Two Old Wimmen go to see NORMA

My friend and I went to the movies to see Met @ The Movies first offering of the season NORMA by Bellini. My friend went to NYC sixty years ago to be an actress. She was an actress, too, and has terrific stories about performers like and then taught in city schools, because that's often the way "careers" in the Arts go--your chosen professional becomes a hobby, or you starve. She's verbal, sophisticated, and she Got Experience, as we were all instructed to do we young adults of the '60's.  She is, in the language of grand opera Tesoro mio (think that's right--except maybe in the feminine).  She's got first hand stories from those days, a few about actors of the calibre of Albert Finney, who she met back when he'd just played Tom Jones (!!!)   I'm just chuffed to know her, a lovely person in my town who also shares a love of opera. When she returned home to finish up her days--NYC is no place for the old unless they are also, very much, The Very Rich--there was mutual celebration when we discovered one another. 

Neither of us had ever seen NORMA before and were unfamiliar with the story, although we vaguely knew it was Druids v. Romans. We both love the operatic style "Bel Canto," which was brought back to the stage by great divas like Ponselle, Sutherland, and Callas.  Bel Canto means "beautiful singing" which really doesn't give you much information when the subject is opera. Lots of "too many notes" if you're like the Emperor in Amadeus, but let's face it, that's basically so clueless that only an Emperor could get away with saying such a thing and go blithely unchallenged.

If you know any Rossini, you get the drift of how Norma sounds, although I think Bellini is far more entrancing, with his long lyrical lines. My friend and I were just knocked over by both the singing and the production by Sir David McVicar, whose Druids looked like--well, Druids--in a dark forest with the monster stub of an dying oak decked in skulls and swords and shields as the lurking focal point. The singers were stellar, as we Met @ the Movies folk have come to expect. Joyce DiDonato and Sonya Radvanovsky sang with balance, craft, and beauty. Both women can act and handled their closeups well. The tenor who played the point of the love triangle, the super-male Roman commander who thinks he can discard wife#1 without consequence, was played by a charming--in his actual self--Joseph Calleja.  We noted that while he played the villain, he seemed determined, in his interview, to express his personal dislike for the behavior of  male Chauvanist pig he played. 

For a libretto crafted in 1831 in Italy, the story came amazingly close to being a feminist shout out. When the two women, one older and one younger and both priestesses, discover that they are both in love with the same man, they draw together instead of fighting one another. Of course, the older woman has to sacrifice herself for the "greater good" in the end, so we can't give it full marks on liberation, however, my friend was sufficiently amazed to burst out "that's how women should treat one another." 

We could barely get back on our feet when it was over, because we'd stayed where we were during the intermission, which was filled with another fascinating look backstage at workers and machinery at this grandest of all grand opera venues. All those hours later, I was bent like 97 years and grasping the handrail all the way down the stairs from our seating. 

~~Juliet Waldron

P.S.  And is it obligatory that all movie theaters (and Casinos) have those "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" carpets? 

http://amzn.to/24EUxiC  Nightingale ISBN:  B00D8MEL8E

The Fuller Brush Saga

Those Were The Days, 1970

I’ve brushed my hair with this model -nylon handle, hard nylon bristles—since the 50’s. Over the years, I’ve bought replacements from Fuller local distributors--in Connecticut, in Tennessee and later, in Pennsylvania. The last Old Reliable came from The Vermont Country Store catalog. This, however, should have given me a clue that the unthinkable which was about to happen. 

A few weeks ago, when I went to order a new brush from Vermont folks, I found that they were no longer pictured in the personal care section of their catalog. I called them—no dice. They had my old 520 Half Round Brush, but when I inquired further, I learned that this 520 ain't the same as the old one. Now the only available "Model 520" has a wooden handle and soft boar bristles.  That sort of thing won’t even go through my hair. I may be old, but I still have hair. 

 L

To clean a hair brush it must be soaked in a hot soapy solution and then combed out, rinsed and sun dried. The old time boar bristles could stand up to such treatment, but the new cheap-o ones go from soft to softer—my balding husband has one of the wood + bristle versions, so I know. Moreover, you shouldn't soak wood. If you do, results will be dire. 

So now the search begins--either for Old Faithful--which may be waiting for me in a dusty warehouse somewhere, or in the remainder stock of some disgruntled Fuller Brush distributor I've yet to locate. I hope to get lucky and find one, but the chances, even with the 'net, are slim.

I've learned in my searches that Fuller has been sold, or more like "sold out." The industrious distributors, some of whom spent their whole lives working for the company, have been shucked off without the recompense they were originally offered.  Now they are just another set of victims of our steal your way to the top culture.

Sorry to digress into an oldster's gloom-and-doom rant about nowadays, but, damn, I'll sure miss having a good hairbrush. The current one is now beginning to lose bristles, and I dread the day when it finally has to be retired for good and all.



~Juliet Waldron

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Mozart's Wife
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Genesee
Roan Rose
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Fly Away Snow Goose, a story set partly in the Canadian Residential Indian Schools, is a December 2017 release from Books We Love, Canadian Brides 

  

Untrainable

The old people stand in the kitchen, arms around one another, side by side, and regard the tiger cat. He sits erect, tail neatly curled around his tiger legs. They stand on the yellow linoleum beside the fridge. The cat is at rest now, but he has been swirling. and, with a nasal meow, asking for something which remains undefined. 

The old people are stymied.

The cat’s lamp eyes have exclamation points standing at attention in the center of each round green pupil. His eyes are a laser, lightly glazed with disdain for the poor mental capacity of the old people.

The woman addresses him.

 “We, your self-assigned caretakers and healthcare providers, continue, every day, to strive to serve you better. How may we help you today?”

“Yeah, cat. What do you want?” The man, annoyed because both treats and a lick of cream have been rejected, gets straight to the point.

The cat continues to stare. He’s unimpressed by monkey noises, all those different vocalizations they make.

He would like to see some action. As usual, Meow #24, though clearly enunciated, means nothing to them. Even after all these years.

Sourly, the cat thinks that the human species is, very nearly, untrainable.

Juliet Waldron

http://www.julietwaldron.com

Enter the Smartphone

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Okay! Here I am, like Constanze Mozart, making an embarassing confession. I must be one among the last people in the US to switch to a smartphone. On a trip to Atlanta to see a stellar grand-girl graduate High School, I was overwhelmed by family, both kids and grandkids, demanding that I get a "better" phone. So—I caved at last, regaled with all the storied delights that awaited me once I owned such a device.

I returned home with said smartphone tucked inside a pair of socks. We had been too busy with visiting back and forth from one side of Atlanta to the other and hanging out, or attending various graduation festivities to go searching for a case through the always mind-boggling traffic.   I'd figured this would be a good time to make the big change, as there  I’d have two sons, two DILs and a grand girl to instruct me in at least some of the Major Arcana.

I was once considered a tech savvy person, but those days are loooong gone. There’s a certain Luddite pride in still using a genuine IBM keyboard from the 80’s, hitched to 2004's computer. It is, however, getting to be more difficult to lag behind than to “get with the program,” as software (and hardware too) endlessly morph. IMHO, (as I learned to say on AIM) I suspect that all the “updating” is simply an excuse to wring more $$ from us hapless consumers. 

One of my friends has a terrific notion about a kind heart software firm (!) who would build MS65, a program guaranteed to run without chronic episodes of illogic/insanity (could I perhaps be alluding to MS 10??) and not to change or alter in any way for a decade. That’s about the right amount of time for many of us less sophisticated cotton-tops to learn new software.

I’m under no illusions, though, I’ll soon be scrapped and dissembled for the metal value of my components, along with my beloved Wang PC which still crouches sadly in the back of a closet.  Stability is not what software developers are into these days—the more things fail to work properly, I guess, the better it is for IT, or something. Anyway, while I’m griping, what’s with the penchant for hiding the most commonly used operations three or four—or five--pull downs deep? Is it so we have to humiliate ourselves and buy the latest copy of “…For Dummies”? And what’s with that “Search” that leads you into Alice in Wonderland conversations with "Cortana." (And, hell, I'm not fooled. It's just that g-d paperclip tarted up and back in our faces again.   Couldn’t "search" have just searched, as the word indicates that it does?

This morning, I awoke to the sound of chimes—my new phone, of course. I’d set the alarm, hitched it to the wall socket and left it wakeful. Now, I leapt out of bed, and attempted to turn the alarm off without first putting on my glasses. Next thing I knew, I’d taken four blurry pictures of myself--nothing you want to keep, especially those taken first thing in the morning. It took a few minutes before I managed to figure out how to put the camera back to sleep and delete the alarm. 

How did I, whose first and foremost mental image of “phone” remains the graceful black candlestick apparatus in my grandparent’s living room, enter a world where a small slim box in my hand can deposit checks, take pictures, tell time, and connect me to the internet and thence conduct me into untold wonders of consumption?  

~~Juliet Waldron, who just keeps getting older...

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Husband in Kitchen

Possum sez: 

Every wife/working woman knows that after years of having her husband at work all day, when he retires, things change around the house.  Mine retired and flopped around aimlessly for several years before hitting on something to do with all this time on his hands. I suggested that there were things he could do around here which would be helpful—instead of just micro-managing me, reading The Economist, and playing solitaire. Eventually, he took something up.

Typically—at least, I think it’s typical—the tasks he decided he’d like to take over were also the ones I most enjoyed—shopping and cooking. Somehow, women are always left with the scrubbing, mopping, vacuuming, and cleaning of bathrooms, the least favorite parts of the routine. We must have it written on our foreheads, or on some stone tablet s somewhere:  “Woman, Thou Shalt Clean Toilets and Vacuum Cat Hair off the furniture to the End of thy Days.”

Anyhow, at last he took up doing something, so these are now mostly off my to-do list. I need to mention that he’s not much of a yardwork or DIY guy either. Not likely to launch into painting, or even mowing when it’s the season for that. I do half the mowing and at least half of the snow shoveling, so I’m standing by my man on those fronts, but I sometimes wish he had more of a bent for DIY. We’ve got a carpet in the unfinished basement that could probably qualify as a superfund site, but, I digress.

He’s been “learning shopping.” This entails frequent calls from the supermarket to ask me what the hell my handwriting says, or what the hell is that and where the hell can that weird-ass ingredient be found? There’s a smallish local supermarket that we’ve patronized for the last 30 years, so I pretty much have the place memorized.

There are pitfalls, however. The other day he returned with two sacks of yellow onions because they were a to-fer. He’s begun cooking Indian food—and in all fairness making delicious dinners, tasty, spicy vindaloos and curries -- so we do use a lot of onions in the course of making masalas of various flavors, but I didn’t see how we were ever going to use two sacks. After all, there are only two of us! So they sat on the counter, withering, until this snowy weekend I thought of a frugal solution: onion soup. Hating to throw anything away like a good Yankee, I suggested he chop them up. He, chef-like, has been working on his knife handling skills.

He chopped meticulously and produced an entire mixing bowl filled to the top with onions. Then with butter, salt, the same technique I’m learning as we do that “Indian Cooking” together, I slowly stirred them over medium/high for a very long time, while they cooked down and down and down and finally changed color. Next came the chicken stock, added a little at a time, all the while cooking and cooking, reducing and reducing, and at the end, a LOT of Parmesan, quickly whisked in.  It took us amateur cooks about three hours, but eventually we’d produced about six bowls of very tasty onion soup.

I don’t think either of us are going to be ready for Chopped any time soon.

  ~~Juliet Waldron

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Sleeping with a Cat (When you’re stiffer than you should be at your age, for goodness sake!)

One of the great blisses of old age is the nap—the bumper sticker with sleeping cat which says “There’s a nap for that” just about sums things up for me. Even when I was small, I don’t think I ever did too much fussing about the approach of naptime.  For me, tucked away on a smooth sheet in a room with a tree outside the window was as good as it got, in this strange new world into which I’d so recently been dropped.  Naps were a time of quiet rumination, of drifting away into Asperger’s heaven, without facing unsettling and unpredictable human interactions. 

Today, after an illuminating session of senior yoga with Kate, I arrived home relaxed, despite having had a spat with sig other before I’d gone to the class. Those spats are a feature of married life, or maybe just, this married life, but I am always left feeling as distressed as sig other is. Anyway, when I arrive in such a state  for Yoga, I think the best thing I can do is put it all behind me and JUST DO THE POSES.

“I love Yoga” our instructor announces with a blissed out smile.  It’s an invitation to join in her game. I-- and the other attendees--we’re no longer  “seniors” in any of our gym classes. We are all treated by the instructors as a crowd of very stiff, worn-out, yet tight-wrapped of kindergarten kids. This shiny faced instructor thinks that besides stretching, we also need to remember how to play again. We also need practice at smiling at the others with whom we share our circle.

Even after years of life, it’s hard to look others in the face and remember their names.  I continue to fall down at the task, even while calling myself “lazy” and “rude” and other worse things. It’s either “old” or “woman” that causes this “memory” failure—if that’s really what it is, and not some egregious character flaw. I am now working on the association thing: “Amy with the great sneakers” is also pretty and short, definitely a Little Woman.

 I can do the smiling part. Most people in this Yoga class are like me, so that’s easy, and a nice first step toward sociability.

Then, having stretched sufficiently--and sometimes, yes even in senior yoga it can happen, over stretched--you’re home, lunched on too much curry, rice and Brussels’ sprouts. Next, you are weary, heading upstairs for that retired folks’ mid-day lie down.  

Outside the window, breezy clouds flip the switch on and off as they pass. You reach your sleeping spot, but there atop the bed, head comfortably upon your pillow, is a twelve (at least) pound cat. You are going to have to readjust your plans for collapse, but you are ready because sometimes the cat switches things up like this—you have developed a strategy.  The knee pillow goes under the head, while you lie flat on your back with a prop in the “small”, catawampus, so you’ll fit, all because, after all, there has to be a good-sized sleeping rectangle for the cat.




~~Juliet Waldron

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A Quilt, An Heiress, and A Spy

                          http://amzn.to/1sUSjOH Angel’s Flight  ISBN: B0098CSH5Q

Set in the Hudson Valley during the Revolutionary War, it's roughly 100 years since New Amsterdam became New York, but the life styles and folkways of the original Dutch settlers still lingered in the little valleys upstate.  In the early 19th Century, Washington Irving would make famous his quaint, winking tales of the Hudson Valley Dutch, such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.

Where he saw humor, I saw a marvelous starting place for a historical romance, among these hard-working Americans With a Difference, people who did not live entirely in accordance with the more familiar English tradition--some, my ancestors.

"Angel's Flight" tells a story with many threads, the mingling by marriage of the Dutch and English and the terrors and hardships of our first Civil War, where friends and families found themselves violently thrust onto opposite sides. There is also romance--Jack, with his multiple personas, is soon unmasked as a spy and a formidable soldier. His world, however, will be "turned upside down" by passion for a fair rebel. 

The Blue Bird Quilt is a hymn to quilters everywhere. Angelica, the heroine, hunted by men and events through the ruins of her own once comfortable, New York world, tries to keep her sanity by collecting pieces while even escaping one peril after another on the road up the river. She will, with only her needle, return a world ripped apart by hatred to a new, harmonious and beautiful whole.

                                        See this talented quilter at:  
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Angelica hated it when Tories made fun of General Washington, a gentleman whom she’d been honored to meet. George Washington was the noblest—and absolutely the tallest—person she’d ever met. He had looked invincible seated on his steel gray stallion. With grave civility, he’d doffed his hat to her as he’d ridden past, accompanied by two smartly uniformed aides de camp.

“I did not intend to mock your general, miss. I think he is doing the best a leader can, without supplies or any trained soldiers. There are famous precedents in military history for his strategy, you know. Fabius was a Roman general who saved the lives of his men and finally wore his enemies out by running away. However, while your modern Fabius runs, the civilians of America are in terrible danger.”

“I know all about Fabius,” Angelica replied haughtily.

Jack’s response was to chuckle and shake his fair head, apparently amused by the dogged way she kept up her argument.

“You should read The Farmer Refuted.” She cited a patriotic pamphlet that had impressed her Uncle Jacob. “The author had a wonderful grasp of both Judge Blackstone’s work and the famous economic philosopher, Mr. Postlethwayte—”

“Good Lord, miss!” Jack burst out laughing. “By God, Armistead is right about one thing. This is a most amazing country! I’ve never, ever, had the names—much less the virtues—of either dry-as-dust scholar brought up to me by a beautiful woman before.”

Angelica pulled her arm away from the pleasant resting place it had been enjoying in the warm crook of his. “And why shouldn’t a woman take interest in the fate of her country?”

“I would never say that,” Jack replied, cheerfully capturing her hand again. He attempted to bow an apology over it, but she pulled away. “Peace, however, is the proper preoccupation of all womankind, for peace is necessary for the nurturing of children.”

“And, therefore, war is the proper interest of mankind? The cruel and pointless sacrifice of our sons as—as a sort of blood sport?”

“By God! You are indeed a philosopher!” Swiftly, he captured her hand once

more. “I thought Dutch women were like their German cousins—interested in little but babies, church, and cooking, and here you stand, arguing like a lawyer--a good one.”


Angel's Flight--adventure and romance in the American Revolution, Hudson Valley theater

~Juliet Waldron

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The Meek Shall Inherit...

So, I looked into the natural history of my marsupial buddies today, and here’s what I found.

Once upon a time, 70 million years ago or thereabouts, these little guys emerged from the Cretaceous North American underbrush. The proto-possums are called Peradectids, at least, that’s the latest research from the University of Florida and those sooooooutherners  should know a thing or two about possums, after all. They were sharing their territory with the dinosaurs, so things were probably pretty tough, but then, just 5 million years or so later—the mere blink of an eye in geologic time—that famous or infamous asteroid struck, putting a sudden, dramatic end to the long reign of dino domination. Possums somehow survived.

What is more, they used the new space they’d acquired, after emerging from various fallout shelters—probably the gigantic ribcages of their now deceased neighbors—and, in a fit of exuberance, split into several families. Eating insects, fruit and eggs and other people’s leftovers, they trudged down Mexico way and over the land bridge into South America, where they continued to evolve. At this time, South America, Antarctica and Australia were still cuddled up together on a big comfy couch of floating basalt, and so from here, the proto-marsupials marched on to find new homes.

The three continents finally parted company and drifted away from one another. Eventually isolated in Australia, the marsupial line would proliferate into many strange and wonderful shapes. Sadly, most of these exotic critters, are now extinct or on their way out, like the legendary Tasmanian Devil, who is really—cartoon aside—quite a fetching little beast.   

Meanwhile, in North America, all the possums went extinct during a time when North and South America were no longer connected. Therefore, for an epoch or two, North America was deprived of this a vital member of Nature’s clean-up crew.   Fortunately, for fans, like me, a short three million years ago, the land bridge between North and South America rose again—or the ocean receded, locked up in the polar ice caps or whatever—and possums returned to their ancient point of origin once again.

Now, while you are laughing at possum—squashed by the side of road—no doubt intentionally driven over by some bully of an ape with delusions of grandeur because he sits in a machine with an internal combustion engine—well, think again! The “dawn of man” --and guess what, guys? There wouldn’t have been any “dawn” at all without woman, too—this “dawn” began a mere 3 million years ago, about the time possum was returning from his very successful South American road trip.

Now, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit—true proto-primates came on the scene some 55 million years ago—but essentially, a possum is, was and has been, a possum. You’d recognize a Peradectid as a possum, but you sure as heck wouldn’t recognize that little shrew thing with the forward facing eyes hanging in a tree as a member of your high-falutin' family.

There’s something to be said for plain and simple, for humility, for not making a fuss and aggrandizing oneself--that, and for a body plan which allowed possum to survive 70 million years -- plus that legendary asteroid that took down the grandest, over-the-top animal family our planet has ever given birth to. It has been said that "the meek shall inherit the earth" and perhaps they will--which is one of the reasons why I admire this mundane, gentle creature. 

Cute as a boxful of possums

--Juliet Waldron

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A restrained country romance about Post Civil War Pennsylvania--a young, too pretty German girl comes to America to the house of her well-married big sister and learns a few things about love, life and religion.

George Washington

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The story of Alexander Hamilton & of his wife, Elizabeth Schuyler

I happened into the world on George Washington’s birthday. For many years I took some pride from sharing the day with the great man. After all, back in the ‘50’s it was still celebrated on the day on which it fell, which meant that I always had my birthday off from school. Pretty sweet—even if February in upstate NY meant we were buried in snow. 

Washington and Blue Skin

It was fun to have a party on a school holiday. Friends came to sledding parties and for snow-fort-buildings, but, by the time I was eight or nine, costume parties were my favorite.   To have a costume party in the dead of winter was a little outre—remember, this is the ‘50’s in farm country—but everyone got into the spirit, even if it just meant digging out last autumn’s Halloween costume again.

Father of Our Country. Think about what it means. It’s pretty heavy stuff to lay on anybody who used to put his pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. Still, when you take a look at his track record here’s what you find:

“Washington was Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army upon whose victory the thirteen colonies depended to secure their separate and equal station among the powers of the earth. In the summer of 1787, he presided over America's Constitutional Convention. His presence lent decisive significance to the document drafted there, which continues in force in the twenty-first century as the oldest written constitution in the world. From 1789-1796, he held the highest office in the land as the first president of the United States of America under this constitution.”  

 * The Claremont Institute via PBS website

More than that, Washington was “the man who would not be King.” Unlike every other Revolution since, our military hero didn’t become a dictator imperfectly hidden beneath a variety of pious designations as did so many others:  Augustus Caesar, Hitler, Napoleon, Kim Il-sung, Stalin, Oliver Cromwell and Mao Zedong. After our American Revolutionary War was over, he quietly went home, to tend to his plantation. Later, when his two terms as president were completed, he went home once again. 

George Washington was truly the “Cincinnatus” his contemporaries named him. Like that legendary Roman farmer, he left plowing his fields to assume leadership of his country in a time of war; afterward, he went home again. Like the title of historian James Flexner’s biography, George Washington was The Indispensable Man, a popular figure who did not use his overwhelming personal popularity to grab the reins of the new nation and declare himself Emperor, or whatever.

Moreover, Washington did not use his office to enrich himself. As one who'd sat through a sweltering summer in Philadelphia while the Constitution itself had been hammered out, he not only knew what it said, no doubt line by line, but he respected it, too, and intended that it should continue into the future, to serve the cause of liberty and justice for all mankind.

I'll close with two powerful, pertinent quotes by America's great founding father: 

"Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism."

"If the freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter." 

~~Juliet Waldron

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The Rat and I

Mom and her rescue dogs, Barbados, 1962

Another memory, this one from the West Indies, back in the early sixties. Mom and I lived in an apartment in Bridgetown, Barbados, one that was near the race track. Who knows what it’s like now? In those days, this was a quiet pleasant residential area. We shared the house with the owners, a pair of elderly British ladies who lived beneath us on the first floor. All sorts of stories could be told about events that took place in this house, but one of the third-world variety recently came back to me.

Our kitchen was down a flight of stairs, an add-on affair at the back of the house. Outside the door, as was common, was a step over a gutter. Gutters ran along the sides of the streets everywhere and were to be avoided. When someone drained gray water, from a sink or whatever, it went down the gutter, right out in the open. You saw whether someone had washed their dishes, or their hair, or whatever and bits and pieces traveled along the gutter as well—bits of food etc. It was a common sight—and smell--here, but of a kind that I, as a middle class American kid, was not accustomed to.   There were chickens—they belonged to someone who lived along the street—wandering wherever they wished, looking for bugs and odds and ends, like the bits of garbage that ended in the dish water.

Island Inn, Barbados, 1959

Other critters found food there as well. Rats were common, especially outside at night, but I didn’t expect to see them inside the kitchen, which was where I met this one. I’m going to assign a sex and call it he, though I don’t know. He was quite tall and large, and seemed especially so because he was standing on his hind-legs, getting ready to leap up onto the table just as I came down the stairs.

The rat spun around and stared at me. I stood on the last step and stared back.  It was one of those frozen moments, a perfect picture left behind. He was rather pretty, actually, athletic, sinewy, and glossy brown. His beady eyes were bright, and not particularly anxious.  He’d apparently come in through a broken screen on the kitchen door; his home was probably beneath the gutter step just outside. We were neighbors, it seemed, although uneasy ones. Who knew how many times he'd come in that way? Fortunately, we kept all our dry goods and things like bread shut away in a cupboard.

I could almost hear him thinking about what to do next; I certainly was. When I reached around the corner to grab a broom—the only weapon within reach—he shot away through the ragged screen and vanished beneath the step.

~~Juliet Waldron 

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Constanze tells all.

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She served Anne Neville and loved her husband, Richard.

The Moon and I

It’s hard to recreate a time when there were no words, only feelings.

Moon~~Tree~~Clouds.

These are the first things I remember. Crib slats casting black shadows on a summer smooth sheet. White face through spreading branches. Next, a perfect silver disc lending its sheen to arching branches. The sugar maple that grew behind Grandparents house was enormous. 

Perhaps, long ago, it had been brought west to Ohio by a homesick Yankee.

Of course, I knew nothing of that. All I knew was that the spreading maple was good to see, the harmony of black and white, the leafy patterns, a vision which sounded in my head like a clear note. I was here, entirely secure. Outside the broad leaves with their sharpened edges were barely moving against a velvet sky. Moon face gazed down serene; a cloud edged in rainbow and silver passes.

No wonder I am who I am.

Ghosts of Abbott Road, Ellington, CT

In the next room, women’s voices. They were the ones who cared for me, two young, one old, getting ready for bed next door in the spacious bathroom, big enough to accommodate one woman at the dressing table mirror, a bather in the claw foot tub, one at the sink running water--or perhaps even seated --the “watercloset” was one of the first improvements my Grandfather had made after purchasing this house. He had called his home “a girl’s dorm” for years, and now here I came, the newest addition, another little female--the one now wondering in the room full of moonlight.

Two Juliets, 1945

Sleep was impossible bathed in silver, danced over by mutable leaf shadow. There was nothing frustrating or lonely about it. I didn’t need to cry and call them to me, even though I knew they would come. After all, the women were happy. I was fed and dry and comfortable.

Besides, outside my window was the venerable breathing tree and a full moon.  

~~

Juliet Waldron

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http://amzn.to/1YQziX0  A Master Passion   ISBN: 1771456744

Happy Birthday, Alexander Hamilton!