Writers' Houses

The kitchen in the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, in Asheville, NC, where I visited last year and was able to take photographs. Preserved as the boarding house where Wolfe lived with his mother, it also inspired his novel, You Can't Go Home Again.

I am a consummate voyeur. I have enjoyed a too significant amount of reality programming since its inception and, yes, I have watched every season of Flipping Out and The Real Housewives of New York City on BravoTV. As well as some superior blogs, I even read a few inane ones, too––gossip sites and others––where I really shouldn't lurk at times [People of Walmart comes to mind], and where I even occasionally post, just because. I like a good bit of celebrity gossip. In more erudite moments, I read a lot of memoir and biography. Perhaps it is the architectural historian and writer in me, but whenever I travel I like to visit the literary homes of authors. I have on occasion, blogged about or have published articles about them. For a time, I even lived in a museum that belonged to a self-ascribed poet and his Boston Brahmin family.

Writer A.N. Devers shares this same passion as she has recently started a blog called Writers' Houses. It promises to be a wonderful journey into the homes of writers around the world [the criteria is that they be open to the public]. I learned about Devers' new blog today in my daily The Daily Beast email and just had to sit down and tell you all about it.

Writers and their homes are intricately fused. Where a writer lives can be as important as what they write about as it helps shape their outlook on the world. It is also a treat for a fan to be able to visit where a writer lived and sometimes wrote. My first such pilgrimage was to Haworth, England as a sixteen-year old exchange student. There the Brontë sisters lived and wrote at the Brontë Parsonage at the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Let me tell you that seeing the bleak landscape that inspired the wanderings of Heathcliff and Cathy made Wuthering Heights that more real for me.

As one who has worked in numerous house museums, I understand why these places are of interest to people. When you add a famous person or a writer to the equation, it can make the experience even more powerful. Tromps to writers' homes become more of a pilgrimage. There are also writers whose homes we wonder about––J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee come to mind (I have driven past Salinger's former home many times in Cornish, NH and have seen his mailbox and barn, at least!)––and others that are as open as, well, a book. Others are as secretive as their former occupants: the rather starkly furnished Emily Dickinson Museum comes to mind (where the pantry is now a storage closet for the museum shop, but where Emily was said to have written many poems in it while tending to her domestic chores in the kitchen). It helps when these places are left with their original contents, too.

The former chicken house at 'Shieling' was the location of early children's Story Hour times led by author Elizabeth Yates McGreal in the 1950s after she moved to Peterborough, New Hampshire. I was glad to see, a few years ago, that it was still as I remembered it on the property.

This new Writers' Houses blog is timely for me this week. The other day a woman contacted me who is now a caretaker in the former home of Newbery Award-winning children's author Elizabeth Yates McGreal. She wanted information on the original stencils in the house so that they could be restored. [I assumed they had been painted over by a former caretaker and it bothered me to think about it.] When Elizabeth left her 18th century Cape and its property in Peterborough, New Hampshire, known as "Shieling," to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, she likely hadn't included provisions for the preservation of her house. One of her books, Patterns on the Wall, was inspired by the restored stencils in the front room that were presumably painted by itinerant artist Moses Eaton. They are gone but her house, and barn––where her writer friends Elizabeth Gray Vining and Dorothy Canfield Fisher used to come and write at different times in the small apartment every summer––and beautiful property is still preserved, at least. I spent many Tuesdays in her home as a teenager, and later as a young adult home from college, reading aloud and having Lapsang Souchong tea and English biscuits. She was one of my early mentors and I am grateful for the friendship that we had.

It is always a great thing when a writer's home is as preserved as their literary legacy. I look forward to seeing what the blog Writers' Houses has to share in the coming years.

To Kill A Mockingbird

Harper Collins has just reprinted the classic novel with its original jacket rendition.

I couldn't let the recent 50th anniversary of a great novel pass without tipping my hat to Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird was the first adult novel I ever read, in Mrs. Ann Royce's class, in 7th grade English class at St. Patrick's School in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. I was drawn into the dreamy and sultry, yet divided, Southern world of manners and injustice that Lee's heroine, Scout Finch, so beautifully describes and narrates throughout the novel: 

"Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flied in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

The story was not only compelling but timely. It remains one of my favorite novels. With Mrs. Royce, one of many memorable teachers but one of my best English teaches along the way, we wrote short essays about the book, had vocabulary tests from it, discussed it in class and even had to write our first term papers on it. I felt so grown up delving into class discussions and thinking about what I was reading in a new way. Somewhere in a box from our move I still have that term paper, typed on onion skin, and the cover collage that I made from magazine bits and words. I haven't read the book since 1975 and think it's time for a reread, just as it is time for our oldest son to read it. In the same class we also read Carson McCuller's novel, A Member of the Wedding, and I remember being struck as a 12-year old girl by the power of the young female voices of Lee's Scout and McCuller's Frankie. They were what I needed to hear at the time. I had just moved to a new state and school, even though I had loved coming there in the summers to see my grandparents, at a very inward and insecure time for me. Reading this kind of fiction was empowering.

As was J.D. Salinger in his lifetime, Lee has been largely silent for many years in the public eye and never published anything after her only novel's release. Her sister was quoted as saying that Lee told her that she she couldn't possibly live up to her own, or everyone's, expectations with a second novel so why even try? The work has no doubt sustained her financially all of these years but you have to wonder if she just stopped writing or, as Salinger was witnessed doing after he stopped publishing, if she has kept writing for herself.

Harper Lee, c. 1962, during movie filming.

A few years ago, two movies were done about Truman Capote's writing of In Cold Blood, with which Harper Lee assisted him, at least in the fact-finding. They were childhood friends and Capote was the inspiration for Scout and Jem's friend, Dill, in To Kill A Mockingbird. My favorite of the two movies was Capote, with its Oscar-winning performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Oscar-nominated Catherine Keener portraying Lee (who also should have won: one of these years the Academy will recognize this fine actress. I recall reading that Harper Lee was struck by Keener's performance at the time). It was a bleaker, drier film whereas the other less memorable one, whose title I can't even recall, was campier and silly, with a really dull performance by Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee (ok, so she had the hair right). Of course, the movie version of Lee's book was its own masterpiece and hopefully it will not follow the trend of Hollywood remakes. It would never have the same power or effect as the black and white original, narrated version starring Gregory Peck (its courthouse copied from the one in Lee's hometown of Monroeville, Alabama).

Among the powers of To Kill a Mockingbird is that it was written in a period in our history before the Civil Rights Act was even passed and when a person of color was still legally, and always immorally, discriminated against. That it was written by a white woman who seemed to understand racial injustice from a child's voice, that was no doubt the author's own, is even more extraordinary. When the book caused a great stir and was banned in many school districts, Lee wrote this response in a rare public letter to the editor: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that To Kill a Mockingbird spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners." ["Harper Lee Twits School Board In Virginia for Ban on Her Novel". The New York Times: p. 82. 1966-01-16.]

It is also a book about children and the loss of innocence––and the validation and the respect that we should have for children––as much as it is about race and Southern culture. A nation, and its readers, and hopefully generations of young readers in the years to come, will be forever grateful to Miss Harper Lee and her Pulitizer-prize winning magnum opus.

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

– Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, 1960

Patchy Feets

Patch was named for my husband's New Hampshire farmer friend, Norris Patch.

Momma Fox, I presumed.

A year ago today, Patch, the original alpha male of the Pond puppy trio, went off into the woods or the sunset and never returned. The worst thing is not knowing what happened. We suspect he got in a tussle with a fox that was sited lurking around on the property a few days before he left us, or maybe even a raccoon or a poisonous snake. Of the three puppies, Patch was the most aggressive in terms of hunting: off they'd go at all hours, running into the woods after something or other: rabbits, squirrels, anything that moved. No hole was too scary for Patch and it's likely he encountered one mad mother, like this worried-looking fox.

As for the chickens, we'll just say that Patch's attentiveness (and John's) when I was feeding the young chicks was not meant to be helpful: they were just eying potential future chicken dinners. As for the ducklings in the pond who lasted about four days, I'll spare you the details. Only a mother can forgive her dogs of being true to their nature and these were the first mutts we'd ever had. It has been a lesson in mixed breed traits, triumphs and tribulations. You get what you get and you love them all the same.

This is my favorite picture of John, Tom and Patch, taken when they were c. four months old in spring 2009. Who could refuse this barnyard trio?

Patch had my heart at hello. After only six weeks after losing Lucy in early December 2008, we got three farmyard specials, brothers from the same mother (but we question if they share the same father), at a Mennonite farm. The females of the litter had already been euthanized and we couldn't stand to know that two of the remaining three would suffer the same fate if not found a home (yes, birth control is not practiced much here as few owners get their pets spade or neutered and then think nothing of tossing them out or doing them in if no one wants them). So, we took home all three. Not my initial idea but when I met them, I soon agreed with my husband and boys. Besides, I'm a sucker for cute puppies living in a hay mow.

Patch tackles Tom in a typical puppy moment. I nicknamed him "Patchy Feets" because he, like the other two, always liked to jump up and gently press his feet on my torso for a friendly chat. Tom and John still do.

But Patchy had that distinct puppy personality: all presence, a bit of an observer, and cute as all get-out. His quiet demeanor belied a true alpha male, however. He was the one who led the trio over hill and dale on our farm: John would scream a high-pitched yapping bark of excitement, following close behind Patch, also barking. Ambling along at the rear was Type-B Tom, who really wouldn't hurt a flea but didn't hesitate to haul out dead carrion when he ran with the boys. Patch and John, especially, had the Jack Russell traits in them but it was Patch who also had, what I can only term, an Irish street scrapper persona. He wasn't fierce or scary but he'd get right in the thick of things and then back off, on his terms. When I first saw him I sensed an old dog soul, someone who had been here and back before, perhaps, a quiet observer of things but not afraid to speak his mind when necessary.

Patch had the most lovely blue-green eyes and red coloring. He had a lot of Irish in him, I'm certain, mixed in there with the Jack Russell-ish traits he seemed to exhibit.

We often speak of Patch and imagine him emerging from the woods one day, in full Rambo gear, his floppy red ears framed by a bright red bandanna and brandishing weapons and knives like some kind of pumped up dude in survivor mode. You could also imagine him in a little tweed vest and pants, tucking in by the fire with a glass of bourbon and a good pipe. I think, in the end, Patch's enthusiasm for everything that moved was his downfall. I hope he died on a happy mission. We still miss him.

 

John and Patch on my favorite old-style chair.

See what I mean?

The last two photos I took of Patch: late June 2009, age 7 months.

John and Tom, late June 2010: remarkably, Tom's coloring has gotten more blonde and his fur more shaggy.

 

"The puppies," as I will forever call them, follow us all over the farm and wouldn't miss a thing.

John is one lucky fellow, having been given a lifetime stay of execution for numerous poultry offenses. Like everyone else, he just wants to be loved and accepted for who he is and his positive traits outweigh his fierce need to kill small things.

Keep Calm and Carry On

A tea towel sold by www.KeepCalmandCarryOn.com ~ Don't you just want a stack?

I love these reproduction items from English war posters. They were put up in the Underground (or "Tube") and around London and other areas during World War II: here is some history on them. There is no more British sentiment than "Carry On!" It means, in essence, "as you were," "keep going," or "just do what you were doing." If you wait in line in England, you will be in an orderly single-file line, or "queue." ["No bunching!" as my son's English soccer coach used to say to the boys as they huddled about the field in little packs.] Can you imagine that in America?

Space is a big issue in England, too. There is much less of it now but I'm talking about personal space. If someone gets in your space, or walks near it, or dares to bump you, you will hear a "Sorry!" uttered. Not in a sarcastic way but in an "Oh, I'm so sorry to have bumped into you or near you" kind of way. I have to say, we have a lot of space here and I've happily traded perfect Miss Read-esque kind of New England village life (in some ways) for land spreading out so far and wide on a rolling rural ridge in Kentucky.

"Keep Calm and Carry On" is a motto that I can use right now, if not every day of my year. When I had a major disappointment the other day (from something where I'd done everything by the book, to the letter, had waited anxiously upon for almost three months, and then to find that an important email to the process had never been received: so here's my word of wisdom on that front–CALL!), my friend Edie (and fellow Cupcake) just reminded me to keep swimming, even if it is water over (or is that under?) the ubiquitous bridge. [And that's the little song that Dory sung in Finding Nemo, too: "Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming..." Sometimes it is all you can do. And like Dorrie, I have a similar attention span/short term memory issue.]

So where is the summer going? It is slipping away from us and next weekend will already be July 4! We've had a lot going on at the farm and there are days it is all I can do not to just crawl into bed with a good book (although I highly recommend this for afternoon siestas, if possible, or early-to-bed-with-book evenings). Right now at Cupcake Chronicles, we're on a path of new literary vigor and have collectively chosen the novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender. I highly recommend it, especially if you like food with your fiction. Next we'll be (re)reading a classic English novel by E.M. Forster called Howard's End. Join us!

Berries!

Fresh local strawberries! Our season here in Kentucky lasts about three weeks in May.

I do know what you're probably thinking: didn't this woman just say she wasn't blogging for a while? Perhaps it is just crazy Summer Solstice energy fueling my peripatetic moods but, you see, I'm always open to suggestions, great ideas, and new ways of seeing the world. One of our readers here (Destiny, thank you!) has suggested that I just post a photo from time to time and not worry so much about writing. Brilliant! [Of course, I've probably already babbled on too much.]

So here's my plan: throughout the summer I'll post photos with captions, at the very least, and if I am able to write more, I'll do that, too. It works for me. [I have to say that I am so very pleased with Blogger's recent tweaks to ways of blogging, especially in the new ease of uploading, posting and editing photographs. They have come so far in the past five years in terms of self-design options.]

Organic black raspberries from the local Casey County Produce Auction have been frozen for muffins and for homemade black raspberry ice cream that I'm planning for a Father's Day cookout on Sunday.

My first attempts, ever, at making ice cream, and using our local strawberry finds! Last month I purchased a Sunbeam® ice cream maker for under $30 at Target in Lexington [now it is on sale for even less than I paid. It is electric and makes a gallon in about one hour. Loads of fun (but I didn't realize it would require loads of heavy cream to make it: yikes!)