Mercurial, unsettled weather lately. Pendulum swings. Dark and light. Sunny and soggy. Unsettled hours and days. My moody meditation is inspired by this dockside monochrome.
Snapped this photo after an unsuccessful first foray into waterskiing and freshwater surfing for the 2023 season. Too rough. Susan tried. A valiant effort. Abbreviated…
Dockside Monochrome (Photo: Geo Davis)
Today’s words and thoughts are also abbreviated. An abridged initiative. Venturing out. Briefly. Then returning to safe harbor.
Dockside Monochrome
Moody mornings and monochrome afternoons re-recalibrating, observing, listening, trying to remember. Or, maybe, to forget for a little longer, for rhythm re-syncing, for watery waves, for whispering winds, for yes-yielding, for exhaling, for reboot, for today, for us, for now.
Perhaps a miniature video clip better approximates this liminal moment…
The art of home is a tidy title with an unpretentious posture. And yet it’s idealistic and evocative, ample and ambitious. Frankly, its restrained and self contained first impression is a little misleading. Maybe even a little ambiguous. What do I even mean? I’m not offering a catchy epithet for design and decor. Nor architecture. And yet, it certainly may include some or all of these. When I describe the art of home, I’m conjuring several things at once.
In conjoining art and creativity with home-ness, I’m alluding to my own personal outlook on an intrinsic relationship between the two as well as an aspirational goal. Home isn’t science. Or, home isn’t only science (or even mostly science.) Sure, there’s science and math and all manner of practical, detail and data driven inputs in transforming a house into a home. But there’s much more. There’s a profoundly personal, subjective, intimate relationship at play in the act of homemaking. And, in the best of circumstances, essential circumstances in my opinion, home becomes a sanctuary for creating, an oasis for art.
All of this binds art-ing and homing. The art of home is a look at the homeness of art and the art of homing. It is an attempt to discern what allows one’s domestic sanctuary to transcend mere utility (a garage to cache one’s car, a grill to sear one’s supper, a nest within which to sleep, a shower with which to wash away the sleep and sweat), to transcend the housing function and become a place of growth and nurturing, an incubation space, a revitalizing space, a dreaming and dream-fulfilling space,…
In the photograph at the top of this post you can see the icehouse, mid-rehabilitation, tucked in beside the carriage barn, both frosted in snow like fairy tales illustrations or gingerbread confections. After a decade and a half my slowly percolating art of home has matured from a pipe dream into a concept into a clutch of sketches into construction plans into a creative collaborative of many. And for a few short weeks I’m privileged to participate daily, to engage in a real and hands-on way after participating from afar, participating virtually. It’s a peculiar but exciting transition. An ongoing transition.
The Art of Home: Poem Excerpt
I’ve been excavating through layers of creativity compressed into, and coexisting within, my notion of homeness. While shaping a house into a home is in and of itself a creative art — indeed a nearly universal creative art, even among those quick to volunteer that they are not artistic, not creative — I’m deeply curious about my awn associations with home as a cradle and catalyst of art. I’m trying to tease apart these different layers of art in a still embryonic poem, so I’ll include only a section about gardening, a creative pursuit that I inherited from my mother decades ago.
...composing a garden,
my own personal patch,
from selecting seeds —
corn, radishes pumpkins,
tomatoes, and sunflowers —
to turning the soil,
working compost
into last summer's
stems and stalks,
into clay clodded dirt,
into July-August hopes.
Watering and weeding,
thinning, scarecrowing,
suckering, and staking...
Composing a garden is but one of the many instances that the art of home means something to me. Cooking. Writing. Telling stories. Pruning the orchard. Entertaining guests. Landscaping. Drawing. Adapting old buildings into new lifestyle enabling and enriching spaces.
The Art of Home: Documentary
At the heart of Rosslyn Redux is a quest to discern and describe what I’m learning about the art of home. But there is still more question than answer. I’m still untangling my thoughts, still reaching for some sort of clarity that might improve my ability to communicate concisely what I have found so captivating, and why it has obsessed me for so long.
But I’m not there there. My journey is ongoing. So I will, for now, offer another perspective on the art of home, a captivating documentary that obliquely sheds light upon our Santa Fe / Essex home duality.
Two indigenous artists create new works reflecting on their tribal homelands, the Wind River Indian Reservation. Ken Williams (Arapaho) is a Santa Fe art celebrity and Sarah Ortegon (Shoshone) is an up-and-coming actress in Denver. Both artists travel to Wind River Reservation to reconnect with their ancestors and present their art work to a somewhat isolated community. (Source: The Art of Home: A Wind River Story,PBS)
Intertwined with Sarah Ortegon’s and Ken Williams’s extended meditation on the relationships between art, creative expression, identity, home, culture, family, and belonging are the perspectives of other Native Americans including George Abeyta who touches on home as a place of strength.
“Your home, it’s a place of your family. It’s a place of warmth and comfort and strength and happiness. It’s the place where were you look forward to going because that’s your stronghold. That’s your place of prayer.” — George Abeyta
In the context of beadwork Abeyta is examining it feels seamless and comfortable the way we moves from beading motifs to home as a bastion of strength, as a stronghold. Also a space where family, warmth, comfort, happiness, and even prayer coexist. Perhaps even where they are rooted, where they thrive. The subject of his reflection, a beaded ornament akin to a necktie, is an intricate work of art, and as such it functions as a vehicle or a vessel to showcase and honor these fundamental elements. This notion of home, and more specifically the art of home, as a sort of sacred space for strength and belonging, for identity and connectedness, for family and for happiness resurfaces throughout this documentary. I encourage you to make time (just under an hour) to appreciate it from beginning-to-end.
I’m verily inspired by potsherds and beach glass, coal fragments, and other detritus churned up on Rosslyn’s waterfront. Or disinterred from the yard while planting a garden or building a stone wall. I stall a while and meditate on the process of fragmenting, the potential for reimagining artifacts. I wonder about dark or damaged backstories, sharp shards, mollified by time’s persistent palliative pressure into “worry beads” carried and caressed like the glass glob I carried in my pocket for several years as a totem, a talisman, a pocket palliative for angst. Imagine delightful detritus strung into necklaces, assembled in mosaics, relics rhymed in song, or puzzle-pieced into a poem.
Relics Rhymed (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Relics Rhymed
I gather fragments wrought asunder by great gusts, gales, and tempestuous tantrums of feuding forces, jagged shards tumbled in the roiling surf, defanged, lenified, smoothed, polished, and rhymed by the tides of time, memory’s meager mitigating reach.
A runaway run-on identifying as a poem, a piece of a poem, a poetry puzzle piece,… Make of it what you wish. Those last two lines are a piece of what I’ve been wrestling with in many ways. In what ways does the past extend into the present? To and through the bits and pieces proffered by history, inherited evidence of a long before, timeless tidbits ostensibly proving our place in the river of life and death, creation and destruction? Do these artifacts salve us?
Many questions. Few answers.
Wanting wonder, I’ll simply allow that — as so often — relics rhymed.
The male ruffed grouse in the photo above was documented on a Rosslyn wildlife camera about a year ago. Fancy fowl! And the two images below were recorded a few weeks ago.
Rosslyn’s backlands are fortunately flush with ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), a welcome reminder that wildlife gravitates — as if by some primal sense — to safe havens and sanctuaries. If you preserve it, they will come (or so our experience over the last 12+ years suggests.)
Ruffed Grouse (Rosslyn Wildlife Camera)
What is a Ruffed Grouse?
A brown or gray-brown, chicken-like bird with slight crest, fan-shaped, black-banded tail, barred flanks, and black ‘ruffs’ on sides of neck.
Habitat: Deciduous and mixed forests, especially those with scattered clearings and dense undergrowth; overgrown pastures.
Female gives soft hen-like clucks. In spring displaying male sits on a log and beats the air with his wings, creating a drumming sound that increases rapidly in tempo. (Source: Audubon)
Popular among hunters for their tender meat, the ruffed grouse in these images are safe in Rosslyn’s wildlife sanctuary. Although Susan is a vegetarian (a pescatarian, actually), I concede a robust appetite for wild game. That said, I’m not a hunter. And when we purchased first one, and then a second adjoining lots, our intention was to preserve and rewild, to invest in a healthy and resilient wildway buffering the already significant wildlife moving along Library Brook. With acreage expanded and John Davis’s wildlife stewardship guiding our rewilding efforts, native wildlife are returning and prospering.
If you’ve never heard a ruffed grouse drumming, you should definitely play the video below. It’s a mysterious rhythm I associate with late winter through early spring outings — cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and sometimes mindful, sometimes mindless meandering — through Rosslyn’s forests and meadows.
Looking down from my United Airlines window shortly after takeoff from Burlington I’m able to discern Rosslyn’s waterfront and backland, recognizable despite distortion caused by the crazed, milky portal bless. My eye-in-the-sky perspective of Essex, New York (and our Adirondack Coast “home sweet home”) tickled a lyric into my mind, and before I knew it I was humming Phillip Phillips’ catchy tune “Home”. With belated apologies to the stranger seated beside me, I hummed most of the lyrics, but it was impossible not to voice the refrain: “‘Cause I’m gonna make this place your home…”
Make this Place Your Home (Photo: Geo Davis)
This song is catchy. An earworm. And for me it’s one of many that has woven its way into my subconscious because it resonates with our Rosslyn relationship.
Hold on to me as we go As we roll down this unfamiliar road And although this wave (wave) is stringing us along Just know you’re not alone ‘Cause I’m gonna make this place your home
Settle down, it’ll all be clear Don’t pay no mind to the demons They fill you with fear The trouble, it might drag you down If you get lost, you can always be found
Just know you’re not alone ‘Cause I’m gonna make this place your home
(Source: Phillip Phillips, “Home”, by Drew Pearson and Greg Holden)
That’s the gist, although it does revisit those lyrics to prolongue the catchy tune. It’s that last line that gets me. “I’m gonna make this place your home”.
I recently talked to part of our dynamic crew working on the icehouse rehab about the circumstances — at least a couple of the most significant circumstances — that contributed to our decision to purchase Rosslyn back in 2006. For now let’s just say that it was an inflection point at a singularly challenging time for us. It was an “unfamiliar road” with troubles aplenty dragging us down. And, in many respects, the challenges continued, some worsening, during the first couple of years after — and in no small part because of — purchasing Rosslyn. But this pledge (mine to Susan, and Susan’s to me) to persevere in order to “make this place your home” became our mantra. And it worked!
“Settle down,” the lyrics urge, as if homemaking (I prefer “homing” to homemaking for reasons explained elsewhere) ensures analgesia in troubled times. Yes, the trouble “might drag you down” but “you’re not alone”. Together we could fend off the demons. Together we would make Rosslyn our sanctuary.
Phillips first performed the song [“Home”] on the [American Idol] season’s final performance night on May 22, 2012, and then again on the finale after he was declared the winner. (Source: Wikipedia)
Almost six years out of sync with our purchase of Rosslyn, we unfortunately weren’t able to crank up Phillips’ song to boost our morale in times of need. But when the song began to blanket the airwaves a few years after we finally completed most of the most significant work on the house and boathouse, it instantly felt familiar. It conjured the tribulations we’d navigated as well as the strength we’d found — and rely upon to this day — in our union.
As we explore what life might look like after Rosslyn — an inevitable if not imminent consideration — we contemplate what it will take to transform a new property into our sanctuary. But this time we understand home and homeness a little bit differently. To “make this place your home” we simply need to be together. Coming home is returning to my bride after time apart (as I did last night after a week away.)
Tucked into the folds of the icehouse rehab scope of work some accomplishments stand out more than others. The garapa paneling in the bathroom, for example, has been a long, slooow labor of love many months in the making. Many stages and many hands have shaped this initiative, so anticipation has been building for many months. The column flanked vestibule (and the bookmatched ash threshold upon which they rest) is different. I’ll try to explain why this installation is momentous for me.
Justin Installing Columns (Photo: Geo Davis)
[Let’s start with the] architectural salvage [of]… Greek Revival columns that we salvaged from Rosslyn’s future dining room back in 2006 in the early days or our renovation project. (Source: Architectural Salvage: Repurposed Columns)
Icehouses didn’t historically rely upon columns for structural support, of course. They were utilitarian buildings purpose built to preserve ice cut from lakes, ponds, and rivers during winter to ensure access to ice (and cold storage) during more temperate seasons. Icehouse design was practical. Embellishments like Greek Revival columns would have been impractical, perhaps even frivolous.
But, needless to say, Rosslyn‘s icehouse rehabilitation is not an historic preservation project. It is an adaptive reuse project. It’s heart and soul is relevance to us today. Think dynamic, multipurpose, vibrant. Think simple and minimalist, but beautiful. Think inviting. Think whimsical. Straddling an unlikely divide — home office (though I prefer the connotations of study/studio) and recreation/entertaining space — the icehouse we’re conjuring into existence will blend productivity, creativity, wellness, and the largely outdoor lifestyle that we favor.
Why, you might well ask, would we need two imposing columns inside the diminutive icehouse? While the question is reasonable, perhaps *need* is not the most appropriate evaluation. After all, adaptive reuse of a utility building originally constructed to fulfill a highly specific (and outdated) function obviously doesn’t *need* handsome embellishments for structural support. And yet the opportunity to re-integrate these historic Rosslyn elements into an otherwise utilitarian barn has presented a whimsical challenge that at some level echoes the unlikely marriage of work space and recreation hub we’re imagining into existence with this newest rehab project. (Source: Re-tuning Columns)
Just as fusing work and play in a single space might initially seem incompatible, designing a column flanked vestibule inside an icehouse might evoke concerns of incongruity. Fair concern. And final judgment will be for you to make once we reach completion.
Peter in Column Flanked Vestibule (Photo: Geo Davis)
And so as we stride toward completions of the icehouse rehabilitation I draw your attention not only to the finally repurposed columns that once supported a beam in Rosslyn’s dining room. Now let your eyes drift down to the floor, to the bookmatched ash threshold crafted byPeter from some of our homegrown stump-to-lumber hardwood. Yes, it’s breathtaking. And, yes, the charactered grain forms a large stylized heart (and an enormous grin!)
Columns, threshold, and header are finally coalescing in a long envisioned “spatial transition from the more intimate entrance and coffee bar into the loftier main room”. Witnessing this accomplishment after so many months of planning and anticipation filled me with joy. It affirmed hopes and plans, it rewarded a risky design decision, defining and framing two functionally distinct spaces without losing the transparency and porosity. It instills a playful unlikelihood in an otherwise mostly predictable environment. It filters light dramatically, adding sensuous silhouettes to an otherwise geometric linearity. It delineates without restricting. It is a suggestion. It is poetry.
And, although there’s more work to be completed before a final assessment is justified, I am immensely pleased with the column flanked vestibule. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Justin.
I missed my mark — Earth Day, April 22, 2023 — with this post extolling the poetry of earth. It was germinal then, and it remains germinal today (albeit marginally more mature?)
Sometimes a seed germinates with exuberance, practically exploding into existence as if overcome with the glory of imminent bloom and fruit. Other times a seed lingers dormant — cautious or reticent or simply, inexplicably vigorless — for so long that its potential is overlooked, obscured by the foliage and flowers and harvest of its neighbors.
And through it all nature’s song endures. Just when we are lulled into torpid tranquility it swells in symphonic crescendo.
“The poetry of earth is never dead.” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Poetry of Earth, May 2, 2010 (Photo: Geo Davis)
Often a blog post is sketched out with a few simple strokes that distill the essence for what I expect to write about. A mini map yo I de ate my route. As I develop the post, filling in the voids, perhaps adding texture and color and context, I approach the anticipated narrative scope. Upon arriving at my destination I publish and share. But exploring a preliminary sketch or fleshing out a rough outline sometimes occasionally renders surprises. Wayward adventures lurk in the most unlikely places. I plan to take journey A, but I end up taking journey B.
And then there are the posts that linger dormant. A seed is planted, but it doesn’t leap to life. Perhaps the ground is still too cold, the earth isn’t sufficiently fertile, or the rain and sun remain elusive. A sketch, an outline, a map. Perhaps even a journey — or several journeys — but they are abbreviated and fruitless. False starts.
It is wise on these occasions to move on. Maybe circle back in the future. Try again. Or compost the effort that it might fertilize another seed. For this is the wisdom of nature and the gardener. This is the poetry of earth.
My mind meanders from Pollyanna printemps — nature reaching and bursting, reinvigorating all that withered and laid dormant these frosty days and nights of winter — to autumn’s harvest. Symphonic crescendo and resounding applause. Such success and such succession. Sweet reward and bitter decline. Decadence and decay.
This seasonal swan song’s poignance is the marriage of expiry and infinity, waning and immortality.
As when winter succumbs to spring’s tender caresses, thawing and refreezing, thawing and refreezing, melting into muddy mess, then gathering composure, turning etiolated tendril toward the sun begins to warm, to green, toward foliage and flower and fruit and… fall.
The poetry of earth is a consoling refrain. It is a reminder that beginnings end and endings seed new beginnings. Out of the mud, a sprout. From the sprout a life full of wonder and another generation of seeds.
“The poetry of earth is ceasing never…” — John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket” (Source: Poetry Foundation)
Keats’ poem delivers where I have come up short. Perhaps grasshoppers and crickets and birds lend themselves more willingly to the poetry of nature. Perhaps not. Perhaps this still muddled effort is destined for the compost where it’s decomposition will enrich a subsequent effort to compose this song of seasonality that so far eludes me. To convey the tragic beauty, and the profoundly consoling inspiration of the poetry of nature…
An endoskeleton for the soon-to-be loft shelving has begun to take shape.
Loft Shelving (Photo: R.P. Murphy)
Shop-built carcasses fabricated by Bernie Liberty have been delivered and installation has begun. Lining the north and south knee walls, these reading repositories will soon be lined with bound words. One further step toward completion of my icehouse loft study.
Loft Shelving Haiku
Book bound words in a reading repository, icehouse loft shelving.
A little forward leaning, I suppose. Aspirational. Projecting, courtesy of my imagination, a few weeks forward…
Call it a 184-day streak. Or call it dogged determination. Either way I have 181 days to go until I reach my goal. And with each new post, each small victory, I am growing more and more confident that I will accomplish my mission of 365 posts, one complete year of daily updates beginning on August 1, 2022 and concluding on July 31, 2023.
So how to commemorate this midpoint milestone? With 6 months down and 6 months to go, it feels momentous enough to pause and praise my good fortune. But should this benchmark be acknowledged with a celebratory salute? A solemn ceremony? A toast, my first spirited sip after 31 days of teetotaling? (Yesterday marked the conclusion of my 7th or 8th, maybe even my 9th “dry January”.) Or perhaps a decadent dessert after a sugar free month? (For some sadomasochistic reason I’ve decided in recent years to add a sugar fast to alcohol abstention during the month of January, a timely recovery after the excesses of Thanksgiving-through-New Years…) A new month (ie. rabbit-rabbit) ritual transcending the delicious dinner I shared with Jim and Mark two nights ago at Juniper?
Slow Cooked Whole Rabbit: cumin, blood orange and smoked paprika glazed, corn tortillas, chimichurri, salsa fresca, refried beans (Source: Juniper at Hotel Vermont)
Maybe a romantic romp with my bride who suggested, upon retrieving me from the airport yesterday, that we celebrate a belated anniversary to compensate for the one we missed this past autumn when she was unwell. 17 years of marriage and 21 years together. I’m incredulous even as I type these numbers. Neither seems remotely possible. But my 50th birthday seemed similarly inaccurate this past spring, and I’m obliged to accept it.
Or how about we honor the 200th anniversary of Rosslyn’s front façade, ostensibly completed in 1823? (Apparently 3/5 of the building — the two window portion to the north of the entrance, as well as the entrance itself — was completed in 1820. The remaining 2/5, including the two windows to the south of the entrance and comprising the dining room downstairs, a guest bedroom and Susan’s study on the second floor, and another guest bedroom on the third floor, was most likely finished three years later in 1823, fulfilling the the architectural promise of this classic Federal home with Georgian and Greek Revival elements.
An auspicious confluence of milestones and anniversaries. I’m choosing to interpret this is a good omen even as I nevertheless acknowledge that I’ve meandered from my original mark, hoisting the flag at my halfway point, mid-journey in my post-a-day quest. I recall an earlier waypoint in this quest, an update I published on October 10, 2022 when I was still just shy of halfway to where I am today.
Yesterday marked ten weeks of old house journaling. Every. Single. Day. Two months and ten days back at the helm of this wayward, meandering, sometimes unruly experiment I call Rosslyn Redux. I emphasize the daily component of this benchmark because it’s been an important part of the goal I committed to at the end of July. (Source: Old House Journaling)
Then as now my emphasis on everyday journaling remains a top priority.
Over the last few years, Susan and I have scrutinized our hopes and expectations with Rosslyn. We have reevaluated our plans as they originally were in 2006 when we embarked on this adventure and as those plans evolved during the decade and a half since. It’s been an extended period of introspection, evaluating our current wants and needs, endeavoring to align our future expectations and goals with respect to one another and with respect to Rosslyn, and challenging one another to brainstorm beyond the present.
There’s no question but that our impromptu quarantine at Rosslyn during the spring and summer of 2021 catalyzed some of this soul-searching. But so too have the many life changes in recent years. Our gradual shift toward Santa Fe as our base and Essex as our getaway rather than the other way around. The loss of Susan’s mother. My parents’ retirement near us in Santa Fe. Our nephews and nieces growing up and expanding their orbits far beyond Rosslyn. A perennially postponed but driving desire to collaborate on a smaller, efficient, creative lakeside home of a different DNA altogether, an unrepressable will to imagine into existence the sort of slow cooked (albeit shapeshifting) and highly experimental homestead we originally envisioned in 2003-5 when we first began to explore our Adirondack Coast homecoming. And there is that hiccup in our 2006 original timeline, our 2-4 year vision for homing at Rosslyn until we’d managed to reboot and reground, until we were ready for our next adventure. Those naive expectations were eclipsed — willingly and joyfully — within the first year or two.
So what does this have to do with my daily Rosslyn updates?
Everything.
In committing to this daily practice last summer I was acknowledging that I had some serious work to do. In order for us to constructively sort through out collective vision for the future, to determine whether we’re too fond of Rosslyn to proceed with plans for designing and building the lakeside retreat we’ve conjured over the years, to honestly assess our willingness and our readiness to hand this sanctuary over to another family, both Susan and I are undertaking the sort of “deep work” that will hopefully enable us to make some decisions. I’m talking about 100% honest, prolonged consideration. Rosslyn has quite literally been a part of our family, and not just our nuclear family. Can we untangle her? Are we willing to let her go? Can we joyfully pass the privilege on to new custodians? Or are we not yet ready?
For me this daily practice, digging deep into sixteen and a half years of living and loving Rosslyn, is my time and place to work through these questions. To sort it all out. To find peace and confidence in my convictions. And six months in, I believe that I’m on the right path. Not all the time. There have certainly been some tangles and tangents that got away from me before I realized what was happening and reined them in. But the constant conversation — *internal* as I study, reflect, and compose these installments as well as *external* as I share these updates and then interact with many of you — is reinvigorating and reawakening Rosslyn from her comfortable slumber (and me from mine!)
So this midpoint milestone is a profoundly significant benchmark for me personally. It’s the tangible representation of my germinating confidence and clarity. It’s the measurable mean between a conflicted outlook and the conviction I’m hoping to discover over the next six months. In a real sense, it’s a halfway point toward the sort of rehabilitation that we’ve been undertaking with Rosslyn’s buildings and grounds since 2006, only in this case the journey is profoundly personal. Instead of historic architectural rehabilitation, it is restoration of my innermost wonder, my romantic dreams, and my idealistic hopes. With passion reawakened and a map forward becoming more apparent each day, I’m tempted to see this benchmark as the sort of celebration enjoyed upon finally reaching a base camp, a lofty peak viewable in the distance foreshadows the ambitious ascent ahead but also offers a majestic affirmation of the reachability and proximity of the summit. Today marks just such a halfway point, an opportunity to appreciate the accomplishments so far, and an incentive to forge ahead.
When I first titled this post it was “If Lost, Poetry”. But it felt phony. If? Too hypothetical. We’re ALL lost from time to time. Provisionally lost. But… when lost, poetry.
When Lost, Poetry (Credit: Geo Davis)
Fortunately former U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, has the right words for us.
“Without poetry, we lose our way” — Joy Harjo
Exactly. And with poetry, we can rediscover our way. Ergo, when lost, I search for the poetry!
No Poetry, No Way!
Sometimes the workflow, the punch lists, and the deadlines mesmerize us. Lull us.
We become lost.
In these moments, I choose poetry. I untether from the routine, the daily demands, the results-driven dynamics for a few heartbeats or hours. In this case, it’s been a full week.
Back from a wandering, wondering week in the West Indies with family. Laughing, telling stories, dining, dancing, sailing, windsurfing, swimming. Reawakening the poetry. Revitalizing the poetry. Rebooting…
I’ve lived much, perhaps even *most* of my life in old houses. With the exception of late middle and high school, 3/4 of college, briefly in Santa Fe (1996-9), and briefly in Paris and Rome, my homes have been within old houses. And, come to think of it, some of my boarding school years were in old homes too. And yet each new home was revitalized — and revitalizing — when it became my personal (or familial) residential oasis. Old house, new home.
Hyde Gate, Essex, New York (Illustration by Kate Boesser for All My Houses, By Sally Lesh)
With Rosslyn becoming our place of residence, starting in 2006 and fully by 2008, this old house, new home combination took on new levels of significance. The oldness of the house wasn’t just evident in the architecture and design, the building materials and dated/failing mechanicals, and the time-earned gravity that many enduring old buildings exude. All of these were in evidence with Rosslyn, for sure. But there was something more.
Rosslyn’s history included a notable human legacy: lives lived and recorded; stories told and retold; images made, circulated, and collected. Rosslyn’s backstory as a prominent presence along Merchants Row; built by one of the two founding families in Essex; plus the iconic boathouse attracting the eyes of generations of photographers, artists, travelers; the years spent as a local enterprise (restaurant and watering hole, vacation accommodation, and boating regatta hub); and well documented home and preservation subject of George McNulty who helped catalyze Essex’s recognition in the historic register;… Rosslyn was an old house, new home with an outsized history. This was new to Susan and me.
The questions. The advice. The judgement. The memories and stories and artifacts. The responsibility. The stewardship. The pride… It’s been an adjustment. A learning curve. A deeply formative journey. A privilege.
Once upon a time this handsome old house became our new home, and along with it almost two hundred years of backstory, lives, styles, and lifestyles. I try to gather into a basket or a tapestry, a moving picture or a singalong, the colorful threads, the adventures, and the text textured tunes.
A day after my bride’s “polar plunge” in still frigid Lake Champlain, I’m swimming and drifting in the warm waters of Antigua, enjoying a free ranging conversation with one of my nephews, allowing salt and surf and steel band sounds (drifting intermittently from further up the shore) to exercise the sort of deep relinquishing that comes from knowing a vacation has only just begun.
Before departing Rosslyn I handed off germinating spring starts (broccoli and cucumbers) to Pam along with various vegetable and flower seeds that will be sown before long. Among the latter, thousands of poppy seeds. Always plenty of Red Corn Poppy (Papaver rhoeas aka Flanders Poppy) seeds as well as Shirley Poppy seeds, a cultivar of Papaver rhoeas that reminds me of my mother-in-law, Shirley Bacot Shamel. As my affection for poppies has long since escaped the restraint of manly propriety, I’ll concede that one of my spring fever symptoms is an infatuation with poppy plants, poppy blooms, poppy seed pods. And, in the case of the Shirley Poppy blooms, there’s always the added excitement since variations allow for intriguing surprises.
So a sunset soak with Christoph, gazing back at the oasis that we’ve been fortunate to enjoy as a family for eight years, curiously preoccupied with poppies, and looking forward to wandering the grounds in the days ahead to inspect the vast array of tropical orchids cultivated at Curtain Bluff, it struck me that I needed to explore these connections in a poem. Perhaps a Shirley Poppy poem?
Perhaps, but not today, as it turns out. The words that wanted to be written were driven in large part by a connection to place. This section seems to be headed in an interesting direction, for example.
Upon arriving,
a warm Wadadli welcome,
a breeze mellowed sun,
familiar phrases,
cadence, laughter
lilting,
lulling,
returning us
to the leeward lap
of ease and comfort,
a simple sanctuary
bursting with blooms
and recollections.
A bit decadent and overwrought still probably, but I am pleased to read it aloud.
But where am I hoping to go with this?!?! I can’t seem to see my way from tropical orchids to Shirley Poppy blooms. Nor am I certain that allowing my perennial passion for place, indeed for the poetry of place, to kidnap this still evolving verse is advisable.
Instead I’m curious how place, right now this perfect place nestled unassumingly into the hilly shore of Old Road, as well as the memories conjured by returning here, especially memories of my late mother-in-law, somehow a little more present when we’re here, connect. And why are they bleeding into my anticipation of a bumper crop of poppies back at Rosslyn?
Hhhmmm… Sometimes it’s wiser to admit defeat. For now. But stay tuned; I’ll try again.
