Postcard from Ragdale #4: The long look back

Today is my last day at Ragdale--tomorrow morning, a driver will pick me up and take me back into the world, back to O'Hare, where I'll board a plane and be with my family before it's time for dinner. I've missed them all, of course, terribly, and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. Still, it's hard to want to leave this place.

Last night I sat on the Blue Room porch and watched the sun set over the prairie. One evening the sunset was a bright, electric pink; last night, it was a softer peach . I'm wondering how many other colors I might see, given another week. The autumn light in Illinois feels very different from the light this time of year in Texas--and I suspect it is, given the difference in latitude.

But being here by myself, in this light, has helped me remember what it felt like to be young, single and childless, consumed by my writing. That wasn't always a happy time. But I do remember it as a time when writing was often all I really wanted to do, when I spent more time in the world inside my head than I did with the people who actually live out here with me. (Maybe it's healthier to keep the focus out here, but given the shape the world is in, I'm not so sure.) And it was important to remember how it feels to want to write--not just to know you need to do it, because it's your job and you're on sabbatical and people expect things from you, not to mention what you expect of yourself. This was the first time in a long time when I sat down in front of my computer with my brain full and thought, This is going to take all day. And felt pleased.

Today I went for one last long walk on the prairie. I tried to remember all the things I'd noticed yesterday, when I went for a walk without my camera. Something happened over this past weekend--whether it was a change of light or a change of temperature, I don't know. But everything was different, suddenly: the trees are going yellow and red in big patches (and there's a shade of red that belongs only to fall, it's nothing like the red hibisus that's probably blooming in my back yard right now); the grasses are drying gold and orange; the milkweed pods are just about to split open and release the cottony stuff that carries next year's seeds to the ground and catches on the grass to keep them from blowing away. I hadn't forgotten that fall color happens-- but I had forgotten the overwhelming sense of nostalgia that comes along with fall's arrival.

There are many things I want to remember about my time here-- like the way, very briefly, when you're out in the middle of the prairie and there are no airplanes flying overhead on their way to O'Hare, when you're far enough away from Green Bay Road that you can't hear cars passing by, you can almost imagine you're hearing what the first pioneers heard, and seeing what they saw, as they whacked their way through the tall grass prairie. I want to remember the excitement of hearing fresh work from the writers who read last night, especially the one who was brave enough to share a few new pages from the story of a kind of a grief I can't begin to imagine.

Too often, I think about my writing very casually. I make up stories. It's something I do when I can find the time. Last night was a good reminder that writing can, sometimes, be the thing that saves your life.

A Meditation on Walking

We live in a world that is not kind to people, especially women. One of the first things I have to teach my students in Women’s Studies is that women are taught to be scared for a reason: if we’re afraid, we won’t venture far from our homes. If we’re afraid, we might not try to do scary things, like be the first person to hold a particular job. If we’re afraid, no one has to work very hard at keeping us in check, because we’ll do that to ourselves.

“But wait a minute,” my students say. “There are good reasons for women to be afraid.”

Well, true. And this is when we discuss what the statistics tell us, and my students learn that they should be more afraid of their fathers and uncles and boyfriends than the stranger in the bushes.

I walked the Shaw Prairie for the first time Wednesday, and I went back for a longer walk yesterday. But after a week here, I’m still trying to leave the world behind: when I hear a rustling in the tall grass, I get nervous. When I hear a sound on the trail behind me, my first thought is that someone’s following--not the more likely explanation, that a squirrel just shot across the path or a bird just landed in one of the bushes. There is no reason to be afraid here. I know that. And still I am.

Today I started wondering if it would be possible to lose that reflex—if I stayed at Ragdale long enough and walked the prairie every day, would I learn to stop being scared? Would it be like when you get a drastic haircut and, for awhile, you keep trying to push your hair behind your ears, even though there’s no hair left for you to push? Eventually, you stop. And maybe, given enough time, given the right circumstances, I could learn to stop worrying that someone—that big scary stranger in the tall grass—was out to get me.

When I was in college I liked to take long walks by myself, sometimes in the arboretum in the afternoon, sometimes in the residential areas after dark. Every one of my friends told me this was dangerous. If I left a fraternity party on my own, I’d get at least three offers to escort me home. I didn’t know, then, that I had more to fear from the people I knew than the people who might be lurking between Here and There. I just knew that I wanted to walk by myself, because I enjoyed being alone and because I refused to be afraid of doing what I wanted. I wasn’t going to be limited by the assumption that someone was waiting to get me.

Maybe what I did was dangerous. I know I wouldn’t do it now, and I know I would yell at my daughter if she did the same. In spite of what I know about the stranger in the bushes, how unlikely an assailant he is, I’m still afraid of him. More afraid, now, than determined to enjoy myself, to live my life the way I want to. And I’m not sure whether this is a bad thing.

I doubt I will ever have the chance to spend enough time on the Ragdale prairie to stop being scared. But it’s good to know there are still some places in this world where that feels like it is, at the very least, a possibility.

Postcard from Ragdale #3: Little Writer on the Prairie

The rain has stopped and the weather has cooled and I think it's officially coming up on fall (in this part of the country, anyway.) The Canada Geese have been flying overhead en masse, the crabapples are ripe on the trees--to the great delight of the chipmunks that live on the grounds, all of whom are stuffing their cheeks full of them--and every morning, when I look out my window, a few more leaves on the trees have started to turn. It's still very early in the season, of course, but I'm glad I was here for a little piece of it.

Yesterday I took my first long walk on the prairie, starting out at the north end of the Ragdale house, where I took these pictures of the Ragale angel. There's a small blue angel at the top of the official Ragdale letterhead--everything around the Ragdale house, not just my room, is a very specific shade of Ragdale blue--and there's a carved wooden angel's wing on the wall of the Barnhouse living room. I'm assuming this is the woman who inspired it all. And that seems fitting, given that there is definitely a sense that someone's watching over you here. Not in a creepy way, but in a grandmotherly kind of way. At dinner a couple of nights ago, one of the other residents said "There's something about this place that just puts out of a vibe of 'Come on now, no procrastinating, get to work'--but in the nicest possible way." I think I'd have to agree.

From there I ventured out beyond the split rail fence. The Shaw Prairie, right behind the Ragdale house, is one small part of the Skokie River Nature Preserve. What I like best about the prairie is that trails are mown into it, so that when you're walking you're surrounded by the tall grasses and flowers, some of them ten or twelve feet tall. There are moments when it's a little claustrophobic, when I hear a noise in the grass and start having a Children of the Corn flashback--but then I remind myself that this is the real world intruding unnecessarily, because there's not a thing to harm anyone at Ragdale, as those casual raccoons demonstrated earlier. (In fact, the day I arrived, the driver who brought me up from the airport said "There's no crime in Lake Forest. The police here really have nothing to do. So be sure you come to a complete stop whenever you're at a stop sign.")

I took the center trail out into the middle of the prairie, then cut off to the north and found an area with trees and a bench dedicated to several members of the Ragdale family. That's where I called my husband and tried to describe what I was seeing, though I'm the first to admit that words are no match for the prairie and we didn't talk long. I wandered back to the center trail, then toward the Skokie River. I think this suspension bridge might be a new addition since my last trip to Ragdale--it looks new, anyway. I didn't brave the swaying bridge this time, though. Instead, I kept meandering north along the riverbank, through the Shaw Woods, and eventually found myself in Bennett Meadow. In spite of the fact that I feel like I'm out in the middle of nowhere when I'm on the prairie, I think it would be pretty hard to get lost. All the trails loop back on themselves, kind of like the circular path of the labyrinth mown into the grass in the back yard of the Ragdale house. (And, after all, it's still in the middle of Lake Forest--how lost can you get in a town full of houses the size of Costco?)

I don't know if you can see the bee at the center of this photo on the right, but he was one of many I saw while I was walking. At dinner, a visual artist commented to me that he'd been for a walk as well, but hadn't seen any bees. "That's because they were all following me around," I said.

After an hour or so of walking, I ended up back at the Ragdale house, on the south porch. These cat sculptures were soaking up the sun in a bright corner, exactly where a pair of cats should be. And they didn't seem the least bit interested in bothering this little bird I found perched on top of a (blue) post at the edge of a nearby flowerbed. I sat on the porch for awhile, soaking up some sun myself--it isn't cold for the people who live here, but it's cold for me. Let everybody else wear shorts, though. I'm putting on a sweater and enjoying a little taste of cool weather while I can.

The Wildlife Catalog

Three deer, grazing in a corner of the back lawn when I got up and opened my window shades.

Two fat and casual raccoons who emerged from the shrubs when the rain stopped yesterday afternoon and moseyed across the back lawn toward the garden, not the least bit concerned about who might be seeing them. They know this is their home and we're just polite guests, trying not to leave our footprints.

An abundance of chipmunks, too many to count, one of whom had breakfast with me this morning--I sat in the geranium room with my coffee and newspaper, he sat calmly on the window ledge, on the other side of the glass, eating seeds from a dish someone had placed there for him.

Two arrows of Canada Geese flying south through the cold, clear sky--one early this morning, one just a few moments ago. A sure sign that fall is on its way.

Postcard from Ragdale #2: Rainy Saturday

It's been raining here at Ragdale, pretty consistently, since mid-afternoon yesterday. This is good writing weather--it keeps me inside--and we're supposed to have one more day of rain tomorrow. Then a sunny week ahead, which is good, because it's going to take a day or two for the prairie to dry out enough that I can go for a walk. Yesterday I had the good sense to walk the grounds and take some pictures before the rain began. (I also had the good sense to decide against a walk on the prairie when I saw how dark the sky had gone--otherwise, I would have been soaked to the bone by the time I got back to the house.)

Yesterday, reading on the back screened porch, I kept getting distracted by the sound of trickling water. Then I decided that I was being distracted for a reason--a fountain exists to be looked at and listened to, after all. So I ran upstairs and got my camera and headed around to the south end of the house. This "purling fountain" sits right in front of an outdoor porch--as I mentioned yesterday, there's no end of spots in which to sit and enjoy the outdoors at Ragdale. It's one of the things I love most about this place. The inscription on the fountain reads "Purling fountain cool and gray/Tinkling music in thy spray/Singing of a summer's day."

Near the foot of the outdoor patio on this end of the house is a cement block that holds the impression of many, many hands. I got all choked up when I saw it--maybe because it reminded me that Ragdale was, for a long time, a family home, and this is such a common and familiar thing for a family to do. It turns out these handprints belong to the children and grandchildren of Alice Hayes, granddaughter of Howard Van Doren Shaw, who designed and built the Ragdale house for his parents and his family to use as a summer place (hence the abundance of porches.) They made these handprints as part of a farewell family gathering just before Alice donated the Ragdale house to the city of Lake Forest.

From there I walked across the back yard and into the garden. The garden gate has an "R" woven into the wrought iron design at the top and two little Chinese lions beside each gatepost. The trees on the Ragdale grouns are just starting to turn (the green leaves have that tired, yellowy color that means they're just about to give up), but the garden is still full of flowers. Also, as is the case in just about every corner of Ragdale, it's full of scultpure: I found this little guy hiding under an oak tree. (I actually had to kneel down and get under some low-hanging branches to take this picture--that's how hidden he is.) In the Ragdale living room there are scultpures of bears, a dog and a chicken, so I'm guessing that Sylvia Shaw Judson, the sculpter, was a great lover of all animals. I'm impressed that the sculptures aren't on display so much as they're just part of the scenery--this deer is placed exactly where an actual deer would be, hiding away out of sight.

Also in the garden: this sundial, designed by Shaw. The inscription reads "Hours Fly/Flowers Die/New Ways/New Days/Pass By/Love Stays." You'll notice that the grass around sundial isn't pristine, and that's pretty much the case throughout the Ragdale grounds; everything is very beautiful and well-kept, but not perfect. This looks like a place where real people live. I think that's why the writers and artists who come here marvel at how quickly they settle in and feel at home.

I left the garden and meandered toward the back of the grounds, where the split rail fence divides Ragdale from the prairie preserve, and that's where I made the decision to turn back rather than brave the prairie in the face of what looked like an impending downpour. On my way back toward the house, I passed this profusion of flowers (and for those of you worried about the dwindling bee population--I really think it's okay. They're all up here, having a snack, and they seem quite happy.) Lots of other flowers in all colors, too, many of them taller than me--that's the really cool thing about the prairie, how tall the flowers grow when they're left to do their own thing. Not to mention the variety of flowers. I didn't even know that phlox grew wild before I saw the prairie last time.

Heading around the north end of the house, I made a final stop to photograph the "Bird Girl" statue that sits in front of the Barnhouse. This is probably Sylvia's most famous statue, thanks to Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. She's smaller than you might imagine, and I think I'd prefer her without the flowers. The Ragdale office sells replicas of this statue (in addition to sweatshirts and other Ragdale paraphernalia), and I'm fairly certain I'll have a copy of "Bird Girl" sitting on my entryway table at some point.

Once the prairie has time to dry out, I'll post more photos. I'm sorry now that I didn't take the time to walk the trails on Thursday afternoon, when I first arrived. I was so tired from travelling that I opted for a nap instead. With any hope, the trails will be dry and travel-worthy within a few days. It wouldn't be a Ragdale experience without some time on the prairie.

Postcard from Ragdale #1: My room with a view

My first Ragdale visit was four years ago, and I didn’t have any idea what to expect from it. What I got was a quiet room at the end of the second-floor hallway in the main house, Alice's Room--an easy place to hide out and do nothing but work.

I’m staying in the main house again, but this time I’m in the Blue Room (aptly named for the painted blue woodwork and wild, leafy wallpaper. That’s right, blue leaves.) My room faces west, so as I sit here typing I can look down on the back lawn, where deer sometimes wander out to graze, and into the south edge of the prairie preserve. I also have half of a screened porch to enjoy—I share it with another resident, and our halves are divided by a privacy screen. But there are so many porches in the Ragdale house that I’ll never have trouble finding a place to enjoy the outdoors. (Last night I heard a coyote howling just before I went to bed. I love that this place is designed to communicate with its surroundings instead of sealing them out.)

New things: the Barnhouse was under renovation last time, so this was my first opportunity to see the beautifully updated space. I hope I’ll have a chance to stay there sometime, though those rooms tend to be assigned to the visual artists. Regin Igloria, the director of artist residencies, tells us that plans are in the works to renovate the main house before too long (though the plan is to leave the house esentially as it is--just in better repair, and with updated plumbing. To which I say, "Hooray!")

Also new is the presence of wireless Internet access, which I'm going to try to use sparingly. Part of the point of being here is disconnecting; I had a conversation with another writer at dinner last night, and I told her that one of my favorite parts of being at Ragdale is the change of pace that occurs when you give up a car and every little errand involves a longish walk.

I’m going through the usual stages of residency: yesterday afternoon was panic (“Why did I do this? I’ve made a terrible mistake. I have nothing to write about, and I’m stuck here for two weeks.”) Once I’d taken a nap and had an excellent dinner and met the rest of my resident cohort, that feeling subsided a bit. Now I’m in the settling stage (“Okay, at least I can read and relax and have some time to myself, even if I can’t write a lot. This won’t be so bad, and two weeks isn’t that long.”) As I recall, this fairly quickly resolves into a productive writing groove, after which the time begins to fly and it’s clear that two weeks is nowhere near long enough to do what you’d like to do.

The last time I was here, I was intent on having something to show for my residency (since I was missing my son’s birthday, and a visit from my sister, in order to be here) and I made an effort to do little more than write. This time, I need to wander as much as I write—both in my thoughts and on the grounds. I need to look around, get my bearings, figure some things out. I need to read and think and rejuvenate the writing part of my brain. Clearly the folks who put Ragdale together know what that involves—note the nice little library and cozy reading chair beside my bed (complete with a throw, lest the reader should take a chill.)

This time, what I needed most from Ragdale was a peaceful room with a view that encourages lots of daydreaming. And magically, here I am.

On the road (well, in the air) again

I'm off to Ragdale for my second writing residency tomorrow. My last visit to the magical and historic home of Howard Van Doren Shaw and family was, in a word, fabulous: lots of walking on the prairie, lots of sitting on my screened porch and thinking, lots of deer-watching, lots of writing. I don't want to sound too new agey here, but there is absolutely something to be said for the energy in spaces that have housed writers and artists for so many years. I don't think I've been able to sit at a computer and write for eight hours at a stretch anywhere other than Ragdale.

I'm feeling anxious about leaving the family for two weeks, of course, especially now that Hurricane Ike has decided to make the Texas coast his target. I know the kids will be fine, though. They're largely able to take care of themselves, and they have a very capable and caring parent to rely upon when they need help. But it's not so easy to turn off the Mom side of the brain, even when I'm too far away to solve many of the problems that might arise. Or the Wife side of the brain, for that matter; when you're lucky enough to be married to the person you most enjoy talking to, it's hard to be away for so long.

At least Ragdale has wireless Internet access this time around--last time, such was not the case. And while that did make it easier to disengage from the minutiae of family life, it also made staying connected that much more difficult. I can see where this would be a good thing, sometimes, but not when there are kids in the mix. Still, I'm going to try to limit my Internet use in the interest of keeping my brain focused on the task at hand.

Assuming I can get my wireless connection and digital camera to work properly, I'll post photos and updates here in the next few days. Onward (and upward!)

Amusing moments from the McCain viewing party at my house

So my son had to watch John McCain's acceptance speech last night as an assignment for his history class. (I didn't object when he was required to watch Obama's speech last week, but this time around I was thinking, "What? That's a ridiculous assignment. They shouldn't be requiring me to expose my child to Republican propaganda.") My son decided he wanted to watch the speech by himself, in our bedroom, where he could focus on his note-taking--his job was to write down 15 facts from McCain's speech. Please don't get me started about how difficult I would find that task.

After my son had left the room, my husband turned to me and said, "That's probably for the best. I wouldn't want him listening to me and writing down facts like 'If John McCain wins the election, my family will be moving to Canada.'"

Once McCain started speaking, of course, no end of hilarity ensued. I can't wait to introduce Sarah Palin to Washington.

"Um . . . Mr. McCain . . . Washington is dead, sir," my husband said.

"What?" I said. "No one told me that! I just had coffee with him yesterday!"

And on and on and on. Before too long, my son came out of the bedroom with his list of facts (I didn't fact-check his assignment, in the interest of letting him get to bed sometime before the new year.)

"So, what do you think of Mr. McCain?" I asked.

"He almost got me," my son said. "I think it's pretty impressive that he spent five years in a prison and didn't come out completely mean and evil."

I declined to challenge that assessment. "Well," I said, "Dad and I have always told people that the only way you and Sissy can rebel against us is by becoming Republican accountants. I guess it was inevitable that we'd part ways."

My son gave me a sideways look. "I said he almost got me. This fish is not taking the bait."

If my eleven-year-old is smart enough to see through the rhetoric of jingoism, let's hope the rest of the country is too. I'm not holding my breath, but I'm audaciously hopeful.