I Believe In You

Posted on August 30, 2014 by pacienciapaciencia

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Sonnet 116

Tonight, I watched the sun set over the ocean. It spread lavender and navy and peach and magenta red light out over the horizon and washed the clouds, bathed them in color. I looked up at the clock and noticed it was 7:15: we have already lost a full hour of daylight. I noticed one branch of maple leaves was bright red against the remaining green ones stretching up to the roof of my building. This morning, I woke up to a breeze blowing through my windows. I had kicked off a blanket last night and woke up cold: it was a fall morning.

Life is a constantly changing mystery; but if you start to pay attention, the good floats to the top, until it’s all you want to see.

Bene Vixit Bene Latuit*

Posted on November 5, 2013 by pacienciapaciencia

“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

– Anais Nin

It was one of the last warm mornings, and by warm I mean it was in the low 40s, as we drove a silver truck down a lonesome highway on a small island toward an equally small pond.

This pond, owned by the Rockefellers and gifted to us as our dog park, is one of my favorite places on our island and the site of many morning and evening ice skates of last winter. Little Long Pond was even memorialized into a pendant made of silver, which I, of course, forgot to photograph. It was purchased by a lady book seller from the Yosemite Valley of California, who found it to be truly beautiful despite never having been there. I asked her to please go to the pond after she left my little town, and she told me she would take her son there and take photographs.

In the bed of the truck lay tied a red canoe: flat bottomed, without a keel, it promised to glide over the smooth surface of the pond at that early morning hour. It was Saturday, it was sunrise, and we were all alone, as we are during most of our adventures. Ours is a sort of magic that one finds only maybe once in a lifetime, and the moments one finds to be so precious you hold them in your heart like the palm holds a delicate match’s flame in the darkness.

Carrying the canoe down to the water, I was surprised at how heavy the canoe was and found its fiberglass-plastic to cut into the palm of my hand. Switching positions, my friend ended up dragging the boat to water’s edge, to the very same spot that we had laced our skates nine months before. There is a stone bench under a sweeping tree with weeping branches, covered still with leaves turning gold and rusted brown. The canoe slipped into the water, and I stepped in slightly to push us off and back. I simply kept the pace as all navigation was taken care of for me, slipping away, away, and down the pond.

To my right lay the bank that, last winter, was frozen and held in ice and snow. I used to skate near that bank and watch the snow’s height grow and shrink. I saw how the wind carved the snow and ice as the winter progressed. It was there that I gained confidence as a skater, doubling back many times to skate in large swathes, circles and ovals, taking precious time that I know made my friend impatient.

We paddled on, toward the end of the lake, watching the trees and grass on the left and the boathouse on the right. The boathouse is brown, and the ground near it was littered with brown leaves and yellow ones, too. The boathouse is always empty: its windows are like eyes, downcast.

Slipping through that water in the early morning, I looked back toward the ocean and saw the colors of the sunrise beaming to us across the water. A crowd of eider ducks ahead of us were disappointed with us interrupting, and whined and cried and muttered and flew off to the far end of the pond. We paddled on, looking at the muck of the pond’s floor, the grasses and reeds covered with detritus. Some of them coiled and looked like fuzzy brown intestines, clumped together on the floor. So shallow this pond: months ago, I dreamed of its depths, of the ice cracking and of my body slipping below into black water so cold and bottomless. Only now I know that it was shallow enough to stand up in the whole time.

Towards the end of the pond lie two beaver dams, one closer and one further away. They are constructed of branches and twigs and leaves and myriad other items, these bower birds of our biome no doubt are resourceful. Most of their dam lies beneath the water’s surface to protect their homes from predators. That morning, they were coated with hoarfrost, and glistened in a musky way. The eider ducks continued to watch us from the left side of the pond, and we endeavored to paddle further back into the cattails, into the marsh, into the rivulets we had skated last winter. We were, alas, curtailed, by a low water mark that caused our boat to run aground in silt, and we turned away. As we glided by the closer beaver dam, my friend remarked to me to look at the water’s surface and as I listened to a strange, slight crackling, I realized we were canoeing through thin sheets of ice.

Like the sound the wind makes through leaves, like the feeling of your hand brushing across grasses in an open field, like the cracking of a crusty piece of bread, the bow of our boat pushed through the ice crystals, breaking them apart into hundreds of invisible pieces. I reached out and tried to touch them, only to pull my hand away when I realized that I would do nothing more than disrupt them myself. The crystals had formed large triangles, prism-like, as if they were transparent, gossamer wings stretched across the water’s surface.

As we headed doggedly back to where we’d started, the ice dissipated, seemingly only to be found where the eider ducks swam, where the water was least disturbed by the tide or perhaps the wind off the ocean. Canoeing on through those shallow waters, I remembered skating for hours on this same pond, when the ice was bright grey, when I imagined wolves and foxes and harpies and Russian faerie tales alive in these woods, so silent as they are in midwinter.

Almost back to the stone bench, we slipped around an edge of the pond that was covered with small lily pads, the same ones that soon will be frozen into its surface. Skimming among and between them reminded me of skating in tight circles, of avoiding the leaves and lily pads because they caused the ice to melt and form dodgy places that could catch the tip of your skate and cause you to fall.

Pulling the canoe out of the pond, my friend dragged it back to the truck and I helped him hoist it into the bed once more. He tied it up, we climbed back inside, and returned along that same highway, not so lonesome as before as others had woken while we were paddling, and returned home for another late autumn day in Maine.

*”The good life is the hidden life” –

the epitaph found on Descartes‘ gravestone

What a Difference a Year Makes

Posted on November 3, 2013 by pacienciapaciencia

At Rockefeller Gardens

I have a neighbor named Jill; she and her boyfriend are about to go to Florida for the winter, but she came over to chat tonight and betrayed The Secret, the thing that you are not supposed to say out loud when you live here: she said, “this place is hard when you’re alone, by yourself, that’s for sure.” (Her boyfriend, Bobby, is already on his way to Florida and she has been solo now for about a month. She also said she’s staying til November 20th and at this point, has no idea why.)

The stores all closed this past weekend, the weekend of Halloween, and many of the year round places are taking some time off. This is not hugely significant to me, as I spend most of my time at my house or at my friend’s houses, but it is strange to think of this island, so abuzz with activity all summer, as literally shutting down: closing doors. I keep noticing the dark curtains pulled close across all the windows of the summer houses and interpret it as a metaphor for this place.

What does that mean? I honestly have no idea, just am mulling over the loneliness factor of living here for a second winter. People here pair up, hardly anyone is single, and I think the reason is that the starkness and the harshness of staring down the barrel of a long, cold winter, is just too much for any one person to seriously be able to handle. Perhaps people like the North Pond Hermit love the loneliness and isolation, and I do, too, for many, many hours and even days during the winter.

But I miss strangers, strangely. I miss the surface level interactions you have with people in cities: with the guy that works at the coffee shop, or the bartender at the pub. I also miss seeing people on the street and smiling at them or just saying hello, knowing that will be your only interaction with them for the rest of time. Here, in winter, you know almost everyone to the point of being actual friends, and having conversations every time you run into them. Now, this may sound magical and sweet, and it is, but sometimes I just want to be anonymous as I walk around the towns, and there is no anonymity here. You, your business, your quirks, are all on public display and a topic of public conversation.

To meditate for too long on one’s existential loneliness is probably not a good idea, but places like this tiny island do force you to think about the Big Ideas, the life issues that we all must confront at some point: what gives our lives meaning? What messages are we putting out there for all the world to see? What does accountability mean? How do we really communicate with those we love? What is community? Family? Truth in relationships? How do you balance independence and a desire for companionship? Are you doing it right? The last question is, of course, a joke, but these are the questions floating through my mind tonight, a night of cooler temperatures, a rare solar eclipse in the morning, and our first snowfall coming sometime tomorrow.

Today, whilst driving through the park, listening to the hum of a very loud engine, I saw hundreds of naked beech trees. Silent, tall, skinny, with knobby trunks, they are deep grey with black blotches. Growing in stands, or groups of trees, they dazzle the eye with their sheer number and monochrome. Beyond the stands of trees are great granite outcroppings, covered with lichen in various shades of green. Almost gone are the colors of spring and summer: green and grey are highlighted in the fading light, in the absence of leaves and flowers.

From Outside, Looking In! Photographer Unknown

PhotoDiary – L’Automne

Posted on October 8, 2013 by pacienciapaciencia

A natural reflecting pool, Route 1 near Milbridge, Maine

Marshland

Last week, I went out, with borrowed camera in hand, and took photos of the beauty that is autumn in Maine, autumn in our Acadia National Park, autumn on our island. I am so sad for people who are coming here to see our park and are being shut out or, in some cases, ticketed, for those of who live here can see it all the time. Maybe this glimpse will, at least, help for those of you who are not lucky enough to come and visit during leaf season. I, myself, have not seen anything like it in my lifetime. Once more, I stand ever thankful to be here, right now.

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”

L.M. Montgomery

One early fall morning at the Carriage House near Northeast Harbor

I noticed something miraculous and held in time…

Bricks, granite and leaves sharing similar hues!

These autumn colours are electric, especially when posited against grey roof tiles and trunks

A glimpse of the far side of Lower Hadlock Pond outside of Northeast Harbor does make you wonder how it all happens so quickly…

…you can see it again on Parkman Mountain in Acadia National Park.

The trees are beginning to rest…

…the grasses are sprouting rainbows from their bases…

…green is turning to gold.

Before it all fades to grey, it is time to bear witness to the rash of colours all around us!

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

George Eliot

The Gift(s) of the Magi

Posted on September 21, 2013 by pacienciapaciencia

Sunrise with silhouettes and magic lantern slides…

After much silence here on the blog, I promise to return, with intention and frequency, very soon! I am even buying a new computer that will surely reinspire my fingertips to transpose creative ideas and deep thoughts from my neurotic, swirling brain, to you, the reader.

In the meantime, here is a story quite apropos to my life at the moment, and maybe to yours. Sometimes, in moments, I have a hard time understanding why, sometimes, we choose to make this all so difficult. In those moments, I try to be more like Jim, and sit on the couch with my hands under my head, but most of the time, I am much more like Della.

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI

by O. Henry

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty- seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.

There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.

While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.

In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”

The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.

Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling–something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.

There was a pier-glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier-glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.

Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.

Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the airshaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.

So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.

On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.

Where she stopped the sign read: “Mne. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”

“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.

“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”

Down rippled the brown cascade.

“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised hand.

“Give it to me quick,” said Della.

Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.

She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation–as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value–the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.

When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends–a mammoth task.

Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.

“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do–oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty- seven cents?”

At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.

Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit for saying little silent prayer about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”

The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two–and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.

Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.

Della wriggled off the table and went for him.

“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again–you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say `Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice– what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”

“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.

“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”

Jim looked about the room curiously.

“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.

“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you–sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year–what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.

Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.

“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”

White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.

For there lay The Combs–the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jewelled rims–just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.

But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”

And them Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”

Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.

“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”

Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.

“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”

The magi, as you know, were wise men–wonderfully wise men–who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

Photodiary: Harbingers of a Maine Autumn…

Posted on August 27, 2013 by pacienciapaciencia

We have entered the very beginning of the waning season: the light, less gold, more cottony-white, as I heard it described yesterday, slants sharply across the horizon and through the branches of trees. The swamp maples are already changing to red, the leaves are beginning to bleach, the seed heads on flowers dessicated, brown, crackled like bark or the wizened hands of an old woman, the reeds in the ponds are tipped with gold, no longer green from end to end.

Last year, one of my first posts here was of photos of my new, tiny town on the coast of Maine. Last year, everything was new and my life to come here was full of unknowns. Now, a year later, this place still surprises me every day with its dynamic change, its eccentric personalities, its size, and its amazing beauty. I think I am beginning to know it better.