Stranger in a Familiar Land

Of course High Valley is familiar. My first stay was a two week stint at High Valley's summer camp at age eleven. I was warned then to “stay away from Olga’s son.” (My future husband) “He snaps people’s butts with towels.” When I was kicked out of school at sixteen, my brother suggested: “Send her to Olga. Olga will find her something to do.” So for two years I served a sort of tweeny maid at High Valley School. Later, married to the son and heir, I worked for a time as a cook and a drama teacher. My kids attended nursery school here. And when the school closed, I started The Center at High Valley, which I ran as a sort of back burner operation, always careful to defer to my mother-in-law’s sovereignty and always able to retreat to our house a mile away on the other side of the hill.

Now, as those of you who follow this blog might know, we have moved to High Valley to an upstairs apartment—which I had painted in many intense colors after years of living with white walls. It is a rabbit warren of an apartment where people get lost and where tall people look too big in the narrow hall. (My husband and I are both short). Our bedroom—two walls raspberry, two a rich green to match an old oriental carpet—is the one my husband’s parents shared. It has a commanding view of all there is to enjoy—and tend!

All my adult life, I have kept to an unvaried schedule: write in the morning, work at whatever the job I had in the afternoons and evenings. I raised kids, kept a comfortable house, without paying much attention to detail or dust, and enjoyed an undemanding yard surrounded by the friendly trees of a deep wood. Now that whole part of our life is past. Though our apartment is small and will be easy to keep, we have many other spaces to maintain for the Center, not to mention lawns and endless overgrown gardens.

And, for the first time in twenty years, I am not working on The Maeve Chronicles. (They are complete. Red-Robed Priestess is coming out in November.)

I have no schedule—at least not yet. I wander here and there, tugged by this or that task. Though I still write and have a counseling practice, I am feeling more and more like an arch-housewife and inept groundskeeper. Sometimes I long to go home to my old house and life, and yes, sometime I weep. More often, I feel tickled. I am enjoying being a stranger to myself, growing willy nilly into a new life. I like that every day is different and that the weather plays such a big role. It’s dry, so today is the day to mow. It’s cool and damp in the morning, time to weed. It’s raining…rest!!!

I will close this post with a recent poem:

Reluctant Gardener

Overwhelmed by weeds
besieged by poison ivy
overrun with grass

I weed-whack away at a bit
of lost garden and give
it a bad haircut.

I must plant something here,
something that will spread
and take care of itself.

Oh the choices! A low yellow bloom
whose name I forget, whose leaves
turn red in the fall.

Butterfly weed, iridescent orange,
and a butterfly bush that promises
to grow and grow, adding butterflies

to its blossoms. How tenderly I mulch them
as instructed: cardboard, dirt, hay,
how anxiously I water them,

how I plan to seek more plants
today, ground cover, dark red daisies,
lavender. Now the garden

is becoming mine, has called me
to itself through my ineptitude
and so we will grow each other.

PS: I don't seem to be able to comment on this blogpost anymore. Maeve has something to say. Here goes:

"I still exist and have a voice, even though my Chronicles are complete. My friend, Tim Dillinger, and I have plans for me to take back this blog at some point soon. Though she is not writing my story, Eliz is still performing portions of it live (and perhaps livestreamed). Her next performance is at the Barn Theatre at High Valley to celebrate my Feast Day Friday, July 22nd. Details on how to tune to livestreaming in will be posted on the blog!"

Out of the Closet

Note: We are in the process of getting ready to move from our home of twenty-six years to an apartment at High Valley. I am keeping a journal of the process. Below is an entry.

I finally open a dreaded closet, the one in my office (that used to be part of the attic). I know there are boxes of Christmas ornaments there and probably manuscripts, but my long ignorant bliss of rest of the contents is ending.

I pull out a box with a tarnished silver tray and another also tarnished tray with a glass cover (for smelly cheese?) and six small knives. Unused wedding gifts? What to do with them now? Polish them up and give them away? Add them to High Valley’s eclectic communal stash of cookware and plates?

There is a more poignant box presided over by Glumph (a stuffed lion who was hard for a three-year old to haul around; the name denotes the effort) and Elsa (of later vintage, named, of course, for the lioness in Born Free). Their already-worn fur now sports embedded mouse droppings. Chewed insulation lies in clumps, dry dirty snow that will never melt to any spring. And in the rest of the box: all my writings from just before college till just after as well as letters from my college teacher and mentor who took lavish epistolary care of me long after I was his student.

So I sit and read and sift, marveling at all the spiral notebooks filled with the ink of cartridge pens and the academic papers painstakingly typed on onion skin paper with handwritten corrections. I made far more attempts at writing fiction than I remember. I am impressed with some of my papers and exams. Such an unedited trove, one I would like to discover after my own death, though my progeny may not feel the same way.

Now I compose on the computer. I have lots of word files, but I weed through them, every now and then, pressing the delete key with a fair amount of ruthlessness. I do write and receive a lot of email (most of which I don’t save), but I think I wrote more letters, certainly longer ones, and I received wonderfully long, detailed letters in return.

I have lived long enough to see the passing of an age.

What will be in the closets of the digital age? Will there be no more steamer trunks of journals? (I have one of those, too, crammed with all the journals I wrote till my journal became electronic five years ago.)

I find I like typing with two fingers and having my words so easy to store and transport. I don’t like the mouse shit (or the pee on some of the pages) or the dust of the ages in the boxes. I don’t like the space all my old writings require. But I do like the thrill of discovery, of a largely forgotten life revealed. I felt the same way when we found my father’s correspondence with his father. I knew my father had been hostile toward my ambition to write, but until we found the letters, I never knew his father had said the same awful things to him, almost word for word. (Therein lies another post).

Will going through someone’s computer files or Blackberry yield the same excitement or poignancy?

I am going to have to kiss Glumph and Elsa goodbye (carefully so as not to ingest the droppings). I will probably keep only a small sample of handwritten drafts of published work. But I will keep the term papers and the early unpublished strivings in a file box from Staples. Enough is revealed in these that the journals, as I’ve always intended, can burn.