Wisdom for the Aged from Lolly Willowes

                                                   

    

 I continue to move through the house, thinning out a bookshelf here, a drawer there. As I was reading Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, one passage really spoke to me:

She had lived for twenty-eight years in a house where there was no lack of cupboard room and a tradition of hoarding, so the accumulation was considerable. There were old toys, letters, stones of strange shapes or bright colours, lesson books, watercolor sketches of the dogs and the garden, a bunch of dance programs kept for the sake of the little pencils, and all the little pencils tangled into an inextricable knot; pieces of unfinished needlework, scraps cut out of newspapers, and inexplicable objects that could only be remembrances of things she'd forgotten.

                                    

Oh, my, how exceedingly accurate this is for me. Except I've been in this house for fifty years, not twenty-eight, and I never had dance programs with little pencils. If I had, I'm sure I would have saved them. And Lolly didn't have an accumulation of mysterious cords and chargers to deal with.

                                         

  

There was another passage I loved, quite zen-like--but I'm not likely to manage it:

It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be wholly earth before one die. 

                                             

Empty Bowl Blues

I got those empty bowl blues . . .

Yeah, those empty bowl blues . . .

Standin' here with nothing to lose.

The Woman ate it all up . . .

I say, she ate it all up . . .

Got not a thought for this sad pup. 

Breakfast long past . . .

Oh Lord, breakfast long past . . .

Can't see how a poor dog can last.

Lunchtime's years away . . .

I say, lunchtime's years away . . .

Don't see how I'll make it through the day.

(Repeat first verse)

 

Lest We Forget

 

We find their beautiful spear heads and points as well as fragments of stone tools in our fields, just as we find remnants of those who supplanted them.

There is no record of permanent Cherokee settlements in our county, but we were certainly a part of their hunting ground. The big bottom field at the lower part of our farm is where most of these artifacts came from and the presence in one small area of numerous half-finished points and flakes of flint leads us to believe that this field between two streams must have been a summer encampment and this one area must have been where a flint knapper worked.

The Indian Removal, also called The Long Walk or, more poetically still, The Trail of Tears is a part of our history that the current regime would prefer we forget.]

Briefly, the story is this. White settlers wanted Native American land and in 1838 the Indian Removal Act meant that all Native Americans in the southeastern US were driven from their land, houses and orchards destroyed. They were rounded up, impounded in stockades, and forcibly marched west to Oklahoma. 1,200 miles they traveled -- a six month journey. Men, women, and children, the very old and the very young were forced along the Trail of Tears--most walking -- in the bitter winter weather. One in four of the some 17,000 Native Americans died on the march.

There were some Cherokees who avoided the removal by hiding and some who came back later. Eventually, the Cherokees were 'given' land here in the North Carolina mountains -- a tiny fraction of what had been theirs. This is the Qualla Boundary -- Cherokee, NC, a few hours drive from our farm.

The Trail of Tears is our country's shame. As is slavery and Jim Crow. As are the Japanese internment camps. As are the current inhumane ICE concentration camps. We should never forget but should endeavor to do better by our fellow man.

Wordless

 

The English Patient

         In my recent reorganizing of bookshelves in my workroom, I came across this unread copy of best-selling, made-into-a-movie, Booker Prize winning The English Patient. 

I have no idea when I acquired it--could be 25 or so years ago. I know that for whatever reason I never read it--maybe because it was so talked about at the time, maybe the cover that made it look like a romance, maybe I was afraid it would be too sad . . . who knows?

Anyway, I pulled it out and set it where I couldn't ignore it any longer. But I did, for about a month, till, surfeited with the undemanding comfort reads I've been enjoying, I took my challenge and began reading.

And I'm glad I did. It's no romance and it's not heart-breaking--it's a strange and beautiful tale of four very different people thrown together by war.

I won't attempt to summarize it-- you've probably read it or seen the movie (I haven't.) But I found it a compelling read, one that I expect to return to before long. I may very well get the audio book, the better to appreciate the language.

Meanwhile, I've begun reading God's Perfect Child, a book by Caroline Fraser who was raised in the Christian Science faith but left it. 

I'm a total non-believer but am nonetheless fascinated by some of the more extreme manifestations of faith--the Amish, the Hassidic Jews, the snake-handling churches, celibate communities . . .

Mankind is strange and wonderful.

Marked Safe from the Cage Match

...  and enjoying a peaceful view

 

Bread and Circuses

                    

'

That was how the Roman emperors kept the population happy--free bread and gladiatorial contests. It worked for a while.

And here we are, a couple of thousand years later and our Toddler-in-Chief is throwing himself a birthday party with lightly clothed sweaty men, fighting on the White House lawn.

Because nothing says real class like a cage match. 

An odd fact is that service members are invited to attend--as long as they meet certain physical standards--and pay for their own transportation.

The general public is pretty much excluded from the event--they can watch if they have a streaming service.

And there is no free bread.

 

Hot, Hot Day

                                          

                                                                                                                         

 

Painting Day

 

                                   My painting buddy Louise came over yesterday. She is working on an amazing project--about which I'm not at liberty to say more or show any.  She is always an inspiration.

I fiddled around with some partially finished projects, giving myself permission to be sloppy and take liberties with color--the photos I was working from were either black and white or kinda boring browns and grays. Several of these were on the backs of other unsuccessful pictures and I was ready to call them done and move on.

On the way back from taking Louise down to her car, I was stopped by a young black snake stretched across the road. It seemed in no hurry to move so I got out of the car (forgetting my phone) and poked at it with my walking stick, expecting it to slide into the weeds.

Imagine my surprise when it coiled up and threatened to strike. Okay, then, I said, and retreated back to my car to wait.

After a few minutes, it came to its senses and headed for the undergrowth. It was maybe a yard long--just a foolish teenager, I guess.
                                                          

 

Almost Summer

 

Recently Read

                                 

A novel without a plot or a protagonist, STW's The Corner That Held Them is an absorbing account of the daily comings and goings at an English Benedictine convent in the 14th century. The Black Death makes an appearance, as do various peasant uprisings, but it is the small, ordinary day to day matters that truly immerse the reader in the times. 

I'm a great fan of Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede--a look at the life of a 20th century English Benedictine abbey, and I enjoyed seeing the many parallels between these two books. A community of women, whether in the 1300's or five hundred years later, is subject to the same strains and revelations. 

Then there's Warner's Lolly Willowes. Set in England in the early 1900's, it's the story of Laura, aka Lolly, a dutiful child and later a dutiful spinster aunt who, after forty years of dutifulness sets out to live on her own terms.

Warner's prose is engaging and precise in detailed description. The novel caught me by surprise in the second half, when Lolly, fighting to maintain her autonomy, becomes a witch.

Warner is known as an early feminist and certainly such themes are apparent in both of these novels. But for me, what stood out was the beauty of the prose and the finely drawn characters.

Good reads, both of them.

Josie's To Do List

A day with Meema. First of all she made a To Do list.

1. Organize Castle People

2. Draw

3. Eat lunch

4. Tablet time

5. Paint

6. Play cards

7. Read

8. Brush the dog

9. Tablet time

10. Clean up

She says this is from a Lego movie and Koko is pronounced cuckoo and that's how it was in the movie.

So much to do!

 

A Field of Daisies, Updated

 

In 1973 John and I decided to escape the ever-expanding suburbs that were wiping out the old Florida where we’d grown up. We ran away in search of a new home.

On a day in early June, we found ourselves sitting in a mountain pasture, watching the daisies stirring in the breeze and listening to the hollow sound of a pileated woodpecker hammering on a tree. The sky was Carolina blue and all we could see in the distance were mountains, green with trees and the occasional pasture. Except for an old cabin behind us and two tobacco barns just below the field, not another building was in sight. Breathing in that sweet mountain air, we decided we were

home.

  
It was the beauty of the place that bewitched us – those rolling ranks of mountain ranges in hazy blues and purples, the lush early-summer greens of the poplars and locusts, maples and walnuts, the orange day lilies crowding the banks of the creeks and branches, the blue of chicory that reflected the sky, the white of the lovely Queen Anne’s Lace . . . the beauty that seemed to be everywhere we turned. We fell in love with the scenery, took a leap of faith, and bought the sixty acres with the barns, the cabin, and the field of daisies . . . and then, as we spent the summer camping out in one of the barns, we fell in love with the people and a whole new way of life.

 

Fifty-three years later  and we've never regretted that leap of faith. And every time the daisies bloom, I remember that magical day . . . sitting in the field of daisies and deciding we were home.