Red-headed Polar Bear, and Magic in the Air

We went north from Brunswick, Maine, to visit a piece of land I inherited from an artist friend in the mid '90's. An acre and a half of low-lying Maine coast.

I know. Me, a waterfront landowner? Read on...

I got quite a thrill photographing our spawn on this hallowed ground. We don't get up there much. More, now that Phoebe's our reason to go.

Yes, it's beautiful, and there are ravens and bald eagles flying over it, and it's got an ocean view. It seems now, with rising ocean levels, that it has a little too much of one to be buildable, unless you're very creative, or are into stilts. 

Buffleheads on the yard list, so close you could hit them with a well-thrown oar. Imagine!! But I don't really let myself imagine it, because I don't have the means to make this my yard. I am neither a visionary nor a dreamer. I'm a worker, pragmatic to a fault. I get down and deal with things.

Not sure what to do with it, other than to scratch up the shekels to pay the frankly ridiculous taxes on it every year. Because hey! Like all freelance artist/writers, of course I always have two grand I wouldn't miss just lying around at the end of the year. I pay more in property taxes on this 1.6 acre than we do on 80 acres with a durn fine house in Ohio.

 If there's one thing I've figured out in the last couple of decades, it's that a freelance artist/writer can't  even hope to build a vacation house on a little parcel of waterfront 16 hours away by car. This year, I wrote the tax collector to ask when the appraised value might possibly be brought into line with the actual value, and received no answer.  Tax collectors in coastal Maine probably start the morning fires in their Jotul woodstoves with politely querulous letters like that.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Here I am with the kids on my bit of land in Maine. So beautiful. Achingly so. But damned if I know what to do with it. Visit it every time we visit Phoebe, I guess. That's a start. Wish I could afford to erect a small hovel on it, but local zoning prohibits hovels. Yurts? What about a yurt? Nope, no yurts either.  I know they won't let me put so much as a pup tent on it, because if I put up a pup tent I will eventually need to poop. On my own land. And landowners' association rules won't let me do that, either. One of these days I'm going to sneak up there, dig a little hole, and poop. In the spruce forest, on my own land in Maine. And you'll be the first to know about it when I do. I think I'd just said something to that effect when Bill took this slightly cracked family portrait. Caption contest, anyone?

The last day we were in Maine, it rained. And poured. And poured. And it would all turn to snow by the Sunday morning after Halloween. But we'd be out by then, home, by the hair on our chinny-chin-chins. So that last Saturday, we planned to visit the awesome little Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum and the equally awesome Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Both of which are hangouts for Phoebe, yay! We looked at a bunch of art depicting the myth of Psyche and Cupid, then watched a mesmerizing animation telling the whole story. It sticks with me to this day. Such are myths--applicable for eternity, because they are rooted in our most primitive centers.

In the Peary-Macmillan Arctic Museum, Inuit art: amongst my favorite in the world. I have a couple of pieces, a weighty soapstone walrus (from the same artist who left me her land!) and a woman's face pendant that I've been wearing since 1983. Also a gift. Riches, in simple stone.

Musk ox of soapstone. Hard to pick up without dropping it, I bet. 

Dancing polar bear. Maybe she's skating on the pack ice.

Snowy owl, saying BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!! I love this piece but don't think I could put it where I'd look at it every day. It's too primal, too upsetting; it speaks to me of a bird laying out everything it has in self-defense, the last thing it does before it either lives on or dies, right there.

Polar bear, not dancing. Eider and puffin, considering their collective fate: standing, quietly collecting dust, atop a sofit for all eternity. No preening, no pooping allowed.

photo by Bill Thompson III

Zick, clowning. Forgot meh toga, and meh laurel, but I got meh digi. 

Call me on meh digi. 

(a billboard we saw years ago in Trinidad and still quote weekly)

Phoebe, made to stop in mid-flounce. She has only to lift her chin a bit to strike me dumb.

In July 2013, we brought Phoebe and Liam to Bowdoin to see the place and meet some people. We had a wonderful student guide named Mark who showed us all the best napping couches and alcoves. It was exactly the kind of thing that spoke to us. We don't need superlatives (though there are plenty to be had, the academics and food being two). We need napping couches and well-lit alcoves, and Mark understood that.

The two things that seemed most important in Phoebe's college selection criteria were architecture and food. A child of my heart: looking to send down roots, seeking quality and beauty in the most basic things. Excellence in both, non-negotiable. 

On that July visit, Phoebe stopped to investigate a restroom in Hubbard Hall, and upon exiting, she was wearing a polar bear mask we'd bought in the Arctic Museum's tiny gift shop. It was her way of telling us she wanted to be a Polar Bear. She'd made up her mind in Hubbard Hall.

 We understood, got her message at that psychic root level. No matter where she was admitted, and there were many colleges that wanted her, it was Bowdoin she wanted.

photo by Bill Thompson III-still has The Eye for the shot. I just copy him.

We re-staged the shot on a rainy Saturday in October 2014, when she had become a Polar Bear. Arctic Museum Ancillary Exhibit: Girl, unmasked, living her dream.

I thought about it all the way home, gazing out the window at pillowed cloud layers. Thankful for the girl we'd left behind (again), for her sweet brother, for the love that had made them both.

 Still amazed and beyond understanding at how we could lift off in a metal tube with engines powerful enough to make it go fast enough to become airborne, how a man in a snappy hat could fly that thing and set us down a little roughly in Boston an hour and a half later, so we could drive a couple more hours and end up in Maine on the same day we left Ohio, with our arms around Phoebe. And then that gaily painted jet would bring us back home again in another magical hour and a half, for far cheaper than we could drive it.

Grateful for the friend who helped us get there, for those cheap, nonstop Southwest flights from Akron to Boston, for the tiny airport where you can walk from your car to the gate if need be. CAK, you will see us often.

Part of me just doesn't understand it all. It's like the way I know there is an afterlife, but I don't quite grasp how it works.

I promised the clouds never to become blase about that. About any of it.

And I never will. Part of me, no--most of me-- will never get over dropping down into the bumpy stratocumulus--

me! up in the sky! flying!

leaving the sun and the pink pillowed sunset

and seeing Canton, Ohio, burning auburn, appear suddenly below. And with that sight, a rush of emotion I can neither explain nor contain, Celtic knots intertwining feelings of joy, loss, anticipation, sadness, and wonder. I know, because this is how it's all going, that this is how it all should go, but I keep hoping there's something more coming, a good, surprising, unexpected next. Because it can't all be just about saying goodbye now, again and again. There has to be a good hello out there somewhere, too.

Looking at Pennsylvania

Bethlehem and Kunkletown, Pennsylvania are very beautiful towns. Although I've been to mainland Europe only for the briefest time, and that was Holland, I can't help but feel I'm being transported back to my ancestral Germany with the gorgeous architecture and lush plantings. 

An allee of hydrangeas. Really! An Italian villa, plopped down against the Kittatinny Ridge.

And yet a fieldstone house is so uniquely Pennsylvanian, and I celebrated that fact every time I went for a walk. My dad was so enamored of Pennyslvania's fieldstone houses. I remember as a kid wondering what the big deal was, what a house was made of. Now I get it. Local stone that nobody else has. And so beautiful. I'm so thankful to have been raised by parents who sought out and appreciated what was special about each corner of the America they knew. Dad, Mom, it sank in.

A John Deerey bit of Americana. I couldn't resist.

More Europe in Bethlehem, but with New England asters. 

Diane Husic and I went on a little tree safari around the campus of Moravian College, where she is Professor and Chair of Biological Sciences. This oak rang a distant bell, but I don't get to see many of them, so I held out a leaf and used Diane for scale against its magnificent trunk and rectangular chunky bark so I could check my Sibley Tree Guide when I got home.  It turns out to be a burr oak, which my dad always called "Vanguard of the Forest" because it was the first one to grow on the prairie. Sigh. Glad I remember all this stuff. Or maybe he's whispering in my ear. This photo makes me smile. iPhone as Naturalist's Companion. Note to self: identify this oak. Tiny Diane perched on my hand like a parakeet in her chicory-blue sweater. I had a parakeet named Bing. Chicory blue he was.

Diane showed me a fern garden growing in a London plane tree (sycamore, Platanus x acerifolia). Those little fern spores can blow around and land about anywhere. Moravian College's campus is absolutely loaded with plane trees, which glow golden in fall light. Their bark is distinctly yellower than our native sycamore's.

Ahh, I could look at their bark for hours. 

There are so many pictures in it.

Moan. These trees are such extravagant beauties, such a lovely choice for streets and campuses. Magical.

 We walked toward Moravian Academy, where soon-to-be-world-famous naturalist Corey Husic had his start. It was all so beautiful, so surreal, so very different from my low-slung brick elementary school, baking in a field next to a strip of loblolly pines in Richmond, Virginia.

 Diane showed me the building where I'd lead a creative writing class that morning. Wow. It was so...Harry Potter.

Out on Main Street, a duplex that made me laugh out loud. A schizophrenic house. Yes, we are joined at the awning and roof, and have had to live as Siamese twins for decades. But don't for a moment think we are ANYTHING alike. Hodge, baby, this one's for you.

I was also amused to note how thoroughly the birds had enjoyed this urban American Poke's fruit.

Stripped nekkid, it is. A fine bird food, makes for lovely purple poops to swoop down and put on cars. I tell anyone who will listen that American Poke is valued as a specimen plant in fine English gardens. And in not-so-fine Ohio gardens as well. I do pull it out of the main border when it tries to start, as it has a little problem with scale. It leans toward gigantism, then it leans toward the ground and flops all over smaller, weaker plants.

Just a few things I noticed and enjoyed on my Pennsylvania strolls.