Ice Will Suffice

     Snow is falling; I’m watching through the kitchen picture window. Plump, languid flakes meander to the ground, the occasional updraft setting them into a sudden tumble. Courtesy of a January thaw, an odd slab of my backyard is now an angular shallow pond frozen solid beneath the cover of downy snow, doing who knows what sort of damage to a few already put-upon apple trees now up to their kneecaps in ice.

     Ordinarily, I’d be moved by the beauty of this scene, by the snow-globe quality of the atmosphere as it pales the dark green and brown trees beneath a veil of white and blends the line between earth and sky.  Though it is otherworldly lovely, an image you might find on a holiday card, I’m thinking about how fabulous it would be to have a condo in Boca Raton. A small unit with single bedroom would suffice, with a serviceable kitchenette and a balcony with a distant view of any body of open and unfrozen water.

     This year, I’ve lost my patience with ice.

     Earliest ice memory: I’m a kid, no more than four. We’re living in a bucolic suburb of Hartford, where my father works in the insurance business.  The day is darkening, and the roads, wide to a child as ancient boulevards, are treacherous, glazed and reflective as mirrors. And I’m in trouble. I’ve been outside alone, playing or walking home from next door: somehow I’ve put my small existence into peril. There’s a scolding of a tenor previously unknown. Ice is dangerous! Message received, Mom.

     Eventually our family settles in lower Delaware, land of vast soybean fields, fragrant pines and the delicate lady slippers that grow beneath them, humid summers and generally mild winters.  An exception to the last looms large in the mind.  A freak ice storm downs power lines for a week. No water, no heat, and no way for an insecure teenage girl who must still go to school every day to wash and style her untamable hair. It’s tragic.

      Two decades later, with much the same head of hair, I’m back in Connecticut, in another bucolic suburb. Ice happens in the Farmington Valley, not infrequently.  By this time, I’m carting around three small children, and they all have the stomach flu. No bathroom, no laundry for days, the house growing ever colder.  I go to the window and watch in disbelief as power trucks pull through the neighborhood without stopping; I can’t get a human being from the electric company on the phone.  At week’s end we finally give in, toss the kids in the car and head for a hotel in Rock Hill.  I never so much enjoyed a hot bath or a meal at Red Lobster in my life. 

     And that first winter in Vermont: the initial week of temperatures nearing 40 below is quite an education.  I buy hats and scarves and appropriate footwear, boots from LL Bean so stiff with insulation and deeply treaded, they could see me through a nuclear winter.  The flatlander adapts, tumbling occasionally but soon mastering the awkward tundra dance, the slow, splayed steps one takes when the driveway turns into a skating rink.

     “Make friends with the ice!” is the mantra this freshman student of the cold adopts, repeating as necessary while watching with admiration the many role models of the north country: the robust souls jumping into Willoughby on the first day of the year; skiers traversing slopes as slick as luge runs; and fisherman dragging shanties far out into the middle of frozen lakes behind hardworking Silverados.  Bravery (and occasional foolhardiness) abounds on the hillsides and slippery back roads alike.

     Years pass, and the ice and I manage more or less companionably.  I forgive it the dam that backs up water through the roof, and the trees it twists beneath its crippling grasp; I learn what can and cannot be done with bags of salt.  Despite the danger, I appreciate the glory of frosted early dawns, when everything – branches burdened like weary arms, the fading length of cedar fence, the gentle rise beyond the house – sparkles after a freezing rain with touches of gold and hues residing at the far end of the spectrum.

    And this year:  the Kingdom is treated to that January thaw and the subsequent freeze.  The ice brings a fall and a hip-fracture for my father. An hour or more of lying in the snow before he is discovered.

    I’m rethinking my relationship with ice.  This spring, whenever it departs from Joe’s Pond, it won’t be soon enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This column appears in the February 2014 issue of The North Star Monthly. Check out the site: 

http://www.northstarmonthly.com  Images are from the Library of Congress. 

        Fire and Ice

                                                     Some say the world will end in fire,

                                                     Some say in ice.

                                                     From what I've tasted of desire

                                                     I hold with those who favor fire.

                                                     But if I had to perish twice,

                                                     I think I know enough of hate

                                                     To say that for destruction ice

                                                     Is also great

                                                     And would suffice.

                                                                                         --------Robert Frost

Starting at Happy

     Can we decide to be happy?

     A new year dawns, and with it comes the habitual assessment of the year we’ve left behind. Many of us make resolutions to right whatever we felt went wrong, to turn over the proverbial new leaf, to chart a course to improve ourselves and our lot in life.

     At the heart of this resolve is the supposition that we, as thinking beings aware of our shortcomings, are or at least ought to be dissatisfied with the present, discontent with our circumstances and with ourselves.  “Happiness in intelligent people,” said Ernest Hemingway, “is the rarest thing I know.”

    Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t seek improvement, or work to acquire those certain things that would make our lives easier, more pleasant – in short, happier.  But we might consider the sources of our discontent, and the various entities  -- outside of ourselves – that benefit from it.  That original sin doctrine has something to do with it, for sure, though many of us lead lives so secular in nature that we are not consciously aware of the theological burden. 

     But we are on intimate terms with the world of getting and spending, and there’s a lot of money to be made from unhappy people, from consumers who feel the need to replace reasonably acceptable old stuff with shiny just-out-of-the-box stuff, people encouraged to be displeased with themselves and what they possess, to crave change and novelty for their own sake.

     The New Year arrives, and in the spirit of bigger, better, best, we make our various lists. Maybe it’s time to upend the process.

      The quotation has varied as it traveled down the years, but Abraham Lincoln said something akin to this: “Folks are usually about as happy as they make up their minds to be.” Through our study of history, of the magnificence of The Gettysburg Address to the savagery at Ford’s Theatre, through literature and movie portrayals, we carry a mental image of the revered president, gangly in body, so eloquent in speech and steadfast in resolve. How his hardscrabble childhood in that one-room log cabin in Kentucky and the devastating loss of two young sons prepared him to utter such a statement about happiness is beyond comprehension for most of us.

The Mansion of Happiness:

An Instructive Moral and Entertaining Amusement.

Children's board game first published in England in 1800. 

     Let’s play it out: let’s say there are two women, identical except in name. We’ll call them Agatha and Zelda. Both live in old homes that in winter are drafty as birdcages, cold air wafting in at every aperture with a right angle. They murder houseplants with regularity, and for company, each has a pampered calico cat named Mr. Spangles. Both are blessed with good health, though in conversations lately they often whisper, “Excuse me?” and let’s face it, their skin is unfortunate.

     Both have jobs that entail moving papers from one side of a desk to another. Occasionally one batch of papers is more important than the last, and during their handling and assessment, the women employ some small part of their educational backgrounds. But essentially, Agatha and Zelda are bit players in a grand assembly line of printed materials.

     Let’s go out on a limb and say that neither woman has seen her childhood dreams come true. Neither had expected to spend quite so much time wrapped up in bulky sweaters, or to build a career out of perpetual eyestrain and red pencil. And while the two Mr. Spangles are attractive fellows, their conversational skills are limited and they hog the remote.

     So on the first of January, Agatha looks around and accurately assesses all that’s lacking. Her list of New Year’s resolutions begins precisely from that point of view and accumulates predictably, in much the same way it has for the last decade.

     What if Zelda takes Lincoln’s aphorism to heart?  On January 1^st she breathes in and out, and acknowledges that that is a far better occurrence than not breathing in and out. The skin’s a disaster, but there are salves and cover ups; the job keeps the roof leak-free atop the chilly house. She decides, in essence, to be happy with what she has and is.

     What larger, loftier goals might Zelda consider placing on her New Year’s list, if “finding an in-network dermatologist” doesn’t automatically make the cut?

      Agatha, the realist, the one who sees things as they truly are: Is she more apt to genuinely improve her lot and to be ‘happier’ by the end of December? Zelda, who squints at life through rose-colored bifocals: Is she in denial, out of touch with her ‘real’ emotions if she choses to be happy?

     But as a friend pointed out to me during a rough patch, an emotion is only an emotion. The weight we grant it and the influence over our actions are up to us.

     A few years ago, a writer of some means looked around her distinctly privileged life and decided she ought to be, well, happier. She launched a blog and book aptly titled “The Happiness Project,” and set out and managed to become, through incremental steps designed to reach a number of well-defined goals, a (best-selling) happier person. 

     In her book, she offers advice on how to create your own Happiness Project by closely examining what makes you feel good or bad, and what seems out of sync in your life, and in light of that reconnaissance, crafting a list of goals that can be broken down into discreet units. Along the way she tosses out a few questionable maxims (“Happiness is other people.”), but all in all, the book offers a sensible guide on setting measurable goals aimed toward becoming  “happier.”

     It is, arguably, a fine occupation for the month of January, for any of us, to take stock and assess where we’d like to be at the end of this beautiful year ahead given where we are. But the thrust of “The Happiness Project,” as I understand it, as is the act of making quantifiable list upon list, is based on an assumption that happiness is not a choice, that it must be accumulated or acquired, or at very least, enhanced and improved upon, year after year.

     Which puts us at odds with Abraham Lincoln, who knew a thing or two.

     What if, as we settle into our easy chairs to make our resolutions this year, we stood the process on its head? What if instead of listing all that needs improvement, we start by solidly acknowledging what’s going well and, further, allowing ourselves a bit of the serenity that comes from wanting what you have, rather than striving to have all you want?

     How much more joyful would our journey through the year be if we started at “happy” in the first place, and allowed ourselves to appreciate that every item we check off the list, every step forward in the coming months, is gravy.

This post appears in the January 2014 issue of The North Star Monthly.  Images from the Library of Congress.

The Mysteries of Capri

You could say that I went to Capri to look for my mother.

     All my life, Capri had been a fabled place, a fabulous homeland not easily forgotten.  My widowed great-grandmother, Josephine Capritti, had left the island unwillingly with her youngest child, my grandmother, enticed across the ocean by grown sons who’d departed some years earlier in search of fame and fortune, or at least something more than the meager future the sun and sea could offer them.  She made her home in Brooklyn, and when her daughter had grown and married, lived with her and tended the grandchildren.

     From the tone of her voice in the retelling, my mother must have felt one of her most favored.  In the mysterious logic of the heart, the Isle of Capri came to mean to me all that’s best and beautiful of love and family. I suppose I felt I could find something of my mother in the very air and something of myself as well.

    

My mother, Josephine Berretta Buel

May 26, 1924 -- December 21, 2006

     A shock of recognition jolted me when I approached the woman behind the desk at our hotel.  With her crop of graying curls, reserved smile and simple dress, she reminded me in every way of the Italian grandmother who’d given me her faux ruby rind and her prayer book when I was teenager. I found myself telling the hotel manager, and in short order everyone else, that my grandmother had lived on Capri.

     “Yes, of course,” said the man who wanted to sell me Limoncello.  He could see right away I had Italian blood in my veins.  He plied me with a sample. I bought a bottle on the spot.

     Over the next five days, I would try the patience of every merchant surrounding our hotel with the story of my grandmother.  The cobbler and his son at work under an awning, the waiter scooping out gelato, the woman peddling expensive scarves.  No one was spared.

     I was amazed at not only the ease with which I imparted this information to complete strangers, but the utter glee as well. I ‘d never before felt such a need to belong as I did walking those streets, to be differentiated from the crowd of tourists clogging the way, or sitting in a darkening restaurant relishing the last sunlight falling on the sheer rock and glimmering sea.

     Something in the combination of elements called to a memory not my own – the heat of the day relieved by the breeze off the water at night, the twisting roadways revealing slices of a panorama so lush and grand words fail to define.  Something in that combustion felt like home.

     Our last evening in Capri, I found myself with some hours alone.  It saddened me to think of leaving.  I retraced my steps one last time along the narrow streets, most of the shops closed, the superb restaurant we’d patronized twice just beginning to collect diners at the tidy, linen covered tables set out on its bougainvillea entwined porch.

My daughter Marion

     The white façade of a small church finally beckoned me inside; a few curious tourists scrutinized the spare but beautiful interior. I took a seat on a back pew and with little regard to the surroundings, knelt to say a prayer.  In mere moments, several other women took their places beside and around me. Then a few couples appeared. A number of families. Some elderly men and women. In no time, the church was quite full.

     A man dressed in street clothes approached the altar rail, genuflected, then took a seat near the front. Without introduction, he began to recite what I felt certain must be the Apostle’s Creed in Italian.  The parishioners joined him, and the Rosary was underway.

     I stayed through the five decades of prayer, letting the music of the language fill me, the glorious, sorrowful, and joyous mysteries of the Holy Mother coming clearly to mind. I cried tears both grateful and glum. And I said a prayer for all the women in my family who had walked on the island before me, and for my mother, who hadn’t, but was there with me even so.

This atricle first appeared in North Country Cooking, March 2010

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O, Little Town of Bethlehem, NH

Edward Burne-Jones, Star of Bethlehem

     Some of us -- and you know who you are --struggle to get into the spirit of the holiday season. No need to name names. But believe me, you have plenty of company.

     For many, the ghosts of holidays past are too much with us, as Dickens might suggest; so perhaps is Wordsworth’s world of “getting and spending,” as we race from Black Friday to the finish line under the lavishly decorated tree (though Camille Paglia, in her book Break Blow Burn, puts a new spin on explicating that oft-quoted phrase from the famous poem; suffice it to say the early Romantics were, well, romantic). 

     We cringe to recall the hard work and expense poured into celebratory meals gone utterly amok.  The guests who wander in ninety minutes late; the one-upmanship over cranberry relish recipes; the finicky eater who won’t touch the entrée or six of the seven elaborate side dishes.

     I’m thinking of the mother of a friend who, in a fit of despair or exasperation, threw the blasted turkey out the kitchen window, which one would assume put something of a crimp in the family gathering.  I’ve pulled a few slightly bloody carcasses out of the oven myself -- the still-frozen underbellies of overstuffed birds simply refusing to roast. Then there was a leg-pulling over a spiral cut ham that sent a sensitive relative to another room in tears. Yes, that was a fabulous holiday indeed.

     Some of us, missing those no longer at the table, can’t help but feel a little sadness creep in this time of year. Or, in the fever pitch of shopping and planning and partying, we find ourselves so overwhelmed that when the day itself arrives, we’re physically and emotionally spent. Occasionally, I’ve wanted to greet guests at the door with, “Here’s your turkey sandwich. Have a safe journey home.”

     It helps to hold in mind why we’re gathering together in the first place, often from afar, and to consider that legendary journey long ago, a difficult one, as T.S. Eliot described it in his Ariel poem, Journey of the Magi:

A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey;

The ways deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.

     Soon we will come into winter with its weather “sharp.” We know what the Magi sought, however in Eliot’s poem, simple joy is not to be found in Bethlehem: the birth of the Savior summons in the death of the old order.  So it is with all that’s new and unfamiliar. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded that it’s frequently a tough, hard road to a desired destination, and that even mixed blessings are blessings still.

     Now it’s December. Time to catch our breath on the fast track to celebrations both sacred and secular. By seeking out a bit of tangible proof that joy exists not merely in myth, we are better able to reach the end of the holidays with our spirits lifted, not simply with the satisfaction of having lived through them for another year.  To that end, I took myself on a journey recently to our own Bethlehem, close by and with an easy highway that needs no sure-footed camel to traverse.

Bethlehem NH, 1907

      Bethlehem was first known as Lloyd’s Hill, but according to the official town website, voters resolved to change the name after the revolution, apparently to break from loyalist’s roots. Less than 3000 people live in Bethlehem proper, which in the Gilded Age became a resort for the rich and powerful, luring profiteers and presidents alike.  In the 1920s, it was the headquarters of the Hebrew Hay Fever Relief Association, as many Jewish families from New York vacationed or decided to reside in Bethlehem, finding the clear mountain air alleviated their symptoms.

     Bethlehem is quieter now, though stately old homes of more ostentatious times stand guard along the main street as you drive into the village, where shops, antique stores, and eateries await. On a recent Saturday morning, patrons walking the streets were few; a restaurant I had hoped to visit was closed. A sign in the window, illustrated with a photo of a bear, indicated that the establishment was in ‘hibernation’ until early December.  Business hours on another shop were described this way:

OPEN most days about 9 or 10

Occasionally as Early as 7, But SOME DAYS

As Late As 12 or 1.

WE CLOSE About 5:30 or 6

Sometimes as Late as 11 or 12.

SOME DAYS OR Afternoons, WE

Aren’t Here At All, and Lately

I’ve Been Here Just About All the Time,

Except When I’m Someplace Else,

But I Should Be Here Then, Too.

     At any rate, I found that business and others were open and well worth the trip.  Two antique shops satisfied my passion for searching out beautiful things at bargain prices. Ragamuffins Design offered select antiques and gently used books and clothing, along with oriental rugs, batik scarves, and hand crafted ornaments and greeting cards.  In Country Collectibles, I examined at length lovely platters, glassware, and ornate silver-plated tableware and serving pieces. From this store I came away with a delicate glass-domed plate – the perfect showcase for iced and decorated Christmas cookies.

Country Collectibles

     If you visit Bethlehem, you’ll have to stop at Local Works Marketplace, the gallery of handcrafted items and specialty foodstuffs from the Women’s Rural Entrepreneurial Network.  One room is devoted to wines, cheeses, and row upon row of small batch local preserves and condiments.  WREN members fill the store with gorgeous jewelry; healthy dog treats and cool canine supplies; pottery and original paintings; unusual cards and prints; and fragrant soaps and balms. Here I found a skein of hand-dyed wool for a friend, a great gift for someone unlikely to have sought it out for herself.

Local Works, WREN Gallery

     After a few hours of gratifying hunting and gathering, I enjoyed a stunningly good lunch of spinach-artichoke heart quiche and a bowl of tomato-roasted pepper soup at Maia Papaya, a small café next door to the post office, where some 50,000 seasonal cards are postmarked each year.  There’s still time.

    On Saturday, December 7^th, the town will host the annual Christmas In Bethlehem celebration, which kicks off with the Methodist Church Bazaar and Santa’s Workshop for younger children; a cornhole tournament for those nine and up; a tour of Dawn Cottage; and a late afternoon spaghetti supper. Main Street will close at 6 p.m. for all sorts of festive entertainment, including bell ringers; several tree lightings (arrive earlier in the day and cut down your own tree at The Rocks Estate); tractor rides; the arrival of Santa himself; fireworks; and even a giant bonfire, which might warm the heart of those among us of more pagan sympathies. 

     In our own backyard, you’ll find a day of merriment and light, and of simple joys, enough to brighten the disposition of even the weariest traveler on the long holiday journey, and a reminder to be grateful for the abundance and blessings so close at hand. In Bethlehem, New Hampshire.

Some of the local libations available at Local Works.

This column appears in the December 2013 issue of The North Star Monthly. Check out their site.

The North Star Monthly