On Gansevoort Street

I spent part of an afternoon searching for remnants of the old meat market, knowing beforehand how little would remain of the area I remembered.  Back in the 70s I had been fascinated by the scale of activity down here....the butcher shop to the grandest of cities.  I remember the noise of the huge trucks, their grumblings reverberating off the sides of the buildings.  I remember the movements of men, carrying boxes and bags, swinging carcasses, hosing down docks.  I remember the acrid smells in summer and the drafts of chilled air breathed out from the open bays.  I remember the men looking up only briefly as I skirted pools of water in the streets, their hours and days and years absorbed by the most elemental of tasks.

On this weekday afternoon, more than 30 years later, this part of the city was very quiet.  I wandered without seeing anyone for whole blocks at a time then found this man looking at this building.  I took some pictures of the building, of him, and we talked for only a moment.  He seemed to need to explain what he was doing...he knew the owner of the previous restaurant....or the new one.....or someone else.  I said I just liked the old buildings and left it at that.  No matter, really.  I suspect we both came down here to find something - a piece of the past, a piece of ourselves, or something to help us accept what is gone.

(January 2008, New York)

Morning Music on Rue Charlot

My windows opened on Rue Charlot and with the morning sun came the sounds of people starting their days.  As I dressed, the steady swish of her sweeping caught my ear, a background to low conversations and the staccato click of heels from passersby on their way to work.....her rhythm supplanted every few minutes by the whine of a motorbike or the roar of a car, then resuming its place as the beat of the street.  She scrubbed..... floors, sill, sidewalk, gutter.....even took a swipe at the walls.  She scrubbed and swept with the thoroughness of those bred to present --- always --- their best faces to the world.  I admired the apron over her red skirt.  I admired her energy.  I admired her efforts to stave off the ravages of time in a city this old.  After some minutes she finished and I turned from the window.  The air outside was fresh and cool but the blue sky promised another warm day.  After breakfast I'd walk by this little cafe and look at the menu.  I thought of the glassware and how it must gleam.

(April 2011, Paris)

Of Those Times

I don't buy anything at McNulty’s today because, although I seldom admit it, I prefer Taster's Choice Instant over anything made with exotic fresh-ground beans. I'm always relieved, though, when I find this store still exists because I've known it as long as I've known this city. The atmosphere inside is rare, elemental, and powerful. Dark and bitter smells from roasted beans and toasted twigs mingle with sharp, earthy overtones of burlap, wood, and straw. The air has weight and texture and cradles the richest scents just above the bins and bags. I dip my head and breathe the aromas as I move through the shop, admiring tea sets and coffee-making tools, reading tags on long rows of canisters, marveling at how many kinds of mint teas they have. The shop is tidy and organized these days and I miss the old feel of overflowing, unrestrained abundance that I remember. Still, the heady smells lift and carry me and I am 24 years old again in the summer of 1970.

It's a Sunday afternoon and we've been to breakfast with friends. We walk slowly along Bleecker and talk of nothing special, lingering to look at a window full of vintage toys and dolls, pausing to give way to the old woman walking her dog, lingering again at McNulty’s while someone buys some tea. We'd all danced long and hard the night before and other nights that August in a sweltering loft south of Houston Street. A friend of a friend of a friend lived there, perhaps an artist, perhaps someone of a more political bent. In the afternoon we’d met to share secrets and bare old wounds before putting the tears aside to embrace understandings of our common experiences in that mans’ world. Remember June Cleaver waiting in her shirtwaist dress, heels and pearls for her husband Ward to come home for dinner? Remember Mary Tyler Moore’s flip? Remember that little girls said they wanted to be teachers or nurses or mommies when they grew up and little boys said they wanted to be doctors or scientists or astronauts? Remember that girls were told to smile, be demure, and never challenge men’s authority? Remember the vows were to love, cherish, and obey? Remember the catcalls from men as you walked demurely past them on the street?

Remembering, sharing, and analyzing those ways of being taught to girls and women was the point of Consciousness Raising groups in the early days of the Women’s Liberation movement. That, and using those understandings to develop strategies for change --- of ourselves, of the world around us. We marched and wrote and made a lot of noise. We threw away dresses (and, yes, bras) and wore clothes that let us breathe and move without restriction. Sisterhood was powerful and all politics was personal.

We’d talked all afternoon about the fears and the pain and the anger and the going forward but at night we’d danced with abandon to Aretha and Janis and Santana and Sly until finally, exhausted of tears and joy alike, we'd walked home through deserted streets, much too late, with only a wisp of an unrefreshing breeze following us around the corners in the overheated City. The next day, after not nearly enough sleep, a stroll in the Sunday quiet of the Village had soothed nerves roughened by those unrepented intemperances.

Today I leave McNulty’s empty handed and decide against a visit to SoHo, a place I no longer recognize. Blocks on end of deserted cast iron buildings once used to manufacture and warehouse goods had stood solid and silent in the 70’s. Now they’ve been transformed to hold wave after wave of new, newer, and newest art, clothing, and frivolous fare. There’s no use trying to remember where the loft was. It’s likely an upscale gallery full of very large paintings I wouldn’t like. And the context is all wrong, the streets too clean and the sky too blue, the murkiness of 1970 New York replaced by glitter and glitz.

We thought we’d made a difference, changed the world. And, yes, the young women I pass on the sidewalks now have different assumptions than we did about what it means to be a woman. To many of them, though, feminism is a dirty word --- dangerous, or at best irrelevant. They are free to have jobs and careers, aren’t they? Yet they mustn’t make a fuss about being paid less than the men doing the same jobs. They are friends, peers, partners with their men, their boyfriends, their husbands, aren’t they? Yet when choices must be made about one career or the other, one need or the other, whose mostly wins? And when violence is done to them they still often keep silent out of fear of even greater repercussions. These still hard truths are leading to new grumblings in these young women and the unrest thrills me. It’s past time for another wave to wear down the bastions and carry away the debris of inequity and oppression.

As I leave McNulty’s today the intoxicating smells of the store stay with me for only a minute. No matter. I savor what they summoned as I walk west to the Hudson and decide to have faith in the young.

(2008)

Believe in me

I'd already driven for miles that morning and I was intent on finding a place to walk.  The roads had few places to stop, the speed of fellow travelers had kept me moving, and the land I passed through seemed more and more remote with each mile.  Finally, I saw a dirt parking lot and a sign for the trail to Vulture Peak.  I pulled in and parked near posters describing the wildlife (rattlesnakes and tortoises) and mapping the trail and 4WD road.  A couple of very large RVs were parked overlooking the rolling hills and an old man walked a chihuahua on a leash beside one of them.  In a few minutes man and dog disappeared inside and I was alone.  The sun was bright, the sky was a clean, clear blue, and a soft....so very soft.....breeze cooled my face.  I walked across a high plain populated by huge versions of plants I'd only known from dish gardens in supermarkets or sills in office windows that didn't open.  Above the silence I thought I could hear the rattle of the doves' wings and the air smelled like no other air I'd ever smelled,  the blended fragrance of thousands of tiny desert flowers (perhaps) .... or the breath of tortoises just finished feasting on prickly pear flesh.

(April 2010, Arizona)

Regardless

They made her leave last winter,

not when the man died,

that had been so long ago …. what was the word?

Decades?

not when she sold the car,

choosing to walk

or ride with the neighbor’s girl.

They made her leave after the dog died

and any reason to quit the bed

eluded her.

I wonder if she knows

that the neighbor’s boy still mows the path?

And her poppies still bloom?

Regardless.

(a fiction: Christine Acebo)

Sentinel

In the 1980's we three old friends, John, Carol and I, pooled our meager sums of money and bought these woods from a retired professor who had moved away and was willing to give us time to pay. The land had never been surveyed formally and no one was really sure how many acres were in the parcel, so we spent hours and days searching through very old records in the Ashford town hall. We found deeds and wills from the early 1800’s from Colonel Bugbee and his sons and followed the records forward to the present owner.  John and I made our own survey by foot --- counting strides as we found and walked boundaries referenced long ago by intersections of stone walls, roads long overgrown, and wolf trees.  Our record search and informal pacing convinced us the deal was good.  A formal survey later showed the parcel to be larger than thought because one of the Bugbee sons had left Connecticut for Vermont, abandoning his center section of the original parcel, that piece then lost to further recording.  After a fruitless search for heirs in Vermont, a quit claim deed gave us 80 acres that had been thought to be 52 for over 50 years. The footwork we’d done had given us even more.  We learned these woods and the secrets they held --- the rocky glens, the laurel groves, the rotting chestnut hulk, and the spring in the hollow of the ravine. We tried to picture the animals that had been contained by the stone walls outlining rectangular pastures on the gentle north slope of the hill. We met the wild animals that lived on the land and told them we would try to do no harm. We fell in love with the land and its wild inhabitants.

This tree near the top of the hill held a rickety treehouse back then, already abandoned for some years, perhaps by farm boys who still lived nearby, grown now with sons already too old for such things. I used to wonder if any girls had been allowed up top but though I was strong and agile in those days I shrank back from the rungs that twisted slightly under pressure, the backward lean of the tree, and .... how very high it was.

We subdivided the land into 2 large pieces that would be house lots and 3 small pieces that would be sold to raise money for the structures we planned.  We logged the land lightly and carefully and sold the logs for timber.  John built a log cabin in and of these woods, trees felled from the top of Perry Hill and moved with an ancient boom truck, driven by a grizzled Vermont farmer, to a local mill to be shaved on 2 sides.  The logs were lifted and lowered into place for the cabin’s walls with that same boom truck (and lots of human muscle).  Friends helped over several years but it was mostly John, John’s vision and John’s body that built the oak and hickory log cabin on top of the hill and fenced the circular vegetable garden with 6-inch diameter log posts.  There is nothing delicate about any of the structures on the top of the hill and nothing will take them down easily.  John bought used solar panels and harnessed the sun to provide all of the energy for his compound and power lines were never strung to the cabin.  He periodically included others in his domain over the years and built a barn and a vineyard and an addition to the original cabin.  Finally, Jose joined him for good, became partner and co-owner and spread the top of the hill with gardens full of flowers.

At the bottom of the hill Carol and I, joined by new recruits Michelle and Gina, first built a barn for my horse Dandy and a shop for Carol’s woodworking business, then designed a house that would reflect each of our disparate ideas of style and function.  The resulting house had 4 rooflines: a gambrel roof for Carol, a shed roof for a shared kitchen, an A-frame for me, and a cape cod roof for Michelle and Gina’s side of what was technically a duplex.  We found an architect to draw the plans and then a builder to build the house.  The project was demanding and accompanied by no small amount of conflict before the house was finished in 1990. A pond, gardens and greenhouses were added and the deer moved in to eat the bushes and flowers until deer fences went up.  In the Spring the peepers deafened us at night.  In the Spring hundreds of rhododendrons bloomed from Carol’s plantings.  In each Spring since some of the visions we’d had back then still unfold.

Now, almost 30 years later, I’m the last remaining owner of the house at the bottom of the hill and I rent half of the house to a wonderful young man who can do work I no longer can. The others of the original group have moved on to other towns or other states.  John and Jose still live on their piece of heaven on top of the hill but have started to wonder how long they will be able to keep it going as their bodies grumble and balk at the work the land requires of them.  It is not clear which of us will have to leave first as age continues to gnaw at us. 

The treehouse fell into pieces over the years, leaves covered the rotting boards and turned them to black earth, and rust blunted bent nails. Only a few twisting rungs remain, an illusory stairway to a view across the top of the hill that no one has seen for a very long time from the tree’s aerie. The edge of the ravine would be visible, the smoke from John's chimney would scent the air, and perhaps the deer would gather for the night, as always, right below.

They were their own death panel

I was in a favorite little restaurant in Boston for lunch on a late summer day, sitting alone and enjoying warm and fragrant Portuguese cornbread as I watched passersby on the sidewalk outside the window.  The door opened and a trio of older women, all with silver hair and all carefully dressed, came in and sat at the table next to me.  The restaurant’s tables were close to each other and I could easily hear their conversation even without leaning in their direction. The tall, thin, hollow-cheeked waiter, who could have been a model for El Greco, brought my pasta con marisco and then took their orders.  After he left I ate slowly and listened. 

They talked about the lovely sunny day outside.  They talked about how nice the summer had been and that they hoped winter would not be too cold this year.  They talked about themselves and about others they knew.  Then the conversation turned more serious. A friend had killed herself.  She was in her 80’s, their age, had gotten very sick and had ended her own life. I ate my crusty bread quietly so I could listen better and hoped the waiter wouldn't bring their food too soon. They talked about their friend and how she had been suffering. They talked about what she had been like before the illness. Together they mourned her loss. 

The conversation turned again as they each shared their fears of being ill and in pain with no end in sight but a painful death. They discussed ways to kill themselves:  what methods might be quickest and least painful; what could be done without implicating others; where they could get help if needed. They talked like they might have talked about the best way to make a pudding, or a scarf, or about the kinds of roses that were most resistant to black spot. The conversation was dead serious, matter-of-fact, and grounded in the wisdom and common sense that can come with age. Although they came to no real conclusion, I had no doubt there would be other meetings, other conversations, and each would do some homework in the meantime. The end of my lunch came at the same time as theirs and I left the restaurant just behind them.  I walked away as they gathered once more to say goodbye to each other. 

This is a true story.

(September 2014, Boston)

On the Trail to Lake Irely

The trail to Lake Irely led through a rainforest of fir, spruce and hemlock and beside bogs lit by the bright yellow flowers of skunk cabbage. It crossed streams over log bridges and tiptoed on steps of wood boards laid down in muddy areas.  I saw only two other people all morning and few footprints in the soft ground.  Later that evening some local people told me they were surprised the trail was passable that early in the year. 

The Spring air was soft and mild and patches of dappled sunlight danced to the faintest breeze on the trunks of the mighty trees.  Deep pink flowers decorated canes of salmonberry in every small clearing and hummingbirds twittered and whirred around the thickets.  The air smelled green above the deep soft layer of needles beneath the spruces.  Each time the path turned I entered a new territory announced by the aria of a winter wren (no mere song for him) or perhaps the hammering of a woodpecker.  I could feel the eyes of those I could not see watching my passage.

The trail led to Lake Irely but it took me back to childhood.  I balanced on rocks and logs in wet spots and remembered dark, pre-dawn mornings in Colorado when I walked behind my father and just in front of my brother, all of us in jeans and sneakers and straw cowboy hats, carrying fishing poles and lunch fixings.  We skirted the edges of swamps but inevitably sank into cold, oozy water when a log dropped beneath our weight or a sneaker's sole skidded off a wet rock.  We stumbled through thickets of thorny canes and tripped over roots and stumps.  We’d started out cranky from missed sleep and by the time we reached the mountain streams and beaver dams that my father loved to fish we were soaked, chilled, scraped and drained.  The sun would be up by then but would give no warmth until it rose above the forest trees a few hours later.  We never got through those mornings without some misery.  We never said we didn't want to go. 

After the morning became the day and our wet jeans and shoes warmed up, my brother and I would recover and begin to explore the mysteries of the deep, clear pools behind the beaver dams.  We might thread our hooks with worms and wait for the tug of the beautiful brook trout, salmon belly and glinty scales flashing fast at the end.  We might catalog the wriggly critters in the water or try to find the entrance to the chipmunk's den.  We always made whistles from the young willow branches. 

When we were hungry we might have sandwiches my mother had packed or kippered herring and boiled eggs, the fare my father said he used to bring when he skied Tuckerman’s Ravine as a young man.  We fed bits of bread to the “camp robbers” (Gray Jays) and settled in for a lazy afternoon.  Dad would catch his limit, and as the sun dropped we'd pack up and leave the rest of the fish to hover undisturbed in the streams.  The trip back was fast, in part a flight from the biting flies and mosquitoes that emerged with the midday heat, in part to be done with the dirt roads before dark.  I'm pretty sure I usually fell asleep in the car on the long ride home.

My hike to Lake Irely had none of the discomforts of those childhood trips.  I started out at a "civilized" hour and the day was already warm and pleasant.  I moved at my own pace, slower now to protect fussy joints, and I stayed dry the whole time.  I loitered to take pictures of the oozy swamps bordered by masses of sphagnum moss and lacy ferns.  I smiled at the flash of little fish in pools.  At the lake I listened to a symphony of bird and frog songs, nearly deafening after the relative quiet of the forest.  Ducks tipped their tails in the air as they fed on water plants and I ate some almonds and raisons to keep them company.  I had left the tin of kippers in the car.  The memories were light and I carried them with me.

(April 2009, Washington)