sewing box

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After posting about the Fauchon coffee tins, I got to thinking about this sewing tin I inherited from my mom.

As a teenager, if I needed to replace a button or repair a hem, I'd go into my parents' cool second floor bedroom to find needle and thread. Shaded by an old maple tree on our Michigan town street, the chair by the window where Mom did her mending was the repository for the sewing tin, or else the floor right next to it. I'd lift the loose lid and dig for the right color thread and a needle from her soft round red pincushion. My eyes were good then, and I could thread the needle with ease. Mom taught me to double the thread and knot the end with a lick and a twist.



When we eight children cleaned out our parents' big three-storey house and judiciously distributed their belongings, the dining table was spread with a miscellany of items that had little or no monetary value, and we each took what was of personal value. What was left got tossed. By then, I was sick and tired of STUFF after spending weeks sorting and digging through 50+ years of accumulation, and I was disinterested in the dining table assortment. But Don, bless him, nabbed a few pieces he thought were cool. As time marches on, I am more and more appreciative of what he took for me that day. Every passing year I turn more often to my parents for guidance and connection, for what it means to be human in this world.



Any number of people would have tossed this tin, rusted and misshapen as it was, and impossible to get the lid on tight.

Maybe it originally came filled with cookies - a gift to my mother, or grandmother. Did Grandma Olive empty cookie crumbs, wipe it out and turn it into a sewing tin, and then Mom took it from her New Jersey house when Grandma died in 1960? Had Mom as a girl gone to her mother Olive's sunny bedroom overlooking the garden by the New York Bay and dug for thread and a needle, or a button?



And did she too find comfort?

I keep my sewing tin on the floor under my dresser, or on the sewing machine in the den. I've seen it this week with new eyes and noticed for the first time that Degas' ballerinas at the bar would need the same color thread to repair their tutus as Bonheur's horse rider's jacket: blue ice.

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John James Audubon

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John James Audubon

April 26, 1785-January 27, 1851

Birds. How exasperating they are! Even when I lift my camera to shoot them through the window, they scatter. Light, vulnerable and deft, they hide in the branches until the frightening woman with the black box vanishes. They must think my camera shoots bullets instead of photographs.

I told you about my single attempt to photograph birds in the meadow in winter. None appeared though I sat for an hour and a half and froze my tush, never to embark out again this season.

Not so Mr. Audubon. From the time he was a baby he felt an intimacy with birds bordering on frenzy. He spent most of his life chronicling them, often in harrowing conditions. (See field notes from his journals, below.)

The portrait, above (now where Sasha and Malia can see it daily on the west wall of the Red Room in the White House), of Audubon by John Syme shows him as he must have looked in the years 1820-1824 when he explored Mississippi, Alabama and Florida in the start of his attempt to paint all the birds of North America. One of the treasured books I inherited from my parents is Audubon's Birds of America, the greatest picture book of all time. It has 435 watercolor plates of birds painted by John, well my edition has photographs of the plates. In all, the field work and paintings took 14 years to complete for the book. Yes, the gun there means he shot birds in order to draw them. At the time of the painting of this portrait in Edinburgh by the Scottish Syme, Audubon was in the British Isles looking for a publisher for the book.

mourning doves

He intended to include paintings of eggs in his book, but they didn't make it into the final copy. (In my 1966 edition, Marshall B. Davidson included Audubon's eggs in his Introduction.) Eggs are more docile subjects, no need to shoot them. But at first glance at his drawings at the right I thought the pen scratches under them were feet!

The book has 435 hand-colored prints of over 700 North American bird species. He tried unsuccessfully to get it published in the U.S. Eventually in England it cost more than $100,000 at the time to print (over $2 million in today's money). Copper plates had to be carved, and the original edition was hand tinted and printed with the aquatint process.

cardinals

It seemed to us as if we were approaching the end of the world. The country was perfectly flat, and, so far as we could survey it, presented the same wild and scraggy aspect. . . We now and then passed through muddy pools, which reached the saddle-girths of our horses.

- from Audubon and His Journals, chapter "Spring Garden"

scrub (or Florida jay), Stellar's jay, yellow-billed magpie, Clark's nutcracker

In the morning when I arose, the country was still covered in thick fogs, so that although I could hear the plain notes of birds on shore, not an object could I see beyond the bowsprit, and the air was as close and sultry as the previous evening.

- from the chapter St. John's River, Audubon and His Journals

purple finches

The National Audubon Society was of course named after John James Audubon.

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winter solstice

On this shortest day of the year, we look out through the front window, between peeling porch posts, over the humble spirea's snowflake blossoms, and on to the neighbor's spruces across the road. I love the farm in all the seasons, but winter is the best, and this day must be the bestest as it's the winter-i-est of them all.

Inside, on the sofa in front of the window, oh dear, the fabric is starting to fray on the edges. I can never replace this fabric. Even if I could afford it, I doubt I could find anything like it. Horsemen trot along in a perpetually fruited orchard while farmhands pick pears. Quite fitting for the farm. (There's another image with detail, below.)

Some women meet here on the sofa too, though you can't see them. The couch belonged to Grandma Olive, a woman unknown to me except in stories and objects that traveled many miles and decades to get here. She was like Martha Stewart, with the same impeccable standards for design and beauty, and also lacking a bit in warmth. She died when I was four. My mom's dad (stepdad actually, her dad was far away, but her stepdad adopted her) remarried another woman after Olive died. We called her "Aunt Edith" - a wealthy, distant woman who is also represented on this sofa in the cushion she needlepointed with a daffodil. Edith didn't have children of her own (though she had one stillborn), and my memories of her are chilly and sharp. I don't have much to judge Olive and Edith with, except stories filtered through my family and a few memories of feeling inferior to rich relations. So why do I treasure their objects? These cushions are stuffed with down feathers, so soft you have to fluff them after sitting. Every time I do that I see Edith's chauffeur fluffing them when he came in before breakfast to ask when she needed the car. I'm still that wide-eyed preacher's child in a corner taking it all in, but no longer wishing for a life not meant for me. Years have changed the tools I use for measuring and observing. I know my own sharp edges that need softening, and I see how people's life choices are sometimes made out of pain. Olive was divorced young, she struggled with a temper, and when we packed up Mom's house I found tender letters she wrote to Mom lamenting her own failures as a mother and grandma. Also I can see how Edith's inability to have children might have turned her toward travel and material things for meaning. Even so, there is life in the stitches she made.

Now I lie back on the sofa while I meet Lesley on the phone, in the laps of Olive, Edith, and my mom - and feel all of us warm and soft.

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Today's Christmas decoration:

These Matroyshka stacking dolls observe from the piano, behind Grandma Olive's sofa.

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Paradise, and Hell: lost

With head, hands, wings or feet, pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.

. . . Hail horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

John Milton was born 400 years ago today. When Milton began writing Paradise Lost in 1658 at age 50, he had been blind four years. Then for the next five years he recited the entire work to a series of assistants who wrote it down for 40 minutes every morning. Apparently he became quite annoyed if they were late. "Milton was said to have grumbled around the house, 'I want to be milked. I want to be milked.'" (Read or hear more surprising facts about Milton in National Public Radio's little piece played Sunday.)

I never read Paradise Lost, or any other Milton, but as a kid I looked through my dad's oversized 1865 copy of the book again and again, at the illustrations of Gustave Doré shown here. (Another book I got, lucky me.) Embedded in my brain are pen drawings of Lucifer - Prince of Heaven - falling from grace (example above), and of Adam and Eve being cast out of Paradise (example below). I remember feeling awed by the beauty and depth of the drawings while at the same time being stumped that God would - or could - be threatened by anyone and have to cast them out. Yet the power of the drawings pointed at the power of God, and somewhere in those batlike wings of Lucifer and in the soft vulnerability of Eve, the story did its job. I was a very obedient girl.

Some natural tears they dropt, but wiped them soon.

Hell lost

If you are interested and have time, there was a related (in my mind) story that was also on NPR earlier, on Ira Glass's "This American Life," about Carlton Pearson, pentecostal pastor of 5,000 who fell from grace when he declared that God told him there is no Hell. When he began preaching that new theology, he was of course declared a heretic by the likes of Oral Roberts, Billy Graham and the whole evangelical community, and his congregation dwindled to 200. Makes me wonder which is more costly: Loss of Paradise, or loss of Hell?

That to the highth of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

x o x o x o x o x o x
Today's ornaments:

Peter just arrived back from his band's cruise ship gig in the Caribbean, bringing these stunning etched gourd ornaments - a pair of owls for me, a hummingbird for Don - crafted by an artisan in Bonaire, a Dutch island colony still quite untouched. They reminded Pete of the gourds his dad grows on the farm. It's time to do some etching!

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non-toxic wastebaskets

Eee gads, we've been steeping in the toxic waste of the mortgage-backed securities mess - and bailout, which didn't pass in the first round, then passed in the second after some changes. We generous taxpayers came through for our poor, suffering corporate dimbulbs. I hope it will be a better move than many of us feared and will help settle the markets down. (Whispering now . . .) Hey, if anyone sounds as though they understand this mess, don't believe 'em. As Don's economics professor said, no one really knows what affects markets and how to fix them. But don't tell anyone, this is just for you, because I know you can handle the ambiguity and not get freaked out knowing no one really knows what will happen.

Anyway, all that waste presents a good opportunity to show you my little wastebasket collection.

This one is in l'atelier. I picked it up at a yard sale.




This one is very old, and sort of falling apart. I think I bought it at a flea market, for the guest room. If you come for a visit, please don't throw anything into it, I think it would disintegrate. I see it as a sort of faux wastebasket, a wastebasket wannabe, a piece of art posing as a wastebasket. I should probably make a little sign to lean on it: PLEASE DON'T PUT ANYTHING IN ME. You can just throw your kleenex in the sturdy plastic bathroom wastebasket (which I'm not showing off here, as you see).

This one is a treasure because it was my mother's. It sat in her study for as long as I can remember, under her secretary desk. I think it was her mother's before it was hers. I keep it by my dressing table (not on the bentwood chair on the porch where I posed it for a photo). Peter and Lesley can fight over it when I'm gone.

Detail of my mom's wastebasket.

I guess I'm just as guilty as anyone of covering up and prettifying my trash.

I don't know about you, but this is what we do:

• recycle everything that can be recycled around here: plastic containers, newspapers, glass, magazines, junk mail, paper, tin cans
  
• get paper bags at the grocer to use for paper trash that we burn (I hope our little bit of paper burning doesn't hurt the atmosphere too much); goodness! some checkout clerks do not like bagging in paper! Yikes!
  
• give food scraps to the chickens, except what isn't good for them, which we dump in a compost pile (that isn't being dealt with as compost yet; we're lazy so far about that)
• the rest of the unrecyclable, uncompostable garbage goes into old plastic bags from the store; we finally stopped buying garbage bags - what a waste! We hardly have any garbage that goes into the dumpster now.
• Oh, and when I'm gone, I want to take up as little space as possible. I want to be cremated.
  

I've been excited to hear about NYC and LA and their recycling of food scraps for compost for farmers.

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the 'bastard'

Please click on the images to see the details better.

This old 7-foot cabinet stands in our family room. It was named "the Bastard" affectionately by a local antique dealer because of how it combines several furniture styles: bits of Empire, Rococo, Neoclassical, etc, and the extra wooden base added at the bottom for height.

My mom's mom, Grandma Olive, made a living as an artist~illustrator~designer as a single mom in the 1920s and -30s when she and my grandfather were divorced. My mom was just 6 then, in 1924. I think I met Grandma Olive at least once (she lived several states away), but she died in1960 when I was 4; I have no memories of her. I wish I could ask her about many things, including this cabinet, which belonged to her.

Grandma Olive painted the Romanesque scene on the door of the cabinet, above. Here's a detail, below.



Mom told me that Grandma Olive was always picking up stray pieces of furniture at a bargain on the back streets of NYC (they lived across the bay in Bayonne, New Jersey), then taking them home to rejuvenate with her artistic imagination.

When I got this cabinet after my parents died, it was hard for me to put anything on the shelves besides "pretty" things - like the vases on top. But something in me rebelled against pretty decorating for the sake of form and not function, so now I keep my oversized books and some of our CDs there. Since I think books are beautiful, and piles of books even more so, I am okay with my own "bastardization" of this old treasure.

I dream of someday writing a book about four women: Grandma Olive, my mom, me, and my daughter Lesley. In it I would have to "create" Olive, since all I have are some things she touched, created, repaired, loved, and a few words about her from my mom and dad, and my older siblings. Although Olive had, and created, many beautiful things, I've read a couple of her letters that show material things weren't all to her. She had a big heart, but didn't always know how to share it.

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old book

Among the many things I inherited from my parents are a number of old books. My dad had books floor to ceiling in many rooms of our house.

This one, published in 1938 in England is a collection of 100 paintings on color plates.


I had never heard of this painter before, Gianbattista Moroni. The painting, above, is titled 'Portrait of a Tailor,' which is in The National Gallery in London.



Apparently my mom gave this book to my dad in 1939, before they were married (in 1941). (My brother Nelson kindly corrected the year of their marriage, which I posted wrongly as 1939 before.) My father was a Baptist minister.

He was also an artist in his own right, drawing this pen & ink of a hart, which he turned into the personalized book plate that is inside the cover of this book. This drawing was also etched into the headstone at my parents' grave (photo at bottom). His surname was Hart, and a 'hart' is another name for a deer. He loved the verse from the Psalms:

Psalm 42:1 (King James Version)
"As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God."

Click on the image above to see the detail better.

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pitchers

I haven't counted the pitchers we have, but here are a few, in the china cabinet I inherited from my dad. Any oak furniture we inherited were pieces my dad picked up. (The other wooden heirlooms were from my mom's parents or grandparents, or even great grandparents).

The little Belleek (bowing) lady in the top and second photos is one of my faves, given by my sister Nancy.



This little madonna is not a pitcher (obviously), but a soft stone sculptured piece from our days in Turkey. Don't recall exactly where we picked her up, out East I think, maybe Cappadocia.

The stacked pitchers below are for sauces and gravy. The bottom one, along with the stacks of plates and bowls here, are from the Johnson Bros set I bought at auction for $55 - service for 12! Later the set was appraised for $2,000. :)

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mom's jewels

(Click on the images to see the pins better.)


Mom was 40 years old when I was born. She was born in 1916. You can do the math.

She was of the generation of women who wore matching shoes and purses, and hats too, until the late ‘60s. Because she was a preacher’s wife, she dressed up every Sunday.

Fine jewels weren’t affordable or appropriate.

Costume jewelry was just right. Some of these pins belonged to my mom. Some I bought. Some were given to me.

This one was given to me by my sister Ginnie when she came back from Peru. I might have been 11 or 12 at the time.

Mom used to say:

“You get hungry for what you feed yourself.”

“Don’t let intellectualism take the place of God.”

“I always knew I had to marry a preacher and a redhead.”

“I try to be funny, but no one ever thinks I am.”

That last quote is a jewel I share with my mom, along with these pins.

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broken

Some things around here were broken when I got them. Like a couple of statues that were my grandma's.

And this cognac bottle. We don't drink the cognac (too sweet). We just like the bottle and the color of cognac.

This necklace Lesley made for me broke all by itself. I swear. I love it, and I need to get it restrung.





This lamp stands by my dressing table, I don't know whose finger poked through this old silk lampshade. My dad had a collection of lamps. You wouldn't believe what a lamp fetish he had. I think we have four floor lamps out in the shed that are waiting for shades or new wiring that were his. Anyway, this one was my dad's, and probably my grandma's before that. I know, it should probably be in the shed.

This bowl got broken at Thanksgiving after the mashed potatoes were eaten, before it had a chance to get washed. I bought this Old English Johnson Brothers set at an old farm auction when Don and I were first married, and I got the whole 12-place-setting and multiple serving dish set for $55. I didn't know until later that I was bidding against my sister-in-law, who was standing behind me. This bowl only cost me a few cents, but I was sorry to see it break after all those years the old farmer woman had it and didn't break it.

I hope our kids will like some of these things when we're gone. Living with old worn and repaired treasures reminds me of the people who lived before me and used these things, admired them, dusted them, washed them, and shone light through them.

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