The Closest, Realest Face

"The big ideas huddle
in the jar together. You spread them
over the black bread of day after day
and swallow them."
Yesterday, I was writing about Quinton Duval and his poem "Day After Day," -- see also, quotations to the right -> -> ->

Not only has this poem been one of my favorites for the past thirty-five years, and served as an inspiration for "The Quotidian Kit," but it also brings to mind one of my favorite novels, My Ántonia, Willa Cather's early twentieth-century classic which features one of closest, realest faces in all of American literature: Ántonia Shimerda.

Ántonia embodies both "the big ideas" and "the black bread of day after day." When her childhood friend, Jim Burden, comes to visit, he observes that "All the strong things of her heart came out in her body . . . She was a rich mine of life" (353).

Proudly, Ántonia introduces her family to Jim and shows him around her flourishing fields and orchards, explaining to him the working of her farm and the feeding of her many children. As the little ones excitedly show Jim the preserves in the cellar -- strawberries, cherries, crabapples, spiced plums -- Ántonia describes the baking of the bread: " 'You wouldn't believe, Jim what it takes to feed them all! . . . You ought to see the bread we bake on Wednesdays and Saturdays. . . . We have our own wheat ground for flour' "(337 - 38).

Jim admires Ántonia's tireless persistence, the "planting and tending and harvesting at last," i.e., the black bread. At the same time, he also recognizes the the big ideas that inform her life: "She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken . . . she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things" (353).

Common things, quotidian, day after day . . . See what I mean?

********************

"You Americans are always looking for something
outside yourselves to warm you up,
and it is no way to do. In old countries,
where not very much can happen to us, we know that,
-- and we learn to make the most of little things."

Willa Cather
from One of Ours
(28, emphasis in original)

********************

A few more "big ideas"
and favorite lines from My Ántonia:

Earlier in the novel, Jim visits Ántonia after a five-year separation (from age 18 - 23). He is gratified that "She wanted to know about my friends, and my way of living, and my dearest hopes. . . . 'Do you know, Antonia, since I have been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. . . . The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times, when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.' "

" 'And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people,' " responds Ántonia. (320-21)

"I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory.

'I'll come back,' I said earnestly . . .

'Perhaps you will. . . . But even if you don't, you're here' " (322-223).

Many more chapters and another twenty years go by before Jim comes back to his home town: "Perhaps it was cowardice that kept me away so long. . . . Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again" (327 - 28).

"Before I could sit down in the chair she offered me, the miracle happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy excited passages in life. Ántonia came in and stood before me . . . We stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me were -- simply Ántonia's eyes. I had seen no others like them since I looked into them last, though I had looked at so many thousands of human faces. As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent, her identity stronger" (331).

All passages above from the novel My Ántonia
by Willa Sibert Cather, 7 December 1873 – 24 April 1947,
eminent American author from Nebraska, best known for her depictions of frontier life on the Great Plains in novels such as
O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark.

In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, inspired by reading the wartime letters of her cousin G.P. Cather,
the first officer from Nebraska to be killed in World War I.

Willa Cather's Birthplace & Early Childhood Home
Gore, Virginia
Willa Cather's Later Childhood Home
Red Cloud, Nebraska"There are only two or three human stories,
and they go on repeating themselves
as fiercely as if they had never happened before;
like the larks in this country, that have been singing
the same five notes over for thousands of years."
O Pioneers! (Part II, Ch. 4, p 44)

You see, there are all those early memories;
one cannot get another set; but one has those.
Shadows on the Rock (p 85)

both by Willa Cather

Falling Faintly and Faintly Falling

Forest-Llewellyn Cemetery ~ Kirksville, Missouri
ethereal photo by Jay Beets
~ cosmic illumination through the fog ~

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

~ James Joyce `
~ last paragraph of "The Dead" ~
~ last story in The Dubliners ~

Yes, I have posted this paragraph
previously, but that was 10 years ago!
So, tonight is the night to share it once again.

Along with these additional connections:
1. The perfect observation from a facebook conversation:

"The end of Joyce's "The Dead" is probably the most beautiful poem pretending to be prose ever."

2. The prayer in Jesus Land:

"Heavenly Father," I say, when it is my turn,
"deliver us all from evil, the living, the dead,
and everyone in between." (219)

~ Julia Scheeres ~
3. Willa Cather's winter reverie, similar to Joyce's:

"When you get so near the dead, they seem more real than the living. . . ." (164)

"Marie sat sewing or crocheting and tried to take a friendly interest in the game, but she was always thinking about the wide fields outside, where the snow was drifting over the fences; and about the orchard, where the snow was falling and packing, crust over crust. When she went out into the dark kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by the window and look out at the white fields, or watch the currents of snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one’s heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!" (117)

~ Willa Cather ~
~ from O Pioneers! ~
~ more Cather on FN and KL ~

My street tonight,
under the first full moon of 2024.

Willa Cather Christmas

Paper Collage Angels from my friend Nikki
~~~~~
Court Jester from Christmas Company UK

There are so many things to love about Willa Cather's novel My Antonia. One of my favorites is Jim Burden's memory of decorating the Christmas tree with Jake and Otto:

"By the time we had placed the cold, fresh-smelling little tree in a corner of the sitting-room, it was already Christmas Eve. After supper we all gathered there, and even grandfather, reading his paper by the table, looked up with friendly interest now and then. The cedar was about five feet high and very shapely. We hung it with the gingerbread animals, strings of popcorn, and bits of candle which Fuchs had fitted into pasteboard sockets. Its real splendours, however, came from the most unlikely place in the world—from Otto’s cowboy trunk. I had never seen anything in that trunk but old boots and spurs and pistols, and a fascinating mixture of yellow leather thongs, cartridges, and shoemaker’s wax. From under the lining he now produced a collection of brilliantly coloured paper figures, several inches high and stiff enough to stand alone. They had been sent to him year after year, by his old mother in Austria. There was a bleeding heart, in tufts of paper lace; there were the three kings, gorgeously apparelled, and the ox and the ass and the shepherds; there was the Baby in the manger, and a group of angels, singing; there were camels and leopards, held by the black slaves of the three kings. Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. Grandmother said it reminded her of the Tree of Knowledge. We put sheets of cotton wool under it for a snow-field, and Jake’s pocket-mirror for a frozen lake." ~ Chapter 9

More Cather on FN and KL

~~~~~

Felt Nativity Set
from Christmas Company UK
[also literary figures]

Softly, softly ~ Lightly, lightly

Willa Cather & Aldous Huxley
for All Souls Day

In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. . . . Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!

from Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)
by Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)
Book V, chap 2, pp 169-70; Book IX, chap 3, p 273

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
No rhetoric, no tremolos,
no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.
Lightly my darling,
on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag,
completely unencumbered.

by Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963)
from his final novel Island (1962)

****************

More Cather & Huxley

Bleak Mid - January

Thanks to Julie Windhorst
~ artist, photographer, friend ~
for sharing her paintings of hope (above)
and warmth (below) to brighten
our bleak mid - January

Willa Cather: "Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear. . . . "

~ from The Song of the Lark (Part I, Chapter VIII)
~ more Cather on FN and KL

And then along came January
to remind us what winter is all about!

Painting by Julie Windhorst

November Personified

Such an elegant personification of Autumn!

Golden Autumn (1925)
by William Henry Margetson (1861 - 1940)
More by Margetson & others

"The Professor happened to come home earlier than usual one bright October afternoon. He left the walk and cut across the turf, intending to enter by the open French window, but he paused a moment outside to admire the scene within. The drawing-room was full of autumn flowers,dahlias and wild asters and goldenrod. The red-gold sunlight lay in bright puddles on the thick blue carpet, made hazy aureoles about the stuffed blue chairs. There was, in the room, as he looked through the window, a rich, intense effect of autumn, something that presented October much more sharply and sweetly to him than the coloured maples and the aster-bordered paths by which he had come home. It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold, which selected and placed--it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection." [Or perhaps there is?]

"We had a beautiful autumn that year, soft, sunny like a dream. Even up there in the air we had so little wind that the gold hung on the poplars and quaking aspens late in November."

both passages by Willa Cather
from The Professor's House
(Book 1, Chap 6, p 61 & Book 2, Chap 5, p 200)

*****************

"It is another glorious autumn day, but there is a bite in the air that tells you there won't be too many left. Winter is waiting impatiently round the corner."

by Richard Osman
from The Man Who Died Twice
(Chap 4, p 22)

*****************

Such a stylish personification of Winter!

Autumn may be mellow,
but still she prefers a fashionable scarf,
something new for the season!

Saved ~ on Facebook
Poem by Emily Dickinson ~ Art by Dee Nickerson

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.
[emphasis added]

*****************

P.S.
Some Schubert for the early evenings:
Fantasie in F minor & The Trout Quintet

P.P.S.
More from Cather and Osman:
In Art As It Is In Heaven

P.P.P.S.
Looking ahead to April / Spring Personified

Like a Coloured Map

"Countryside Landscape from the Hills"
Paint By Number

"How often he had ridden over there on fine days in summer, or in early spring, before the green was out, when the whole country was pink and blue and yellow, like a coloured map. . . . one looked down into a sunken world of green fields and gardens, with a pink adobe town, at the bottom of this great ditch. The men and mules walking about down there, or plowing the fields, looked like the figures of a child's Noah's ark." (164 - 65)

by Willa Cather
from Death Comes for the Archbishop

"Pink Adobe"
Paint by Number

~ And this pink house! ~

Further reading:
This lovely blogpost, featuring both
Willa Cather & Georgia O'Keefe

Listing / Listening, Part 1

Graphic from the Official Lyrics Video
for "Reasons To Be Cheerful"
by Ian Dury and The Blockheads

[See also, Part 2]

What better way to spend the summer than listening / listing
to these nostalgic favs & learning every reference:

You're the Top

Do You Remember These?

Reasons to be Cheerful

You can find lyrics and more on my recent post

Cultural List - eracy,
Part 1: Make Your Own List

[Also, Part 2: From Prime Time to Internet]

@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

P.S.
Cellophane, gutta percha, isinglass --
life - changing new products,
so cool and trendy for their time!

Cellophane
"It was considered such a useful invention that
cellophane was listed alongside other modern marvels"
in You're the Top by Cole Porter (1934).

Gutta percha
The latest fashion in overshoes,
desirable in Ireland because they were all the rage in Paris,
as explained by James Joyce in "The Dead" (1907).

"Goloshes! . . . That's the latest. . . .

And what are goloshes, Gabriel?

Goloshes, Julia! exclaimed her sister. Goodness me, don't you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your... over your boots, Gretta, isn't it?

Yes, said Mrs Conroy. Gutta percha things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them on the Continent."

O, on the Continent, murmured Aunt Julia, nodding her head slowly." [emphasis added]

[And, as Gerry learned from his endodontist,
gutta percha is used today for creating dental implants!]

Isinglass
Surprisingly present in literature and popular culture!
It is mentioned in the opening paragraph
of Willa Cather's novel Song of Lark (1915):
"The isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow . . . "

and in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! (1943):
"The Surrey With The Fringe On Top" has
"Isinglass curtains you can roll right down
In case there’s a change in the weather."

The Long Nights of Lent

The Storm Moon

Gerry and I were recently inspired -- by Matthew Yglesias -- to read one of John le Carre's early novels, A Murder of Quality, which opens with a mysterious letter and this eerie, mystical phrase:

"I am so afraid of the long nights. . . . " (14)
The long nights? Hmmm? Halloween? The Winter Solstice? Turns out even the esteemed and knowledgeable George Smiley shared our question:

"Ah, the long nights, the long nights."

"What are the long nights?" Smiley asked . . .

"We have a proverb that it always snows at Carne [small fictional town and school in England] in the long nights. That is the traditional term here for the nights of Lent . . . Before the Reformation the monks of the Abbey kept a vigil during Lent between the Offices of Compline and Lauds. . . . We continue to observe it by the saying of Compline during Lent. Compline was the last of the Canonical Day Hours and was said before retiring for the night. . . . Prime was the dawn Office . . . Terce was the third hour of daylight -- that is to say 9:00 a.m. Thus we no longer refer to Morning Prayer, but to Terce. . . . Similarly, during Advent and Lent we say Sext at midday in the Abbey. (56 - 57)

I had to take a break from my reading to work out all the complicated terminology. I encountered numerous list and charts that I have attempted to condense into one straightforward reference guide.

Here in Virgina, the church bells next door to us ring out every hour from 9am - 9pm, with a brief hymn concert included at 3pm every day; the Angelus, at noon and 6pm; and another joyful clamor of bells at 5pm!

Now (I think) I know what I've been hearing from across the way:

Noon = Sext (& the Angelus: traditional Death Knell)
3pm = Nones
5pm = an approximation of the Ave Maria Bell
6pm = Vespers (& the Angelus: the chiming of 3 gap 3 gap 3)


As Willa Cather explains:

". . . six a.m., when he heard the Angelus ringing.  He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. . . . marvelling to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval between); and from a bell with a beautiful tone.  Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver.  Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees, — Jerusalem, perhaps, though he had never been there.”

Death Comes for the Archbishop
42 - 43, emphasis added


Canonical Hours,
going back to the 9th Century:
6pm - 6am = Vigil

divided into four 3 - hour segments or nighttime "watches":
6 - 9pm
9pm - Midnight
Midnight - 3am
3am - 6am

3am - 6am = Matins (last portion of Vigil, beginning of dawn)

5am = Lauds (sunrise, varies seasonally)

6am = Prime (first hour of early morning daylight)

9am = Terce (third hour after 6am)

Noon = Sext (sixth hour after 6am)

3pm = Nones (ninth hour 6am)

6pm = Vespers (sunset, evening)

7pm = Compline (end of the day, before retiring)

the major hours were Matins, Lauds, and Vespers
the minor hours were Terce, Sext, Nones, and Compline

Need a snack during the Long Nights?
Here's a welcoming spot for a Lenten Vigil.
No pancakes during Lent?
But what about waffles?

P.S. Couldn't Resist:

Also Halloween

And More

Thanks Molly!

Facebook

The Faithful Beauty of the Stars

Ellie & Aidan

Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. (p 41)

from O Pioneers! (1913)
by Willa Cather (1873 - 1947)
More prose

Winter Stars

I went out at night alone;
The young blood flowing beyond the sea
Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—
I bore my sorrow heavily.
But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.

By Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)
More poetry

More ~ about ~ Orion
from Denver & the BBC

And upcoming posts
"The Orion Connection"
@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
&
"How to Find Orion"
@Kitti's List

Also, a good night for
"Moon Song" ~ Patty Griffin:

" Drank all I could swallow
Now the moon's gonna' follow me home . . . "

Taking Death Seriously

Key West Sunset ~ February 2025
Originally called "Cayo Hueso," meaning "Bone Island"
in reference to piles of bones & human remains
dicovered by settlers in the early 1800s.

1. Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) : "She hadn't any of the sentimentality that comes from a fear of dying. She talked about death as she spoke of a hard winter or a rainy March, or any of the sadnesses of nature."
The Professor's House, 256

2. Thomas Pynchon (b 1937): "At the heart of the story, most crucial and worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator, almost but not quite me, deals with the subject of death. When we speak of 'seriousness' in fiction ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death - how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the apprentice age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted. (I suspect one of the reasons that fantasy and science fiction appeal so much to younger readers is that, when the space and time have been altered to allow characters to travel easily anywhere through the continuum and thus escape physical dangers and timepiece inevitabilities, mortality is so seldom an issue.)"
Introduction to
Slow Learner: Early Stories
p 5, emphasis added

3.Terry Pratchett (1948 – 2015): "No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life is only the core of their actual existence."
from his novel Reaper Man

Ripples Left Behind
Thanks to my friend Lynn Z. who said:
"Nice way to hold people close even after they’re gone
~ be the ripple."

4. Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886):

I stepped from plank to plank
So slow and cautiously;
The stars about my head I felt,
About my feet the sea.

I knew not but the next
Would be my final inch,—
This gave me that precarious gait
Some call experience. (#875)


For further thoughts on
taking death seriously,
see my recent post

Vanity Fair:
Laughing at Death
[Also Smiling]

@The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A literary blog of connection & coincidence;
custom & ceremony

P.S.

I used to love "Prufrock" so much -- "There will be time, there will be time." But now we see that indeed there may NOT be time! So hurry, hurry, hurry to take it all in. In younger days, if I hadn't heard from someone in awhile, I would tell myself, "Oh settle down, they're just busy." But these days: no! You're right to worry; you're not being pararnoid; they may be dead. That's no longer being morbid, just realistic. Sometimes, your time has come; other times, your time is up.

Sadly, even after all the bargaining and denial, nothing will ever change the outcome — no amount of knowing or not knowing, no amount of poetry, no amount of soul searching or second guessing or rewriting history. This is the story now and we’re stuck with it.

As Shakespeare reminds us:

"I am dead:
Thou livest;
. . . draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story."

~Hamlet, V, ii

The Long Long Summertime

State & County Fair Stamps
Issued by USPS ~ July 25, 2019

Whether summer is
icumen in or a-goin' out,

you can be sure,
the days are long and the livin' is easy!

Enjoy the rest of the season!
I'm taking off for a couple of months . . .
back in time for Halloween!

******************

Until then, here are a few
Mid-Summer Posts:

Willa Cather Summer
@ Kitti's List

&

Where is Fancy Bred & All that Glitters
@The Fortnightly

&

Take Me to the Fair!
from the archives

Overdue Book Blogs

It has been many months since I shared
what has been taking place on Kitti's Book List.
"Overdue" is an understatement!

November
New Blue Library

December
Little Golden Christmas

January
Little Match Girl

February
Cassandra, Gemma, Tamara

March
Like Absinthe

April
Way Back Books

May
Life Stories

June
Sweet Serenity But Not Enough Time

July
Willa Cather Summer

Always Right

An old favorite that always makes me laugh!

I was pleasantly surprised and entertained
recently, to encounter a similar sentiment
upon three separate reading occasions:

"I know I'm not clever, but I'm always right."

Mary Rose (32)
by J. M. Barrie

~~~~~~~~~~

"Lillian's prejudices, her divinations about people and art (always instinctive and unexplained, but nearly always right), were the most interesting things in St. Peter's life."

The Professor's House (38)
by Willa Cather

~~~~~~~~~~
"That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she'd ever met. . . . She is rarely wrong. About anything. It's a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask. So if she thinks that about you, there's a possibility it's true."

Hamnet (137)
by Maggie O'Farrell

~~~~~~~~~~

Additional quotations from these books & more
can be found on my recent post:
In Art As It Is In Heaven
@ Kitti's Book List

P.S.
Not forgetting
The Grateful Dead

"Well, I ain't often right
But I've never been wrong
It seldom turns out the way
It does in the song
Once in a while
You get shown the light
In the strangest of places
If you look at it right"

~Thanks Jim S.!

Mrs. Always Right!

Hue, Value, Intensity

Molton Silver
photo by Jay Beets

"The sun was sinking, a red ball which threw a copper glow over the pine - covered ridge of mountains, and edged that inky, ominous cloud with molten silver."

~ Willa Cather ~
Death Comes For the Archbishop, 119

Dazzling, Lambent
photo by Jay Beets

“The sea is not always blue. . . . In the evening a much more dazzling color may emerge. A wave that feels the bottom, crests and topples will release a phosphorescent surf of pale green or red hue. This glowing, advancing surf can be stunning, like lambent lightning across the sky or a rainbow on the horizon.”
~ Wesley Marx ~

What we learned in art class:
Hue, Value, Intensity

Researching the Ancestors

Pioneers of the West, 1934
Helen Lundeberg, 1908 – 1999

********************

Beautiful surroundings . . . those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry aromatic odour. . . . one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert."

from Death Comes for the Archbishop
Book IX, Ch. 3, pp 272-73
by Willa Cather

Recent Fortnightlies:

July 28 ~ Missing, Presumed Dead

August 14 ~ Missing Ancestors

August 28 ~ Your Mother, Her Grandfather

September 14 ~ Grandmothers in the Stars

September 28 ~ Christian Birkinbine

P.S. 2026
Family Research Series
Family History #1
Family History #2
Family History #3
Family History #4
Family History #5

Thanksgiving Fuchsias

Why you have to love England . . .
because there are not only hydrangeas
but also fuchsias in Grandpa’s front yard
every year in November!

~ 2022 ~

This year’s British fuchsia pics ~ 2023
As my friend Natasha* says:
"Gorgeous color and so dainty
with their tutus and spindly legs."

Photo tip:
get as close as you can without using the zoom.

" . . . what was art but an effort to make a sheath,
a mould in which to imprison for a moment
the shining, elusive element which is life itself,
-- life hurrying past us and running away,
too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?"

Willa Cather
from The Song of the Lark
Part IV ~ "The Ancient People"
(chap iii, p 195)

Pierced Ears

More Asymmetrical Favorites
[Following earlier mismatched
socks and earrings]

You don't have to have pierced ears to wear fun earrings,
but it does make it easier!
And French hooks are the easiest of all.
In the following poem, Tammy Sandel traces her girlhood journey into pierced ear status. Her narrative captures my own lobal coming of age experience precisely, with the exception that I was not 12 but 27 (always a slow starter) before taking the leap for pierced ears.

artiface.

Merle Norman 
was the good make-up
and you had to go in
to, go inside the shop to buy it
right next to Allee’s Jewelry
with the good diamonds,
the add-a-pearls,
the good china and wedding registry

i mix this up a little bit in my mind with the pink Mary Kay house parties and the glossy catalogs
from the Avon Lady at our front door,

but Merle Norman was definitely an actual store of makeup
and also the place to get your ears pierced
when your parent (mother) said okay,
when she drove you there and parked on the town square,
walked in with you to the tidy room with pretty chairs and mirrors like a beauty shop
for a rite of passage like a bat mitzvah for us Southern Baptist girls —
i had to be twelve years old
to get one stud in each lobe

(i mix this part up a little bit with the edgy as heck second piercing i got with a college roommate and the much later tattoo).

way back then i was always startled to see small gold studs in the fairy perfect ears of baby girls,
those lucky Catholic
Mexican sweethearts with amber skin
flashing golden ears and
innocently showing off,
nowhere near twelve years old!
their parents (mothers) having made the decision for them well in advance of puberty,
perhaps to spare any anxiety or remembered pain
(like circumcision logic for a newborn boy),
perhaps to preempt tween earring pleas,
or maybe because she wouldn’t need earring communion with all the other rites of her faith

i never really asked
(next time i’m going to ask)
now, today, i wonder who drives our girls (boys, beloved non-b’s) to
um, the mall? for their first piercing
does a parent give permission,
encouragement,
funds?
do they hold their hand and let them squeeze when a silver piercer pops like a staple gun
or when, as my grandmother did it, someone slides a needle through ice-numbed skin into a
waiting cork?

how do they decide where to go?
(Merle Norman’s gone but maybe “piercing parlors near me” works)
and what to pierce?
there are so many options now
there are so many decisions;

does it still hurt?
next time i’m going to ask

i love the freedom to decorate a body with flash and color and marks of meaning
secret and full
and i love as well
the clean slate of a body wearing only (only!) the marks of a life

every one of us so lucky to have ourselves a life
i’ve lucked on into the negotiated ages of ear piercing and driving, consent, voting, drinking, and well beyond,
my skin growing ever more decorated, fragile and fine,
age spotted stretched and thin,
but still strong, still supple enough to hold
all my wonder and delight
i know it’s personal,
but face it, we often put it right out there
for all the world to see,
dangling from our ears
glossing our lip
riding a nostril
wearing it on our sleeves

and personally i’m loathe to miss a chance to notice it all,
to convince you you’re beautiful,
and simply (profoundly) to connect

so…
tell me the story of that fierce scar
which lipstick shade
who styled your ring
designed that knot
your eyebrows slay
what language script is on your arm?

i can’t help seeing you
with your blaring jewelry body beauty art

and you don’t have to answer,
but next time i’m going to ask.  

###
~Tammy Sandel
Summer 2023

A few weeks after Tammy shared her fabulous poem with me, I came across this corroborative passage from Willa Cather, written in 1913, referring to 1880 or so:

“Marie [dressed up for a fortune telling party] wore a short red skirt of stoutly woven, cloth, a white bodice and kirtle, a yellow silk turban wound low over her brown curls, and long coral pendants in her ears.  

Her ears had been pierced against a piece of cork by her great-aunt when she was seven years old.  In those germless days she had worn bits of broomstraw, plucked from the common sweeping-broom, in the lobes until the holes were healed and ready for little gold rings."
~from O Pioneers! (125-26)

In 1984, my sweet sister - in - law took me to
this jewelry store in Germany to have my ears pierced.

I still have the tiny box that the piercing studs came in.
[shown here with a few more mindful mis-matches]

Additional Earrings
Above designs by Lizone
"A Jewel for Mom"
Ocean City Art
"More Mummy Earring"
Diamond Studs Are Forever

See Next Post:
"esquiline venus." by Tammy Sandel