A Series for A Long, Cold, Winter

The Winter creates strong readers.  While Spring and Summer weather go well with "light" stories that demand little focus, winter blizzards are perfect for stories that hold the reader's attention.  When the drifts are piling up outside and the thermometer plummets, I want a story with structure and design, one that commands my attention through the long, dark days.  For the like-minded readers who have already read their way through Dickens and committed Austen to memory, I would like to make a suggestion.  Stuff a copy of The Forsyte Saga into your pack of cold-weather emergency supplies.  You'll have a something good to read until June.

The Forstyes are an English clan who define themselves through their upper-middle class status and an uncomfortable status that is.  They've accumulated enough money to be preoccupied by it to but they lack the antecedents and Savior Faire needed for social success so every move of the first generation is ruled by two questions: 1) Will I profit (monetarily) from this action and 2) will this comport with propriety?  If either answer is "No", some Forsyte will veto the idea.  When Jolyon Forsyte and his children start basing their decisions on happiness instead of social mores or money, shock threatens to destabilize the family structure.  Before they can recover, the Forsytes meet Irene.

The watchful, possessive Soames Forsyte,
as played by Damien Lewis

Part of what drives The Forsyte Saga are the contradictions inherent in two central characters, Soames Forsyte and his first wife, Irene Heron.  Soames is the quintessential Forsyte.  Driven, judgmental and self-centered, he is "The Man of Property" in the first book's title.  For Soames to see himself as a success, one property he must acquire is a wife and he likes the look of young Irene Heron.  She's accomplished, she's beautiful and if she's not rich, that means she'll stay dependent on him.  Yet, the harder he pursues Irene, the more reluctant she becomes.  And every polite refusal she gives makes him want her all the more.

Gina McKee as the enigmatic Irene

Others are drawn to Irene because she is an enigma, a woman so passive we only see her through the eyes of other characters.  To Soames, she's a maddening cipher, the one goal that continually escapes he grasp.  To the conventional Forsytes, she's the creator of scandal.  Soames is an honorable, effective provider so why won't the woman settle down and be happy?  To the bohemian side of the family, Irene is a victim to be cherished and rescued from the inexorable Soames.  Without ever meaning to, Irene splits the family so completely that subsequent generations don't meet unless by accident. The results of those meetings can be predicted by anyone familiar with Romeo and Juliet and each meeting threatens to unearth the old, buried scandals.  It is a tribute to the author's skill that after four Forsyte generations, we still want to know what happens to them and we end up pitying Soames instead of hating him.

John Galsworthy won the Nobel Prize for Literature based, in part, on his Forsyte Saga and it's been adapted for film multiple times.  However, nothing has the flavor of the books themselves.  They are easy to find but written for an audience with more time for reading than most people allow themselves today.  There are dozens of characters to keep up with and a narrative style that encourages readers to relax instead of rush through the pages.  "Everything in Life is here in the story" the author seems to imply, "enjoy yourself, don't rush for the end.

Authors aren't encouraged to write like this anymore; publishers and agents are searching for page-turners with first lines that grab you.  But Winter is something you can't hurry through and you'll need a book that can hold its own with the season.  So, before the next low pressure trough aligns itself aligns with a cyclone of snow, prepare to wait it out in style.  Lay in the firewood, locate the longjohns and as the first flakes start falling, open your copy of The Forsyte Saga.  Few books can make you so glad to be a victim of inclement weather.

A Woman's Life in Letters

Letters used to be gifts, rare and wonderful things.  They came, hand-addressed, through the mail and you were supposed to answer them promptly.  (I know because I rarely did.)  A good letter might remind you of the writer through the distinctive handwriting or the stationary he/she chose but the the act of writing letter was most important: it meant the reader was meant so much to the writer that he/she was invited into a direct channel of the writer's thoughts and feelings.  From personal letters, we went to electronic mail which was quicker and easier as long as you knew how to type and you could, if necessary, address it to many people at once.  After than came social media sites with ever-shortening messages to wider and wider groups of people and now we communicate by emojis, sharing news and opinions so quickly, we're back to communicating through pictures.  That's progress and I'm thrilled because I've managed to reconnect with friends I've owed letters to for decades but there's something missing in our e-correspondence that was present in in the old-fashioned letters.  My mother, aunts and grandmothers could mark the stages of their lives with their correspondence. That's what Lee Smith must have been thinking of when she wrote Fair and Tender Ladies.

Here is the tale of Ivy Rowe, in her voice and captured in a lifetime of letters.  The early ones are the greetings of an precocious and engaging child from her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia to a world she's already longing to see.  Life is hard for those who live on the Blue Ridge at the beginning of the twentieth century but Ivy sees the beauty in the land and the people as clearly as the hard-scrabble existence that takes so much of their happiness.  You can trace the changing fortunes of the Appalachian folk through Ivy's letters.  They descend from the "hollers" and mountain cabins to the river towns of Virginia and then to the coal mines with their promise of greater income and danger for the men who tear the ore from the mountain.  Ivy sees first-hand the wealth of a mine owner's mansion and the poverty of devastated families of the miners killed in an explosion.  Ivy returns to the Blue Ridge mountains to face the good and bad parts of being grown, of making mistakes and getting old.  She watches electricity and the modern world make their way to the mountains and how they change the rhythm of isolated lives. She even learns to accept some of the values her parents had and then lost. All of this is recounted in hundreds of letters to strangers and friends, loving family and long-lost relatives.  While Ivy's early dreams of being a writer and seeing the world can only be fulfilled by her daughter, Ivy points the way with her clear-eyed appraisal of life and her never-ending letters

Ivy speculates that, in the end, the collection of recorded letters don't matter to the writer or to the recipient as much as the act of writing them does.  I'm not sure if I agree since this book (among many others) would not exist if written letters weren't kept.  But she is right about one thing: the act of writing is what makes the document meaningful.  It is the act that says,"I open my mind and soul to you so you know the real, inner me.  Here, I will do my best to capture and transcribe the truth." That act, whether it's done with parchment, paper or pixels is a generous, difficult one and one of the things that distinguishes our species.  We communicate through words and the words, once we release them, expand the universe with our ideas.  Our time here is short but when we leave, the words remain.

The Reading Format Grudge Match: Paper v. Screen

It's funny how often SF writers predicted the future.  Verne imagined exploring space and the ocean floor, Bradbury predicted earbuds and my favorite, Robert Heinlein foresaw the Cold War, the Internet and helped invent water-beds.  Still the development Heinlein predicted that I enjoy the most was in his novel Time Enough for Love.  In that book, Heinlein not only foresaw the development of the e-reader, he predicted the difference between the traditional "paper" book fans and the screen readers.  However, I doubt if he realized how silly that battle would get.

According to that source of all knowledge, Wikipedia, e-readers actually started in the 1930's, long before the computer age (or I) was born and Project Gutenberg started digitizing texts 40 years later. Of course, the hardware wasn't really available to the public then to make the data easily accessible but once personal computers and access to the internet became a common household item, the times began a changing.  People began reading books on screens.  Then eight years ago, Amazon upended everything by coming out with the Kindle, first as a standalone e-reading pad and later as a software app that allowed the user to keep and use an entire library on any computer: from the CPU at home, to the hand-held smart phone.  The format grudge match was on.

Now I'll admit that reading off screens can give the dedicated reader a monumental case of eye-strain.  The night I realized the entire Anne of Green Gables series was available on Gutenberg's website, I strained my eyes racing through all the books in one night.  Of course, I am a card-carrying weirdo. Strained eyes and a headache weren't going to stop me from making sure Anne ended up with Gilbert Blythe.  Since then, screen texts have become a lot easier to read.  So what's the fuss?

Part of it, some friends insist, is the gestalt of the book reading experience.  No e-reader, they say, can compare to feeling the size and weight of a book and turning the printed pages; in a way they have a point.  For devotees to the act of reading, no delight is quite like lifting a hefty book that you've been wanting to read.  But when I'm lost in a story, I lose focus on minor details like the number of pages left in the book (or where I am).  I read until the tale is done or the book falls from my hand as I drop off to sleep (and I can hold the light e-reader in my hand longer than a heavy, traditional book).   Let's put it this way: if you're reading the books of Marcel Proust, an e-reader could save you from straining your wrist.  But if you insist on reading in the tub, paper is the only reasonable candidate. No e-reader I know has learned to survive a dip in the bath.

A real area of concern is comprehension: the e-reader has limited worth as a tool if screen reading results in lower comprehension.  As a teacher, my sis worries about that kind of thing and she sent this article that suggests that "deep reading", reading that involves contemplation as well as visual auditing, falls off when people read off of screens instead of paper.  However the studies in the article didn't list any hard data to support their worry - just the notice that people are more dis-tractable when they're reading off the screen. Since most e-reading is done from the same machine that handles the users phone calls, text messages and social media, it may not be the act of screen reading that creates the distraction but the inputs a user gets while using the machine.  And the question of comprehension is still in debate.  In 2012, a Norwegian study suggested the format made a difference in reading comprehension.  Last year, a French study came to the opposite conclusion.  

So does the format change how we experience or incorporate knowledge from reading?  I don't know.  I wish we could settle the question but I hope the medium is not the message.  To me, a great story is a great story and I don't care if I read those words from a page, a screen or painted on the sky by a plane.  The story is what matters, the prose and the characters, the narrative, themes and thought.  Without that we are arguing about the frame of an artwork; the masterpiece inside would be gone.

Or so says the card-carrying weirdo.

A Great Writer, Stealing

Some say T. S. Eliot came up with the quote, "Good writers borrow; great ones steal."  Others say the line came from Oscar Wilde.  Either way, every fiction writer knows that their finished work is based in part on the experiences and stories of others that they've heard about and read and the best way to avoid a copyright or invasion of privacy suit is to take the base material and then change it until it becomes something you can use for your story.  Do a good job and you'll win the lawsuit, (although you may not be forgiven).  Do a great job and academic types will study your work and reverse engineer it to detect the roots of the story you wrote.  That's what James Shapiro has done in The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.   Whether you like history or theatre, this fascinating book puts a great man's work back in the context of his time.

Shapiro points out the author and the play are not the the creations we assume we know.  Younger Shakespeare is remembered for writing the comedies and historical plays that entertained Queen Elizabeth I but the times and the man have changed.  The author of Lear is an older man, retired from acting, and now writes full-time for the King, James the I.  A theatrical company like Shakespeare's was supposed to produce twenty new plays each year as well as revive twenty more old favorites (well, this was before TV and the internet).  So writers were scrambling for new material to fashion into plays that would divert the court and put audiences in the seats.  Everything was up for grabs including the play someone else invented last season.   Oh, by the way, did I mention Bill stole the basic plot and characters we thought he created for Lear?

The Most Famous Chronicle Historye of Leire King of England and his Three Daughters had been produced 12 years before by Shakespeare's company but it is wildly different from the Lear that we know.  The King still makes the moronic mistake of dividing his land between the daughters that lied to him and disinherits the dutiful daughter but in the original, the King is ultimately saved from his mistake.  The "Good Daughter", with the help of her husband, rescues Lear and his kingdom and puts Lear back on the throne.  All ends well.  Shakespeare wasn't only a brilliant playwright on his own, he was a collaborator and a first rate play-doctor in the bargain and he saw the weakness in this structure.  With Lear and Cordelia well and triumphant at the end, the whole episode lacks consequences.  Let one good character die and make the other one triumph is a standard formula today.  Kill both along with Reagan and Goneril (Stinking Sister One and Stinking Sister Two) and now the country has no government and is likely to fall apart.   That's consequences.  That's believable and (of course) that's our well-known King Lear.

Mr. Shapiro points out that Shakespeare's Lear was political propaganda as well.   While Elizabeth was the Queen of England, her heir, James, ruled both Scotland and England and unifying the two countries (plus Wales and Ireland) into Great Britain was a thorny proposal James was trying to get Parliament to accept.  It wasn't a popular idea in Parliament or Glasgow (Given Scotland's referendum two years ago, the idea still has its detractors).  Shapiro points out that Shakespeare's tragedy starts when a King of Great Britain willfully divides his empire.  Unified, the country has a strong central government.  Divide it between sisters that can't and don't trust each other and eventually the whole island falls apart.  It's a subtle lesson but one that would have easily understood by the audiences who saw those first performances by Shakespeare's company, the aptly-named, "King's Men".  Their objective wasn't just to entertain the Court; it was to support and impart the King's policies.

Bill the Scribe

So much more of what happened that year appears in this famous play.  A woman pretending to be possessed is exposed  and the recipe of the potion she drank to create her altered state is paraphrased in the play.  An anonymous letter exposes the Gunpowder Plot (remembered now on Guy Fawkes day) and another anonymous letter kicks off the sub-plot of Lear where a powerful man chooses to believe the wrong son.  Shapiro recounts the episodes of paranoia, happiness, intrigue and change that Shakespeare witnessed during this year and then ties them to incidents in Shakespeare's Lear, Macbeth and the Tempest so a year in the life of the playwright becomes a key to understanding the man and his work a little better.

And, in the end, it is the work that matters.  We don't remember Lear because it started life as a play with a happy ending or that Bill the Scribe wrote his strongest, darkest pieces when he was old enough to see that older, more powerful men, can make larger, more disastrous mistakes.  We remember the work because it is good, because it moves us and the emotional truth of the piece informs our own lives. Lear is the story of families that come to grief after flattery is mistaken for love.  That is nearly a universal experience recreated in deathless lines that intelligent actors love to declaim.  The Year of Lear gives Bill's tragedy context that enriches our understanding of the play.   But Lear, even standing alone, is a devastating, brilliant gift that writers have been stealing from ever since.

Reading during the Worst of Times

A friend of mine died this week.

A brain aneurysm no one knew she had ruptured without warning.  She lost consciousness and passed away days later without ever regaining it.  She was only 51.

The morning after she passed away, I kept checking her Facebook page, hoping someone would post a retraction.

Oh God, I wanted someone  to post a retraction.

But they didn't.  They can't. My friend is gone and she isn't coming back.

Emotional pain on this level leaves me barely able to function at first.  I spent the first day wandering around in shock and crying.  I wanted to tell someone but I couldn't decide who to call.   There were  colleagues we had worked with years ago but how do you call someone, out of the blue, and say, "By the way, a woman you haven't seen in years died yesterday.  Thought you'd like to know."  I wanted to buttonhole strangers and say they'd missed knowing someone wonderful.  I wanted to share the pain.

I couldn't.

After I came home, frustrated and grieving, I looked up an essay William Allen White wrote when his sixteen year old daughter, Mary, died unexpectedly.  Like my friend, Mary White was enthusiastic soul who liked everyone she met and most people liked her right back.  As I read Mr. White's recollection of the child he'd loved and lost, a knot inside of me started to ease.  When I got to those final, beautiful sentences...

"A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sunlight upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing, gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager joy upon some other dawn."

...part of me could see the face of my friend joyfully moving forward toward her next destiny. 

That night I had trouble sleeping so my husband turned on an audio-book, hopeful that the reader's voice could lull me into dreaming.  The book was the much loved Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows and as the reader recounted Harry's walk toward Voldemort, I thought again of my friend and the premature end of her life. I found myself hoping that, like Harry, my friend felt the support and comfort of those she's loved and lost when she faced her final moments.  I don't know this happened but I hope it did.  I wouldn't want her to feel afraid or alone.

And I realized that although I was still grieving, at least I no longer felt stunned or confused.  Because of what Rowling and White had written about grief, I was beginning to come to grips with mine.     

Reading can be an escape from pain and that can also be therapeutic but greater is the book that helps us cope with it.   Some are fiction, like the ones I've mentioned and others, like C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, are not but their message is the same: they tell us we are not alone.  Someone else has climbed this hill before us, someone has known this grief and, through words, they reach out to help us.  They strengthen us as the memory of love may strengthen those who face the Dark.

Yes, I will remember and miss my friend for the rest of my life.  And I will spend a long time grieving. I know this from experience. But reading the words of others who've mourned helps me during the Worst of Times.  And their words will continue to be there until I can look with joy again at the dawn.

A Life in American Theatre.

If you go to any college orientation, it's easy to pick out the theatre major wannabes.  While the business majors are making contacts and the proto-engineers are using their smartphones to game and/or calculate maximum spillage in their latest prank, the theatre majors are busy being theatrical.  Other students wear clothes; the theatricals show up in layers. Layers and layers of rehearsal outfits which can be removed or rearranged as needed, along with an overly large carrier of some kind that also looks like a refugee from the consignment store.  Once inside, it's hard to get theatre majors out the door again.  They aren't friendly during interviews, they are effusive (or moribund, if they're channeling a Method Actor).  An English Major is ten minutes late for class; the Theatre Major appears just before he/she is declared dead.  It's the nature of the beast.  And, concealed into the folds of rehearsal layers or tucked into the overlarge carrier are the proto-drama major's tools of the trade: their Starbucks card, a few B&W headshots, a book on acting by Stella Adler (read), another by O'Neill on masks (not read) and Moss Hart's autobiography, Act One.   When you see one of these young and theatrical types, knock them down, grab their copy of Act One and run for the exit.  They can draw on the memory of you mugging them to prepare for some future role and you can get a good read.  When it comes to a life in the theatre, there is no better story than this one.

Hart was the Horatio Alger of 20th century American Theatre, a child of immigrants from the poorest slum in New York whose success and drive allowed him to build the kind of life that (according to one critic) God would have built...if he only had the money.  But it didn't come easy.  There was no Julliard at that time, no AADA, or film school for those who wanted a life in the industry.  There was only the stage and how you got in depended on connections or drive.  Moss got there by drive, first taking the worst jobs in the least stable productions (where getting paid was still a gamble) and then inching his way up to something better.  Along the way he saw the Catskills resorts at its best and some declining stars at their worst and realized that he needed a life behind the footlights.  Hart was a director and a playwright but not an actor.  His idea of how sound would affect silent pictures became a satire on Hollywood that attracted the biggest playwright on Broadway at that time: George S. Kaufman.

It's difficult to describe Kaufman in terms of contemporary theatre.   He started out as a journalist and drama critic (like Shaw) and became a playwright, someone infatuated with the rhythm of a spoken line as well as the idea it presented.  He was a sought-after play-doctor, for his ability to see the structural flaws in developing vehicles and correct them.  Harvey Fierstein does some of that these days and, like Fierstein, Kaufman was known to act, on occasion.  He was a fearsome director, a tireless worker and the most intimidating person in the world, according to Moss Hart but he was also a generous collaborator and, as Act One shows, a firm believer in the practice of "Kill Your Darlings."

Kaufman and Hart's first comedy, "Once in a Lifetime" is a study in Hollywood excess and early performances included a third act in an expensive, bird-themed nightclub set that was hilarious to look at but it stopped the action cold.  Another Broadway legend, Sam Harris (the man who partnered with George M. Cohan for years) mentioned after one dreary, show-killing point how loud and tiring the whole show was.  There was never a scene where a couple of the actors could simply talk over the events, he said and give him a chance to rest.  Hart took the suggestion seriously and rewrote the entire act, scrapping the expensive, already paid for set and adding the quiet interlude needed before the mayhem of a finale begins.  That quiet, third-act moment is necessary for the audience and whenever I've seen one in other productions, I know it was put in because the playwright heeded the advice of Moss Hart and Sam Harris.  George Kaufman agreed and when "Once in a Lifetime" opened to rave reviews, Kaufman made sure Hart got most of the credit (financially and publicly) for the hit.

The plural of genius: Kaufman & Hart

It's a shame Hart never wrote the follow-up to this vivid theatrical autobiography because there was so much for him to cover: the string of plays and musicals he wrote and/or directed, his screenplays (including Garland's "A Star is Born" and "Hans Christian Anderson), but it wasn't in the cards.  Moss Hart died when he was still in his fifties and two of his shows (Camelot and My Fair Lady) were still running on Broadway.  Instead, he left behind a widow, two children, the theatrical legacy of a wunderkind and an autobiography theatre majors still pore over.  Let the sagacious and elderly rethink their lives reading Shakespeare; Act One is when you need to feel young.

A Year in the Company of Words

New Years is such a peculiar holiday on the calendar.  It doesn't have religious nor historic connotations like most major holidays although it does contain elements of both.  The drinking or party phase section of the population, commemorate it with the required bacchanalia and woozy recovery but the rest of us aren't so sure of our role.  We can review the year end lists or re-watch  The Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller biopics that seem to appear on each New Year's Eve TV schedule but by now I know exactly when Lionel Hampton will show up and June Allyson will tug on her ear lobe.  Nope, I don't want to spend this New Year's re-watching the same old movies, nor do I want to spend it kicking my poor old liver with an overdoes of scotch.  Instead I want to end the year as I've spent it:  in the company of words.

• Reading New Books - After checking various electronic records and the drain that sucks up my spare income and phone space (Amazon Kindle) I can safely say I read at least one new book every week this year, which was sort of like making a new friend every week.  Some of them, like A Tale Dark and Grimm and The Ocean at the End of the Lane went straight to my heart and onto my  re-reading list.  (I am a re-reader of books).  Others were nice and interesting for the interval but not a lifetime love.  A couple, like The Forsyte Saga, could only be defined as "new" books because I hadn't read them before and one or two I read not from paper or through a book-friendly program, like Kindle, but as text files on a screen simply because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. While each new book may not life up to its hype, each unread book brings new hope when it's opened.  
• Re-reading Old Books - When I was in Girl Scouts, we used to sing a song.

Make New Friends,But Keep the Old.  

One is Silver and the Other's Gold

• Well loved books are like old friends and I have to stay in touch.  Wherever I go, they go with me and yes, I'll put down the new books to re-acquaint myself with the prose and poetry that I've known for decades.  If that makes me weird, so be it.  I just wish I had more time to spend with them.  Still only part of this word year was about reading
• 2015 is, for me, the year I stopped writing in short, painful bursts (and re-writing, re-writing and hiding the finished product in shame) and began the discipline of printing something at least twice a week.  Something the public could see and criticize. I still have an enormous amount to learn but I'm not as afraid of failure as I was a few years ago. Instead of thinking, "Oh what if I fail!" and then scrambling to hide under the bed, I've learned to think "Of course, I'm going to fail; so what!" I learned I can survive being rejected.  I can't recommend it as a life-experience but learning I don't implode after hearing "No" was heartening. I even learned I can write something new to submit for rejection.  Amazing.

Reading, to me, is honest-to-God magic, a way to climb inside someone else's soul and understand their feelings and thoughts.  Because of words, I know the voices of so many people I'd never have the chance to hear, sometimes voices of people who died long before I was born.  Writing then becomes the act of sending out a new transmission, adding my own voice to the chorus.  Amazing.  Words are a human creation but, arranged well, they bring us into the family of mankind.

So the year slides into it's final hours as I continue to peck at the keyboard, looking for the next decent sentence.  I hope you had a full and wonderful year with good memories to temper the bad.  May you find a better world next year and a future filled with hope and words. 

Settling In with a Winter Book

Winter is the Season with the strongest ties to Home and Hearth.  Spring and Autumn may pull us to work in our yards and Summer is for Adventure and Travel but Winter, with its long nights and bleak weather, is the time when people sub-consciously pull closer to the places that comfort and protect them and settle in for the Season.  While the winds blast across the open ground and temperatures plummet, we can feel safe as long as we have dry, warm rooms, comfortable seats and a selection of Winter Books to re-read. If there are Summer Authors (and I think there are) that invite the heart toward roaming, there are also the writers that celebrate hearth and home and these are a joy to re-read.  While the Winter stories are rarely in high demand (Winter tales have pages you want to mull over, not rip through) their appeal is eternal and simple.  Winter Stories insist on a mindful awareness of the joys and trials of everyday life.  They celebrate what is real.

New England is one of those places that seems to have a copyright on Winter and Gladys Taber is still one of New England's best-loved "home-and hearth" Winter Writers.  Robert Frost could scribble out poems about people who underpin their friendships with fences and allow the hired man home to die. That's fine for Robert Frost, but it isn't much comfort during Winter.  Instead, readers turned to the woman who fell in love with a 15th century farmhouse named Stillmeadow and made her life there with kids, cats, dogs and twin devotions to the written word and the natural world.  She supported herself by writing about domestic life and no one has written more skillfully or with more mindfulness about the Winter.

"We have an appointment with winter and we are ready. The wood is stacked with seasoned applewood and maple, the snow shovel leans at the back door, the shelves are jammed with supplies. When the first innocent flakes drift down, we put out more soot and fill the bird feeders. When the snow begins to come in all directions at once and the wind takes on a peculiar lonely cry, we pile more wood on the fire and hang the old iron soup kettle over it, browning the pot roast in diced salt pork and onion. As the blizzard increases, the old house seems to steady herself like a ship against a gale wind. . . Snow piles up against the windowpanes, sifts under the ancient sills, makes heaps of powdered pearl on the ancient oak floors. But the house is snug in the twilight of the snow and we sit by the fire and toast our toes feeling there is much to be said for winter after all." 

Ms. Taber may have been my mother's favorite writer; I'm sure she's the only one Mother trusted enough to write to and Ms. Taber's handwritten reply was one of Mama's treasured possessions.  It was enough for me to watch Mama's reaction as she pored over one Ms. Taber's volumes.  She would sit quietly, with one hand on the edge of the pages and a small smile would appear on her face.  Pages were turned with deliberation.  After spending twenty minutes with Ms.Taber and Stillmeadow, Mama would return to our world, a happier, more serene person.

As for me, I followed a southern star and my favorite hearth writer became Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, that Florida transplant and author of The Yearling and Cross Creek. Ms. Rawlings described the rough but wonderful life she found in the backwoods of Florida and how winter can be a wonderful thing in a place where it's still seen as alien.

"For all our battles, winter at the Creek is the cozy time, when fat pine fires crackle on all the hearths. I take my dog for a walk up the road at sunset and the wind blows in our faces. I turn back to walk westward home as the red sun drops behind Orange Lake. The dusk comes quickly and we turn in at the gate and shut the house door behind us and drop down in front of the hearth fire in the living room. A fresh log of fatwood thrown on the slow-burning bed of oak coals catches and blazes and roars up the big chimney. The flames light the old white-walled room so that there is no need even of candles, though one or two over the bookshelves are always pleasant, for candlelight on books is one of the lovely things of this world. The ruby-red velvet sleepy hollow chair glows in the firelight. The dog groans for comfort and turns his belly to the heat and stretches out his paws in the ultimate luxury. Only a hunting dog or a cat can share man's love of the open fire, and if I had a whole kennel full of dogs, on winter nights I should let them all come in to enjoy mine with me."

In a number of weeks, we will venture out into Spring and run forward again, with our futures.  Take the time this season to be aware of your life and enjoy the comforts of home.  Settle in with a winter book.

A Season for Memory and Love

There's a reason some people love this time of year; the same reason other folks hate it: family. Tradition dictates we spend part of our winter holidays with individuals tied to us by DNA or marriage and who you are determines whether you like or loathe the custom.  My husband says, there's a reason family push our buttons faster than anyone else; they installed most of them.  Still, they are the people who define our earliest selves and even when they're gone, their voices come back in our memories like the song of  The Grass Harp, Truman Capote's novella about his Alabama childhood.  While it's not the obvious choice for December, the Grass Harp is a tender remembrance of how love and family shape us all.

Collin Fenwick is the narrator of The Grass Harp, a boy (like the author) cast into the care of maiden aunts.  Aunt Verena is the financial provider, the richest soul in town and, as Truman says, the earning of her wealth had not made her an easy woman.  The other aunt, Dolly, is nature-focused and terrified of all humans in authority but self-sustaining because of her homemade dropsy cure, an old-fashioned name for swelling.  When Verena tries to browbeat the dropsy recipe from the gentle Dolly, a minor revolt occurs and Capote warms to his other theme: there are family we find, not through DNA but through soul.

Collin, Dolly and their friend Catherine Creek hide in a tree-house outside of town and make friends with two other misfits - Charlie Cool, the superannuated judge who has been bossed out of his job and home and Riley Henderson, a Huck Finn of sorts who worries because he cares for no one except his sisters.  These five and a family troupe of wandering evangelists quickly split the town between those who need to follow a different drummer and those who intend to call the tune.

Anyone whose memories of Truman Capote are confined to murder or his waspish love of gossip need to be reminded he was also be a tender, lyrical storyteller. It is through his eyes that we see that the the gentle Dolly is not be as cowardly nor Verena as unwavering as general gossip would have us believe and it is his voice that brings us back to the place that nurtured them both. 

"Below the hill grows a field of high Indian grass that changes color with the seasons: go to see it in the fall, late September, when it has gone red as sunset, when scarlet shadows like firelight breeze over it and the autumn winds strum on its dry leaves sighing human music, a harp of voices."

It is Dolly that reminds us that the sounds from the Indian grass are the voices of lost loved ones, telling the stories of their lives.  The people are gone but their voices continue to murmur in the whisper of the leaves and the grass, like they sing in the memories of those that love and remember them still. As long as we can hear them, they remain loved and immortal in memory even if in life, they could make us crazy.

So, if the weather permits it in this holiday season, find your own quiet moment outside town and listen to the wind blowing through the long grass.  May you hear the voices of those who defined you and those you found to love.  And may your voice be recalled someday as well in a symphony of grass and the wind.

Unexpected Christmas Presents

Another Christmas is looming fast and I see the hordes of last-minute shoppers whenever I drive by the stores - a vision that triggers my agoraphobia.  Still, I understand the shoppers' need to seek out each perfect present.  Those presents are for loved ones and each year we want to give them something they want or they need.  So, wish lists can really aid a holiday shopper.  Still, sometimes it's the present that's not on the list that makes the biggest impact.

It was 1972 when we celebrated Christmas in California.  My parents drove half way across the continent so we could spend the holidays with my mother's parents in their San Diego apartment.  California was unalloyed good as far as my sister and I were concerned.  California meant warmth, and trips to Disneyland, and time with grandparents who would move heaven and earth to gratify our every whim. I was 13 and, in Grandma's words "too old for toys, too young for boys", so my wish list was fairly nebulous but my sister was much younger and very specific.  She wanted Mattel's "Barbie Surprise House", one of the hot-ticket items that year.  Since I was "old enough to know", Mom told me about the hours she and the grandparents spent scouring stores on the hunt for that prized pink box.  Unfortunately, forays into every "Toys-R-Us" in two states weren't successful.  My sister's wonderful gift wouldn't be available until after Christmas Day.

Mom put us to bed early on Christmas Eve, telling us Santa would avoid the apartment until we were asleep.  I closed my eyes and opened my ears, wondering what delights the grownups had cooked up.  I heard some odd noises and my dad's attempt to sing but I couldn't guess what made them all giggle.  Probably a pitcher of my Grandpa's martinis. 

Christmas morning brought it's usual avalanche of sweaters and socks, hugs and nonsense gifts as well as Mom's earnest promise that we would pick up the Barbie Surprise House in a few days since Santa "couldn't fit it on his sleigh".  Mollified, my sister cuddled a little stuffed dog Grandma had pushed in her stocking while I studied the source of last night's mysterious noises.  My family had given me a guitar.

Now, I had not asked for a guitar. I'd never thought about learning to play one.  Yes, I liked music (who didn't?) and, like most girls I knew, I was taking piano lessons. But a guitar?  What were they thinking?  Did my family want me to become a hippie?

The visit was great and my sister got her Barbie House sometime before New Year.  Funny thing, though: Sis would play with the marvelous toy house until she was tired of it, and then walk away, but the stuffed dog with the club foot and belly-button stayed with her wherever she went. The name on his chest was Henry and Henry became a member of the family, and my sister's dearest companion. At first he followed my sister through the house, then around town on errands.  If Henry came up missing, Dad would tease her, saying Henry went to the local bar to drink beer, but he would search with us until the little dog was located and returned.  No matter what, Henry always came home again. After a few years, Henry became a family man as relatives came to join him but he remained my sister's favorite, following her to school and then to camp, college, and into her married life, the most loved gift of her childhood,  When he disintegrated this year, we both mourned.


And, after a few false starts and blistered fingers, I taught myself to play the guitar reasonably well.  I never became great and the tone of the instrument wasn't much but that unexpected gift filled a hole in my adolescence.  Learning songs and practicing passed some otherwise lonely hours and, even though I still felt awkward and shy  around other kids, I finally had a role; I was the one who played the guitar.  A few years later, another guitar-playing girl moved into town and I made my first life-long, close friend.  The git-fiddle followed me, like Henry followed my sister, and although it disappeared in a burglary, the replacement guitar introduced me to the man I married (another guitar player, of course).  None of the best parts of my adult life would have happened the way they did if I hadn't learned to play that guitar.  I wonder if my folks guessed, when they picked out that gift, how far their surprise present would take me.

 
So I'm glad when friends and relatives tell me what's on their Christmas list.  It makes shopping for them much easier.  Still I keep my eye out for the unexpected gift.  I've learned it's the items we don't ask for - the ones we don't even know that we need - that we'll use  and cherish the most.