Homeward Bound

We're having Fall Break at my university next week (for friends in the north, it's like a miniature Spring Break--we get next Thursday and Friday off.)  I'm heading to Boise for the 4-day weekend.  I love the fall in Idaho, so I'm looking forward to having some time among the turning leaves.  Fall is the one thing I really miss here in Texas.  I thought I'd miss winter when we moved here, but not so much.  Turns out you can live a long and happy life without snow.

I'm a little nervous about my trip home, though--partly because my dad's health has been declining pretty steadily for the last few years, and I haven't seen him since this time last year, when we flew to Boise for my niece's wedding.  I'm expecting to be shocked by how much he's aged, and I know that caring for him is taking a toll on my mother as well.  I doubt either of them will look like the people I remember.  Beyond having to face these rather difficult realities, though, I'm always a little nervous about going to Boise.

I know that sounds silly.  How can you be nervous about visiting your home town?  But these are the facts:  I never felt like Boise was where I belonged.  After I left Idaho, I fell in love with the idea of it; while I was living there, I couldn't wait to leave.  I love mountains, and I always feel at home when I'm within visual distance of them.  The smell of pine trees makes me deeply happy in a way few things do.  But being in Boise makes me remember how it felt to be a powerless teenager in a place I just didn't belong, which is a feeling I'd just as soon forget.

It's not that I don't like the place.  On the contrary, I really love my little hometown.  It's just that I don't know how to be there as a grown-up, I guess. 
      

Esperanza

It’s been really cold in south Texas this week. Honestly, the temperatures don’t have to drop very far before people around here start complaining and the weather personalities on TV start talking about the “bone-chilling cold” outside. But it’s been 20 years since the overnight lows fell into the teens, and even longer since the area saw several days in a row of this kind of cold. I feel completely justified in calling this wintry weather.

I tried to save all the tender plants in my back yard by moving them into the shed. Yesterday, when I went to check on them, the news wasn’t good. My big aloe plant is a puddle of mush in its pot. The hibiscus tree is quite sad and droopy; whether or not the trunk will replace its leaves remains to be seen, but I’m not counting on anything. Same for mandevilla vine. And the things that were planted in the ground—plumbago, esperanza, more hibiscus—are long gone. From what I’ve read online, they can lose their leaves in a frost and still survive, but temperatures this cold tend to kill the root system underground.

I grew up in a place with actual winters, so none of this is unfamiliar territory. I’m accustomed to starting from scratch in the spring; I just haven’t had to do it for awhile, since we’ve had very mild winters for the past few years. But this morning, I was feeling very sad about the loss of the esperanza bush I planted in memory of my friend Linda, who was killed in a car accident last spring. Linda was an avid gardener, and planting a beautiful shrub in her memory seemed like an appropriate gesture.

Well, a little voice in my head said, if you wanted something that would last forever, you should have planted a tree instead of a tropical bush that isn’t cold-tolerant. You can’t be upset when a plant doesn’t do what it’s not equipped to do.

In other words, as St. Exupery writes in The Little Prince, “If I were to command a general to turn into a seagull, and if the general did not obey, that would not be the general's fault. It would be mine.”

Later this morning, my husband was reading an article in the Sunday paper about the construction of Main Plaza in downtown San Antonio. It’s finally complete, after a number of delays—including the deaths of seven red oak trees in last summer’s extreme drought. So, not even trees last forever. Longer than most plants, perhaps, but not forever.

I have to drive past the site of Linda’s accident every day. It happened on the interstate I normally travel to and from my campus. After she died, it took awhile before I could drive through that area without thinking of her, wondering if she saw what was about to happen or if the accident took her completely unawares. But the burn marks in the grass and the skid marks on the highway have disappeared now; sometimes I actually drive home without thinking about the fact that we don’t usually know the last day of our lives is, in fact, going to be the last one. The day after Linda’s accident, I kept thinking things like “If she’d left campus two minutes later, or two minutes sooner, or driven a little bit faster or slower—if she’d done even one thing different, she might still be here now. “

True enough. She might still be here—for awhile longer. But Linda’s death, as it occurred, was no one’s fault. The driver who killed her also died in the crash, as did her teenage son, all three of them victims of a blowout at highway speed. No one was drunk or otherwise impaired. No one was being reckless.

Tires blow up. People die. The weather gets cold, and then it gets warm again. Plants die, and some return in the spring, and others don’t. It’s up to us to choose whether to replant or give up on the things that don’t stick around. Mortal things can only do what they were created to do.

I’ve decided to create an esperanza spot in my back yard. If the bush I planted after Linda’s death doesn’t come back in the spring--well, I’ll plant another in its place. Esperanza is the Spanish word for hope. Linda’s legacy will be the reminder that hope is with me as long as I let it be.

Sometimes You Blog About Idaho

I've been feeling nostalgic for the Northwest here of late--probably because it's been so blazing hot in Texas this summer. (My mom tells me it's been hot in Boise, too, but I'm betting it doesn't feel as hot as 35 days of temperatures over 100.) My mom, sister and older niece went on a church retreat in an area near the Sawtooths last weekend. One of my nieces now lives in Montana. The pictures they've all been posting on Facebook make me want to just sit down and weep.

Which is interesting, because I was explaining to a friend just a few days ago that the Northwest doesn't really feel like my home anymore. Why, then, do I keep checking the Chronicle's job listings, hoping to see a job opening in Idaho? Or Montana? Or Washington? Or Oregon? Or even Colorado?

I've already written about the weirdly conflicted relationship I have with Boise--I know moving back there probably wouldn't be a good idea. Much as I'd like to be closer to my parents, especially now that my dad's health is failing and my mom needs all the help she can get, it's easier for me to be the person I am now when I keep some space between the me that was and the me that is. Last time I visited my parents, my dad said "I'm still surprised that you're a college English professor--I always thought you'd go into teaching the deaf. You were always reading books about that Helen Keller."

Yes, I was. When I was ten years old.

Another good friend of mine, a theology professor, recently wrote a blog entry about Mark 6:4, the Bible passage in which we're told that even prophets have trouble earning respect when they go home--back to the people who knew them as children tromping through the flowerbeds, terrorizing the cat, procrastinating on completing their chores. I suppose even Jesus's neighbors wondered if he'd ever amount to anything. I know it's hard for my family to see me as something other than a loudmouth teenager with lots of uninformed opinions--that's who I was the last time I lived at home. When I talk about growing up with my dad, sometimes my husband just shakes his head in disbelief. "That doesn't even sound like the same person I know," he says. And of course, it's not.

So I don't feel at home in Boise, in the sense of feeling like that's where I can be my honest self--but the Northwest is definitely a place I'm connected to. There's something about a horizon ridged with mountains that puts a big lump in my throat. Something about the smell of pine trees does the same thing. I often hear people talk about the smells they associate with their grandmothers' houses, but I didn't know my grandparents when I was growing up--it's the smell of the forest that catapults me back into my childhood, back into the camper with my parents and my brother. Sometimes, that kind of emotional response can get confused with the need to take some action, to make a change.

But just this morning my husband and I were talking about whether we'd really want to move farther north, out of the Texas heat, if we had the chance. We both agree that the Midwest is a place we don't feel compelled to return to--we've lived in Kansas, Iowa and Missouri, and none of those places has a hold on either of us. The Northeast might be a possibility; we've never lived there, so it would be a new adventure.

And the Northwest? Maybe.

"At this point,I just think I'm more of a live oak guy than a pine tree guy," my husband said.

I don't know if I'd get choked up over a picture of a live oak tree, but I do know that I'd miss the live oaks and their beautiful bonsai shapes if we left Texas. And the wildflowers growing by the roadsides every spring. And the great big storms with thunder loud enough to rattle the windows--those used to scare me, but now I find myself outside with the neighbors, watching the clouds roll in, welcoming the drama.

I suppose I may never feel about Texas the way I feel about Idaho, but I'm not sure I need to feel that way in order for this to be my home. Maybe what I'm responding to when I see a photo of mountains and pine trees isn't the Idaho landscape at all, but what it helps me understand: the enormity of creation, its ability to remind us of how small and insignificant we are in the greater scheme of things.

Postcard from a parallel universe

Perhaps it's because I'm on sabbatical this semester, and therefore paying more attention to the world around me than the stack of papers in front of me, but I'm really missing autumn. Perhaps it's because I was in Boise a few weeks ago (and at Ragdale a few weeks before that) and had a taste of real fall weather for the first time in a long time. In this part of Texas, we know fall has arrived when we need to put on a jacket for the first few hours of the early morning. Sometimes I wonder how in the world I wound up here, of all places

A friend of mine recently moved from Kansas City to an apartment in downtown Portland. She's loving her new life, including the change of climate, and I have to admit that I'm a little jealous. Portland is a great city, and I love the ethos of the Northwest in general--living in an apartment in the Pearl District sounds like a great life to me. There was a time when my husband and I were planning an urban life for ourelves, either in Portland or Seattle, but our plans never came to fruition. We wound up staying in Boise instead, and that turned out to be a great choice for us: we taught at BSU for several years, made some good friends, had a baby, reconnected with my family. I've never regretted that decision, but I've often wondered how our lives might have changed if we'd followed our original plan.

A few weeks ago, I watched a really interesting episode of Nova on PBS called "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives." The premise behind it is pretty complex, but it hinges on the theory of parallel universes--the idea that every time we find ourselves at a point where a decision has to be made, there's a version of ourselves that lives out every possibility. We're only aware of one decision, of course, because we're only one version of ourselves.

So, in theory, there's a version of me that made that move to Portland (and probably a version of me in Seattle, too.) I wonder if the Portland/Seattle versions of me wound up going back to graduate school and earning their Ph.D's. My husband was happy with his full-time teaching position at BSU, but I'd hit the ceiling of my options and knew I couldn't spend the rest of my life as a part-time teacher of freshman composition. That just wasn't going to make me happy. The only way I could open up other options for myself was by getting a book published--a process over which I had only partial control--or by getting a Ph.D. So the Boise me chose to go back to graduate school.

But the Seattle/Portland versions of me might have made career shifts when they arrived in their new cities; those choices might have moved graduate school off the radar completely. Perhaps those versions of me found their way into careers that supported the lives they wanted to live, something I knew part-time college teaching in Boise would never do.

The interesting thing about the trajectory of your life is how it builds itself, how one decision leads to others you wouldn't have had to make in other circumstances. If we hadn't moved to Boise, I might never have thought about going back for my Ph.D.. If I hadn't asked Deborah Eisenberg for a letter of recommendation when I applied to graduate school, I might never have considered the program at Missouri--that was her suggestion. (Of course, there's a version of me that didn't make this decision, too. Who knows where she is now, or what she's doing.)

The long chain of choices that brought me to this particular moment in this particular version of my life probably couldn't be traced back very far, since it involves the smallest decisions along with the big ones--whether to drink a cup of coffee or make a trip to the grocery store, for example. And it's probably best not to think about the millions of versions of me that have met with untimely deaths because of the choices they made, however innocuous those choices might have seemed.

Instead, I'll focus on the small miracle of being where I am right now. It's not a perfect place, true, but it's a human place. The fact that I'm still here seems like reason enough to be happy.

True West

I’ve been doing some reading in the last few weeks, both in preparation for a class I’m teaching in the spring and in support of some writing projects I’m working on. My class is going to focus on literature that examines our evolving relationship with the American west, from frontier to New West. But the reading has started me thinking about why I identify myself as a westerner, and what exactly constitutes “The West” in contemporary culture.

I’m planning to ask my students that question next semester, to give them each a map of U.S. and ask them to mark off The West, then discuss how they came to a decision. How would I mark that map myself? To be honest, I’m not sure. Certainly the Midwest is part of the western U.S., part of the frontier that people were exploring as our country expanded westward—but is it a subsection of The West now, or is it something else, something of its own? I spent twelve years in various parts of the Midwest—Kansas, then Iowa, then Missouri—and I have to say that none of those places felt like Idaho, my geographical home. But does that mean they didn’t feel like The West?

I didn’t expect that Texas would feel like home either—it was just below Oklahoma, certainly part of the Midwest. By the time we moved here from Missouri, after I’d finished my Ph.D., my husband and I had moved enough times that we knew what to expect: we’d hate our new location for awhile, identifying all the ways in which it failed to measure up to our old stomping grounds. Eventually we’d forget to hate it, though, and start to focus on the things we liked. We weren’t even planning to live in Texas long enough to get used to it; we’d live here only as long as it took for one of us to find another job in a more desirable location. Texas was never a place we’d imagined ourselves living for the long haul.

Imagine our surprise, then, when we found ourselves immediately delighted by just about everything we discovered in San Antonio. Excellent Mexican food on every block! (We’d never been able to find even passable Mexican food in Missouri.) Fresh tortillas made daily at the grocery store! A festival for every imaginable thing—books, strawberries, accordions! Add to this the fact that winter lasts for about two weeks in January, and it didn’t take long before we started telling people that we were never, ever leaving Texas.

My husband and I have often wondered why we felt at home here so quickly. The only explanation we’ve come up with is that Texas felt familiar to us in ways we didn’t expect, ways we still can’t articulate clearly—ways that would seem to include the Midwest, too, though we didn’t have the same affection for that region. (The fact that my husband grew up in Kansas, that it’s his geographical home, just complicates matters further. Can it be that Texas feels both like The West and the Midwest? But if that’s the appeal, why does my husband prefer Texas to Missouri—which also must have felt like the Midwest? Shouldn’t Missouri, Kansas’s next door neighbor, have felt more like home than Texas?)

I guess there’s no accounting for what the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia, the emotional connection between people and the spaces they occupy. Perhaps it's just as irrational as most emotional bonds.

All I know is this: I love The West. I know it when I feel it, and I miss it when I don’t. And here in Texas, for whatever reason, I find myself at home.

Home Again

I'm back in Texas after a week in Boise. I made this trip to the Northwest mostly to celebrate my dad's 82nd birthday with my family, but I did some work while I was there as well--I met with a class of really wonderful students at Boise State University on Thursday and did a reading at BSU on Friday evening. I taught at the university for a few years in the mid-90's, and it was good to have a chance to reconnect with some of the people I knew back then.

I still call Boise my hometown, but I have a troubled relationship with the place. Partly, I think, this is because I lived in Boise mostly as a kid--so I go back to feeling like a kid every time I return, feeling trapped and discontent and vaguely furious all the time, exactly like a teenager. There's no reason for me to feel this way now, of course, but it's like an emotional reflex I can't prevent. I lived in Boise for only three years as an adult, those three years I taught at BSU.

This time, though, staying with my sister instead of in the house where I grew up, it was easier to be in Boise and still feel like myself. Just having my own car to drive seemed to make a huge difference. When I'm there with my own little family, my husband usually drives; it had never even occurred to me that being a passenger in a car in my hometown contributed to that feeling of being dropped back into childhood again. Just having some small measure of autonomy this time let me be in Boise and still feel like the generally well-adjusted adult I've been for more than twenty years now.

When I talked with my friend Karen's nonfiction writing class at BSU, one of the things we discussed is what constitutes an Idaho story. Does it have to include hunting and fishing, for instance? Part of my own Idaho story is having grown up as a non-hunter in a family of hunters, and becoming a vegetarian as the result of that. (Though I gave up vegetarianism when I moved to Texas, a.k.a. The Land of Meat.) Another part of my Idaho story is the class division I faced because I never learned how to ski. By the time I was in high school, all my friends had been skiing since they could walk; even if I'd had the money to buy or rent equipment and go skiing on the weekends, I wouldn't have been able to keep up with them. Whole layers of the social hierarchy in my high school just weren't accessible to me for that reason alone.

In my first novel, part of what makes it an Idaho story for me is one character's feeling of being trapped by the landscape of her life. The Boise where I grew up was very remote--it's not within easy driving distance of a major city, and in any case my family didn't travel for recreation. We drove to a campground, or we drove to a relative's house in the Midwest; it wouldn't have occurred to my parents that we might just go visit a city for the sake of seeing what it had to offer us. I always wanted to live somewhere other than Boise, because it seemed like Real Life must be happening somewhere else. I always wrote stories about people who lived elsewhere: Seattle, New Orleans, Chicago, Paris, all manner of places I knew absolutely nothing about. I had no idea how I'd manage to go to any of those places on my own, but I was intent on getting away.

When I drove across the country to start graduate school, I remember being shocked by how much space there was between Idaho and Kansas. Somehow, the "away" I'd imagined wasn't quite as far away as reality took me. I wound up in a strange state, in a strange town, on a strange campus with (it must be said) a strange roommate. But that's where I learned to see Boise as a place in its own right, a place with a very specific personality and character--a place worth writing about. When I left Idaho, for the first time I met people who were fascinated by the idea of a place they'd rarely even heard of. As my friend Steph puts it, "Before I met you, people from China were more real to me than people from Idaho."

These days, when I go back to Boise, it doesn't look a thing like the town I remember. It's much larger than the place where I grew up, much more urban, much more hip. And, truth be told, San Antonio feels like home now. I'm glad to be back.

But Boise is a place I love. Most importantly, Boise is a place.

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.