Householder into the Woods

Alpenglow on the Himalayas

I have sometimes thought of leaving this country for good (or more or less for good) whether in protest over one thing or another or (more likely) in search of a gentler environment.  I know that one cannot "go back again," but some places do stick in my mind and Darjeeling, India, is one of them.  Kashmir is another, though since being there in 1980, the politics have totally shifted and aren't good for the likes of me.  At any rate, I fantasize sometimes about what it would be like to put aside most of my worldly goods and enter something similar to the fourth stage of a Hindu's life--the householder who says goodbye and goes off to meditate or cogitate.  (The four stages are student, householder, retired, ascetic/meditator.) 

In this return to a simpler life, I have envisioned a trim, wooden house, perhaps no more than one room overlooking some part of the Himalaya.  It is a fantasy, as I say, but, while immersed in this dreamy state some years ago--twelve to be exact--I sat down and made a quick list of things that came to mind, that I would include in a goodbye letter.  For what it's worth, here it is.


Dear Friends,

1. I shall write letters, but I shall not expect answers in return unless you are so moved.
2. I shall think of you fondly at times of celebration, birthdays, Christmas, but I shall no longer necessarily send cards or gifts.
3. I shall welcome all visitors and will locate accommodations for you when you visit.
4. I shall devote my hours to reading, painting, writing, walking, dancing, playing musical instruments, drinking cups of tea with friends, arranging flowers in a vase.
5. I shall get up with the sun, enjoy sunsets across the mountains, and go to bed when it is time to blow out the candle.
6. I shall strive to live as healthy a life as I can.
7. I shall hope to live where I can walk in one direction into fields and forests and in the other into town where I can buy stamps and bars of chocolate.
8. I shall hire people to help cook my food, clean my house, tend my garden, and drive me where I need to go, though I shall pursue those activities as well.
9. I shall return from time to time but not all that frequently.
10. I shall write down my thoughts as insights come to me.
11. I shall burn incense to the gods.
12. I shall wear long skirts and comfortable clothes and not concern myself with hair style and makeup not because I don't approve of them but because I've never been able to figure them out for myself.
13. I shall strive to equally enjoy things of the mind, body, and spirit.
14. I shall always think of you with great affection.

Frisky Answers

Not having a clue how to illustrate this posting, I decided to simply have fun with it and show these paper butterflies.

You know, you've hauled all this stuff from the back of the store (near the pharmacy section) through the aisles to the check-out counter--the packets of toilet paper, the boxes of tissue, the tooth paste, etc.--but then there's no clerk in sight.  She's probably off price-adjusting the lipsticks.  But then she makes her way to the register and asks, "Are you all set?"  In fact, I want to say, "I'm all set; I'm just waiting for you."  But I'm polite, smile, and she rings me up.

Then sometimes, if I'm writing a check for something, a clerk will ask, "Is everything current?"  Have I changed phone numbers, noted a new address?  I'm afraid I could not help myself one day when checking out two separate batches of groceries, one for a friend.  I wrote a check for the first batch and handed it to the clerk.

"Is everything current?"
"Yes," I said.

Then she checked out the second batch for which I wrote another check.  I could barely believe my ears when she asked again, "Is everything current?"

With a broad smile and hoping we could both have a bit of fun with this, I said, "No, I just got married while you were checking me out and I changed my name."  She blinked but didn't say anything.  (It's times like that when I say to myself, "Where's Will Rogers now that we need him!"  I never knew Will Rogers; he died before I was born.  But, as I've heard tell, he had an engaging sense of humor and could make people laugh.  Or at least smile.)

Many years ago, a family member answered the door bell and found a salesman selling encyclopedias.  (Yes, back in those days.)  Already owning at least one set ... and, feeling his oats, the family member said, "I'm sorry, I can't buy anything; I'm illegible."  The salesman looked startled, confused, then skedaddled away.

Another time, when a clerk told a family friend, "Have a nice day," the friend replied, "Thank you, but I have other plans."

Finally, in an airport cafe recently, when I got carded for ordering a glass of wine between flights, I asked the waitress if she'd like to see my Medicare card.  But, even as I said it, good girl that I am, I pulled out my driver's license.

"You just made it," she teased.  We both chuckled. 

Gallery of Tulips: Paintings

I am particularly fond of painting flowers--especially tulips, daffodils, cosmos, and lisianthus.  Here are three paintings of tulips from past years, all from life.  The first two are in watercolor.

"Fantasy on May 7th"

"Fantasy on May 13th"

And this one is in oils--two blooms which I placed on tin foil so that I could then paint their swirly reflection.

"Two Tulips on Tin Foil"

Gallery of Tulips: Photos

This always seems a joyous time of year -- when the wintry world has made way for the entrance of color!!  Daffodils, forsythia, and then tulips in that order!  Not only are they glorious when young and perky, but some hang around longer than others, their petals turning tissue paper thin with maturity as they assume dancing poses.

Eight Children's Books

Late in 2011, after writing a posting about re-reading nine children's classics, I promised to re-read the other six I still owned and write about them.  When a friend sent me two of her favorites, I read those as well for the first time.  Here they all are.

1.  Margaret Sidney:  Five Little Peppers and How They Grew.  This is a late 19th century children's classic--the story of the five Pepper children, all of whom (nowadays) seem way older than they are, more imaginative, responsible, and creative in their activities.  In fact, for a modern audience, I found it a bit goody-goody.  But sweet.

2.  Robert Louis Stevenson:  Treasure Island.  I had read this as a child but admit to totally forgetting much of it.  I found it a highly rousing tale, rightfully a classic.

3.  Eric Knight:  Lassie Come Home.  This still made me weep, even as it did when I read it years ago.  It's the tale of faithful Lassie who can no longer be kept because the family finances won't allow it.  So she is sold and eventually taken up to northern Scotland where she manages to escape and make her way home, crawling back, barely alive, to be at her old 4:00 post when her young master gets out of school.  Hurrah!

4.  The Brothers Grimm:  Grimms' Fairy Tales.  Unlike the H. C. Andersen tales, I found these much more rousing and generally engaging.

5.  Lewis Carroll:  Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  This, of course, is his writing down of the tale he told the real Alice and her sisters on a day's boating trip together.  It's made up of a lot of literary nonsense, word plays, puns, etc.  I felt it should have held up for me now as an adult but found it simply too silly for the most part.  Though I did love the poems, such as Soup of the Evening, and the wonderful assortment of strange characters.  But I also found it deeply nonsensical and rambling.  In Through the Looking Glass, things, of course, are backwards, as they would appear in a mirror, a looking glass.  The characters are all a bunch of scolds. And the theme and setting are that of a chess board.  Sorry to say, I found it very tedious to re-read.

6. Howard Pyle:  The Wonder Clock, or four & twenty marvelous Tales, being one for each hour of the day.  Twenty-four tales, each with several beautifully executed drawings by the author.  About tomfoolery, good luck, greed, three of everything (mostly brothers, the youngest always being the cleverest) and, of course, the most beautiful princess with a father who puts strict conditions on the man who marries her.  Since he's writer and illustrator both, you know that the drawings absolutely represent the author's vision.

7.  Frances Hodgson Burnett:  The Secret Garden.  This was my first reading of this classic which I had viewed at least twice as a film.  It's a splendid book which incorporates the power of positive thinking, aka "the Magic" which heals the bed-ridden lad and opens his father (and the house) to health instead of grief.

8.  Elizabeth Enright:  The Saturdays.  This, too, was my first reading.  In 1939, faced with their usual Saturday boredom, four New York City siblings come up with interesting activities.  A trip to the opera, the ballet, a museum.  By pooling their allowance, each goes alone, seeking out that special activity that matches his/her particular interest.  Imaginative and fun.

Well Said

Every so often I write down something I particularly like that I've just read.  Here is part of my current collection.

• Of his gorgeous, remote, and mountainous principality in northwestern Pakistan, The Mir of Hunza once called it "The happy land of just enough."  He also spoke of one's "young, middle, and rich years."
• This lovely line, "...the noise of failure growing beautiful," describes the wind trying to blow leaves off an aspen tree a month too early.  From the poem, August in Waterton, Alberta, by Bill Holm.
• Apparently Franz Liszt described composer John Field's nocturnes as "dissolving into delicious melancholy."  Field (who died in 1837) wrote the first nocturnes.  Everyone else, including Chopin, copied the form. 
• From Robert Higgs, Truncating the Antecedents:  "Unvarnished truth is to our rulers as holy water is to vampires."
• Here's one from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa that captured me because it reflects my love of places that are a few thousand feet above sea level.  "Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart.  In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought:  Here I am, where I ought to be."
• I pulled this out of Alexander McCall Smith's The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection:  "Every life needs spells of calm, every life needs expanses of time when nothing much occurs, when one may sit for several hours in the same place and gaze upon static things, upon some waxen-leafed desert plant, perhaps, or a path of dry grass.  Or a group of cattle standing under a tree for the shade, the slow, flicking movement of their tails the only indication that they are animate beasts, not rocks; or a sky across which no clouds, or perhaps only the merest wisp of white, move."

This spot, overlooking St-Remy, France, would count as my family's most memorable "spell of calm" spot.  After a picnic, we sat upon this hill, listened to the wind, wished we lived in St-Remy, and let the sun warm us as the scene filled us with its silence.

• A young couple (family members) recently put themselves on a 30-day restricted health regimen (no grains, dairy, legumes, processed oils and only certain veggies and meats) and said, on Day 17, "Lately we've been feeling OK I think.  Today at dinnertime we were dancing around the kitchen improvising a song about pickles in Ethel Merman voices until the children begged us to stop."
• Two from Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs.  "Yes'm, old friends is always best, 'less you can catch a new one that's fit to make an old one out of."  And, "... the days flew by like a handful of flowers flung to the sea wind."

Writing "April"

Crocuses in my front lawn

I can't tell you what a relief it is to be able to write "April."  To have this lovely word, this lovely month now part of our experience.  To have beaten the winds of winter with its cold, icy, grey days.  Winter (for me, anyway) always brings a built-in tension.  Will there be so much snow on the roof that I'll need to hire someone to shovel it off?  Will I have an appointment just when a storm comes up both icing and whiting-out the road?  Will the power go out and, with it, the heat?

But with April, when I take my snow shovel back inside for another six months, I find that I can existentially relax.  I can look out, not to a white landscape (as beautiful as that can be) but to one that is sprouting a healthy, rejuvenating green!!  (Well, not quite yet, but soon.)  The sunshine is strong enough now that I can sit on my front step and soak it in or lie on my sofa when the sun angles through the window there.

Even before the crocuses, the snowdrops appear.

Of course, spring and summer bring on the ticks, midges, black flies, mosquitoes, even unbearable heat and humidity to say nothing of construction season with the sound of back-up beeps, road work, bridge repair, plus the neighbor's barking dog because my windows are now open. 

But just writing the word "April" somehow loosens a lot inside me.  I sometimes think I should return to my old haunts on the California coast.  But family is here now and so am I, appreciating a month that stirs the juices!

Pansies and violas are always the garden center's first flowers.

As an aside ... this first week of April also marks the second anniversary of my posting this blog.