Nell

Nell loved her garden. It sustained her in a way that I suspect her husband, sisters, children, and church did not.  She and Heyward laid it out that first year they moved into the big white house on Harrison Road.  A few years later they planted a magnolia tree when their first child, my uncle was born, and another 10 years later when my father was born. The way the paths folded upon themselves quadrupled the apparent space, making a vast mysterious garden out of a normal city lot. By the time I knew her, the magnolias were giants, dwarfing the white house with dark green shutters. The azalea, camellias, wisteria, and crepe myrtle formed a dense jungle, making dim caves lit with a shifting green light..  The path was narrow and shaded, carpeted in thin zoysia grass and bordered with white-painted cobbles.

Nell was a Baptist and believed in hard work. Life was difficult those first years in Columbia, it was the Depression and she had a young son and a kind, but somewhat hapless husband. When she was a girl, she traveled all over the United States, even as far as Berkley by train to see the sights. We have pictures of her with her sisters at Yellowstone, in New Orleans, in Philadelphia. Three bold girls at the beginning of the new century, just before the first World War would leave their brothers, cousins, and sweethearts dead, lost, or forever scarred.

When I knew her she loved her God, her garden and her family, in that order. The first two restored her; the rest of us sapped her energy.  Nell was the first adult I met that was enthralled with books as I was. I don’t ever recall her reading to me, but she suffered me to sit near her in the garden or on the covered porch, sharing the space, each of us companionably alone in our book.

In the photo, she sits in her blue metal chair in the sunny part of the garden.  It was cool that day, though bright.  She’s bundled in one of her fall coats, but has her  red gardening hat on.  She's sitting in the lee of a big old azalea that hides the road and buffers the traffic noise. The dark azalea, the blue chair and the curve of the path make a quiet little oasis where a reader can hear the redbirds call “cheer, cheer cheer.”

I never really understood my Grandmother.  Granddad was a dear, sweet, gentle man. Always good for a peppermint candy or a piece of Dentine gum, endlessly forgiving of my swinging feet as we sat on the hard wood pews at the big Baptist Church.   

Grandmother loved us, too, but in a different way than Granddad. It was a love that was hard to plumb. I knew it was there, intellectually, and felt it in the way she made tiny baked treats out of the ends of biscuit dough. Small pinches of dough dusted with cinnamon, drenched in honey, rolled into pinwheels, and popped in the oven to bake.  I felt it too by the way she tucked me in too tight under the knobby chenille bedspread, and left the hall light on in case I needed to find my way down the steep attic stairs in the night. 

But she wasn’t the kind of Grandmother who would welcome a sticky-fingered child to climb in her lap the way I crawled all over Granddad, looking for hard candy in his vest pockets, fishing out his pocket watch to run the gold chain through dirty fingers and hold the golden compact against my ear to hear the tickticktick. 

For one thing, Grandmother never sat down until nightfall. Her day was full of business, errands, gardening, cooking, laundry, and darning.  She sat down in the evening to watch her beloved Braves or sat on the porch with the neighbors to drink iced tea and review the neighborhood events.  When I was a little older, she sat more and we became reading buddies, sitting on the covered porch in the hottest days; me curled up in the Granddad’s big leather chair, Grandmother poised in her armchair. 

The year I got my camera we went down to visit. I took photos of the flowers, photos of the yard, photos of the mocking birds and cardinals, photos of my Granddad’s wood shop, and this, my treasure, a photo of Grandmother in her favorite spot, on the blue metal chair, in her garden, with a book.

Safety in (small) numbers

The landform consists of low lying eroded drumlins, oriented northwest to southeast.  The hills and ridges formed are incised in places by short gulches. The Ponderosa pine stand structure on the hillslope shows recovery to healthier patchy growth.  The pine is interspersed with young Douglas-fir with a sparse understory of kinnikinnick growing through the pine straw.

 

Ponderosa pines like their neighbors close, just not too close. The pines in our hilltop forest gather together in threes and fours, small conversational groups in the larger forest party.  Douglas-fir sneaks in, filling in the spaces, shooting up quickly and overtaking the slower, more measured pace of the pines. Pines converse in scent, in times of danger, of beetle or fungus attack, they send out warning signals on the wind.  If they are too close together, the danger arrives before the warning signal and well before the tree can react. In this wood, someone came through and removed all the Dougs 50 years ago, leaving the oldest pines to their business. The wood in the late afternoon smells like a bakery, rich vanilla, a waft of caramelized sugar, and some hint of an unfamiliar musky spice. Maybe roasted cardamom... or something equally exotic.  That perfume is the pines’ voice. As I lean back on the springy duff, eyes closed, I wonder what the trees are conversing about on this sun-warmed slope in their cookie-flavored voices.

When the devil’s beating his wife (sunshower)

If you approached the slate blue house from the darkening beach, and behind the curtain of rain, you’d first see a steep wooden stair and a long tongue of slick wooden planking, then the pair of companionable rocking chairs bumping arms shiny in the late afternoon sun. From the deck, the dunes swell upward, half hiding the house.  Behind the bowing sea oats, the house hunkers down against the wind, as it has done for a hundred years of late afternoon squalls, its low roof down-tilted against the building wind, the white storm shutters folded closed and locked. If you came to the house from creekside, late and riding your bike pell-mell through the curtain of rain already spilling across the dunes, down over the eaves of the house, and pooling in the sweep of white shell anchored under the house piers and curved across the lawn, you’d see the palmetto swaying meditatively, escaped fronds dancing into the low-lying bushes. Sheltering under the house skirts like so many orphaned chicks, the bigger cousins’ bikes, ridden in hard and dumped wet.

In the south, the meteorological phenomenon of rain on a sunny day is explained as "the devil is beating his wife".  It seems to originate on the British Isles because Jonathan Swift used a very similar metaphor...

Evita

When I was twelve, I was gripped by the musical Evita. I don’t know how I came to first hear it, because that year would have been the opening year. Maybe my mother, a musical theatre buff, had purchased the record first and I appropriated it for my own. I can’t say now. But there was The Record, which I played on the big downstairs stereo at window-rattling decibels. And sometime later, a cassette tape which I bought doing extra chores around the house. The tape stayed in the car. And on trips and errands, I leaned up through the gap in the front seats to thumb it back in its little slot as soon as we were in the car.

Why those songs and those voices gripped me so, I’m not sure.  But I knew that it was powerful. That a song could be a proclamation or a lament. That with a pause here and a twist of voice, an actor could mock… and a few beats later, with a pause and a rising tone, could cajole. The politics of Evita, I didn’t understand.  I’m not even sure that I understood in any real way the words I belted out. I understood the tone and the rising and falling notes, the emotion of the pieces. That Peron was evil in a banal way, that Che wanted to love Evita, but hated her.  And wanted to hate her, but loved her. That Evita herself was both astute and delusional.

For my birthday, my parents bought tickets to see Evita at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA.  We dressed up in church clothes. I worried about what to wear, what could I sit in, what would I want Evita to see me in. Full-blown fashion crisis, as my mother called it. At last something was resolved and an outfit was chosen. It was probably done by default, the thing I had on when Dad called “the bus is pulling out!”  rather than by active choice.

I can’t remember the drive to the city, just being in the backseat belted in, watching the freeway billboards and building roofs zoom by in the frame of my window. The cassette played Patti Lupone’s sobbing voice apologizing, rationalizing, Mandy Patinkin’s hurt sarcastic Che, and Magaldi’s sly, oily song.

I don’t remember parking or walking to the theatre. My head was full of the song of the excitement of the grown-up-ness of Going To The Theater.  Of being dressed up and being in the City. When I strain, in my mind’s eye, but with blurred edges, I can see the mirrored sweep of the building. Up and up it went, with banners hanging down. Inside the flow of the stairs dragging your eyes again, up and up. And the radiance of it all. More solidly, I can remember understanding the sanctity of the building. It was a cathedral, a sacred space, as much as any other building I’d seen in my short life.

In the dim hall, we found our places. The seats were properly bouncy and properly red velvet. The stage was hidden by a thick fall of curtain. The lights directed the eye toward the ceiling. I followed the light across the ceiling and around the room, turning in my seat to see what was behind, leaning forward to see what was in front, below our balcony seats. The assembly murmured and the weight of the mass of hushed commentary, the whisper of coats coming off, of slick program pages being turned, filled the room.

As the lights dimmed, we quieted. The room hummed with an excitement. I could feel it in my body too, a restless electric anticipation that built as the house lights moved from twilight to full night and the curtain puffed once and then once again as latecomers hurried to their seats. Then as one, by what signal I do not know, we were still, and in that deafening, anticipatory silence, the curtains rose.