Southbound Train

Happy Halloween!

We're headed next door for trick or treating, but the porch is ready. All that spiderweb will glow under a blacklight once it is dark. Bring on the witches!

Spotted in his natural habitat

Pontuef in the Chicago Red Carpet Club, waiting for a flight to Frankfurt and on to Berlin. He'll be home Monday night, all full of curry wurst and doner and the world's best bread.

Six Months Ago

 Six months ago today, we hadn’t even been here a week. Our stuff was still in boxes, and I’m pretty sure that we were still using the travel toiletries we’d crossed the country with. I was working from a tiny space I’d carved out of the boxes in the kitchen – the kitchen itself was more of a storage area than a place where food was prepared . The yard was wild with spring growth and we had nary a blade to cut it, the John Deere being merely a twinkle in Mike’s eye. In a practical sense, I felt that we’d be living out of boxes forever. Emotionally, I wasn’t sure what was happening.

Six months ago today, we were dealing with the loss of Sidney, who predated our marriage by more almost two years. He’d enjoyed the cross country drive, but small dog old age got the better of him before we’d even begun to settle in. In considering the shock of losing him, I had to also consider that he was eleven, and how could we possibly have been living together that long? Weren’t we just out of college, still?

Six months ago today, the reality of just how far we were from friends and family hadn’t really sunk in. As constant travelers, being away wasn’t anything new to us. It certainly didn’t feel permanent, here, and anyway, people were coming. It wouldn’t be until after I’d put a number of people on airplanes and driven home in silent tears that I would realize just how far we were.

Six months ago today, we were explaining to the crazy frozen meat shipper that no, we didn’t have a forklift, and no, we didn’t know anyone we could borrow one from, and in fact, we really didn’t know anyone at all. The immensity of that not knowing was strange. Really, there was no one we could call, save our realtor, who was likely sick of our calls anyway. Having lived in California all of our lives, we just weren’t used to the idea that there was no one in a ‘hop in the car’ distance that we knew, or that knew us. We were invisible, undefined and unknown.

I realize that all this sounds bad in the retelling. Really (with the exception of little Bids) it wasn’t. There was a lot of liberation in being somewhere completely new, of being completely anonymous. We had the space to focus on us, to enjoy each other’s company and explore this new place together. It has been fun to develop the yard, to plant trees and drag the hoses around to keep them watered, to eat pesto from our own garden and enjoy the surprise luxury of hastily planted melons. The box part of the unpacking wasn’t fun, but seeing the house come together has been.  Even better has been getting live in the house, really sitting at the kitchen counter drinking with friends rather than talking about it, having a glass of wine on the screened porch and counting fireflies. We’re nesting, and we’re doing it together in a way that we haven’t in the past.

We know our way around now, but there is still so much to learn. Watching the seasons change is fascinating for Californians – it seems that every week there is some new thing – this week we’ve been seeing huge furry caterpillars inching their way along the drive. We’ve slowed down enough that we notice the caterpillars. Six months ago, I don’t know that we would have. I started this adventure willing myself to pay attention to the small things, and with six months of practice it’s become a habit.
We’re meeting people, too. If we walk in the neighborhood, we run into people to stop and talk to who know our names. Last night we stood on our neighbor’s porch and chatted for a long time, and two nights before that we had people over for dinner, people we knew really not at all but who turned out to be great dinner companions.

Six months ago today, I wouldn’t have had any idea what today would look like. I didn’t know how much I would appreciate the way fallen leaves swirl behind a car on a country road, or how much I enjoy seeing the local whistle pig fattening up for hibernation. I didn’t know that I’d be spending Halloween with my neighbors, who I like very much, and I didn’t know that  I would have met enough people to have a small cocktail party. I didn’t know how much I liked the afternoon light in the living room, or the quiet stillness of the house in the morning. I didn’t know that as much as I miss people in California, I wouldn’t be missing California itself, that six months of time would be enough to feel (most of the time, at least) like I lived here.  A year ago today, all of this was beyond my imagining, so different of a place was I in then. And two years ago today we were camping out in Castellina, plotting how we could move there. Move we’ve done … not there (not yet) but closer, closer, in so many ways. And now we’re here, today, now, making cheese and baking bread and looking forward to sweater weather, learning to live somewhere different, and liking it.

We’ve come a long way.

(photos of the house, then and now, are in the Ponteuf's Burrow album, over on the left side of the blog)

Wide Open Spaces

I’ve never really gotten the Southwest – it shares a shoebox in my head with modern art. I understand its relevance; I know that some people are very moved by it. Objectively, I can see its value, and sometimes I’m even caught unaware and say “oh, now that’s neat” but mostly it seems like something that people like because liking it makes them cultured. Liking that giant white square canvas with the red dot just off center really advertises our evolved aesthetics, doesn’t it?  The heart of passion in an indifferent world, and all. The Southwest is that red dot, a last bastion of lawlessness and rugged open space in an otherwise bland and increasingly Olive Garden-is-authentic culture. Its spare simplicity will turn us all into artists, open minded thinkers, visionaries. Visiting is worship, a deep breath of clean air and clearer thinking, a higher pursuit than mere tourism. People claim to be moved by a visit to the desert, they get (as Mike would say) moony about it. Lacking the proper amount of peyote, I’ve always been left, if not cold, a little chilly.

I’m wondering, now, if I was just lacking perspective.

Living in California (and in Ojai, really) I knew all about places with spiritual connections, pink moments, breathtaking western beauty. And growing up there made me immune to much of what prompts “those LA people” who visit Ojai to sit around drinking coffee and “just being.” Yes, of course it is pretty, and I like it, and if I could have afforded to live there, I would have taken the opportunity without much hesitation. But stunningly beautiful? I suppose. New Mexico and Arizona have always seemed a little too close to home to get very excited about. They’re dry. Flowers appear in small little scrubby clumps. The architecture is Mexican-Adobe influenced. The colors fall into either the brownish gray spectrum, or blue. Have I mentioned the great empty expanses of rocky dryness that probably harbor snakes in great numbers?

None of this is to say that I don’t like visiting – I do. I enjoyed driving through the desert this spring, I like a weekend at an Arizona spa as much as the next girl, and we were really looking forward to going back to Santa Fe this fall, but more for the feel of the town and (let’s be honest here) the food. I got all the green I could handle by moving to Tennessee, but the Mexican food has been a bit of a letdown. I was expecting to go and be thrilled by the chilies and the smell of the air, but I wasn’t expected to be knocked sideways by the beauty of it all. I opened the curtains the first morning and was amazed by the clear brilliance streaming onto my face. I’d forgotten the clarity of western light, harsher than what I see every day here but beautiful in its intensity. The sun in the desert may be illuminating rocks and scrub and green along the side of the highway that comes from a spray gun and not the earth, but it manages to turn all these unlikely things into sculpted bas-relief.

Driving from Albuquerque to Santa Fe takes only an hour, a drive that in the past I’ve written off as unattractive, at best. This trip it was a revelation: flat open land runs away from the interstate and up the sharp edged peaks of the Sandia Mountains, flecked with black.  A pink moment here would turn them into watermelons, a mirage for the thirsty people clustered under cottonwood trees that hug the banks of the Rio Grande as it sneaks through the desert, hoping to escape notice. The haze of green those trees form in the valley is a faint echo of what I see out my window every morning and it points out to all who are paying attention that the lifeline, however shallow, is still here, not yet swallowed by a parched earth. I’m amazed by the tenacity of any life that makes it in this magnificent harshness, the haze of purple flowers along the roadside all the more beautiful for their unlikely presence. Nothing here wastes much energy – leaves are small, vines don’t overextend themselves and the roadrunner we saw in the parking lot was pretty stingy with its feathers. There isn’t a lot of color in the landscape; everything tends to shades of gray and brown, and before I lived in green I couldn’t see the interest in the monochromatic palette.  Now, accustomed to lushness, I find the sparing but intense use of blinding yellow and burning red exhilarating and shocking. Turning the corner and seeing a strand of ristras drying against an adobe wall or a yellow bush alongside a gray shale hill, I see art.

That same adobe wall against a depthless blue sky is beyond my words. I want to take a thousand photos of the same thing, rounded warm edge against hard, luminous blue. For the first time, I communed with Georiga O’Keeffe. I too, could move here and paint that same image every day, never tiring of the perfect simplicity and infinite complexity contained in one window. I saw a quote over and over while we were in Santa Fe, O’Keffee on New Mexico “no one told me it would be like this.” How could they? O’Keeffe grew up in Wisconsin; nothing could have prepared her for the elemental force of the desert. Until I moved to my own Wisconsin, I certainly couldn’t have told her. Now I understand why she returned, again and again, until finally she never left. I understand the draw of the basic forms that build everything there, the shocking color and the clear air, the dry nose and the relentless sun.

Living in the west, I never really bought the things it stood for. It wasn’t a metaphor for rawness or lawlessness, not a place to test my inner strength or to take the measure of a man. It wasn’t full of promise or ruin, a do or die proposition – it was just home. Having left that home and set up elsewhere, I can see why it has been framed as all those things and more by those who come from the east and the green. It shocked me to step out of the hotel into that bracing, incandescent air, to see the expanse of heaven and earth and nothing else and to feel my smallness within it, less relevant than the strings of chiles and the turquoise doors that echo the sky. Even more shocking was that I liked it. Pass the peyote.

Photos: Santa Fe & Taos, September 2008

Life is but a Dream

Ca.noe [kuh-noo]: a narrow, often human powered boat; a town in Kentucky; to float down a river on a sunny Saturday in August; great fun

We had our first visitors under legal drinking age this summer, and they required a bit more planning than we’re used to. Both of them happen to be part of the under 10 set, meaning that while Uncle Maver’s goofy sense of humor came in handy, they couldn’t be adequately entertained by a couple of cocktails and idle conversation. Clearly, we had to come up with something more fun than shopping and plantation houses, and something cool enough to withstand August. Enter the canoe.

There are a couple of companies that rent canoes on the Harpeth not far west of Nashville, canoes and paddles and life vests and really nothing else in the way of instruction, but we figured we were kayak and tubing veterans, and we could handle it. I am not sure that les petites thought we could handle it, as their morning-of-game-faces were less than thrilled when I suggested they change from cute outfits to something more of a bathing suit nature. They eyed my denim cutoffs and pigtails with distrust when I told them their brand new Nashville cowboy hats probably didn’t want to get wet, and they climbed into the car rather silently. We were not off to the most raucous of starts, so I found some singing along music and made them listen to Boy George. Mike rolled his eyes but the back seat was into it by the time we turned onto the glorious green of the Natchez Trace and headed north for our date with the river.

After the arrival flurry of payment, life vest and paddle picking and ice chest lugging we packed into a slightly damp van that drove us up (down? along?) the river to the designated drop off point where were clambered over the edge of a walkway and dropped down onto a rocky beach lined with brightly colored canoes. The girls were interested in picking colors, which was good, because I was most interested in the fact that we were pointed to the canoes and left with no instruction other than “see you at the other end.”  Blue for Jessica and Aqua for Natalie, and we were off, Mike taking the work seat in the red boat and Anna and I signing up for the comedy of errors paddling the blue. After a few false starts we got ourselves straightened out and headed downriver facing forwards, Jessica sitting on a pile of life vests between us.

It was beautiful. The river stretched in front of us, silvery blue and still, a mirror for the towering trees on either side. I don’t know if the trees are really as tall as they seemed, or if they sit higher on cliffs above the river or if it was some trick of the eye, but I felt Jessica’s size as I looked up at them, so impossibly high were the rounded tops. It was silent save for our splashes and the far off laughter of other canoes, and I felt perfectly languidly warm. We glided down the river and it was easy to get lost in the picturesqueness of it all. Someone spotted a turtle and we all paddled over to the log to get a better look. Birds called and swooped above us, small fish flitted past our boat and we sang, in fits and starts, the ten words or so that we all knew of ‘row row row your boat.’

I’m not naming names, but someone shattered our peaceful existence by initiating a water fight that would continue for the rest of the day and leave all of us as wet as though we’d gone swimming. Mike’s paddle was tops for scooping water and he was ruthless, even dousing his own canoe partner. Jessica mostly shrunk down to try and avoid the waves, but Natalie was as viscous as Mike, squealing and slapping her paddle with abandon. We stopped twice for picnicking and drying out, kids more interested in looking for shells and adults realizing how good simple food tastes after hot sun, cool water and extensive water fights. The watermelon slices I had iced down were better than the soda and the chocolate chip cookies the petites and I had made the night before were even better and I think we all secretly thought that damn the torpedoes and fancy restaurants, food had never tasted so good.

We switched up the paddling groups a few times and I got to hear all about Natalie’s “college of paddling” classes from Uncle Maver, and Jessica’s thoughts on the rapids that we almost tipped in, and how fast we (read I) should paddle to beat the other boat to the end. We found a deep spot and held the canoes together and let the girls swim, pulling them out by the back of their life vests when they were done, dripping and spluttering a little but not cold until the very end, when tiredness and the damp van beat back excitement. The air was so warm and still that even soaking wet denim wasn’t uncomfortable, but it was never so hot that I felt oppressed – it was just right heat. Still, it was wonderful to change into the clean dry clothes we’d had the (are we this grown up?) forethought to pack, warm from their hours in the trunk.

The air is cool here now, and I’m pretty sure the good folks at Foggy Bottom have locked the canoes up for the season. I don’t think the green would reach all the way to the water the way it did two months ago, and I’m sure that no one is languidly hot along the rock banks today. In my pictures, though, it is still summer on that stretch of the Harpeth, and when I look at them I see proof that we were having as much fun as I remember. Mike is dreaming up a new attack, Natalie right there with him. Anna and Jessica are admiring the view, Jessica more relaxed now that she’s on the river rather than just thinking about it. I can feel that warm air and the welcome shock of cool water dripping down my neck, and I know just how pleased I was to be there, thinking this, this is why we live here. I can’t wait for next summer.

Photos of all the canoeing fun (and more)

Autumn Journal

I have a bad habit of missing September. The end of summer flurry always slides into anniversary related travel; the time before and the time after a trip seem to blur into undefined space. This year we left early enough to spend our actual anniversary in Italy, then came home only to turn around and celebrate a birthday in Santa Fe. Suddenly, I find myself two days into October with no idea how I got here.

I like the travel, but I resent the abduction of one of my favorite months. September, beginning of the school year, was always a private celebration. I miss the back to school days, filled with squeaky new white tennies and pristine supplies, the promise of blank notebooks and new text books to collect, filled with all kinds of things I didn’t know and the doodles of people I might. I loved the smell of the grocery bags used to cover the books, clean slates for personal design. Fall to me has always been about anticipation: what I might learn, what comes ahead, the waited for coziness of a warm house after a cold evening. I never liked football for itself, but I loved brisk nights in the bleachers, walking around in a jacket and drinking hot chocolate, wondering who I might see and who might be looking for me. September meant fall, and fall meant school and Halloween and Thanksgiving and decorations and Christmas, sweaters and hot chocolate and pumpkins and apples and rainy afternoons that legitimized hours of reading in sweatpants and slippers.

I often tell people that California has two seasons: February and the rest of the year. Add in a little bit of gloom in June (why my birthday month?!?) and you’ve pretty much got it. It isn’t that summers are cold, or that winters are hot, but the weather is so uniformly pleasant that the highs and lows get forgotten in the retelling. I’m excited to live somewhere with greater definition between seasons, and as summer lounged into early September, I was starting to get antsy about when fall might kick her out. One of the final mornings before we left for Italy (where we clearly caught summer’s last hurrah) I was on the white road behind the house and the air felt – different. A little thinner, a little cooler. The smell was different, too, but I couldn’t then (and can’t now) quite put my finger on how. The breeze tugged a few leaves loose from the trees and overhead I heard a classic V formation of honking headed south. Fall, I told Mike, is thinking about arriving.

Now, a month later, it is here. Crisp, cool, slide between ironed sheets air greets me all day, even as the sun manages to warm up the afternoon. The trees aren’t so much shedding as they are shrinking; the voluminous green of the roadside is retreating just a little, a slowly deflating balloon. There are a few trees with yellow and red at the crown, spreading warmth downward, and the rolling hills that are fast becoming my mental image of ‘home’ look freckled with color. I can wear the lightest weight sweater of the collection I bought in August when only the anticipation of wearing them let me survive the heat of trying them on. I bought a pair of corduroys. My jeans might be coming out of semi-retirement, and I am thinking (vaguely) of soup, and of trying my hand at a loaf of bread. I want to do things, but I’m not sure what – I have a sense of contained energy: fall fervor instead of spring fever?

I don’t know what else fall has to show me here, and I like not knowing. I may not be entitled, any longer, to freshly sharpened pencils and unread textbooks, but this year, I’m enjoying the anticipation of not knowing what is to come with the same excitement that I read the table of contents in my old history books. Will I wake up one morning to a brilliantly yellow tree in the back? Will it rain, patchworking the pavement with scarlet and burnt orange leaves, or will it be dry and windy, perfect weather for flying witches and black cats? What will the fields look like once they are all reduced to  golden stubble and the bushes have gone?

Moving has given me an entire year to experience for the first time, a gift of seeing the world slowly turn and morph in way I’ve never experienced, a chance to relearn the seasons and the passage of time.  I return, again, to the idea that I’ve moved into the setting for one of the many books I spent my rainy afternoons engulfed by, the weather here leaning a bit more towards British than California ever did, even with my most fervent imagining. From one of those books I take, also, one of my favorite poems, one that made me wish I was born in a month with more scarlet. It is, to me, the romance of fall:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.
-Louis MacNiece, Autumn Journal