Eclipse

The Mad Men episode “Seven Twenty Three” has some of my favorite scenes in the show, revolving around Betty and Henry’s meeting at Swenson’s Bakery. The combination of olive green, hot pink, turquoise, and lavender on Betty’s dress immediately transports us to the 1960s, as does the wood paneling in the bakery. 

When Betty and Henry step outside, they witness the solar eclipse of July 20, 1963. The eclipse is an unexpectedly surreal and strange touch after the controlled environment of the bakery. Betty says that she feels faint. They stop in front of the window of an antique store, where Henry points out a Victorian fainting couch, which Betty later buys. 

I grew up in a house from the 1960s with wood paneling and olive green appliances, and since I was a child, have seen and touched many fabrics that resemble the pattern on Betty’s dress. I have noticed when going to antique stores, or watching period pieces like Mad Men, how things that have been forgotten come to the surface when jogged by items from the past. It’s exciting, but also surreal, like the eclipse. 

This small design is inspired by the colors on Betty’s dress. 

In Vogue

Simplicity. It creates an impact. The author Kate Chopin (1850-1904) knew this and used it to her advantage: “A Pair of Silk Stockings” displays how a conservative amount of words and quotidian events can have a deep emotional impact on the reader. The protagonist, Mrs. Sommers, unexpectedly receives fifteen dollars and goes shopping with the most practical of intentions. However, as a result of the softness of stockings, she indulges in a department store spending spree, lunches at an upscale restaurant, and takes in a matinée. Short even by short story standards, how could a few pages about a woman buying stockings be my favorite example of the genre?

In short, the answer is that Chopin targets our most elemental emotions. Even possible judgements are suspended, because we are wrapped up in Chopin’s deft (and simple) descriptions of sensory pleasures. Of course Mrs. Sommers would do this, or do that—how often have we done something similar to soothe some personal trouble, large or small? The plain subject matter, curtly reported, is deceptively deep, and we go along with it easily, without having to wade through wordy prose and elaborate situations. It’s simple, and we understand what is happening. No re-reads with this one: we go shopping with Mrs. Sommers, and wish our trip home would never end. To borrow from Thoreau, the “quiet desperation” of Mrs. Sommers is succinctly described in the last few sentences of the story:

The play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. It was like a dream ended. People scattered in all directions. Mrs. Sommers went to the corner and waited for the cable car. 

A man with keen eyes, who sat opposite to her, seemed to like the study of her small, pale face. It puzzled him to decipher what he saw there. In truth, he saw nothing—unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever. 

The cover of the September 1897 Vogue that contains Chopin's short story. Mrs. Sommers’ $1.98 stockings would cost $57.33 in today’s dollars.

This intense wish is a result of hosiery, of all things, and Chopin’s talent makes this completely believable. The original format of this story bears mentioning: it was published in Vogue magazine in September 1897. How many women in the late 1800s read this and saw themselves as Mrs. Sommers, or glanced about for others like her? Chopin creates a bond between the 1897 reader and the protagonist by mentioning magazines several times in the story. For instance:

Mrs. Sommers bought two high-priced magazines such as she had been accustomed to read in the days when she had been accustomed to other pleasant things. (...) [S]he picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. (…) A soft, pleasing strain of music could be heard, and a gentle breeze was blowing through the window. She tasted a bite, and she read a word or two, and she sipped the amber wine and wiggled her toes in the silk stockings.

Likewise, the last two sentences above are prime examples of the sensory emotions Chopin appeals to throughout the text: hearing, taste, sight, and touch. Touch is very important in Chopin’s narrative, as it is the feel of the silk that beguiles Mrs. Sommers into the sad fairy tale of her afternoon:

An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. A placard near by announced that they had been reduced in price from two dollars and fifty cents to one dollar and ninety-eight cents; and a young girl who stood behind the counter asked her if she wished to examine their line of silk hosiery. She smiled, just as if she had been asked to inspect a tiara of diamonds with the ultimate view of purchasing it. But she went on feeling the soft, sheeny luxurious things—with both hands now, holding them up to see them glisten, and to feel them glide serpent-like through her fingers. 

The stockings are described as serpentine, which suggests that Mrs. Sommers is a Gilded Age Eve. She yields to the temptation, is soothed by purchases and diversions, and is then spit out into a cable car, banished from the exclusive Eden of late 19th-century consumerism. The shortness of “Stockings” is tantalizing. Would Mrs. Sommers find happiness in wealth, whatever amount of money “wealth” meant to her? Or would the emptiness that Carrie feels in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) accompany it? What about us? If it isn’t wealth, is there something missing that would make us happy? Chopin leaves Mrs. Sommers open enough for the reader to squeeze into her place.

I have wanted to create a design in relation to this story since I started Carte Blomst, but I struggled with what to put on paper. I took the colors of the stockings as my starting point: light-blue, lavender, black, shades of tan and grey. I thought about the story’s simplicity and decided to do something simple, too. The modest dots are repeated to make an impact much like Chopin’s story.

The design on a windowsill under shadows of a palm. 

Wild, Nodding, Luscious, Sweet

The coterie of flowers described below by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream were asking to be drawn recently, so I concurred. 

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight;"
(Oberon, Act II, Scene I.)

Thyme (purple) and oxlips (yellow)...

Violets (purple) and woodbine (yellow)...

Musk-roses (yellow-pink) and eglantine (red).

Titania's flower bed. 

Constants

“‘Oh, dear, how hard it does seem to take up our packs and go on,’ sighed Meg the morning after the party, for now the holidays were over…”

New Year’s is one of my least favorite holidays. It signifies the end of them, for one thing, and also ushers in a whole new year full of uncertainty. “January” comes from the word Janus, a Roman god that was commonly depicted with two faces—one looking forward, the other back. As I look towards the unknown, I am comforted by constants. And what is more constant than a favorite book? 

A book and a cat - pure contentment. My first copy of Little Women, pictured here on the back of the sofa, is one of my most prized possessions.   

I have known Louisa May Alcott since November 1994, when my mom and I purchased my first copy of Little Women (1868/69) at a local used bookstore. Since then, my life has been filled with Alcott’s stories, full of humor, kindness, and love. In Little Women, the New Year’s related chapter entitled “The Laurence Boy” is a good example of Alcott’s skill in appealing to common concerns—how we present ourselves to others, how we cooperate with those closest to us, and what we want but cannot have. Running through the text is Alcott’s fine sense of humor, which still makes me laugh even after the twentieth or so read. The March sisters are far from idealized heroines that prance stiffly across the page, out of touch with modern times. It is their timeless humanity that makes them the beloved characters that they are: relatable in flaws, relatable in aptitudes, relatable in feelings. Their authenticity does not come as a surprise, for Alcott drew inspiration from her three sisters, mother, father, and their life in New England. This authenticity pervades throughout her writings, and is a large part of their enduring appeal. 

Orchard House (399 Lexington Road, Concord, Massachusetts), captured on the morning of August 26, 2011.

As we go forward into the unknown of the new year, it is beneficial to remind ourselves of constants—a book, a home, or in this case, both. The Alcotts’ home, Orchard House, still stands, and has stood in Concord, Massachusetts since the early 1700s. Alcott wrote Little Women on a half-moon desk between the upper right hand windows. I drew the warm and peaceful Orchard House from a picture that was taken in 2011, the first time I visited. 

For those interested in the Alcott family, I would encourage you to read the Pulitzer Prize-winning Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father by John Matteson. I received this extraordinary dual biography for Christmas in 2016 and it quickly became one of my favorites on the shelf.  Matteson’s extensive research brings the family to life and honors them with sensitively composed, beautiful prose that reveals his devotion to the subject. I didn't want it to end. 

Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too;
And God bless you and send you a Happy New Year
And God send you a Happy New Year.

An Old-Fashioned Christmas

There’s no way to think about Christmas without thinking of past Christmases. Our point of reference for the holiday itself forces us to look back a year or two—maybe that one time when it snowed, or when you received a special present—or even decades, which meld into centuries. For me, it is the cultural history of the holiday that I find especially interesting, and this is reflected in popular, “disposable” art such as greeting cards and magazine advertisements. 

One of my favorite time-capsule images of Christmas was created by Haddon Sundblom (1899-1976), an artist best known for his advertising work. (Whether you know it or not, you are most likely familiar with Sundblom: he created the iconic portrayal of Santa Claus for Coca-Cola in the 1930s.) My favorite Sundblom image is an advertisement for 7-Up from 1957. Prominently in the foreground, a table is spread with a tempting feast, including an “only from the 1950s” concoction of shrimp, fresh vegetables, and wieners, and of course, prodigious amounts of 7-Up. The light from the candles illuminates two men and a woman and throws shadows on the back wall. The image glows. The man on the left reaches for a green bottle while the featured couple laughingly holds their own: the woman herself resembles the beverage, festively dressed in a green party dress with pearls and red lipstick. Her gold bracelet catches the candlelight and glints. Farther back to the right, and through a doorway, we see an older man in a green tie sitting comfortably with a Christmas tree being decorated in the background. The ornaments shine, the ham glistens. Everything about the scene radiates warmth, laughter, and happiness. How I would love to be a part of it! 

Haddon Sundblom for 7-Up (1957)

But of course, this is physically impossible. “Nostalgia” is spelled in the shadows that fall from the word “Christmas.” Much of what we deem to be the most classic elements of Christmas are filled with melancholic longing, such as the songs sung by Bing Crosby in the 1940s—“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas/Just like the ones I used to know,” and “I’ll be home for Christmas/If only in my dreams.” The cycle of nostalgia repeats itself across the decades, and for me always ends up somewhere in the period of American life easily summed up as “mid-century,” as we see depicted in Sundblom’s 7-Up advertisement. 

Another artist, Eulalie Banks (1895-1999), called upon bright colors and enticing compositions to charm the viewer into her world, though in a different, but similarly underrated, format—children’s book illustrations. Her illustrations filled my eyes as a child: anthropomorphized, chubby animals, cherubic children, flowers you could almost eat, peaceful scenes of domestic life. Eulalie, as she called herself, was born in London and later adopted Southern California as her home. She painted many murals in the area, both in private and public spheres. In 1983 she was asked to remove gnomes, elves, and fairies from a mural in Pasadena—unsurprisingly, this upset her:

"They told me the children didn't know what they were," she told The [Los Angeles] Times afterward. "It's cruel [how] children don't read anymore. . . . Now they sit and watch television." Asked what she would say to a modern child, she said: "Do believe in fairy tales. Hang on to the magic. Never lose your sense of wonder and whimsy, or you'll lose a part of your soul." (Taken from The Times’ obituary from 1999, written by Myrna Oliver; emphasis mine.)

The whimsy in Eulalie’s illustrations for the poem “The Sugar-Plum Tree” by Eugene Field (1850-1895) in The Gateway to Storyland fairly jumps off the pages. The opening lines of Field’s poem are a type of heaven, to be sure:

Have you ever heard of the Sugar-Plum Tree?
‘Tis a marvel of great renown!
It blooms on the shore of the Lollipop sea
In the garden of Shut-Eye Town…

Eulalie's illustrations for Field's poem in The Gateway to Storyland. (The first known usage of the word "sugarplum" was in 1627, according to Merriam-Webster.) 

Though not specifically Christmas in subject matter, the word “sugarplum” recalls Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker (“Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”) and Clement Clarke Moore’s “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (“The children were nestled all snug in their beds;/While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads”), two bastions of holiday music and poetry. “The Sugar-Plum Tree” tells of a tree covered in candy that falls for children when a chocolate cat jumps upon the branches, pestered by a gingerbread dog below. The pastel-colored scenes remind me of the pinks, turquoises, and light greens of Shiny Brite ornaments popular in in the 1940s and 50s.

A box of old ornaments in Forestwood Antique Mall, Dallas, Texas, 2016. 

The first design I did is an ode to mid-century Christmases. You’ll find the plummy purples and orangey warmth in the Sundblom image reflected as actual plums and oranges, an old-fashioned treat, rings of pineapple with maraschino cherries, so beloved by housewives in the 1950s and 60s, and three candles throwing too-perfect circles of light. 

The second design I did is a nod to Eulalie and Field, mid-century pastels, and old-fashioned holiday accoutrements: pink and turquoise aluminum bells, bubble lights, and vintage candies, including ribbon candy, peppermint sticks, lemon drops, and black licorice. I also placed the design against a paper sack to emphasize the “general store” quality of the treats. 

Both of them overlap in the subject matter of Christmas nostalgia: the smaller, more modest things, such as banged-up books, forgotten magazines, and the ephemera of material culture. We can escape to a time which we can’t return to, a place which doesn’t physically exist, but perhaps is more vivid than anything real, for it exists in our mind. And that is eternal.

Fruit for Thought

And there was always the bend in the road! “‘God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world,’” whispered Anne softly. 

So ends Anne of Green Gables, with the quote from Robert Browning (1812-1889) resting on the page and in the reader’s mind. A recent morning made me think of Anne and also Browning’s original lines: 

“The year’s at the spring,
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hill-side’s dew pearl’d;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!”

The above lines are found in Pippa Passes (1841), a verse drama that was published by Browning as part of a series of pamphlets entitled Bells and Pomegranates. Here in California, thanks to the 18th-century Spaniards who introduced them, I am surrounded by pomegranates hanging on trees like Christmas balls. The birds love them; they turn them into impromptu feeders, sitting on the fruit itself while happily pecking away at the seeds until their small beaks are vibrantly red from the juice.

A single pomegranate valiantly hanging on at the Getty Villa in January. 

I have liked Browning’s verse since I first read it years ago, but did not know until this week that the literary package in which it was delivered included pomegranates. Browning explained that his enigmatic title made reference to a high priest’s robe in the Bible: “A golden bell and a pomegranate, a golden bell and a pomegranate, upon the hem of the robe round about” (Exodus 28:34, KJV). Browning said this was to represent the mixture of “music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought.”

Pomegranates are storied, ancient things, claimants of a jewel-like beauty and historic symbolism. Originating in Asia, they filled the Mediterranean gardens of Greece and Rome and were featured in Renaissance paintings, held by expressive hands.

Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Pomegranate (c. 1487) (Uffizi Gallery)

Browning associated the fruit with discourse, sense, and thought; similarly, a pomegranate—timeless, constant—reminds me of my family’s Thanksgiving. It was always my job to open one, the distinctive fragrance of the fruit being released with the first cut. Looking at it from the top reveals a subtle geometry and hints at the organized sections inside. At last the bowl of separated arils would gleam like garnets or rubies, providing an acidic burst of freshness, much like cranberries, in contrast to the richness of the rest of the meal. 

2014's Thanksgiving, with pomegranate seeds to the right of mashed rutabaga, another holiday staple. 

I am pleasantly surprised at Browning’s interest in the pomegranate, and how it is related to the song from Pippa Passes. To me, it is not only a fruit, it is a symbol of Thanksgiving, recalling the same enduring sentiments and simple joys that Pippa expressed and Anne echoed in the world of literature.

In this picture, a little splash of sun was shining on my design. Please visit the Designs page for the original image. 

Time to Time

The sound of the season is Phoenix. I remember hearing them for the first time in Lost in Translation, then in Marie Antoinette, serenading France’s queen in a palace of pastels and florals.

Phoenix's cameo in Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006)

And now this summer, their latest album, Ti Amo, has been playing on repeat since June. My favorite track off the album is “Role Model,” which contains the lyrics:

Don't you feel like a witness in distress from time to time to time to time?
Is that just the way the roses fade? Do you want to find out?
Don't you feel like a witness in distress from time to time to time to time?
Is that just the way the roses fade? Do you want to find out?
So sudden, you hear the quiet, summer breeze outside?
I can't tell you what it's going to be, I'd lie

In my design, the rose petals fall on the edge of the paper, acknowledging its presence and consequently mixing naturalism and artifice. Also, the roses are more “real” because they are fading, but what are the roses growing out of? Spatially, where are they? I wanted to play with a sense of reality combined with an abstract, unnatural quality. 

With its sweet, yet sad tone, “Role Model” reminds me of a song that someone hears and causes them to remember a certain time in their life: a particular season, a road trip, or an afternoon. Those times are gone, past, and we can’t go back to them - each a mix of elements like time and weather that can never exactly be repeated. There is a future, too, but we don’t know what it is; there is no way to know, so we just have to be patient. “Role Model” is a pretty expression of the melancholic magic of life.

Milton's Mirth and Melancholy

“L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are companion poems written by John Milton (1608-1674) on mirth and melancholy, respectively. Milton’s poetic cognitive dissonance is expressed perfectly, and after reading one you are convinced that is the way to be, until you read the other one, which convinces you the opposite. The poems are littered with classical references and words unfamiliar to the modern ear, so it is best to read them with explanatory notes. 

“L’Allegro,” touting cheeriness, mainly describes a morning scene in the country and the pleasures of the country and city. Some highlights:

“To many a youth and many a maid,
Dancing in the checkered shade; 
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday,”
- - - 
“Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.” 
- - - 
“And ever against eating cares;
Lap me in soft Lydian airs,” 

“Il Penseroso” is more contemplative. Milton discusses a moonlit evening, being at the fireside, pleasures of reading, the beauty of rain, shady woodlands, the interior of a church, and peaceful old age. Some highlights:

“Hide me from the day’s garish eye,”
- - - 
“And let some strange mysterious dream
Wave at his wings in airy stream
Of lively portraiture displayed
Softly on my eyelids laid.”
- - - 
“Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.” 

In terms of the poems' visualization, The Norton Anthology of English Literature mentions Botticelli’s Primavera in relation to “L’Allegro” and Dürer’s engraving, Melancholy, in relation to “Il Penseroso.” Thomas Cole, known primarily for 19th-century American landscapes, painted two pictures directly inspired by the companion pieces. Milton’s pair of poems also reminds me of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with its contrasting moods: bouncy “Spring” and “Summer” balanced by the moodier “Autumn” and “Winter."

Sandro Botticelli, PRIMAVERA (c. 1470s-80s)

Albrecht Dürer, MELENCOLIA I (1514) (detail)

Thomas Cole, L'ALLEGRO (1845)

Thomas Cole, IL PENSEROSO (1845)

Similar to the seasons, flora is present much more often in “L’Allegro” than in the subdued “Il Penseroso,” which mentions only two types of trees: pine and oak. In “L’Allegro,” violets, roses, sweetbriar, vines, eglantine, elms, hawthorn, daisies, oaks, and sheaves are all referenced. 

For my own visual representations, I used violets, roses, sweetbriar, vines, hawthorn, and wheat to represent “L’Allegro,” and minimalistic sprigs of oak and pine to represent “Il Penseroso.”

L'Allegro (top) and Il Penseroso (bottom)

Extraordinary Genius

The impact of John Keats (1795-1821) is enhanced by his short life; the fact that he did not live past 25 is almost unbelievable when presented with the caliber of his work. By the age of 22, he had already written the 4,000+ lines of Endymion. A year later he had composed his six famous “Odes,” including “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats’ friend Charles Brown wrote this on the creation of the poem: 

“In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast table to the grass plot under a plum tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale.”

I read “Ode to a Nightingale” in high school and was drawn to its melancholic Romanticism. My textbook also mentioned that F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) loved Keats, and used a line from this poem to name a novel (Tender is the Night.) With his recurring topics of beauty, transience, and unattainability, I later could see why Fitzgerald was drawn to Keats. 

Several years ago, I took this photo of a sweet, tattered butterfly on my windshield: “I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.” John Keats to Fanny Brawne, July 3, 1819

Recently I decided to find where Fitzgerald discussed Keats, and discovered that it was in a letter to his college-age daughter, written a few months before he died at age 44 (between them, Keats and Fitzgerald lived only 69 years.) Here is an important excerpt:

“[Poetry] isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around—John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in ‘verse’ but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non-poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you—like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist—or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. The Grecian Urn is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with The Nightingale which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the Pot of Basil with its great stanzas about the two brothers, ‘Why were they proud, etc.’; and The Eve of St. Agnes, which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, Bright Star and the others.

Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For a while after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.”

It is fun to trace the interests of talented people. One starts to imagine a quasi-family tree of influences, with genius instead of genes traveling through centuries and living on in later generations. I also like how Fitzgerald says that poetry is not easy, and one needs a knowledgable guide to appreciate it. (It’s hard not to think of Dead Poets Society when reading the first paragraph.) The reader can sense that Fitzgerald wanted to instill in his daughter the same appreciation that he had for Keats’ poetry. 

When I was in college I memorized “Ode to a Nightingale” and would recite it in my mind on walks to classes. Because it is so beautiful, it is easy to memorize, almost as if it were a song. Because it is May, I think of the poem, in particular the fifth stanza when Keats describes a dreamlike setting:

“I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, 
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, 
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; 
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; 
And mid-May's eldest child, 
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, 
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.” 

In my design, I started with the grass, then the thicket, and finally the “fruit-tree wild,” which recalls “the grass plot under a plum tree” that Keats’ friend described above. I drew this as quickly as I could, trying not to overthink anything.  

The Canterbury Tail

Whan, yes, whan, the calendar turns to April, the first two lines of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales run through my head: 

    “Whan that April with his showres soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote...”

My professor read the lines in Middle English to the class and the vaguely familiar words were burned into my memory. The gist of the first paragraph is that both the natural world and a motley group of pilgrims start to activate in the winds of spring.

April showers were falling and making the afternoon dark when I took this picture.

I’ve yet to see a medieval pilgrim, but a sign of the changing seasons here are stands of irises, commonly spotted in older neighborhoods. They seem to visibly squeak when they unfurl, showing off their velvety petals, fuzzy beards, and distinctive fragrance. In my design, a cottontail rabbit sits on top of a few leaves and stems.

This idea comes from when my mom and I planted several (doomed) lily-of-the-valley pips in our backyard. We chose the shadiest spot near a north wall and made a shelter out of decorative fencing to protect them. This proved irresistible to our resident cat, who enjoyed naps inside the shelter on top of the leaves!

California Wild

After visiting California from early to mid-March, I was inspired to do a design of some of the flowers that were blooming as if it were already spring. Some of them looked like they belonged in a Dr. Seuss book, brightly colored and crazily shaped. Everywhere I looked there was something blooming: wild, cultivated, half-wild, and even some outlaws.

I put them all together in an imaginary garden. I’ll start at the top left corner of the design, and move clockwise. (This is a detail; for the full image, please see the Designs page.) 

There were flowering trees from Los Angeles to Napa Valley: loads of cherry blossoms in the Chinese and Japanese Gardens at the Huntington Library, cherry and/or plum blossoms lining the streets of Yountville, and small forests of pink haze from almond trees growing along I-5. Fallen petals underneath the trees made it look like a small snowstorm had passed through. 

Pink cherry blossoms in the Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library.

Night-blooming jasmine would fill the air after the sun went down in Los Angeles. While driving in the car at night, all of a sudden the smell of nectar would come through the air vents.  

We (and several bees) were admiring the powder puff plant outside Pizzeria Mozza in Los Angeles. The flowers look like Koosh balls. 

The prettiest of fireworks can't compete with this.

Bright orange California poppies were growing along the roadsides and hillsides of the Pacific Coast Highway. 

I saw flowering quince in Napa Valley. Its ruddy blooms stand out against its stark branches.  

Yellow oxalis covered green fields by the Pacific coast. This is considered an invasive plant in California. 

Oxalis in the foreground; Pigeon Point Lighthouse in the background. 

Exotic camellias, especially pink ones, were well stocked on the grounds of the Huntington, at Hearst Castle, and all over Napa Valley. The flowers will fall off the shrubs perfectly intact. Some of them look like Spirograph drawings, each petal perfectly in place with a mathematical symmetry. 

I found this camellia on the ground at Hearst Castle. 

A Real Phony

In Breakfast at Tiffany's, Holly Golightly is referred to as a “real phony.” That is the way I thought of Los Angeles when I went there for the first time last month. In contemporary culture it is almost as if everyone has vicariously been to Los Angeles due to the amount of media produced and featured there. Los Angeles was strangely familiar. It felt like I was in a movie, or a type of suspended reality, a type of dream. At least this was my impression, being a non-native with most of my knowledge of the area established through film.

Thus, I looked at L.A. through the lens of film. One of the best classes I took in college was Film as Art, which was structured by Stephen Lapthisophon around the theme of “Movies About Movies.” Among many other films, we watched Sunset Boulevard (1950), Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Day of the Locust (1975), and Body Double (1984). All of these films have L.A. as their setting, one might even argue as a character. In some films the area and its atmosphere was portrayed as a very dark character. 

The L.A. of movies is backed up by concrete streets and places and vistas, but the reality is that most of the stories are inventions of someone’s imagination. David Lynch described L.A. as “the city of dreams” when speaking of his film Mulholland Drive (2001). As I travelled down Mulholland Dr. in the dark listening to the movie's main theme, it was surreal. It was a perfect cocktail of both reality and fiction. The experience was a microcosm of L.A.

This design does not match my words above, but one thing that is definitely real about L.A. is its beautiful foliage, flowers, and fruit. This little sketch is based off of a picture of a lemon tree that was on my hotel room’s porch.

The American Style

When I was very young, I remember looking through framed prints with my mom at our local library. We found a beautiful one of three women and a baby, their dresses splashed by sunlight. We checked the print out and it hung in my room for several weeks. 

I remember looking at the dresses, the shadows, the sunlight, the jewel colors. It must have inspired something inside me, because I never forgot it, years and houses and towns later. Several years ago I began to talk about the painting with my mom. Neither one of us had seen it before or since: neither one of us knew the name of the artist, much less the painting. For now, it existed entirely in our minds.

So, we decided to try to find it. We narrowed it down to Impressionism fairly quickly due to its loose style and fresh colors; however, that did not narrow it down all that much. There are thousands of paintings by hundreds of Impressionists, at the very least. But I remembered that it had a certain spirit, something familiar. I thought that it might be American. After a search of American Impressionists, we found it: Three Sisters - A Study in June Sunlight (1890) by Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938). It was like seeing an old friend again.

Edmund Charles Tarbell, Three Sisters - A Study in June Sunlight (1890) (Milwaukee Art Museum)

When I was in college studying Art History, I wrote a paper on Tarbell and his distinctly American style. I summed up my paper with this:

Accomplishing the rare feat of successfully combining tradition with innovation, Tarbell’s rendition of Impressionism was distinctly American, not only due to the values it espoused, but also in the disparate range of its inspiration. As a result of an amalgamation of influences, Tarbell developed an American style, pleasingly unaffected in the consistent quality of its translucent beauty.

I don’t doubt that the presence of Tarbell’s painting in my room as a child made me more aware of art and its history. I’m really thankful for coming across it, and continually thankful to my mom for introducing me to art and literature.

Although Tarbell’s painting is loose and airy, it is composed. I used the diamond pattern on the blue and white dress to establish an underlying structure, then casually filled in certain areas with tangled flowers and foliage, leaving other spaces blank to represent the sunlight and white dresses.

The Frosty Light

In It's a Wonderful Life, Jimmy Stewart plays George Bailey to perfection, a working class hero who is constantly putting others before himself, sacrificing his own dreams in the process. George’s heroism is not dramatic; it is not announced with trumpets and fanfares; it is not lavished with attention. Making sacrifices for the benefit of others, being stedfast and responsible, having good character—these are the everyday heroics that are proven to be priceless by the end of the film. NBC has aired this classic for as long as I can remember, the snowy streets of Bedford Falls connecting us warmly, near and far, on Christmas Eve.

Bells have a special significance in It's a Wonderful Life. Clarence the angel finally gets his wings when a bell on the Baileys’ Christmas tree rings. The film opens and closes with a large bell, at the beginning with the production company’s name (the short-lived Liberty Films), and also at the end, where we see the bell ringing while “Auld Lang Syne” is being sung. “Auld Lang Syne” traditionally reminds us of the ending of the current year and the beginning of the next.

This combination of bells and the New Year also brings to mind Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ring Out, Wild Bells” which is part of In Memoriam A. H. H., published in 1850. This passage also has a message of optimism amidst a work that was written out of a place of profound grief and questioning.  The first two stanzas are below. 

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
   The flying cloud, the frosty light:
   The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
   The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Another poem that incorporates bells is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Christmas Bells.” Longfellow wrote this poem in 1863 while the Civil War was raging in America. The last two stanzas are below.

And in despair I bowed my head; 
“There is no peace on earth," I said; 
    “For hate is strong, 
    And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!” 

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: 
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; 
    The Wrong shall fail, 
    The Right prevail, 
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

Running through these holiday-themed works is doubt, sadness, and desperation. Even though we may not be experiencing the exact same challenges as George Bailey, Tennyson, and Longfellow, we share the same reactions. But as all three works show, hope will always remain, if we have the courage to hold fast to it. 

In my design, I hung a bell on a branch of bittersweet in the snow. I chose bittersweet for its pretty red berries, but also as symbolism of the ending of Christmas and the beginning of a new year. 

Please see the Designs page for the full image.

The Frosty Dark

Below you will find one of my favorite passages in literature, which can be found in the final chapter of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my Middle West — not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Fitzgerald associates Christmas with going home, as many of us do. The train looks cheerful, indeed, like "Christmas itself," and from it Nick sees the "real" snow of the Midwest and feels a connection with America. For me, Christmastime is made up of feelings and fragments, much like Nick's intangible sounds and shadows.

In my drawing, I grouped together several wintry plants. Ivy, holly, pine, blue spruce, and pussy willows mingle in a vase made of birch bark. Please see the Designs page for the full image. 

"And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people."
Luke 2:10 (KJV) 

Hello Autumn.

October reminds me of past autumns and old books and warmth and happiness. Seeing pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn heaped on doorsteps and lining supermarket entrances is a welcome sight after a long summer. 

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” Anne Shirley says through L. M. Montgomery’s poetic prose in Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908. Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind (1936) writes of “still forest paths under frosty autumn stars” and “cool autumn moons.” And scenes of childhood come back when reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Autumn Fires” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

For this design, I was inspired by literature and styles from the past. I did not reference any specific text or drawings but was influenced by the memory of Victorian illustrations and Arts and Crafts lettering. Many vintage cards have the charming habit of putting a period after whatever greeting is printed, so I added one as well.

The Powerful Play

What are you born with that no one can take away from you? 

My family does not come from where I was born, and until I went to college, I was educated at home by my mom, a former teacher who graduated from the University of Minnesota. Unsurprisingly, I became more familiar with the culture and customs of another region than the one in which I lived. A college classmate thought I was from Fargo, North Dakota, due to my accent. “I’m from here, but…” would be a common preface to my response, especially because I put a lot of stock in history.

Studying history is being a detective, it is discovering why things are the way they are. History is not boring or impersonal. It is very personal, and when things get personal, they get exciting. I might have a foot in two worlds, but I can tell you my history, and I can claim that and identify with that. No one can change it. There is peace in the immutability. You are you, I am myself, a unique part of history, with a past that stretches far and wide. It would be so dull to only live in the present! It would be like reading the last page of a novel and skipping the first thousand.

So what does this have to do with traveling to Woodstock, Vermont? After I returned I found out from my mom that my 3rd great grandmother was born in…Woodstock, Vermont. My wish to be a part of a place that meant a lot to me unexpectedly came true. An exciting coincidence! Or is it? Why we are drawn to what we love is an intriguing mystery.

In Woodstock, Vermont, where my 3rd great grandmother was born. 

By doing a little more research, I discovered that my 5th great grandfather fought in the Revolutionary War. Less than one hundred years later, my great-great uncle volunteered for the Union Army. The National Park Service’s website references him in relation to Shiloh National Cemetery: “Near the river bank lies six Wisconsin color bearers, all killed in action as they carried their regimental standard into the heat of battle.” One fought to create a new country, the other died to save it. 

As evidenced above, some New Englanders gradually migrated towards the Upper Midwest. Others moved west, too, in particular a family with an ocean separating them from America. My grandfather was born in Norway and traveled by ship to the United States with his parents and siblings in the early 1900s. My mom, a treasure trove of stories, wrote on her father and his family for a 10th grade school paper; her eloquent words are in the quotes below. 

The Atlantic from the coast of New England.

“Each person on that ship shared a common joy—they were going to America. Although the family had this realization, each passenger had a difficult time crossing the cold, bleak Atlantic.” My great grandfather’s ultimate ambition was “to farm the rich land which stretched and flowed across the Upper Midwest.” Eventually, after hardships and struggles, the family purchased a farm in Minnesota. I never met my grandfather or his parents, but I meet them through seeing the land that they loved, and feel the realization of their dreams. The landscape of southern Minnesota is beautiful in my eyes, and it is a part of me. When visiting the Upper Midwest, it feels like home, because my history lives there.

In front of a home where my mom lived in southern Minnesota.

History has formed my identity. My grandfather was born in the 1800s, and I am here now. The past does not seem so far away when I look at it like that. I am a part of rustic log cabins where Scandinavian ingenuity made life bearable. I am a part of farms where hopes were planted and bodies ached from work. I am a part of America. I am a part of history. That is my identity.

The design above is made up of flowers and plants that stand for the regions where my history lives: lilacs for New England, red clover for Vermont, violets for Wisconsin, showy lady's-slipper for Minnesota, wild prairie roses for North Dakota, and finally, some stalks of wheat to represent an agrarian past. 

That You Are Here

Hurricane-free September 2014 was the second time I went to New England; this time it was Woodstock, Vermont. Woodstock combined the good about the past with the good about the present, leaving behind the bad aspects of both. It comes close to fulfilling the illusory wishes of “Golden Age thinking."

So how does this relate to the question of identity? Well, you can imagine that the whole time I was in Woodstock, a part of me wished to be a part of it. We can all relate with this wish, whether it be in relation to a town, a place, a state, a country, an institution, even a sports team, or something existential, like a feeling. That tiny bit of ownership in something that appeals to us goes a long way.

The first time we explored Woodstock was on a Sunday evening. It felt like we were the only ones there—and what year was it? There were no power lines above the quaint buildings. The sun slanted lower and lower over the quiet streets. A covered bridge crossed one of many streams. There was a slight chill in the air as the day slid into dusk, and after dinner we walked the dark streets with no concerns.

There is just something special about Vermont. Doe-eyed cows grazing; fruit trees hanging low with apples and pears; sugar maples flowing with sweet syrup. The restaurants always featured local products, and they were all delicious. For all the romantic—yet real—imagery, I understand there is a lot of work behind it, too, for we all know that agriculture is not an easy job. People care, and it shows.  

Cows grazing near Woodstock.

Laurance and Mary Rockefeller donated their home and farm in Woodstock to the National Park Service in 1992. It became Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, which focuses on conservation, and is a fascinating place to tour and explore, as is Billings Farm and Museum across the way. The Rockefellers were the ones who buried the power lines underground in Woodstock. The garden at the Rockefeller house on a late September day was chock-full of flowers and bees, with no one else. Perfect!

In my next post, I will explain how Woodstock and New England encouraged me to write on personal identity. Also, we will be going west, like so many before us.

The garden at Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park. 

The design I created was inspired by Vermont’s red clover. I found its sweet blooms near Quechee Gorge. Please see the Designs page for the finished version. 

The Leaf-Shapes of Our Hearts

We all have history running through us. People from hundreds of years ago are currently living through you and me today. We are all looking for an identity—some of us, for one reason or another, more so than others. We love certain things for reasons that are for the most part mysterious. It is up to us—you, me—to make whatever sense of it we can.

Much of what appeals to me about a place to visit involves history, in particular personal or literary. Five years ago next month marks the first time I visited New England. Granted, we were only there a day and a half, due to Hurricane Irene coinciding with our vacation. But we made the most of it, and August 26, 2011 was one of the best days of my life. It was hard to believe that a hurricane was imminently approaching, for the day was ironically clear: bright blue skies scattered with a fluffy cloud or two.

We drove into Concord, Massachusetts, the site of one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, and a treasure trove of American and literary history. Flags snapped in the breeze next to picket fences. Black-eyed Susans blazed in the green grass of the roadsides. It was the early morning. I had a wonderfully eerie feeling that I was in some sort of time warp. Orchard House, built in the early 1700s, home to the Alcott family, appeared outside the passenger side window. Pinch me, I thought, I’m dreaming. I stood next to where Louisa May wrote Little Women (1868-69)—just a humble little half-moon desk in her room between two front windows. The whole house felt warm, kind, peaceful. Just a few minutes away from Orchard House, the romantically-named Sleepy Hollow Cemetery is the resting place of the Alcott family, as well as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. We walked amidst the beautiful cemetery’s shaded trails with not a living soul in sight. It was a glorious morning.

The evening found us at The Breakers, the Vanderbilt family’s Italian Renaissance-style mansion, built in 1893 in Newport, Rhode Island. (We got around that day.) No pictures were allowed inside the house, but we took plenty of the exterior and the expansive lawn that stretched out to meet the Atlantic. After reading Edith Wharton’s novels, it seemed as if I could catch one of her characters wandering around the grounds. There was plywood out on the big balcony to board up the windows against the storm. The mansion was absolutely huge and beautiful, but seemed tiny and insignificant in relation to the ocean it faced. 

Later I thought about the two houses that I saw that day in 2011 and how different they were. On paper The Breakers looks to be the more impressive and meaningful; but I feel the opposite. I loved seeing and imagining the Gilded Age in Newport, but being at Orchard House meant more to me. The world that Louisa May Alcott created, inextricably linked with her family and home, was inextricably linked with my childhood; in a sense, it was my world too, and I was coming home. No amount of wealth or glamour can buy that feeling. 

Above are a few pictures from that day. The purplish-brown house is Orchard House.

Amy Lowell, an imagist poet from Massachusetts active in the first quarter of the 20th century, wrote one of my favorite poems—“Lilacs,” an ode to the flower itself, New England, and I think identity, too. I cannot tell you how much I love this poem. When you read it, it sweeps your eyes along like a boat on its waters.

“Lilacs”
By Amy Lowell

Lilacs,
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac, 
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England. 
Among your heart-shaped leaves
Orange orioles hop like music-box birds and sing
Their little weak soft songs; 
In the crooks of your branches
The bright eyes of song sparrows sitting on spotted eggs
Peer restlessly through the light and shadow
Of all Springs. 
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversations with an early moon; 
Lilacs watching a deserted house
Settling sideways into the grass of an old road; 
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom
Above a cellar dug into a hill. 
You are everywhere. 
You were everywhere. 
You tapped the window when the preacher preached his sermon, 
And ran along the road beside the boy going to school. 
You stood by the pasture-bars to give the cows good milking, 
You persuaded the housewife that her dishpan was of silver. 
And her husband an image of pure gold. 
You flaunted the fragrance of your blossoms
Through the wide doors of Custom Houses— 
You, and sandal-wood, and tea, 
Charging the noses of quill-driving clerks
When a ship was in from China. 
You called to them: “Goose-quill men, goose-quill men, 
May is a month for flitting.” 
Until they writhed on their high stools
And wrote poetry on their letter-sheets behind the propped-up ledgers. 
Paradoxical New England clerks, 
Writing inventories in ledgers, reading the “Song of Solomon” at night, 
So many verses before bed-time, 
Because it was the Bible. 
The dead fed you
Amid the slant stones of graveyards. 
Pale ghosts who planted you
Came in the nighttime
And let their thin hair blow through your clustered stems. 
You are of the green sea, 
And of the stone hills which reach a long distance. 
You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, 
You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. 
You cover the blind sides of greenhouses
And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass
To your friends, the grapes, inside. 

Lilacs, 
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac, 
You have forgotten your Eastern origin, 
The veiled women with eyes like panthers, 
The swollen, aggressive turbans of jeweled pashas. 
Now you are a very decent flower, 
A reticent flower, 
A curiously clear-cut, candid flower, 
Standing beside clean doorways, 
Friendly to a house-cat and a pair of spectacles, 
Making poetry out of a bit of moonlight
And a hundred or two sharp blossoms. 
Maine knows you, 
Has for years and years; 
New Hampshire knows you, 
And Massachusetts
And Vermont. 
Cape Cod starts you along the beaches to Rhode Island; 
Connecticut takes you from a river to the sea. 
You are brighter than apples, 
Sweeter than tulips, 
You are the great flood of our souls
Bursting above the leaf-shapes of our hearts, 
You are the smell of all Summers, 
The love of wives and children, 
The recollection of gardens of little children, 
You are State Houses and Charters
And the familiar treading of the foot to and fro on a road it knows. 
May is lilac here in New England, 
May is a thrush singing “Sun up!” on a tip-top ash tree, 
May is white clouds behind pine-trees
Puffed out and marching upon a blue sky. 
May is a green as no other, 
May is much sun through small leaves, 
May is soft earth, 
And apple-blossoms, 
And windows open to a South Wind. 
May is full light wind of lilac
From Canada to Narragansett Bay. 

Lilacs, 
False blue, 
White, 
Purple, 
Color of lilac. 
Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England, 
Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England, 
Lilac in me because I am New England, 
Because my roots are in it, 
Because my leaves are of it, 
Because my flowers are for it, 
Because it is my country
And I speak to it of itself
And sing of it with my own voice
Since certainly it is mine.

- - -

As you can see below, I’ve done a simple design of purple lilacs.

Go to the Designs page to see the finished product.

My next post will continue the theme of personal history and identity. Next time, we will go a little farther north. 

Heaven in a Wild Flower

When I was in high school, I composed the following for a class assignment. I had recently bought a small notebook at the dollar store, and I was inspired by its cover. 

“1887”
by Joy Curry

 Last season’s leaves crunched under my feet as I followed the old path. The spring sunlight, filtered by the trees, fell lazily on the fresh green grass. I was searching for the abandoned house that I had caught a glimpse of a couple of weeks earlier. My anticipation mounted with each step, waiting for it to peek from behind a grove of birches. Suddenly, it came into view. It was an idyllic spot; the house was nestled like an Easter egg between a long-neglected garden and some budding maples. Massive clumps of paper-white narcissus, daffodils, and fragrant hyacinths were strewn haphazardly throughout the yard, proving that gardens do not have to be manicured to be beautiful. I turned my eyes to the broken-down dwelling. The front porch, previously painted a creamy white, had slumped to one side while a decrepit swing hung precariously from a rafter. Cautiously, I circled the house and took a look at the backyard. An encrusted fountain met my eyes. A lifelike statue of a lady, her pitcher tilted, waited patiently for water to stream through it again. A hoe was leaning by the back door, almost as if someone had just gone inside from working in the garden. My heart beat faster when I placed my hand on the cool door handle. The door was swollen from years of stress, but finally gave way with a loud noise. I looked inside. A kitchen, dusty and forgotten, revealed itself in the doorway’s light. A basin sink, a cast-iron, wood burning stove with feet askew, and something like a pie cupboard were jumbled together in a state of disrepair. Greenish, cracked windows sifted the light they wanted, and left the rest outside. The house looked dark and foreboding. There was a doorframe to my left, and I glimpsed a flight of stairs, which were decorated with fine finials and carvings. I gingerly stepped across the hardwood floor to investigate. The planks groaned beneath my tread. I grasped the newel post and squinted into a sitting room of some sort. Sagging sofas, heavy velvet draperies, two enormous wing chairs, and a threadbare rug sparked my imagination. This house might have been a country retreat, perhaps a vacation spot, for a wealthy family of the Gilded Age. I stared at the dark stairs above me. Apprehensively, I mounted the first. “What will I find?” I thought excitedly. I took a deep breath. I reached the landing and sighed with relief. A relatively long hall stretched to my right, and a single room was on my left. I turned into the lone room. A huge wooden clothes-press and a musty, ivory colored lace coverlet graced the double bed. Crackling rose-patterned wallpaper, masked in dust, was expertly covering the four walls. A Windsor chair, already an antique in the 1800s, caught my eye. I ran my hand along the spindly back. I went over to the wardrobe and tugged gently on the smooth knobs. The doors gave way with a tiny squeak of protest. Two porcelain dolls, their shiny cheeks still pink, gazed blankly at the wall behind me, their dainty dresses diaphanously fragile. On the second shelf, a quilt, finely sewn in an intricate diamond pattern, was folded neatly. The third shelf held a single burgundy book, bound in gold, with a wide ribbon stuck in the middle of it. My eyes widened. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I reached out and gently picked it up. Too impatient to look in it after I finished exploring the rest of the house, I went down the creaking stairs, through the dusty kitchen, and into the sunlight-bathed garden below. I seated myself beneath the ivy swathed fountain and excitedly opened it where the ribbon was placed. “A diary!” I breathed out loud. Its fine script read:

“Sunday, February 27, 1887.

Dear Diary, I have, in great happiness, acquired Peter Henderson & Company’s latest ‘Everything For The Garden’ publication. Father and Mother graciously gifted it to me after their most recent trip to New York City. This spring, I shall be planting white narcissus, yellow daffodils, and china blue hyacinths…”

My little notebook.

For my birthday in March, my mom picked me the most beautiful little bouquet. The flowers themselves were precious to me, but more importantly, they were gathered and assembled with my mom’s creativity and love. I called it the Little Women of bouquets. Naturally, it was perfect.

I love old fashioned flowers. They have a charm and a depth to them that the grandest arrangements cannot equal. Flowers growing wild are independent little things, thriving where they choose, untouched by cultivation and restraint. They are jewels when one discovers them. Bulbs have history; they are floral postcards from the past. Often one will see them growing in empty lots, reminding us that a house used to stand there. The bulbs in my bouquet (April tears, grape hyacinths, daffodils) were planted by my mom and me several years ago. Every spring, they are a nice reminder of the day that we planted them.

Birthday posy from my mom. 

The design I created, just like my birthday bouquet, has purple violets, April tears, grape hyacinths, scrambled eggs, daffodils, and feathery asparagus fronds. A detail is pictured below; visit the Designs page for the full image.