Mary's Room With a View

Heirloom: A valuable object that has belonged to a family for several generations

Among common practices of those over seventy is the dispossession of material objects, some decorating our environment for decades, treasures having arrived in our homes from parents and grandparents who also arrived at their “uncluttering” years. I have reached the age my mother was when she began taping names of her heirs to the backs or bottoms of almost every painting or vase in her home.  I am now suffocating under collections of teacups, floral Wedgewood china, figurines –Beatrix Potter bunnies brought out for Easter, snowmen at Christmas.  Seven decades offer ample time to collect and to graciously receive heirlooms passed down in a family for generations. Even the root of Heirloom suggests inheritance, promising spiritual longevity beyond the grave.  What an honor to receive them.  What a duty to preserve them. Merriam Webster suggests the objects are valuable.  But how do we determine value? 

Here is Mother’s blue hen I place on a runner atop the dining table.  As long as I can recall, this hen was an heirloom, never intended for my table. How did I know?  Mother told me so.  The blue hen was bequeathed to her by her cantankerous mother-in-law who gave nothing but criticism to my mother during Grandma Linton’s lifetime.  Then she died.  The cobalt blue hen that sat on her kitchen table had mother’s name taped to the bottom.  Mother told us almost every holiday dinner we ate in her home, that the blue hen would someday be passed on to her first-born son, John.  However,  she also promised it to her second born, Jim (from whose house I borrowed it), 

When my son-in-law spotted the blue hen on my dining table, he said, “I remember that your mom had that on her table.  You know, she told me that when she died, she would like me to have it.”  Oops!  Was Mother deceptive?  Will the real heir of the blue hen please stand up?  I like to think that the hen was less an object of monetary value and more a metaphor for Mom to say, “You are important to me.  Here is my hen.”  As to the value, I Googled antique glass blue hen and found several for sale, prices ranging from $3.85 to $ 250, with most averaging $25.  Valuable?  Not worth taking to Antiques Road Show.  But valuable yes, because I cannot lift the hen from its glass nest without thinking of my mother, without seeing pastel dyed eggs she placed there on Easter.

Memory is tangible and mutable.  Perhaps that is why we are so reluctant to take the second set of china to the church superfluity sale, our father’s walking stick to a neighbor who could use one. If I never see that cane again, I will not forget the image of Father rapping it with importance on the top stair as he pushed open the front door on his return from a walk. I could safely let it go, but I don’t.

It is common knowledge and common sense that people are more important than objects.  We embrace maxims such as “You can’t take it with you.”   In one tornado, entire homes are flattened, the surviving families shown on the news rifling through the wreckage, not for a television or a computer but for an heirloom, a wedding ring, a photo album.  “Link me to my former life, now that my present dissolves to dust around me.” 

Lasting through time seems important for a thing to be called an heirloom.  Thus, even a plant can be called heirloom, such as tomatoes  carefully cultivated over years and boasting a prized inheritance.  Years before you could buy such a fruit at Whole Foods, our family was vacationing in the tiny village of Issa, Italy.  Our last day, we reluctantly left the villagers who had welcomed us, displaying special affection for our toddler granddaughter.  An aged man in a worn army shirt, a faded ribbon over the pocket, reached out to us a handful of the most gnarly red tomatoes I had ever seen. 

“Oh, Allan,” I said, “He wants to sell us his tomatoes, but we won’t be here until dinner time.  Let’s buy them anyway.”  My husband reached in his pocket and offered what he thought would be a fair price. 

“No, no,” the man insisted, still thrusting his produce toward us.  With his vacant hand, he pointed to that faded ribbon and said “Resistance” his Italian dialect strong on the last syllable.  The tomatoes were a gift honoring American allies remembered from his war years.  We accepted his gift and carried them back to our rented villa,  There, among suitcases packed for leaving, we sliced three large tomatoes and ate.  The juice ran down own chins in streams of gratitude. Our first taste of “heirloom” tomatoes.  Valuable? yes.  Memorable? yes.

Inasmuch as we treasure heirlooms in an effort to preserve memories, heirlooms are the most mutable of things, for the value rests in the tie between the giver and the recipient of the heirloom.  Perhaps when Mom put that blue hen on her table, she thought of her mother-in-law and the struggle to persuade her that my farm-born mom was worthy of her city-bred son. On my table, the crystal blue morning light shines through the hen, lighting my way to a childhood lived in five distant states where the blue hen set a new family table, a symbol of stability in change.

For her graduation, I gave my granddaughter an opal ring, first made as one of a pair of earrings my father brought my mother from India where he served in WW II.  My mother lost one, and, after her death, I found the other in her small jewelry box.  I saw in the soft blue stones exotic India and my absent father. I made a ring of the opals. My granddaughter will not see in the stones New Delhi nor my father.  Now, in a ring on my granddaughter’s hand she will find me.   

In Robert Frost’s iconic poem “Mending Wall,” it is spring when he meets a neighbor, each on  his own side of a crumbing stone wall, to put it aright after winter’s ice tumbled the stones.  The neighbor contends, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The wall serves no purpose, so the poet flirts with nudging his neighbor away from maintaining the barrier, acknowledging its uselessness.  “Flirts,” because he doesn’t want to scold his neighbor into adopting his point of view, but rather to plant a seed to grow the man’s questioning of the wall’s value.  Frost writes, “Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder / if I could put a notion in his head: / ‘Why do they make good neighbors?’” 

“Spring is the mischief” slipped into my thoughts this morning  where I sat with my steaming coffee mug on a bench above the pond, and overlooked my ploughed vegetable garden, last week’s seeded rows lined beneath floating row covers, as if soft clouds were down comforters over vegetables planted in a one-day gift of March sunshine.  Yesterday, when I peeked underneath the white cloth, spring pleased me with tiny green shoots of arugula and radish.  Tomorrow a heavy frost is forecast before April opens up a week of sun and warmth. Will I lose my early green vegetables? If it is not mischievous, spring is certainly fickle.

All nature is human nature.  Frost’s poem remains iconic, season upon season, because among images of walls, cows and apple trees, the poet places a conversation about persuasion.  How do we coach another person to rethink a firmly held position?  Such positions often have the easily quotable “evidence” of bumper stickers or scripture.  What a memorable adage: “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors.”  it is hard to dispute it.  At best we “try to put a notion in his head,/ Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it / Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.”  In the long run, Frost concludes what he could  say, but would “rather have [his neighbor]say it for himself.”

In the last polarizing year, I have struggled to understand people who think differently than I do.  My husband once joked to friends, “I married Mary for her opinions.”  As a career teacher, I had thirty years standing in front of twenty to thirty young people, hoping to convince them to embrace Shakespeare, parallel sentence structure, and poetry.  Having so many years of “telling,” now outside of the classroom, I am learning better how to listen, and, with luck, to nudge a person’s attitudes, rather than dictate and follow up with a final exam.  

For example, should I care that approximately 40% of certain populations refuse to get Covid vaccines?  Is it my job to meet my neighbor at the wall of their refusal and try to nudge them into understanding that getting vaccinated may be a gift to our community?  My neighbor is, in many ways, a community supporter, the first to arrange a fundraising Christmas auction to pay for gifts for underserved families.  He greets me on the road along the bay where I walk afternoons and where he drives his red pick-up polished to perfection.  

“Miss seeing you guys,” he shouts.  

“ Got your vaccination yet?” I call back. 

 “No,” he replies.  “Sarah (his wife) got hers.”

I am familiar with his political persuasions.  I infer that he will not get a vaccination.  Standing by the fence that surrounds Joe Packer’s steers, I say nothing. 

Perhaps spring is the best educator.  Every year it returns with the equinox, drags us out of bed earlier and keeps us outside planting seeds long after the  usual dinner hour.  We unconsciously follow her diurnal temptations, one step forward into cultivation, one step back to replant after cruel frosts. This spring my venturing out to plant seeds of understanding in a sodden soil, I have felt the sting of frost-bitten fingers.  But there are more seeds in the packet, and if next week the temperature really does reach sixty-five degrees,  I will spade a new row in welcoming earth, measure distance between seeds, and pat the earth with my own warm hands.  

I

            For two weeks each February we stay at a welcoming Pacific Ocean cove on the island of Maui.  There the ocean is a half-moon of swimmable salt water between two lava cliffs slapped with waves that toss dramatic sprays of foam into the blue skies.  Idyllic for me who likes to swim laps from one cliff to the other, daring proximity to the rocks where I can see below rainbowed fish and an occasional turtle twirling its great weight through waves to feed on algae.  

            Once the hot Hawaiian sun urges me to swim, I walk on to the fine sands of a beach that shortens every year with the rising of ocean tides.  I stand there for the water to come to me, to tickle my warm toes with cooling fingers of surf.  I pause, pull on my goggles and measure my way until I must decide if the next incoming wave will wipe me out or welcome me into the bay.  Experience is the great teacher.  I know this beach, its sudden drop-off denying no second thought for footing or floating.  Cautious immersion until the drop-off begins, an incoming wave big enough to coach me out, small enough where I can dive into it, I plunge followed by long freestyle strokes and a rhythmic rocking side -to-side so I can keep the shoreline in sight.  Having a rather right-angled stroke, my history includes too many unconscious swims to frightening depths before looking up at last to discover I have swum well past yelling-for-help if needed.

            Such a process, you’d think immersion challenged more than return to shore.  Wrong.  Getting out requires all the wits of an oceanographer intimate with swells and calms.  Sensing my swim is done, I don’t merely head to shore, but navigate what the tides have done while I delighted in my cross-bay laps.  Did low tide shift to high?  If so, on return, I could be swooshed onto the sands and slapped against the restraining wall built to protect the condominiums.  

If the calm sea I entered switches to hillocks of swells, one big wave could roll me on to the beach like tumbleweed in a grassland.  Every crevice of my body will fill with sand as the water discards me, sometimes changing its mind and sucking me back, as if enjoying the torture tossing me over again. Simply one foot of rushing wave requires some leg muscles as I race out of the surging surf.  But experience does teach.  Now before getting back out of the water I alternately turn my gaze forward and backward like a driver at a busy intersection.  How close am I to where the drop-off rises?  What wave is coming from behind?  How far until it reaches me?  It is usually best to let it lift me in its arms and carry me toward secure footing.,  Not quite there?  Well, give in to it, slide out with it, and wait for the next wave to ride.  Feet securely planted on sand?  Then run like hell before the receding surf grumbles back to sea without me.   I head for the fresh-water shower where the grassy lawn meets the sand, shower off, return to my beach towel and face-down drowse off to the fragrance of new-mown grass and my own sun-washed body.  My heart beats with good health.

            Most of our fellow tourists at our resort are retired as we are.  Few of them swim in the ocean.  Occasionally they will bob in a social group at low tide, but usually they congregate in the small, warm, kidney-shaped pool.  They cheer me on for my courage or foolishness.  They are safer for sure.  But they have not seen the rainbowed fish, nor been surprised by underwater encounters with giant sea turtles.  When they emerge from the pool, are their hearts beating?

            Swimming for me is also meditative.   When I was teaching, swimming mornings before school, I revised lesson plans for the day.  Since retirement, I swim through struggles. and today  I am writing to swim through my thoughts, the reason I write any of these blogs.  It is human to replay painful experiences to learn, to decide if there is a next time when things could go better.  In spite of my husband’s admonition to avoid discussing politics, race or religion, I recently ventured into a discussion of my experiences growing up in the segregated South.  My small discussion group was inter-racial and much younger than I.   Should I have stayed in the little kidney-shaped pool with the other senior citizens?  The conversation did not proceed amicably.  This is a tense time in our nation as we deal with centuries of racism and division.  My 77 years of a life shaped by segregation and privilege may not be of interest to the 20-year-olds who want to build a more just life without the elders.  I keep replaying words said and left unsaid.  When I fled the angry waves and sought the comfort of my beach towel, I had not reached a resolution to the conversation I was replaying in my head. So much for swimming meditatively to resolution.

            At this moment , I am 10,000 feet in the air flying back to Seattle after our vacation.  Next year, will I swim in the ocean again?  I might get pulled out too far by a changed tide, or dragged ashore by a rogue wave, yet I might get to swim with a turtle again, a stunning, fellow-creature even older than I am.   

            Common sayings fascinate, not only for their surface wisdom, but also for their substratum implications.  What fun to excavate, especially when an adage is spoken as a dictum. Who of us was not advised by our parents,  hoping to steer us from troublemakers, “You are known by the company you keep?”  In my adolescence, the dictum rarely worked for me, as oftentimes  the “troublemakers” displayed exciting lifestyles.  My parents hoped to direct me to their notion of “us,” in other words, teenagers at our Congregational Church who gathered Sunday evenings for Pilgrim Youth Fellowship or students enrolled in the college bound curriculum at Newton High.  Diversity widened there, but essentially kids on paths our family wanted for “us.” By spending my growing up days with them, my parents assumed those kids’ virtues might control my wanton wandering to the valley of troublemakers whose futures were destined for the state penitentiary or greasy spoon diners.  

            The “Company You Keep” dictum allies with another maxim: “Birds of a feather flock together.”  You can learn a lot from birds.  One of the blessings of forced isolation this past year is time taken to look outside, if only to your suet cage, to appreciate lives of the birds.  The hummingbird hangs out at our red, sugar-water disc, just a pair or two over the winter.  Come June we can count over twenty hovering, diving, pushing one aside to get a substantial sip of nectar.  All are hummingbirds, but not the most congenial flock, rather a Me First aggression that defies their common species.  Geese and ducks float by our Quilcene Bay cottage in rafts of sameness: Canadian geese, a raft of pintail, another raft of widgeon, each with a distinct quack or whistle. 

            Yet many birds migrate and roost as mixed species.  Why?  For protection and for sustenance.  It has been shown experimentally that chickadees and titmice are used as sentinels by downy woodpeckers foraging in mixed-species flocks. Smaller birds often fly in great flocks of larger birds for protection from raptors that could easily spot and pick them off in single flight. 

             Foraging for food also pays off in mixed species with an increase in feeding efficiency. Migrating groups are able to feed in areas from which single individuals would be ejected by the “owner” of the territory. Having more individuals searching for food increases the likelihood that a rich feeding patch will be located. By moving together in a mixed-species flock, birds with the same sorts of diets can avoid areas that have already been searched for food. Individuals in mixed flocks learn about new food sources from other species; tits have been observed to visit the site where a woodpecker was pecking at bark and to begin pecking in the same place. Associating with birds of different species that have somewhat different food preferences and foraging techniques, each individual faces less competition than it would in a same species flock.

  I can’t let my ornithology lessons go without getting back to parents selecting friends or searching for sameness.  Having followed their encouragement, I did gather mostly with my WASPish community.  In 1958, moving up to Newton High School, a school of 3,000 students, my buddy group didn’t diversify.  That, in spite of Newton High’s proud advertisement that it was 1/3 Protestant, 1/3  Catholic, 1/3 Jewish.  Looks good on paper, but does not reveal that each third rarely socialized in “mixed species” with the other two.  In the college-prep Curriculum One I sat beside Jewish students who didn’t invite me to parties or to join their clubs.  The Catholic kids might invite me to follow them to Mass, but were prohibited from attending my Pilgrim Fellowship.  Competition for grades and college entrance, led to reinforcing stereotypes feeding anti-Semitism, as several Jewish kids surpassed my academic ability. 

            And speaking of friendships disallowed, when the Trump followers stormed our national Capitol, I responded in a stupid way, flying away from the flock.  Searching to find a reason for such insurrection, hoping reason would explain why anyone would vote for Trump or deny the legitimacy of the election, I emailed two women who have been friends for 60 years.  They were the first two girls at Lincoln High to welcome me when my folks moved us from Newton to Seattle in 1960.  Ardent Republicans, they likely voted for Trump and may have denied election results, so I concluded that without an explanation I could accept — something to make them more like me — I could no longer communicate with them.  Later, maybe too-late, I apologized.  I am ashamed.   

            Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are 48 hours away from the longest night of the year.  The Solstice has an intimacy on Quilcene Bay where at mid-day I look out of the casement window with its view of the gray water, the dark russet evergreens on the opposite shore with foothills beyond in a receding, rolling  charcoal beneath a gray coverlet. Those clouds are now dripping rhythmic rain on our shake roof.  In December, we can wrap ourselves in gray reminiscent of an army blanket, if less scratchy.  So why should I take note of the longest night of the year when gray succumbs to black for fourteen hours?  

            This morning, before rain resumed, I rode my bike around the end of the bay to deliver the last Christmas cards to the village post office before the 10:00 AM deadline for outgoing mail.  On the north side of the road, tidelands swelled with saltwater seeping under the road at high tide.  On the south, the waters rose to lap the bottoms of purple martin boxes Allan secured on pilings there in the spring.  Before me, the layered hills cradled creamy clouds like woodfire smoke  between ridges.  I relished the subtle softness of winter dormancy.  I noticed red rose hips, the remaining color on Nootka rose bushes that surround the fields.  My ears received plaintive moos from Joe’s steers who sauntered from grassy humps to feed lots spread at strategic locations across their pasture. No sunshine to cast my shadow as I pedaled across the bridge spanning the Little Quilcene River.  Instead, I watched the river, clear and cold hurrying below the bridge, amber and gray stones gleaming below the cold, clear water. 

           The lack of light gives my eyes a rest.  In welcomed summer, light would reflect off those stones, glare blinding my eyes, forcing me to squint and adjust my sunglasses.  Perhaps outside light withdrawing, allows inside light to glow.  Today I am glowing with gratitude for the seasons, for the understandings that the circle of life offers.  As the title of my blog announces, time intrigues me.  Well aware that fewer days are before me than behind me, I am gathering decades of memories as I ride forward to what life may still offer.  Our Christmas card endeavor, a creative tradition of my husband’s art and my poetry, still takes over several days of addressing, writing accompanying notes, stuffing art and poetry into envelopes and hefting the box of them to the post office.  Handling the address list is my job.  More often now, I am pushing “Delete Row” after learning a friend or relative is no longer alive.  But I am also adding in another column the name of a friend’s new grandchild.   Life is not a timeline.  It is a circle, a carousel from which one steps off as another is carried on to a shining horse.  The Winter Solstice does not end a year, but rolls over on the planet’s turning toward Spring’s Equinox – equal day and night.

            The Winter Solstice, so near New Year’s Day, acknowledges the passing of 2020.  Everyone is ready to hand the hat to 2020 and show it to the door.  Before it steps away from the circle, let’s walk out on a winter day, wrap the grayness around us and consider the dormant wisdom we’ve gleaned through the Longest Night of the Year.