childhood flowers

A visit to Bow Street Flowers means a flower filled house.

The scent of lilacs is with me as I write this.

When I was a child we had massive lilac shrubs on the edge of our yard--

my favorite summer space in which to read and daydream.

Lilacs takes me back to the worlds of 

All of  A Kind of a Family, The Saturdays, 

A Wrinkle in Time, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

The Borrowers, Pippi Longstocking.

Places I wanted to live, families I wanted for my own.

Are there flowers that evoke your childhood?

whippoorwill nights

Remember a couple weeks ago, I wrote about the whippoorwill (here)?  (This time, no hyphens.) When I went to the Catskills that weekend, I listened but didn't hear it. I think, I hope it's because they stay deep in the woods, and the sound of the waterfall is very loud next to the house. But that night I was haunted by the sound, I heard it in my head, and realized it was a sound of my childhood, when we lived in the Virginia woods, summer nights, the windows open, falling asleep to the song of the whippoorwill.



I think of smells as having that visceral, deja-vu power, but not sounds. In this case though, the sound of the whippoorwill inhabited my five year old self, so deeply that now the sound takes me back to that time, deeper than a memory.

inside the flower

I have been thinking about nature large and small. A couple of posts ago I wrote that I wished I were a bee or a wee fairy, and could climb inside a flower. Sometimes when I look at the lilies of the valley blooming in my yard, or the last lilacs, I want to inhale them and stay, find "heaven in a wild flower". (see Auguries of Innocence by William Blake here).

I read this Georgia O'Keeffe quote twenty years ago, and never forgot it: 

Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers...nobody sees a flower, really, it is so small - we haven't time, and to see it takes time, like to have a friend takes time. So I said to myself -- I'll paint what I see -- what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it -- I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see. 

Pink Tulip, O'Keeffe, 1926 oil on canvas, 36" x 30"

Seeing a flower, finding eternity in a grain of sand the way Blake did, is possible for almost anyone outside of prison. Experiencing nature on a larger scale is not as easy. I've written a bit here about my childhood in the woods of Virginia, the rivers of Maryland, the California mountains and coast--how these environments are integral to who I am. My father worked for the Environmental Protection Agency. I helped develop an environmental education program for a camp and after school program I worked for during college.

That frequent intimate connection with big nature faded when I moved to New York, had children, urban jobs, a complicated life. When we bought our house in the Catskills ten years ago I found it again. We had been looking at charming old farmhouses, but then we saw this waterfall, and time stopped. 

The house is an ugly boxy 80's thing - the interior was entirely painted the color of Silly Putty - every wall, every piece of molding, even the ceiling fans. The kitchen and bathroom cabinets and counters are still Silly Putty colored laminate. But houses can be changed, and we fell in love with the waterfall, the creek, the surrounding woods--an entire wilderness environment.

I felt like I belonged there; like my vision had been fuzzy but now it was clear. That I could really see nature again, write about it. Paint. It was wonderful to see my children wading and wandering, exploring without limits.

                                

When I opened the store I had the idea of sharing my love for nature with my customers, recreating it somehow, inside. I've accomplished that to some degree. But now, when I go to the country, I spend most of my time in the store. I take walks around our property, but I don't go hiking or do anything in depth. I don't have the time to look at everything up close, to breathe, to really see it. I want to be outside again. And have time to linger at the farmer's market, try kayaking, explore new places. And maybe get involved in environmental education again.

So I will be closing the store, a bittersweet decision. Sad, but also a relief.

                                                Jack in the Pulpit No. V,  O'Keeffe, 1930, oil on canvas 48" x 30"

"In the woods near two large spring houses, wild Jack-in-the-pulpits grew -- both the large dark ones and the small green ones. The year I painted them I had gone to the lake early in March. Remembering the art lessons of my high school days I looked at the Jacks with great interest. I did a set of six paintings of them. The first painting was very realistic. The last one had only the Jack from the flower."

*Quotations and flower paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe.

sea nettles and frog ponds

I went to the aquarium in Boston Friday. (Did any other aquarium have a band playing Celtic music the day before St. Patricks?) They have a fine exhibit of jellies.

                           jelly fish, New England Aquarium

As mentioned in my last post, when I was a child, I lived on the Severn River (in Maryland, not England) an estuary of the Chesapeake Bay. Every summer when the water warmed, the sea nettles (a species of jelly fish) came in. We scorned those kids who had community pools that looked like chlorinated concrete shoeboxes, when we could swim forever. I can still feel the sting and prickle of the nettles, a small price to pay for the vast, deep, ever-changing life of a river.

North American Sea Nettles, New England Aquarium

I enjoyed everything about the aquarium--adorable penguins, gorgeous tropical fish, goofy blowfish, massive sea turtles...but was particularly interested in a look at specific habitats such as salt marshes and mangrove swamps. They made me think of our frog pond in the Catskills.

                                            frog pond, Andes NY

On my evening walks in the spring and summer I look forward to the sounds of the frogs croaking and splashing as I near the pond. Approximately 1/3 of the world's frogs, toads and salamanders face extinction due to pollution, pesticides, climate change and habitat destruction. Frogs, with their permeable skin and land/water life cycle are extremely vunerable to changes in the environment. This sensitivity makes them an early warning system for ecological decline. Every spring, when I walk to the pond I am afraid that they will not be there, and I feel a palpable sense of relief when I hear the first deep rib-bit and the splash of a frog who wants nothing do with a human.

                      Madagascar tree frog, New England Aquarium

African bull frog, New England Aquarium

surrounded by nature

                                                                                    via

Until I was seven, we lived in a house in Virginia, surrounded by woods. My strongest early childhood memories are of being in the forest with my dog, peering down (not far, since I was small) at ferns, may apples, and Virginia bluebells; and up at the light slanting through trees.

From ages 7 to 14 I lived in a house on the Severn River in Maryland, and then in one surrounded by hills covered with olive trees, poppies, and mustard flowers in California.

Much of my childhood was spent outside. Even today, I feel the most comfortable, the most myself, when I am surrounded by nature.

Two weeks ago I was at this beach in South Carolina, with no other people in sight. It was a sunny windy day.

The sand blew so hard I thought of tales of sandstorms in the desert.

Mesmerizing patterns formed.

I'm sure that the woods, water, and hills of my childhood are why, the first time we saw our property in the Catskills it resonated so deeply with me, and continues to do so eleven years later.

Is there a place you feel the most yourself?

I am staying in Massachusetts this weekend, thinking about going to the New England Aquarium...

Enjoy your weekend!

Jen
All pictures, except the first and last were taken by me in South Carolina. The first one is credited, the last I took on our property in the Catskills.

rough hewn

I have a strong belief in personal geography--the places that have shaped us, that we return to, in some form, again and again. My early childhood was spent in a Virginia farmhouse surrounded by second-growth woods--farmland that had reverted back to nature.

Yuri and Vera, our friends in Italy, have several buildings on their property including the main house, elaborately renovated by its previous owner "the Count". But that is not the one I took pictures of.

This is. Known as "the barn", which I suppose it was at one time, and later converted to a house and then gone to ruin.

We had an old log barn near our house in Virginia, but I did not spend much time there--it was dark, and there were spiders and snakes. And yet this ruin resonated with me. I was enchanted by its revelations. Alterations made in later years have worn away to show the early bones.

The ceiling is woven with sticks and logs.

Plaster walls worn away in places

revealing the sticks (reeds?) that form the framing of the walls.

Plaster covers brick which covers

stones cobbled together.

a faded pink wall

layers of paint

a rough hewn door. 

And there, as I write, my subconscious reveals itself. My father named our property in Virginia "Rough Hewn" something I have not thought of in many years. It's all connected, isn't it?

porches and children

                                                                                                                     here
A chilly spring night in Vermont. Spent a few days with my youngest, Luke (19) and am going home tomorrow, so happy and sad. He lives in a wooden house with a small front porch (that pretty much describes all the houses here and they are all full of students). He has 2 chairs on the porch and is so happy that the snow has finally melted. I love porches. Our house in New Jersey where we lived for 15 years had a huge one and it was the best room in the house. Our house in Massachusetts and the one in the Catskills have decks but it's not the same. So I was thinking about porches and started to make an etsy treasury about porches but moved off the porch a bit. Awaiting Summer.

secret garden

When I was a child we had a border of massive, unpruned lilacs. That was my special place to read and play and daydream. The smell was lovely--sweet and fresh. Last spring I went to see the lilacs at Boston's Arnold Arboretum--there are hundreds of them in shades of white, pink, blue and purple and I got that deja vu smell thing and was happy and sad at the same time. I like to think about lilacs now when I have three feet of snow in my yard. Did you have a favorite place in nature when you were a child?