Silver Linings: On The Occasion of Grammy’s Birthday

Today, April 11th, is my grandmother’s birthday. She would be 116 years old. She wanted to live to be 105 because she was competitive and wished to out live her great grandmother, Nancy Cooper Slagle who lived to be 104 and was the oldest in our line. Grammy didn’t make it, died at 91 in the hot August of 1995. Nancy, Grammy would tell us, her granddaughters, was the cousin of the great James Fenimore Cooper. We believed that for a very long time. It was not the truth, but she didn’t care. “If I don’t like something the way it is, I simply say it as I would prefer it to be.” She learned that concept growing up poor in Montana.

I’ve returned to my childhood home to care for my mother during the Virus. I’m sleeping in Grammy’s room, as we like to call it, left pretty much as it was when she died. Her beaver coat hangs in the closet along with her long fuchsia “opera” coat and a floor-length wool cape that fastens with silver buckles. On the walls are portraits of our ancestors, Grammy’s mother, sister, cousins, myself and my sisters as girls, my mother as a bride. It’s a room of many generations of women. I’m inside our family history and it is both compelling and terrifying as I am not a huge fan of time. Looking at the image of me as young girl, a pastel portrait commissioned by my grandmother because important people did this sort of thing, it is easy to feel that I am already an ancestor.

But I am not yet an ancestor. I am alive and trying to learn new things–gardening, chicks. I’ve written a fifth novel, An Elegant Woman, arriving on June 2, which uses my grandmother’s life and the stories she told (and others that she didn’t) to explore what it means to make a life and then to pass it down. Here, on her birthday, I am awed that this room has been left untouched since 1995, some twenty-five years (Lordy) not because she might come back to it, of course, but because the opera coats and the beaver fur and all the pictures are still telling their stories.

Beaver fur and the opera coats, hanging in Grammy’s closet

If you want to know how she got out of an impoverished childhood in Montana and into a Lincoln Continental in New Jersey, you can pre-order An Elegant Woman today–and I would be very grateful. These days, it is easy to forget that I have a novel forthcoming, and then this magically appears:

“In these difficult times, we do need a big, involved, warm-hearted family saga. This is a great distraction and a wonderful story of a family’s changes throughout the twentieth century. Through good times and very tough ones, these characters are always engrossing and usually entertaining. A lovely and much needed diversion.”—Anne Whalen, Brown University Bookstore

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GRAMMY

As always, inspired by Jenny McPhee

Silver Linings: Garden Update

The day before yesterday marked three weeks that I have been in New Jersey. I have planted snow peas, sugar snaps, kale, spinach, cranberry beans, onions, broccoli rabe, parsley, basil–both red and green. I failed with the spinach, planting it too deep and covering it too tightly so replaced it with lettuce. I killed three baby chicks by overheating them–an accident, of course. And I weeded a patch of a flower bed too enthusiastically with a new favorite tool (a Japanese weeding sickle) and removed some dormant flower bulbs, killing them too. But I am learning and I enjoy learning something new. When I’m not teaching, overseeing school at home, or caring for my mother, I spend the free time watching YouTube videos about gardening. The kale I planted is sprouting in its long beautiful row.

My many onions are pushing up their green stems.

I replaced the dead chicks with six more, though it took a good ten days to get them since there has been a run on the local chick supply.

They are Purebred Ameraucanas which will have muffs, beards and a pea comb, and lay beautiful blue eggs. I also have Cream Legbars which look like chipmunks, are active and curious and are good foragers. (In fact, just today the legbars fought over a stink bug in their little coop.) They too will lay beautiful blue eggs.

I miss New York City.

Inspired by Jenny McPhee

Silver Linings: On Keeping A Journal

Why Martha McPhee Carries a Notebook Everywhere

Though published today in The Wirecutter in the New York Times, I wrote this piece last summer, long before Covid-19. Keeping a journal now however, observing, bearing witness, taking note of all this pandemic brings, is more important than ever. It’s urgent, actually. To quote from a writer I admire so tremendously, Valeria Luiselli, in an Associated Press article, “’I think it is my duty, and the duty of every writer, whether is a science-fiction writer, a journalist, a poet, each at their own pace and within their own capacities, to document this moment,’ she said.”

This is an “excerpt” from my journal, included in the above art. It’s a response to a Louise Bourgeois exhibit at MOMA from a few years ago. I had an apron from my grandmother that I had saved for years, but didn’t know what to do with. I cut it up and glued it to the page because Bourgeois used scraps of discarded clothe in her art. The Bourgeois work that inspired the response:

As always, Jenny McPhee whose most recent post, “Feathered Friends,” includes must watch tv, encourages me to find the silver linings.

Silver Linings: My Students

One week ago we returned from spring break — and some spring break it was — to the classroom, now on line through Zoom. I’ve been teaching Creative Writing for many years. I love being with my students in the classroom. I learn from them, we exchange ideas. This particular class is working on one story each across the semester, turning in their work in installments. Their themes are the usual: grief, love, identity, desire, adventure–navigated sometimes with humor, always with the aim of discovery. In all my years of teaching, I’ve never felt as grateful for what I do. We get to interrogate stories, use stories to write our way out of the present, to seek to understand the past, peer into the future.

As it happens, my desk in my childhood home where I’ve returned to care for my mother, is in my stepfather’s study. Here he saw “patients” when I was a kid. He is long dead, his patients even further removed by time, but I remember them. They came for therapy–a nun, a pair of Shik brothers who wore turbans, an old lady who wet her pants. We kids, ten of us, had to be quiet when the patients came. They lay on a red velvet chaise and spilled their woes. The library was filled with books on sex and sexuality because my stepfather was not actually a therapist. Rather, he was a philosopher writing the definitive treatise on love. Like Edward Casaubon from Middlemarch, writing the Key to all Mythologies, my stepfather’s treatise was his life’s work, incomplete at his death. His study terrified me for the strange books that seemed to fall from the shelves, the red couch upon which the patients lay. But I sit here now, preparing for today’s class and on the bookcase in front of me, my desk apparently angled in the right direction, I see: Shelley, Byron, Homer, Plath, Rich, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Graves, Frost, Poe, Milton, Stevens, Thomas, Kinnell, Hughes, Lawrence, maybe too many men, but stories all the same, poems to save our lives, all of these poets dead and yet alive.

With my students, this particular group of eighteen, we are on an unexpected and epic journey into the unknown. Among other things, we are learning to carry on, to put aside terror, one word at a time.

A word is dead

When it is said,

Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

Emily Dickinson

As always, inspired by Jenny McPhee … who may still be in bed

Silver Linings: Reading about gardening

We’ve planted kale, spinach, broccoli rabe, strawberries, snow peas, sugar snaps and all those onions. My garden so far:

In my part of New Jersey, there has been a lot of rain with time for reading. I am not alone, of course, planting a garden in these terrifying days. There is a long tradition of Victory Gardens. My grandmother planted one in Butte, Montana during the early days of the First World War. From yesterday’s New York Times: Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory Gardens.

Friends across the internet have been sharing books for me to read. Today a friend from France recommended Le Guide Clause–a practical guide to gardening from a long time ago and that is still producing editions.

Another friend recommended Founding Gardeners by Andrea Wulf–a history of early US through the founding fathers’ obsession with botany.

And yet another friend recommended something more practical:

On I go: cranberry beans, lettuces. Reading Founding Gardeners, I may even move beyond the garden plant some trees.

Inspired by Jenny McPhee

Silver Linings: I know nothing about gardening, but am determined to learn

Yesterday we planted kale, spinach, and broccoli rabe. Today we will plant onions, snow peas, and sugar snaps. Loads of onions. I love onions. In Italy, onions are known as the regina della cucina–queen of the kitchen. Snow peas and sugar snaps make me think of sweet peas which make me think of my grandmother who grew up impoverished in Montana. She wanted to write a novel, Sweet Peas and Rattlesnakes, but never did. Instead, she employed the oral tradition and told stories across her life. I spent the past thirty years understanding how to turn them into fiction. My mother loved to garden, but her memory is gone, so as I sort this out, my garden, I rely on friends, the internet, and the channeling of my grandmother’s determination as she made her way through childhood in a bleak Montana. As it happens, she survived the 1918 flu pandemic in that state — one of the hardest hit in the nation. I could quote some of the things she said, but they hit too close to home right now and I don’t want to scare myself–Silver Linings. She did mention that it was believed the Germans sent the virus in little envelopes. Sound familiar? Back to the garden and all that I need to learn…. For example, I had always thought that sweet peas were like sugar snaps, a delicious edible pea. Today I learned that they are poisonous, if fragrant, flowers. My grandmother’s title, Sweet Peas and Rattlesnakes, today takes a much darker turn. Gardening: Any tips? I love tips.

Inspired by Jenny McPhee

Silver Linings: A Garden ?

I am living once again at my childhood home. Weird, yes. When I was a kid there were ten children, goats, donkeys, a horse, chickens, ducks, peacocks. We ate the lambs for Easter. My mother had a flourishing garden. There was chaos and much more. I left as soon as I could. Now I am home again, now with my daughter (20 and a college sophomore) and my son (a high school sophomore), and Mark, of course. For many years I have wanted a garden even if I have no idea what to do. Day 3 of self-isolation we have begun to feel our way forward. Long ago, when the kids were little, they liked to play a game: What would you bring to a Zombie Apocalypse. Seeds I would always say.

Inspired by Jenny