I stutter when I try to speak the language of life
I want to shout out loud but I just cry inside
Sometimes it feels so holy sometimes so absurd
So who am I to try and put that into words
I am nothing
But the angels sometimes whisper in my ear
Yeah, they tell me things and then they disappear
Though I am nothing I sometimes like to make believe I hear
I stumble when I try to walk the straight and narrow
I have heard it said God's eye is on the lowly sparrow
Who in spite of everything will sing for all he's worth
You know sometimes I feel exactly like that bird
I am nothing
But the angels sometimes whisper in my ear
Yeah, they tell me things and then they disappear
Though I am nothing I sometimes like to make believe I hear
-Pierce Pettis
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Monday, October 18, 2010
Peeling carrots in an old house.
I am standing in front of an open window peeling carrots, listening to the whistle of the 6 o'clock train crossing the Connecticut River from NH to VT. The trestle is about a mile from my house though it sounds as if it were much closer. The air tonight is fresh and comfortably cool, the first dry leaves of the fall are scattered across the yard. I am wondering how many women have stood here in September, preparing dinner for their families in this very kitchen. Tonight's meal is humble - carrots from our garden, potatoes and applesauce made from apples we picked last Sunday when it was still hot and summery. Probably many a housewife before me has combined these three late summer vegetables and fruit in this same New England house.
I love living in an old house. I often find myself thinking about the dozens of people who have lived their lives here before me - for whom these rooms have been "home," who have been born and grown up, married and borne children, and died in the rooms I think of as my own. Several years ago our family volunteered at a colonial fort, dressing in period clothing as reenactors. I would stare hard at my children as they played on the front yard in their knickers and muslin dresses, trying to imagine the house as it looked when children dressed just so actually lived here. I could never do it - I could never make the present fade away even in my own mind, but I liked to try.
In the first fifteen years of my marriage we lived in two other well-worn dwellings. Our eldest child was born in the tiny second floor room of a log cabin. She took her first breath in a bed wedged beneath the steeply sloping roof of a house built nearly 220 years earlier. When my midwife first visited our home she stood in the room thoughtfully, feeling the history there and pronounced it a good place to give birth. We had no idea how many babies had entered the world in that single, upstairs chamber, but there must have been many.
Our next children were born in a newer house - a Mansard-roofed Victorian rowhouse with a stone facade. There our bed was in a huge, high-ceilinged room with and arched doorway, tall windows and a balcony. That room later became our playroom where our children played make-believe and built forts and block castles. Sometimes when I passed through the dark hall at night to check on a sleeping baby or adjust the blankets of a restless toddler I wondered what mothers and children had lived here before me and what, if anything, of themselves they had left in the house. My daughter left a small, handwritten note under a loose floorboard when we moved away.
Here our last two babies were born in what was probably the parlor; they may have been the first of the dozens of babies born here in 200 years to emerge in the best room of the house! We have no record of who entered life in this house, though many of the former owners are buried in the colonial-era cemetery just up the hill. We know our house was built by the Comings family, and we can find their names carved on old slate slabs in the back part of the graveyard. The woman we purchased the house from is also buried there, next to her husband whom we never met. Sometimes I wonder if my name will be on a stone there as well.
Life in an old house makes me feel often the brevity of my life - to remember the Scriptural image of my life as a blade of grass that once withered, will be remembered by few. The King James version says, "It's place remembers it no more." The wind will continue to blow across the wheatfield and the grass will quickly close over the place where that one blade grew. Consumed with the big events of my own life - children's weddings taking the place of their births - I can feel more important than I really am. One day another woman will stand at this window who knows nothing about me; this will be her house and all traces of my life will be gone. It is already so in the other houses that were such a part of my life. No one but my husband, and maybe the midwife, has any memory at all of the birth-days that changed the world for me. No one else remembers the weather on those days, how hot one day was, how gray and chilly another, how the stars were so brilliant that night or how the sun gradually brightened the east-facing room as we waited for the child to be born. One day someone else will tend my lilac bushes and call them her own, will listen to the waterfall through the open window and never think of me.
I love living in an old house. I often find myself thinking about the dozens of people who have lived their lives here before me - for whom these rooms have been "home," who have been born and grown up, married and borne children, and died in the rooms I think of as my own. Several years ago our family volunteered at a colonial fort, dressing in period clothing as reenactors. I would stare hard at my children as they played on the front yard in their knickers and muslin dresses, trying to imagine the house as it looked when children dressed just so actually lived here. I could never do it - I could never make the present fade away even in my own mind, but I liked to try.
In the first fifteen years of my marriage we lived in two other well-worn dwellings. Our eldest child was born in the tiny second floor room of a log cabin. She took her first breath in a bed wedged beneath the steeply sloping roof of a house built nearly 220 years earlier. When my midwife first visited our home she stood in the room thoughtfully, feeling the history there and pronounced it a good place to give birth. We had no idea how many babies had entered the world in that single, upstairs chamber, but there must have been many.
Our next children were born in a newer house - a Mansard-roofed Victorian rowhouse with a stone facade. There our bed was in a huge, high-ceilinged room with and arched doorway, tall windows and a balcony. That room later became our playroom where our children played make-believe and built forts and block castles. Sometimes when I passed through the dark hall at night to check on a sleeping baby or adjust the blankets of a restless toddler I wondered what mothers and children had lived here before me and what, if anything, of themselves they had left in the house. My daughter left a small, handwritten note under a loose floorboard when we moved away.
Here our last two babies were born in what was probably the parlor; they may have been the first of the dozens of babies born here in 200 years to emerge in the best room of the house! We have no record of who entered life in this house, though many of the former owners are buried in the colonial-era cemetery just up the hill. We know our house was built by the Comings family, and we can find their names carved on old slate slabs in the back part of the graveyard. The woman we purchased the house from is also buried there, next to her husband whom we never met. Sometimes I wonder if my name will be on a stone there as well.
Life in an old house makes me feel often the brevity of my life - to remember the Scriptural image of my life as a blade of grass that once withered, will be remembered by few. The King James version says, "It's place remembers it no more." The wind will continue to blow across the wheatfield and the grass will quickly close over the place where that one blade grew. Consumed with the big events of my own life - children's weddings taking the place of their births - I can feel more important than I really am. One day another woman will stand at this window who knows nothing about me; this will be her house and all traces of my life will be gone. It is already so in the other houses that were such a part of my life. No one but my husband, and maybe the midwife, has any memory at all of the birth-days that changed the world for me. No one else remembers the weather on those days, how hot one day was, how gray and chilly another, how the stars were so brilliant that night or how the sun gradually brightened the east-facing room as we waited for the child to be born. One day someone else will tend my lilac bushes and call them her own, will listen to the waterfall through the open window and never think of me.
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