Tag: Portsmouth

Fleeting Façades

The lion or the lamb?

A façade sometimes bears little relationship to what, or whom, you will find beyond it.

(As has been underscored to me by more than one bitterly divorced friend, what you expect from what’s on display is not necessarily what you will find.)

I come from a generation of buttoned-up New Englanders and introverted first-generation Brooklyners. Putting aside childhood theatrics and the professional behavior necessitated in criminal courtrooms and other adversary situations, we tend to be back-benchers in social settings. We’re not temperamentally inclined towards public displays of any kind. I may be a lioness in court, but dissolve in tears when I am alone, missing people I love.

We’re more Eames than Baroque. My mother’s collages and paintings used clean lines and empty faces which viewers are free to fill in. My late husband filled a Federalist home with a truth-in-advertising interior of hand-hewn pine furniture that was Quaker-like in its simplicity. I moved from there to a much tinier Victorian house and outfitted it in mid-century Danish Modern. (It was, as they ironically say, a look.)

I leave the most raucous visual displays to nature. As one must.

Between sunrise and sunset displays, I see nature showing off all around me. A Maple leaf crushed underfoot, transformed into an ascending dove A single bird perched in Jaiselmer, like its tethered twin in the exquisite miniature painting that hung on display in a New York Museum gallery in The Goldfinch.

I’ve realized only in reflecting about what I choose to exhibit that the photos which adorn my desk and wall are of discrete displays. Every day, I look at the series of black and white portraits arrayed at my eye level and see my children on the day my husband coaxed them into posing for a Mother’s Day gift. I feel my heart settle every time I see their faces, carrying me back to the old yellow house my husband loved when we were a family of six (not counting the beagles and their own occasionally unfortunate mischievous displays). When my husband was alive and we had no inkling anything was amiss.

Nature continuously launches and reformulates its own displays. The outdoor photos my husband took and I’ve framed are of colorful performances among living creatures in their prime: a male frigate’s stunning (and successful) performance before a rapt audience of potential partners; scarlet macaws’ mating dance; magnificently armored molting reptiles making their rounds. A voguing sea lion. An icy silver heart lit by moonlight and delivered by high tide, displayed like a crown jewel on a black velvet beach in Iceland.

From the air, it seems like the Blue Planet itself is on display. Closer in, I’ve been struck by displays left by unseen human hands. Installation art in Boston and New York City. Wares and murals in Morocco. A single flower displayed against a silver New Hampshire pond. Birds positioning themselves within algae-slicked pier frames in Boston Harbor. A gathering storm beginning to show itself inland.

As with all art, capturing a display from whatever space I occupy in the world, and being able to share it, is both the privilege and essence of photography.

Primes of Life

I rarely photograph primary colors. I grew up in a household where paints were rigidly sequestered in their tubes and only sparingly dabbed onto precious watercolor paper. But outside, even primary colors are rarely static.

Of course, sometimes color itself is an illusion. Georgetown, Massachusetts’ reservoir is not filled with scarlet water. Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s colonial-era waterfront is not actually bathed in yellow. No ancient cobalt fish, nor any color at all, resides within the soapstone slab below; it is plebeian daylight refracted through dishwashing liquid.

In general, I find pure and primary colors less interesting to capture. I’m drawn to gradations. To transfigured, quickly changing–even messy and decaying–colors all along each spectrum. One kind of magic happens as opposites on the color spectrum gather, in autumn leaves and gardens and water and sky.

And the changes are always worth waiting for. The slightest disturbance to a pure red sunset over water may turn it into strings of rubies over rippled black velvet, and to violet dragon’s breath clouds.

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.