The Dream of Writing

One day you are able to go back there.
You are able to see into all of their houses,
Into all of their lives,
As easily as someone’s face on the sidewalk.

You see where the plywood patches are,
And the shrines their mothers kept.
You stay long enough to hear them speak
The familiar cadences of the neighbor’s names;
Even long enough to say such things
In your own inward tongue.

And find you know them now
All the way through
Like a god
When you look in their eyes.

Report Card

I've been working on a lot of short fiction this summer and decided, since this one was so short, to post it.

“Eyes on me,” Ms. Felicia said. “All eyes on me,” she repeated. Before her sat twenty eight fourth graders barely restrained by their tablet-shaped desks. She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring.

Dylan knew what that meant. He worked a sticky patch under his desk – boogers, maybe, or a petrified piece of gum – and watched Ms. Felicia from the front corner of the room. Ms. Felicia was beautiful, he thought, more beautiful than his mother or his aunts. She was taller than any woman Dylan had ever met. She wore her hair cropped close to the scalp, like a boy, and big dangly earrings in the shape of Africa and loose dresses in crinkly, earth-colored fabric. She was Dylan’s favorite teacher, because on Friday afternoons she read to them from chapter books and had let Dylan be the plant monitor for two months in a row.

“Ladies. And. Gentlemen.” She spoke now in her no-nonsense voice and walked toward the light switch. “Five, four, three, two,” she counted down on her fingers. Dylan sunk his fingernails into the mass and scraped it away from the bottom of the desk. He rolled it into a little cylinder before flicking it at the carpet. “One.” The class had fallen silent, and she had turned off the light.

Satisfied, Ms. Felicia flipped the light switch and passed out manila envelopes. She explained how their report cards were inside and that they must show them to their parents when they went home that night. She unenveloped the typed sheet and pointed to their grades, and then to the dotted line that their parents must sign so that they could bring them back the next day, the last day of school.

Dylan looked at his sheet. He surveyed the grades with detachment, and then looked at the bottom of the sheet. “Dylan is recommended to repeat the fourth grade next year.” He stared at the letters anxiously and reread them. He wanted to raise his hand but couldn’t.

Ms. Felicia spoke. “Some of you will be repeating this grade next year, and if your parents want to talk to the guidance counselor, her number is listed at the bottom of the report card.” She paused. “Questions?” Dylan stuffed the sheet of paper back into its envelope. In his haste, he cut his thumb on the stiff shiny glued corner of it and drew it back into his mouth. Ms. Felicia looked suddenly at him.

“Dylan, are you ok?” In a quiet voice, he asked to go to the nurse for a Bandaid, then stared down at his sneakers. Ms. Felicia knelt down beside him. “Are you ok?”

Dylan looked into her eyes, such a warm, dark brown that they were nearly black, and then quickly back at the floor. He felt the prick of tears at the corners of his eyes, and shook his head. Ms. Felicia wordlessly took his little hand in her long, brown one and examined the welling blood at the lip of the cut.

Dylan closed his eyes and allowed the tears to slip down his cheeks. He kept them tightly closed against the chance that someone had seen him. Ms. Felicia patted his shoulder gently, clinically. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked.

The Emergency Alpaca

So one day you find you are a grown up.
All your best friends live somewhere else.
You carry a sense of doom in one pocket
And an indelible longing in the other.
You live in a major international city;
You are waiting on a subway platform
And suspect each oncoming train terminates
In your own middle age.
You drink too much, you wonder
If the kid who had her picture taken in sixth grade
Would have turned tail and fled from the frame
If she knew what sort of mess it became.
And being a grown up, you know in a way that aches:
There is no way it would become anything else.

“There is an emergency alpaca,”
You said to me. I can not only imagine you typing
In a South American cyber café; I have seen you there before –
Your little fingers rabbiting across the keyboard and
Smiles breaking across your face like weather.
I marvel what a wonderful idea this is,
Because the emergency alpaca is meant to bear you up
When the going is rough, when your head goes
All spinny with altitude, and I spend a few days
Thinking about this, and how hard it would be
To fit an alpaca on the subway.
In theory, I mean, you are my emergency alpaca;
No one surer of foot, truer of word or sounder of heart.
But when the distances get too wide, when these pockets are too heavy
I pretend I have just a little one
Living at the back of the linen closet
And I ride across all that divides us
To see your face again.

Daylight Savings Time

In the quiet,
In the waking at eight and nine and ten,
When we are briefly both awake but not speaking;

In these mornings that swell buds high on the street
With late winter winds, with torrents of water,

We become the other’s cocoon.
My little back shields your broad speckled one,
And you are there in my dreams and before me.

Welcome to Crane Hollow

This is a sort of farewell piece my mom wrote about the house I grew up in & I thought it was so lovely and so well describes such a huge part of my life that I wanted to put it up here.

Welcome to Crane Hollow, cradled in the hip of Crane Hill. Here are a few tidbits of information regarding this serene and healing piece of earth, water and sky.

The House:
An elderly visitor (Deke Deklyn, whose grandfather, David Hyler was a candy magnate and whose father, John S. Hyler bought the place) showed up a few years ago unannounced, to explain that his parents had owned the homestead in the early part of the twentieth century, and used it as a second home from New York City. Deke told of being driven up by the chauffeur with his parents and a butler. The chauffeur and the butler slept on the third floor (before a fire burned the roof and it was replaced half as high as before) but they had to shower in the cellar. He told of the original homestead burning in approximately 1914, probably before they owned it. In the early 1930’s the barn was taken down and the chestnut rafters and beams were used to rebuild the house. The barn was replaced with the Adirondack cabin that continues to stand. When he was fourteen, Deke’s father gave him a Model T Ford that he said he drove so hard through the woods over a number of years that it was finally nothing but a frame, a seat and wheels. He thought that the homestead had been previously used for a camp for “unfortunate” children from Boston who would come to Washington on the train when there was a depot here. Eventually the homestead was sold to a logger in the early 1950’s. While sharing a single cup of tea, he took in the new addition of the kitchen /dining room that had been added on by the Velonis family (from New Jersey) in the mid-sixties and delighted in the flower and vegetable gardens.

It is unknown who the Velonis’ bought the house from in the early sixties (perhaps the logger?) but the family used it as a summer home. They had two sons and a daughter. Their son, Elias and daughter, Leila, moved up to the homestead full time in the mid-seventies and some of their children were born in the house and the cabin. Elias was an architectural student and carpenter who started the Heartwood School down the hill in the late seventies (another name for Washington was “Hartwood” in the 1700’s but the school’s name is based on wood). They made some changes in the house, putting the skylight in the master bedroom and actually opening the floor under it and adding a balcony to let in light downstairs and heat upstairs as the house was only heated by a woodstove in the kitchen and one in the living room. Eventually the balcony was closed off again and a raised floor was put down in the main bedroom but with a space to let in the heat.

When Leila and her husband moved in the cabin was winterized and the ceiling re-done and the bedroom was eventually added on. The cabin was heated with a wood stove and was home to a family of four. Both brother and sister and spouses were students of Sufism and hoped to promote a broad-based Yankee community of shared spiritual and life style interests. The Ferro-cement sweat hut (cement-impregnated burlap laid over a wood frame) was built by the pond (and still works well after 30-odd years) and as a number of young folks moved to the town in the sixties and seventies, the general community began to come together to raise children, grow cooperative gardens and make “kid soup” in the pond each summer. The Heartwood School designed and built a number of gorgeous post and beam homes around the hill towns including the house up above Crane Hollow.

After a variety of life changes within the school and the community, the Velonis family moved on but the school remained. The Baiers, who had moved from Germany to build and live in the house up the hill, bought the whole property to protect it from potential development. (They still own the barn and studio at the end of the driveway on top of the hill.) The Beamers, who were running the school, bought it out (and still run it) and in 1987 we were able to buy the homestead. Many small changes were made in the big house: the bathroom was put in downstairs (it had been the original kitchen before the addition but was then used as a laundry room), the floor was lowered in the upstairs bedroom, the picture window put in the LR to let in light and old barn boards taken down from the LR walls to make it lighter and to highlight the beams. Two new furnaces and a heating system were put in, wood and oil, (how the old house sighed the first time the heat was turned on!) and the blue wood stove was brought along from our previous home. Nine months were spent renovating the place over the winter with the kids taking naps on mattresses on the floor and lunch dishes washed in the stream.

The Grounds:

Many years were spent reclaiming the land and there are floral surprises throughout the growing season. The hollow has multiple springs and there is no lack of water. The little stream next to the house has a mixture of forget-me-not, watercress and pennyroyal growing until August dries it out. The big, wild garden along the stone wall started as a blackberry patch with a few ancient phlox plants hidden in between. Much effort was made over the years to tame it and many trials of perennials were attempted but it seems that the winners were the filipendula, asters and primrose, creating wonderful color and form for most seasons. The shade garden next to it is relatively effortless as long as the maple leaves that protect and mulch it in winter are raked off in early spring and replaced around the perennials to keep the weeds out and the moisture in during the summer. There is a wide variety of plants in there, including bulbs, bleeding heart, phlox, geraniums, monkshood, delphinium and Casa Blanca lilies

The leaves have always been considered most valuable as mulch for all the gardens and help to make the upkeep as effortless as possible. There always seems to be just enough to cover the flower beds and walkways in the veggie garden (which are covered with landscape cloth but a covering of leaves keeps the cloth from breaking down). The raised beds in the veggie garden seem to work the best due to excessive moisture. There have always been kale and calendulas that have self seeded and the most incredible showing of annual poppies that bloom throughout the vegetable garden in early July and re-seed themselves each year. One can be quite ruthless with them in pulling them out of planting spaces and letting them grow along the edges of the beds (but a few seed pods can be left to self-seed again).

There is an old asparagus bed by the pond that still provides a few good meals. The trees have grown up along the edge (next to the stone walkway that was used to bring in the cows and was called “home before dark”) and the asparagus bed has shrunk in size as the shade has grown. Behind the sweat hut is a grove of blueberries that has been cleared and nurtured along over the years. In late winter one or two of the oldest branches has been cut out in each plant to encourage new growth. Across the pond there are wild azaleas and daffodils that are a bit far to see but smell heavenly. The azaleas were tied with green ribbon some years ago to identify them (so as not to be weed whacked) but the ribbon may have been used for bird’s nests by now.

Yes, as the pond has aged, the leeches have multiplied, and after numerous attempts to find ways to get rid of them it seems that the best way is to train children (and adults) to delight in catching them with small fish nets and then toss them into the stream going down to the lower pond. Sand has been set down every few years by the old dock, which makes the footing very nice and worked to discourage the leeches. The dock was heaven and much used, but however one goes in, the water is clean, clear and cold and about 8-10 feet in the middle.

There are many visitors to the hollow including deer, bear, moose, otter, raccoons, skunks and even a lynx or two who used to bed in the small caves on the ridge. The birds, from the great blue heron to hawk to hummingbird appreciate the abundance of water and grasses and on an early June morning the cacophony of bird song is wondrous.

There is a wonderful pear tree at the end of the long garden that has been making its way back after the area behind it was cleared. It seems to bear heavily every 2-3 years. The raspberries can be pruned or not—it never seems to make too much difference in their productivity. There are Jerusalem artichokes that show off with their yellow flowers in August next to the little stream near the two wegelia bushes that can be dug to eat and always come back.

Lastly, you will always know that spring must arrive soon when you see the first, secret wood duck quietly swimming in the lower pond getting ready to court for a few short (and usually still cold) days. We have been blessed to have cared for this dear place as it cared for our growing children and friends. May you love and enjoy it as well.

- Katey Grey

Before You Think

before you think about facebook
how you flit from one screen to the next
timing your life in little electronic envelopes

before you rise and wake from dark dreams
to startle at the approximation of exotic music

before you fall into a half-sleep on the Q58
on your way home from the doctor’s office
with someone else’s city
streaming passively behind the glass

remember this moment of grace
in the kitchen making a cup of tea
recalling the deep pockets of love
you are allowed to slide into

these are the unbidden thoughts that buoy you
and that will keep you intact

A Present

My cat left the present of
My trashed jewelry box
After I spent a year
Ceding my heart to other men.

Earrings all shapes and sizes
Like a scad of fishhooks, less beautiful
Nestled in the dusty carpet
Than hanging from my ears.

The lid lay to the side
And would not fit easily
Without the aid of glue
And weights on the edges.

But:
If you leave your cat to his own devices
You can’t blame him for knocking
Everything to the ground.
May as well blame the wind.

He just sees a series of tests:
What is light enough to topple,
What is big enough to scare,
And what is solid enough never to budge.