Life is a Cabaret

"Life is a cabaret," I thought as I drove down the snowy, windy road on my way to the hospital for some pre-surgery tests last week. I thought of Liza Minelli singing it, but really about the lyric itself. I was sleepy as I had had less than five hours sleep--I'd been up late talking very loudly to my hearing-impaired sister on the phone.

I have to have minor surgery, Paul has to have minor surgery, a tree limb fell on our house, a part of our kitchen ceiling landed on the floor (after claw-foot tub leaked through the sheet rock), and when I got to the hospital this morning they couldn't find my appointment (but then did). Awaiting an EKG, I got lost in the computer again and waited an hour.

Despite my list of woes, none of the things listed above are life-threatening or really devastating and I am not an orphaned young adult who sleeps on the floor of the church lounge at night (as one young man at the shelter must do). I am not fighting for my life in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter. Still, these comparisons do not really suffice to explain this lively cabaret feeling I'm enjoying.

A cup of tea and the crossword each morning gives me immense pleasure. Shoveling the lovely, fresh snow while the dog romped around yesterday was really wonderful. The yard was so beautiful and the red roof on our old maple sugar house stood out in relief. I dug out a chocolate cake mix I had in the cupboard and made it as a little surprise for Paul. He loves chocolate cake.

On Saturday, we had a fantastic dinner with a friend and her husband and some of their friends in a giant, rambling,old house in Brattleboro. Jen gave us the grand tour, lots of peeling paint and charm everywhere. Outside is a circular drive with globe lights atop river stone pedestals. Inside, besides two 60's style bathrooms, there is a "two-seater" wood toilet still intact. It seems to  have been perhaps an orphanage or home for the tubercular or some such thing. She and Ian found many old single metal bedsteads in the attic and there are many small bedrooms off long hallways. Earlier this month she had ten friends visit and each had their own room. They made us a lavish meal of gorgonzola and honey on toasted bread, scallops and then beef bourguignon. Their tenant, who lives in an apartment above the three-car garage, made the fruit pie for dessert.

This is all more than cabaret enough for me.

Snow Rollers and Bear Sausage

The mercury is dipping down below zero this evening and Friday was the coldest recorded yet this winter, or so I was told by a clerk at Trader Joe's in South Hadley, MA. I went there with a friend to do my monthly/bi-monthly shopping. We stopped in Amherst to have lunch at a pan-Asian place, delicious "tea rolls" and noodle soup, hot Vietnamese coffee. We got back just in time to pick up her girls at the bus stop--just down the hill from their house. My friend's two daughters and another girl are the only ones left on the bus by the time it less than a mile or so away from the school. It is poignant to see only three little figures on the big yellow bus as it reaches the top of Depot Road next to an old town garage, the kind that looks like it once held carriages, or a snow roller like one in the photo.

Thursday night when it was so windy our chimes were ringing like crazy and clanking against the house, just after I arrived home from a brisk walk with the dog, I heard a loud crashing sound on the roof on the western side of the house. Sure enough, a big limb had fallen from the old maple tree, which the former owner couldn't bring herself to have cut down (and we couldn't either--it is so much a part of the house and its surroundings, and even its weakened state still has the most wonderful canopy of leaves that shades the house in the summer). It appeared to have bounced off the roof and most of it fell on the ground and the largest part got stuck in the crotch of the tree. Some of the branches fell on our cable line and so we lost TV, but more importantly, our phone line. Our cell phone doesn't work out here, but my neighbor's, thankfully, does and she was kind enough to let us use it.

Today, Saturday, Kim and Rick came over to survey the tree situation. They are a wonderful couple who have helped us with our roof, siding, painting, supplying firewood, etc. Once we all took a good look at the the tree, we realized it probably needs to come down. Also, Rick went on the roof and discovered some holes and a bit of damage here and there. Yikes. The maple is clearly too fragile and precariously near all kinds of utility lines. Perhaps phone or electric company will take it down for free? We'll see. Meanwhile, Kim and Rick collected up all the branches and cut up the wood on the ground with a chain saw and neatly stacked it for us.

Then they came inside with their young son, who'd been asleep in the car, and had coffee. They are a handsome couple (she looks like she could have been a Playboy bunny) and unbelievably hard-working. Kim also details cars and sells Avon. They hunt deer and bear and store the meat in freezers for the winter. Along with the produce from their garden, they are very self-sufficient. They are caretakers of a big old house in Wilmington on hundred and twenty acres and frequently see bobcats, "coydogs" (as they call them--close to coyotes, I think), and two different momma bears with cubs. This fall, Kim spotted two large bucks in the backyard. She told the kids to stay inside and went out and shot it herself and dragged it a hundred feet or so by herself. She attempted to begin to clean the carcass, but decided, once she succeeded in getting the knife in its sturdy belly and trying to remove the innards, that she needed Rick's help. We told them about the turkeys in our backyard and they said that one is allowed to shoot two a season (I think) and recommended having them deep-fried, whole. I was hard-pressed to imagine Paul shooting anything, and I do like the idea of getting one's own meat, but in the end, we are artist-sissies, I guess. They said they'd bring us some bear sausage sometime--delicious, they explained, lighter tasting than you would imagine.

Overflow

On a Tuesday night after ten in the homeless shelter, there is a small chorus of snorers who have their bedrolls laid out among the dining tables and the lounge furniture. This shelter is actually an overflow shelter, when the main one is full, and is located inside a church. One young man, who kindly helped me locate an outlet for my three-pronged cord, is wide-awake, but taking care not to bother anyone.

There is a lot of kindness and camaraderie among the clients. One man unrolled the bedding for another man who had fallen fast asleep on the carpeted floor. He put a pillow under the sleeping man's head. I spent the early hours of my shift heating up leftover food for those people who had missed dinner time.Then I and the other volunteer, a young grad student, put Girl Scout cookies out--three plates that quickly disappeared. Movies were played in the lounge area until 10 PM and then it was lights out. A few men go outside to smoke before coming back in.The women are asleep on the floor upstairs in the quieter rooms, which are used as a nursery and children's playrooms during the day. At midnight, a friend, Jo, comes in an hour early to chat with me before her 1-7AM shift begins. She and the other late-shift volunteer will begin making coffee around 4AM.

What is astonishing is the number of volunteers required to attend only this overflow facility, which is open during the colder months (November-April). The dedication of these volunteers is truly humbling. The only paid staff member, the director of the main shelter, is clearly dedicated as well and works many, many hours beyond what she is paid.

At one point, I walk into the sanctuary of the church and walk up the aisle toward a beautiful stained glass window. This church, has, like many churches, lost a lot of its congregation and is struggling to survive.They planned to sell a Tiffany stained glass window, but local and national news got a hold of the story and donations flooded in. These donations have held off the sale, for now, but not necessarily for the long-term future.

Boston Globe article about Tiffany stained glass window

Marriage of Art and Life

One Sunday afternoon my husband and I were looking, through a magnifying glass, at images of work by Bruegel (the elder). "Skaters before the Gates of St. George, Antwerp" is a winter skating scene and so much is going on throughout the whole engraving that it is really a delicious experience to carefully examine it. There are skaters of all classes, one gentleman is clinging to the cape of his man-servant, while other peasant-skaters sit on the edge of the ice to lace up their skates. One man has fallen and onlookers on the edge of the riverbank look on with curious, if somewhat, smirking, expressions. A little boy is in an ice sled that appears to be made from a cow or horse's jawbone. Other skaters pass under one side of the drawbridge where, on the other side, one skater has what looks like a hockey stick and another holds a flag in what appears to be some sort of race or game.

After he made coffee for us, we sat in the front room with an early morning fire going. Paul had a piece of paper on a split log, with which he was combining frottage with drawing. He drew with a fountain pen and walnut ink he made from walnuts that had dropped from the tree in our yard this fall.

Bruegel's drawing was made with pen and brown ink for "transfer on transfer paper with a stylus" as the caption explained. He drew it backwards so that the etching made from it would be right-side up.

"Looking at Bruegel's work," Paul said, "makes me see the world differently." While making coffee he had seen, through the window in our kitchen, a lone turkey under the old apple tree. A few days earlier, we had driven by the Retreat Pond in Brattleboro, now frozen over and covered with brightly painted ice huts or "bobs" and skaters, young and old. We had both agreed how "Bruegel-like" the winter scene looked to us.

When we lived in Provincetown, we referred to particular views of the sea as "de Grootian" after our friend, the painter, Pat de Groot. When, for instance, a winter sea is blue-black and dotted with white caps and seeming to merge with a darkened blue-white sky, we recognize this as exactly the kind of moment de Groot not only captures so well, but also the kind of moment one stops to reconsider precisely because of the way she has captured it.

It seems (immodestly) to me that my husband has become a better, more astute reader because of all the conversations we have had about writing. I can say with certainty that being with him these past fifteen years, and seeing the world and art through his eyes, has absolutely changed the way I see everything.

Opera and Oxytocin

On Saturday, we drove an hour away to the Opera Theater in Weston to see "The Little Prince." We took a friend's five-year-old son and another friend came with her six-year-old daughter. Distance and time are on a different scale here. Vermonters think nothing of driving an hour or more to see a play or have dinner with friends or go for a hike or snow-shoe, and so on.

We drove on dark, windy roads passing villages with nothing in them but a post office, a gas station or maybe nothing other than a small sign with the village's name. The ski-resort towns have more going on: casual and upscale restaurants, some shops, places to buy ski equipment. The amount of farmland, woods, open pasture in this state is always a pleasure to discover and rediscover. Weston is a quaint town with the original Vermont Country Store (known for their old-timey, and often expensive, merchandise and large mail-order business, but our five-year old friend fondly recalled the penny candy counter and a bow and arrow set he got there once) and a small village green with the opera house--a grand white building with Greek columns--right in the center of it. All of us struggled to follow the plot of the children's opera, after all, all the lyrics were entirely sung, but the voices were good, the costumes well-made and the orchestra was particularly talented. Our little friend was bored much of the time and kept asking if it was going to be over soon. I understood his sentiment exactly. We assuaged him, a bit, with a brownie and hot chocolate. He perked up when four hunters, trying to catch the fox, came on stage. I perked up when I saw the woman, a soprano, with a terrific sparkly blue costume, representing the water drawn up from the well that the Little Prince and the Pilot find in the desert. She really sounded, to me, like the personification of water and her lovely, haunting song didn't have any lyrics.

This afternoon, after an opening at the local museum, we went to another musical performance to hear an original score composed by our neighbor, Paul Dedell. It too had lyrics sung by an opera singer, a tenor, and also a choir--both children and adult--and musicians, mostly percussionists. I found it to be a very ambitious piece, particularly because Paul combined poems and prose about love with language from studies about the science of love. This meant that at one point the children were actually singing "Oxytocin! Oxytocin!" This is the drug found in parents tending their children and also in the children who are being tended (but not in emotionally abandoned children who grew up in Romanian orphanages--hence the chemical, biological reason these children struggle to feel attached to even the most loving adoptive parents later on).

His wife was the conductor and both got a rousing, standing ovation from the large audience. It was a show of support for this couple and their contributions to the music community as much as it was for the performance and music itself. The warm reception and affection toward the Dedell's was another hallmark of living in a community such as this one.

A Snowy Carpet

It was warmer today and ice slid off the roof in sheets that thudded so loudly to the ground it startled the dog and cats. Paul was using our neighbor's roof rake to try and loosen the ice dam that has started to form at one corner of the roof. When I moved to Vermont, I thought, "Roof rake? We have a metal roof and won't need one." Ha. Little did I know about all the variations of snow and ice in these here climes.

Nokie and I took a new walk today on a narrow, flat road that runs parallel to the West River. It was so nice to be on a road that was close to a different, larger river than the one we normally walk by. The West River is larger and deeper and so less iced up than Baker Brook. There were mini-ice floes that were loosened up and spinning downstream. The white scalp of the mountainside is close-by there, just on the other side of the river, and as we were walking west there was a lovely pink-lavender light over the crest of their ridges.

I walked to the end of the road and then onto a well-worn, snowy trail into the woods and then down onto a lovely bank right next to the the river. I could have kept walking and walking it was so lovely, quiet, and inviting. The snowy bank was like a white carpet spread out just for us. But the sky was getting darker and so I looped back through the woods were I saw three small drops of blood around a pine tree. I knew some animal had gotten nabbed by another creature right there--a vole or a mouse by hawk or owl or weasel? Paul and I had seen a much gorier site once before.

One morning a couple years ago, after a thick, fluffy snow had fallen the night before, we saw a very bloody trail, the red bright against the fresh snow, as it swept across from one side of Baker Brook Road over to the other, up to the river's bank and then, looking across the river, we could see it continued on the other side. We tried to identify the animal tracks in the snow and the width of the animal being dragged. We imagined a coyote, or even mountain lion (they have been spotted some miles from here) had gotten, perhaps, a young deer. I saw such a deer, a young, vulnerable doe, standing in our driveway last week. Even the sight of our car didn't startle her. She just stood there, serenely innocent as yet to hunters and guns and maybe coyotes. But then Nokie barked from the backseat of the car and she was off, delicately bounding up the hill in between the spruce trees to our backyard and the woods beyond.

The Lazarus Effect

Another gray-steel sky today and the snow looks ever more dirty. But I drove to town to the Twilight Tea Lounge to meet a friend, a young painter, whose presence and lively conversation perked me right up. Speaking with Lauren, who is tremendously driven, sincere and focused in her work, was inspiring. She is always interested in growing as an artist and always shapes her life around her art--not the other way around.The Earl Grey Tea and maple scone helped too. As I took a hiatus from my writing life and have only returned to it recently, it does feel, as I told my husband, like I was a dying person who sat up and coughed. Thank goodness for the company of friends who help, as S. Kunitz said in a poem, "remind me who I am."
image: Lauren Watrous, Untitled, oil on linen, 24 x 36," 2009