Visiting the District of Columbia

At the beginning of this week, I took a mini-vacation to D.C. to stay with Kelsey and Alex, visit with Mom, and see Grace off for her summer in India and Nepal.

Alex and Kelsey’s apartment is this peaceful, minimalistic oasis in the middle of the city. I was delighted to finally be able to see it!

I had most of Monday to myself, so I walked to the National Mall,

and spent the majority of my afternoon in the National Gallery (west building). Delighted to see so many paintings I had only seen before in books.

I particularly enjoyed: the exhibit on Rodin’s sculptures, the pre-Raphaelite exhibit, Van Gogh, and noting how very famous paintings are often nonchalantly placed in a strange corner of the room.

On Tuesday, Mom and I got to spend the morning at the U.S. Botanic Gardens, which was delightful, as I now share her great love of plants.

We killed time here while Grace fearlessly navigated the Metro to Georgetown to apply for her visa, and then we met up again and had the famously delicious lunch at the Native American museum.

More thoughts/highlights:

• The quiet car on the train! The best invention. Also, the ride from here to D.C. is really beautiful. I caught up on my New Yorkers and finished The Gospel According to Woman (Karen Armstrong).
• Dinner with Eric, Cristina, Emily, and Brian on the night I got in. So fun and lively!
• Dinner with Patrick, shortly after Mom and Grace arrived. Just adding to the list of family time, and surreptitiously celebrating his birthday.
• I don’t think I could make it in D.C., but I’m glad that Kelsey and Alex aren’t very far away, and I love their sweet, streamlined lifestyle there. Visiting their apartment felt a bit like visiting an upscale resort (the rooftop pool! You cannot even imagine this pool/deck area). Love those two so very much; they are perfect hosts.

And now I am looking forward to seeing (almost) everyone again in June, for the family excursion to Hatteras! It cannot come too quickly.

Tillman clan weekend

This past weekend, we traveled to Southern Pines and Chapel Hill to celebrate Granddad’s 80th birthday.

He is a gem! We love any excuse to get to see him.

With Guion and his second cousins and their wives.

I like this Tillman clan (my mother-in-law’s family); they are such genial, polite, formal people. They also know how to have a good time at a luncheon!

Favorite party moment: Granddad’s sister, after we all listened to a series of moving and sincere toasts, looks around the room and shouts at her ride: “I would like to leave now!” 50 points for Big Jane. A woman who knows what she wants.

Back in the Pines, our weekend was spent watching the dogs and taking them on long, leisurely walks. So relaxing.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I’ve been thinking lately about friends (and family) who emulate great style and who have taught me what little I know about dress. I was also thinking about how I would define their personal style. Taking a stab at it:

Grace (Aztec ghetto meets bohemian grunge)
Jonathan (urban woodsman art collector)
Catherine (risk-taking French sophisticate)
Stephanie (late 1950s, early 1960s painter and travel writer)

They have all taught me a lot, from simple observation.

Grace has always had panache, even as a child. She would change her clothes five, six times a day. Mom finally got tired of fighting her on it, and one morning, six-year-old Grace came to church in a 101 Dalmatians bathing suit, snakeskin cowboy boots, and a tutu.

It still amazes (and infuriates) me how she has this innate ability to pick out great clothes. She shops primarily at thrift stores, and she can pick out every single designer item in what looks to me to be a pile of worthless junk. For example, she recently gave me some of her clothes, including a Proenza Schouler skirt and a vintage Laura Ashley dress (hilarious in its cuteness), which fit me perfectly. HOW DOES SHE DO IT. I don’t know. I do not have that gift. I wish that I did.

In the meantime, I am continuing on my recent journey to study style, fashion, fit, and fabric, and I am even starting to dress like a grown-ass woman. Advice always welcome.

Celebrating Grace

Baby Grace turns 21 today!

I am thankful for this little marmoset. Creator of all good things: absurdist pop art (of which we are the proud owners of three works, featuring Tracy Morgan, a bearded infant, and David Bowie riding a seahorse), photojournalism, documentaries, yoga classes, poetry, blogs, and perfectly composed outfits.

It is so good to have you in my life, sister. Hope your birthday is filled with stardust of the Ziggy persuasion, tiger kisses, yoga poses, and a smörgåsbord of elitist foodstuffs.

Would that I could spend every day with you! Then my life would be complete.

In the family of things

Photo source: Flickr user superstrikertwo.

An offering of grace, a place to belong.

Wild Geese
Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Have a lovely weekend. I am looking forward to drinking lots of tea and reading and staring into Pyrrha’s eyes and asking her what is to be done with the filth of American politics.

Memorize and recite

Started “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” in the park; words by James Agee, photos by Walker Evans.

Grace asked me for recommendations of poems to memorize and recite for class. I started throwing out suggestions—Elizabeth Bishop! Maxine Kumin! Auden! Everything by Robert Hass and Marie Howe, OMG, Marie Howe!—and I realized: Wow, I do really love poetry. I never thought I did. I always thought poetry eluded my intellect; poems never presented themselves to me in that bold, friendly way like novels did. Poems hid behind veils and shadows; poems could be capricious, malicious. I have never believed that I ever “got” poetry, and I have certainly never believed that I could ever write it (that much has not changed).

Being married to a poet makes you realize how very difficult writing is, and how very miraculous it is when everything comes out well. Poetry is a different animal to me, often alien and shy, but I respect it. I imagine I will always be reading poems, remaining continually and happily mystified by them. I will always love them in the way that you love a humpback whale, because it is so far from being you.

♦

“I have been standing all my life in the/direct path of a battery of signals”

I memorized and recited various poems in my career as an English major, but the one I most remember is “Planetarium,” by Adrienne Rich. It was a difficult, dizzying experience. I mispronounced “Tycho” and only guessed at “Uranusborg.” And those middling couplets were so hard to remember, but that last, fast stanza—it was a delight to proclaim; it made my little sophomore body feel strong, unconquerable, distinct.

♦

We like to talk about the things that “our children” will do, things that we sort of did as children but that we want to elevate to a virtue, to distinguish our offspring from the mundane, materialistic masses. Our children will never watch TV. Our children will play outside every day. Our children will not be pacified with iPhones and iPads. Our children will play with sticks and string. Our children will study Asian languages from birth. All of these things will surely fall by the wayside when and if we actually have babies, but one thing is for sure: Our children WILL memorize poems.

Intense woman time

Kelsey’s bachelorette weekend in the misty mountains = Lots of good, edifying conversations; lots of loving on the very sexy bride-to-be. I felt like it was really intense woman time, because it rained every day and so we were all stuck in a tiny house together, which fostered many good conversations, many gin and tonics, many viewings of many very bad movies*.

Even though I very much missed my husband and my German shepherd dog, it was very pleasant to keep the exclusive company of women for a chunk of time. Being cooped up in the cabin with 10 other women made me think of Emily’s poem about our harem, the girls’ bedroom at my parents’ house—a harem in the sense of a separate sanctum for women, not as a storehouse for one’s concubines. A separate, exclusively female space, but not A Room of One’s Own—rather, a female space intended for community, for sharing. I liked how this weekend felt like that.

I had also just started The Second Sex, which is maybe why the weekend hit me the way it did. Even amid Simone’s tangents about the implications of asexual organisms on historical feminism, I felt content, easygoing, unencumbered. How nice it is to be a lady, to keep the company of ladies.

*Vicky Cristina Barcelona excepted.

Wish I could have stayed

Pyrrha, prowling Juju and TT’s kitchen.

Our weekend away was a happy, full one. The family women accomplished lots for Kelsey and Alex’s wedding; Pyrrha acted like a normal, stable dog and became fast friends with Dublin; we missed Sam; Dad found a new method of receiving basic channels; we spent most of our free time walking the dogs; I nagged Grace to give me some of her clothes; she said she’d sell me her camera instead. At dinner on Saturday, I announced that I would stay for a month. If only I could.

I don’t particularly enjoy driving and nearly five hours in the car by myself (with a sleeping wolf in the back) was plenty. However, after you pass Lynchburg, the landscape suddenly becomes beautiful. The sky clears. The light is purer, the hills are greener and higher. I feel close to God when I’m driving back home in the mountains. “Virginia is God’s country,” my grandmother, raised on a farm near Amherst, has always said. I wholeheartedly agree.

My hair has reached that long, unmanageable point, but I’m too lazy to make an appointment at the salon. “I think I’m just going to keep it at this length for a while, and then I’ll cut it short,” I told Guion the other night, while I was looking at it in the mirror. “I don’t think that’s how hair works,” he replied.

Your uncertainty is God’s will

Click for source.

Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn’t it? And as you split frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God’s will and His grace toward you and that that is beautiful, and part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.

– Tinkers, Paul Harding

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A long quote, but a very good one: How uncertainty can be God’s grace to us. (I saw so much of Marilynne Robinson, Harding’s former professor, in that book.)

I haven’t been around here much lately, and my postings will probably be more than usually sporadic, since the month of May is pure madness for us. But everything in May will be good and new and exciting, even if just looking at my calendar makes me break out in a cold sweat.

I am trying to read many things, even though I feel like all of it is skimming over my head. I am spending a lot of time with Eudora Welty, one of my all-time favorites, in preparation for next month’s book club. I have missed you, Eudora. When I was about 14 and said I wanted to be a writer, Dave gave me a copy of her collected short stories and told me to read them closely. It was very, very good advice. I am so happy to return to her.

I also just started Susan Sontag’s On Photography, which is powerful and mind-opening. I think Guion would like it a lot. And Grace. Most people, for that matter. Anyone who’s ever looked at photographs before.

Talk to you soon.

In a world

Click for source.

“In a world where carpenters get resurrected, anything is possible.”

–Eleanor of Aquitaine in A Lion in Winter.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

So thankful for so many things right now, especially thinking about the abundance of God’s grace. Wishing you a joyful Easter (or Passover or just a joyful weekend, if you observe neither)!

An even fuller week

Thursday night: Tiny Nettles concert in honor of Lulu and her birthday.

Friday night: The sisters arrived! (Plus Eva and Alex, not featured here.)

Saturday morning: Post-race malaise.

Saturday night: Dinner at Monsoon with the fam. Brothers Pratt here.

This past week I:

• Attended a surprise birthday show for Lulu, in which Tiny Nettles played; ate the best (and longest? Most intestinal?) baked ziti ever, by Greg.
• Turned 24; received tulips, chocolate, and a beautiful leather leash (for the dog, not me) from my dear husband.
• Welcomed my sisters, Alex, and Eva for the weekend.
• Ran the Charlottesville 10-miler, didn’t die.
• Ate a celebratory dinner at Monsoon with family and friends.
• Enjoyed the company of many friends at The Local for drinks; felt so very blessed by each one of them.
• Went to the Gordon Avenue book sale, the best bi-annual book sale ever.
• Met a new calligraphy client to start on another job.
• Observed Palm Sunday; was reminded of that feeling during the Passion reading, “Wait, why do I have to be the crowd? I don’t want this part; it’s the bad guy’s part… Oh, wait. Right.”
• Watched Guion finish his master’s thesis, provided some opinions on last lines and em dashes; felt so proud of him.
• Felt very happy.

Love you all very much. There’s a complete set of the weekend’s photos on my Flickr and Grace also published a very nice weekend re-cap, if you’re hankering for more.