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.

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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.