Warp and Weft

Imperfect Reflections (c) SMG 2018

Movers could have unfurled the enormous Persian rug in one of two ways.

Once spread out, it fills more square feet than did our entire first apartment as newlywed grad students.

A symmetrical design falls away in layers from a central medallion reminiscent of a quavering diamond, outlined with both gentle waves and angled peaks.  The rug is distinctly in my husband Jim’s calm color palette: gentle golds, russets, and moss greens, with a smattering of milky blue. (I find that I gravitate to riots of color, at least when I surface from grief to come up for air.)

Over the years I have, heel-to-toe, paced these never-ending lines while preparing to argue cases, waiting interminably as my customer service calls were “escalated” up the line, and giving and receiving both good and Very Bad news.

After the not inconsiderable task of unfurling the rug in my newest home–now three full cities and one state distant from its original tenure with us–I saw that the movers’ serendipitous choice of where to deposit it has laid bare its deep flaws.

Some might have discarded this rug many moves ago.

Had it faced the other way, its mutilated corner would have been hidden from view underneath the cream-colored couch (which, of far more recent vintage than the rug, bears only a minor flaw: a sprinkling of puppy teeth marks) .

But now the abraded corner has been splayed for all to see, if they are in the habit of periodically looking down to see where they are going.

Patches of hand-knotted wool have entirely worn away; fringe has thinned to weary threads.

The selvage cannot be salvaged.

The manner of injury was inadvertent; the cause was over-watering (of a potted ficus that towered over me).

The venue was a more modern home, the sun-soaked slightly sunken living room, to be exact.

My husband made very few mistakes in his all too short years, especially when it came to living creatures.  But boy, did he over-water that plant.

The water, in turn, seeped through drainage holes in its large clay pot, and into a significant swath of the perfect new rug that was then our most expensive purchase in our years of marriage.

We did not actually notice this until we were almost ready to roll the rug up for a move to the old house he loved so much, where his earthly possessions would remain for me to tend to when we moved the next time, and the next.

The damaged portion is now a tattered island moored to the mainland by its underside, where it seems Jim fashioned a large rectangular dressing from carefully cut adhesive strips of silt-colored paper.

Over the years the adhesive hold has become more tenuous; fissures have developed, revealing ragged shallow ridges of scored, carmelized once-sticky paper which poke through the surface like baleen teeth.

The rug’s measurements are the same, but  it is off kilter.  Perfect symmetry is a thing of the past. It’s as if only this portion of the rug has aged–badly, in the way too severe a shock robs a body of its power to entirely heal.

Even in the dark, this damage would make itself known by the gentle crinkling sound the paper dressing still makes when a foot or paw treads even lightly upon it.

I have left the rug that way, not simply because it is far too weighty for me to move.  It is right at my home’s threshold; if you enter and simply glance down you will see it, cross over its threadbare glory, and perhaps contemplate its story.

It was pristine when it came to us.  Jim purchased it after careful appraisal, and with some consternation about the price–more than we had paid for any car we’d purchased, and four times the entire semester’s cash he’d carried as a college freshman–in the dog days of  August.  Our first baby was in my arms and a welcome breeze came in.

For awhile the rug was the only furnishing in our living room.  In the only shaded corner was a large stone fireplace where we posed our perfect baby boy in the tiny Santa suit his Aunt Liz gave him before he was born.

A year later, I sat on it in a room still bereft of furniture , and baby Sam gently patted the belly under which his brother dwelt.

After we had next moved, by then with three preschoolers, we returned to the empty  house for one last visit.  Our smiling sons sat on the two low wooden steps into the living room, where our seated toddler daughter’s image was reflected in the gleaming wood floor.

I have noticed, only in retrospect, that once we became parents Jim became more of a caretaker to all living, growing things.   He brought the ficus home shortly after we brought home our firstborn, and surrounded our homes with bird feeders which he carefully maintained.  Over the years he planted and maintained flowers and bushes and trees and grew berries and vegetables he readily sacrificed to wildlife visitors, rather than safeguarding in a way that might endanger critters emerging from surrounding woods. He even enlisted and supervised less complex organisms, tapping maple syrup, tending to sourdough bread starter, and brewing beer.

He maintained bird feeder cities, tending more meticulously to their culinary sensibilities than I ever was capable of when attempting to sate our humans and beagles.

Perhaps it is needless to say I am not such a fan of perfection.  Maybe it’s just a chicken and egg proposition, as I have never been close to that mark.

I now have another, far smaller rug that appears to be perfectly symmetrical.  I acquired this magic Mughal carpet in Uttar Pradesh, where one of my daughters and I saw such rugs being hand-made.  Unlike the damaged rug at my home’s threshold, its asymmetry is well hidden but complete: due to the arrangement of its warp and weft, from one side it is deep sapphire, and from the other a steel blue-gray.

Little in life satisfies the human impulse to see and seek beauty in perfect symmetry.  And among what is worth holding on to, few things are unscarred.

 

 

Spring Forward, Fall Back Down

IMG_8249 (2)
Frozen in Time (c) Stephanie M. Glennon

 

Spring forward, fall back down…”

I know, I know: it couldn’t be much more wintry in New England.

It’s a balmy -6 degrees, enhanced by an order of magnitude for those who dally with windchill.  Boston had its highest recorded tide, sweeping an icy gray lagoon into waterfront streets.

My big boy beagle gazes at me with recrimination when I am compelled to turn around and whisk him back toward home.  He clearly has places to be, but unknowingly relies upon my limited capacity to exhibit adult common sense.  My less than-scientific measure of when I have ventured half as far as we safely can go is the loss of  sensation in triple-gloved hands.  The outermost layer belonged to Jim: enormous blue-green knitted wool  gloves into which Rufus still pauses to press his snow-dusted nose, retrieving scents of his puppyhood.  I am violently allergic to wool. Angry winter welts encircle my right wrist, which one over-sized glove accidentally touched as I struggled to shovel a path through blizzard remnants.

Even my camera is too cold to do its job.  I dare not risk its delicate inner mechanisms’ life for a picture–even of wavering sea-smoke etched in bright gold across the horizon, or planes of dazzling white which migrate across eye-level snowdrifts, or tree branches encased in ice glittering under a super moon.

Other than at sunrise and sunset, which in winter tend to take place during work days, when they rarely can both be seen, bright color has disappeared from the landscape.  It may visit in the form of  a scarlet cardinal or blue jay, or a burst of berries holding fast for them to find.

But this lyric spanning the other seasons has taken its place as resident ear-worm.

I first heard the Weakerthans’ song on the radio while driving back from a solo trip to Bar Harbor.

My city’s still breathing (but barely, it’s true)
Through buildings gone missing like teeth
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
Sparkled with broken glass
I’m back with scars to show.
Back with the streets I know
Will never take me anywhere but here

My status could be the answer to a riddle: I occupy a new old home in my old home state, having left our old old home in a new home state.

But I am back with streets I know.  In a place I never before lived, I feel I am back home.

Wait for the year to drown
Spring forward, fall back down
I’m trying not to wonder where you are

One daughter came to my new old home for Christmas, bearing a discrete tattoo she explained to me is based on Slaughterhouse Five.

Spring forward, fall back.  I realized it’s not just a handy trick to set clocks to mark time in the seasons that bookend winter’s essence, but a Tralfamadorian progression through life–including waxing and waning grief and hope.  A (Billy) Pilgrim’s progress, if you will (HT Mr. Vonnegut).

I shall try to seize on those glimmers, bright traces which foretell spring or commemorate fall, even when blanketed by colorlessness–the orange fish which glided underneath inches of pond ice as we skated at the old home we shared, the leaf  whose lime stem tilted toward the sun as if it still could absorb light when my beagle’s front paw sank ever-so-slightly into a frozen puddle’s surface, leaving in uneven colonial bricks’ lacuna a ghostly misshapen cameo, a reminder of our presence there made possible by a New England winter.

 

 

(Weekly Photo Challenge: Home) Longing and Belonging

HPIM6794
Jim’s Home (c) SMG 2010

During the past several months I’ve probably given more thought to the idea of “home” than I ever had before.

“The Glennon family was home,” said Uncle Randy at my husband’s memorial service, referring to Jim’s purchase of his very old dream house and land.  With an eight-acre pond.  Jim, who did not long for many things, always had yearned for a pond.  On this unnamed pond, he taught his children and their friends and his nieces and nephews to ice skate.

Jim built benches to drag out onto the ice so children could sit there and he could glide over on his hockey skates, winter jacket flapping open and cheeks as rosy as the toddlers’ were, and pull tightly on their laces and double and triple-knot them.  Then Jim would smoothly skate backwards, holding small hands with fingers ensconced in bright hand-knit frog-shaped or dinosaur-patterned mittens.

One winter Jim and I skated over the pond’s thick frozen surface and I looked down and saw fish swimming beneath us, in blue water clouded over by waves of frozen silver.

The pond and surrounding woods attracted animals of all kinds.  Jim took his camera down to explore and take pictures of swans, red fox and newborn kits, herons, beavers and their formidable dams.

The sun would rise over Jim’s pond, beyond the broad arc of his bountiful bird feeders.  I have never seen so many sunrises as I did during the sleepless nights of his illness, when the fear of missing a waking moment with him–even as he slept–seemed more than I could bear.

HPIM9102

The house itself was and always will be “Jim’s house.”  The new part was built in 1805.  Its thick glass window panes, Indian shutters, original FBUSs (Floor Boards of Unusual Size), ten fireplaces and two brick beehive ovens reminded him of old houses he had worked on with a favorite uncle when Jim was growing up.

As with a Marilynne Robinson character (a widower who remained in the home he had shared with his wife and many children) in Home: “The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable.” “Such times you  had!” the widower told a daughter revisiting the house–“as if the present slight desolation were confetti and candy wrappers left after the passing of some glorious parade.”

sunrise2011
Sunrise on Jim’s Pond (c) January 2011

Continue reading “(Weekly Photo Challenge: Home) Longing and Belonging”

Here Tonight

“Well you went left and I went right
As the moon hung proud and bright
You would have loved it here tonight”

These lines are from Mumford & Son’s “Home,” a song Jim did not hear from here.

The beagles were anxious to explore their new neighborhood today, and I was eager to take my new camera with us now that my daughter has explained to me how its contents magically can be downloaded.  (Evidently I dropped the old one on cement one time too many.  It has solidified in place, its lens half-open but unseeing and immovable, like Lot’s wife looking back towards Sodom.)

I got this small point-and-shoot camera just in time to capture some last photographs outside our old home along with first pictures from where we have relocated.  I realized only after my daughter explained the magical downloading process that all 366 of the photographs I have taken with the new camera are of the outdoors–as Jim’s almost invariably were.

The day I left our old home for good and did not look back, I had taken a final shot of that persistent lone heart-shaped hydrangea on a bush Jim had planted.  It blossomed first in cornflower blue, and I was certain it soon would be joined by abundant brethren.

But two more seasons passed, and that single heart remained alone among the green.  It recently turned a Victorian red-violet as it prepared to return to sepia.

On the tiny lawn outside our new home I have placed a heaping helping of the season’s political signs.

“Think you’ve got enough signs out there?” my daughter teased me, as Jim would have.

Continue reading “Here Tonight”

%d bloggers like this: