s impossible to walk there.  It had even taken to sending limbs down toward the ground– as if to attempt communication with its human family. 

Its trunk still stands  25 feet tall or so, with the lowest limbs  intact, but its sheltering limbs are gone.  I found myself feeling exposed,  my shelter  gone.  It reminded me of the emotions I experienced when my father died in my 20’s.  I no longer felt protected.     The man I imagined to be the strongest person on earth was gone.  The tree that would take four men’s arms to encircle is gone.  The sky is empty where there was  complex tracery.  Empty. 

My brother reminded me of my good fortune to make me feel better.  He’s right, of course.  “If this is the worst thing that happened to you today, you are okay”.  But on the phone later, calling each member of the family to announce the death, I realized we all grieve the loss of beauty.  Born before the American Revolution, witness to the life of my family for six generations, and to another family before that, this tree will have no replacement .

photography by Mike Carroll

July is brand new but it’s hard for me to let go of June in Carolina.  It’s the month I wait for all year… roses, lightning bugs, tomatoes, yellow sun, swimming, painting all day.

The other night I woke up and opened the window.  The night sounds that burst into the room  made me stop mid-motion, holding onto the window frame, my mouth open in sleepy enchantment.  There was, surrounding my house, a web of sound,  an intricate woven form with nubs and holes, rhythms, punctuations, riffs, and mysteries.

To capture the best of the Carolina June day I’ve been getting up at six and going straight to the garden where I’m learning, for the first time, to grow things.  The garden is around what we call “the ruin”.  The ruin is a couple of standing walls from a mostly destroyed building my grandmother called the Jar Room.  I presume that she stored her preserves in it. Perhaps the day’s milking was also kept there, since it had a concrete floor.  When I was little it was a handsome building, made of creek sand, mortar, and local rocks combined into a kind of peach-colored stucco.  It had a hip roof of standing seam tin, and handmade doors.

I am creating a kind of patio area, enclosed by the remaining walls.  It’s been a lot of fun, learning a little masonry in order to patch the crumbling places. From my grandmother’s old cast iron washpot we made a pool, and water splashes into it from an old discarded spout removed from the general store’s  kerosene pump. The ruin is becoming a space that is quirky and imaginative.

In the cool morning I water the rose bushes my son David planted for me, and work on building a low rock wall to surround my kitchen garden.  Perhaps the best part about this experiment is the chance it creates for me to enjoy my mother’s gardening wisdom.  She is, I’m finding, an encyclopedia of knowledge about plants and gardens.  We have a new subject to discuss.  And, for once, I’m taking all her advice.

In the studio I’m working on a lavishly composed and wildly colorful painting of flowers that grow in Kim’s breathtaking flower bed.  My sister-in-law grows about a quarter acre of flowers in deep beds of great soil.  I’m painting a lily that is 5 feet tall with many blossoms on it, each larger than a man’s hand.  I reverted from oil back to acrylic paint for this piece because I wanted its sharp edges and the variety of colors I have access to.  I knew this painting called for the quinacridone reds, magentas and burnt oranges that are in my acrylic palette.  There were a few awkward moments as I began the painting when I tried to remember the difference in media and shift my mode of handling. But the years of acrylic practice came back to me quickly.

In the early hours of the day I can work in the studio with just the ceiling fan on and the door and windows open.  To conserve energy I’m trying to use air conditioning as little as possible.  I’ve even taken to hanging my wash on the line.  All this was inspired by a program I saw on PBS about energy.  They showed a huge pile of coal sitting on a house lawn and said that was how much coal had to be burned to generate enough electricity to run a light bulb   for a couple of hours.  I was shocked to think of energy in those terms, and the polluting outcome of even a little bit of wastefulness.   I recommitted to turning things off, to being responsible for less wasted energy and more protective of my earthly home.  And to my June sense memories I get to add the clean tree smell of my line-dried clothes.

My brother Grier. Photograph by Mike Carroll

I brought a very old laptop to the studio so I could use it when the muse struck.  In dog years this computer is 312 years old.  Some screen labeling itself as “Smart” informed me that the hard drive was about to crash and I should swap it out.  I didn’t come down here with a spare hard drive, so this may or may not see the light of day.  Life on the edge…

Today I’m painting the swirling patterns in a creek bed.  The last time I actually looked at those patterns was back in March, so at this point they are no longer observational, but instead an abstraction meant to create a mood in the viewer—the mood you’d find yourself in if you were standing in a voluptuous body of water and it moved around you in small surges and eddies.  And the sun was beaming down on it to add hypnotic patterns all around you.  That’s some pretty vaunted prose for what I actually turn around and see on the canvas.  There is much to be done to make it do what I want it to.  My son, Gordon, is particularly fond of this painting because it explores some of my “weirder” ideas and pretty much walks off and leaves reality behind.  Paintings like this are more fun to paint.  I long ago became bored with the landscape reproduced as it most often is:   technically predictable,  aping reality.  All those paintings look like they’re by the same artist.   They’re missing the weirdness.  They lack the intensity of a real relationship to what one sees.

Background music for painting swirling water patterns:Etta James.  Especially the sulky ones with attitude.  I guess that pretty much means all of them. And Herbie Hancock, triggering the right brain, surging and eddying as he does.

So that is what constitutes this day, along with the newsworthy arrival of the first ripe tomatoes from the farm, and the first of the amazing corn my brother grows and my sister-in-law sells at the Bradford Store.  Tonight there will be the classic summer feast to celebrate this moment in the cycle of things.  I will soon be missing the fresh spinach, cabbage and  lettuces, but they will be replaced by the mid summer tomatoes, corn and cantaloupe, and they in turn by the fall flavors.

Late afternoon I’ll be cleaning out the debris around the foundation of the smokehouse so my brother can clear it up with a loader and a carpenter can look at it for repairs.  The smokehouse is currently supported by the walnut tree it leans against.  We may set it right.  Life on the edge…

A couple of months ago I moved an easel into my kitchen. It seemed like I would get more work done in the evenings if my easel was in a cozy comfortable place. Sometimes, like a child, I don’t want to walk out across the dark yard to go to my studio. I want to stay in the warm light of the kitchen. This kitchen was first the domain of my great-grandmother and then my grandmother. I remember sitting in its warm light as a child, on top of a phone book, so I could reach the table. I also remember occupying the family high chair, made long ago by a man we know was named Milas Potts. He was an African American craftsman, his skill the best explanation for why children still sit in that chair. It is oak, and its seat is oak, hand split and woven. And the places where little feet go are worn into the curve of Cupid’s bow. I remember falling backwards while seated in that chair. I must have pushed myself stubbornly away from the table. Back then there was an old clock that sat on a shelf above the kitchen table with a handy kerosene lamp beside it. The clock made a calming background sound that was the meter of the evenings. All this makes me realize my kitchen is dense with association. Now it is also dense with spilled paint on the floor, and carelessly disposed pots and pans. I skip the clean up sometimes to get to the painting, with so little time before bed. The painting this week is vertical. It’s a group of River Birch tree trunks, peeling, pastel, complicated, against the green of the woods behind them. It’s a vignette from a subdivision landscape so it seems like cheating. The plants aren’t native. The scene is not venerable. It’s just wildly textured and patterned, and thus it drew me in.

These days I’m working with unaccustomed materials—for the first time in my adult life, oil paint. It’s very different from the acrylics I’ve used for the last 15 years. I miss the wild chemically derived colors in my acrylic palette. There are certain subtle undertones of hue, nearly invisible, that I’m sure can’t be duplicated with my oil paints. But I love the sensuality of the oils, thick, slow to move, grooved by the hairs of the brush. I can almost feel the intersection of two areas of color like a field of conflict.

So in the kitchen, as the night falls, I’m trying to keep the cobalt and cadmium out of my ice cream, so close at hand, and trying to keep the floor from looking even crazier than 150 years of foot traffic has already made it. Then I notice the tread from my shoe reproduced on heart pine in titanium white. Maybe I can find some way to use that…

This photograph was taken by a wonderful photographer, Mike Carroll, last summer.  He spent a day at the farm capturing the light, color and texture of life here.  Thus the ultra-clean kitchen!