June 18, 2014 · 5:07 pm

A Circle of Six

6 Chairs

My husband and I are between homes and living on a boat in The San Juan Islands. Our home of the last seven years in Seattle is on the market. We left it looking picture perfect for a remodel project that we go to every day, on island. First we fell in love with the island, and then with the property: a sloping side of old growth forest on a quiet bay.

The house itself was hideous, but we knew we could do something with that. “There never has been a house so bad,” noted Elsie de Wolfe, “that it couldn’t be made over into something worthwhile.” Elsie was the woman who practically invented Interior Design.

But back to the land. Afterall, it’s all about the land and the sea. That’s what calls us here and holds us here. We reimagine our lives with each move.

My philosophy in moving–I’ve moved often enough in my life to have developed a philosophy–is to create a zone that I can go to initially, where everything is ideal. I can’t tell you how often these “rooms” have been outdoors.

In San Diego I found a shady spot out back under a trellis draped in grape vines where I contemplated growing everything in mossy, old world pots. It was my sanctuary.

And when all the house was covered with drop cloths in the tumult of renovation on Mercer Island, the deck was what pulled me through. Out there I saw how well the orchid plants were doing, resting on the rail overlooking the lake after their cross-country move in a truck. We had flown in, how could I complain?

Here, I created my zone by carrying up rocks from the beach and building a fire pit in a clearing. Around that I envisioned a circle of cedar Adirondack chairs. It was as simple as that and we built it.

So our pow wow is up and ready, long before the house. This is where I sit under the cathedral of trees and remember why I am here. I will learn the bird calls by day and find my way among the stars at night. And it will all be so clear.

Everyone has their own immigrant story, but at one time we were all indigenous people somewhere. Come, count yourself among us.

 

 

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June 5, 2014 · 4:46 pm

Meeting Maya

Passing Time

Your skin like dawn
Mine like dusk.

One paints the beginning
of a certain end.

The other, the end of a
sure beginning.

Maya Angelou

 

Every now and then, perhaps just once in a lifetime, we are in the presence of someone who, we suspect, must be a god. She walked into the room donning a long brightly colored African caftan, her hair wrapped in a turban, holding herself high, seemingly floating on grace. Elegant and eloquent. Each word carefully chosen, as in her poems. The clarity with which she annunciated. Offering words up like holy communion.

I met Maya Angelou before I knew who she was, before many of us knew her. It was 1975 and Random House had just published “Oh Pray My Wings are Going to Fit Me Me Well” and she was on book tour in Hartford CT. The Public Relations department at G. Fox & Co., a large department store, was sponsoring the event in a reception room.

I was on my first job out of college as Communications Editor at G. Fox & Co. With a Polaroid camera strapped over my shoulder, pen and steno pad in hand, I interviewed managers and covered rallies and events for material in publishing “Fox Tales,” the monthly in-house magazine. It was the day of literal cut and paste, and that deadline was perhaps the only time I could be found at my desk. Otherwise I got to run around, and I especially enjoyed covering events such as this that had nothing at all to do with the retail world.

Back to Maya.

Her every word, her commanding presence, demanded we listen, just listen. I remember her attentiveness to us. Her joy in reading. It was like being at a sermon where you get it. And the congregation comes floating out, higher than they were when they came in.

A woman who was silent for so many years. A silence that must have been cleansing like a fast. Thus her purity of words. How could I not think she was deity?

When our daughters were young, we toured the United Nations in NYC. A friend of the family, a delegate, had arranged for us to go behind the scenes. It was spectacular—all the art, the etiquette, rich in languages and men in robes. Ten year old Jackie believed she was in the presence of “kings of many lands.” No one could dissuade her and no one wanted to, for her awe and respect was beautiful.

I felt much this way meeting Maya.

I took her photograph that day and came away with a signed book. That photograph is pressed somewhere in the pages, and that book is packed because I am moving. And now she has died, and I long to hold it.

 

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May 27, 2014 · 6:31 pm

Crazy Making

Garrison Bay 2

Moving is crazy making, especially when we bring it on ourselves. Anyone who knows me or has been reading me, knows how fond I am of Seattle. But in all our excursions to the San Juan Islands, we found something. So I am leaving the city I love for a little home in the woods on a bay. In a perfect world I’d have a pied- à -terre in the city too.

Preparing a home to go on the market, on one hand, and remodeling another house with the other, I lost my stride of a weekly post in blogging. Other bloggers are running circles around me, and because I must jump back in, here it goes:

I have to try this. My romance of living on the water and writing in a hut down by the water’s edge. The wind in the pines and water over rock. The fresh smell of cedar. The smile of a rope hammock hanging between trees. The quietude of kayaks. The grilling of fish, and the taste of the ocean in each raw oyster and boiled crab. Growing our own everything, and what we don’t grow, purchasing from people who do. Adirondack chairs circling a stone fire pit. Watching the fire and watching the stars at night.

This is not going to come by staying put.

It is important to note whether one is moving-towards or moving-away. This is a moving-towards. Only a couple times in my life have I felt the need to move away. Once was from St. Thomas U.S.V.I., and had nothing to do with St. Thomas or The Virgin Islands. The other was from Los Angeles, and had everything to do with LA.

Long ago I set off on a journey with my little neighbor, Tony, into the woods behind our homes. We couldn’t have been more than five or six. I was sure it would lead to somewhere. That we’d come to some place magical like Oz, if we just persevered. Tony, however, turned around and headed home.

This girl kept going. And before long the woods did come out somewhere, but it was just another nice neighborhood in Connecticut. One that looked much like mine, but wasn’t. I was lost. So I did what Dorothy did and knocked on a front door.

It was the age of women at home, and so I was in luck. A kindly lady invited me in, seated me at her kitchen table and fed me milk and cookies. I didn’t notice, but she must have slipped out of the room to call the police and report a lost child. For it wasn’t long before an officer arrived at her house too. How cool was that? I got to come home in a cruiser! 

Look at all Tony missed by turning around.

 

I recently wrote my daughter:

I am sixty-two years old and live, as you know, on one of the “hills” in Seattle in a lovely little English Tudor home where a chandelier is reflected in a Venetian mirror. And I just bought a waterfront house in the islands that’s a total rehab with a trailer dumped on the lot. And all I want to do is go out there and clear brush! Am I nuts?

And she answered:

The best kind of nuts! You’ve lived in plenty of lovely neighborhoods, but you’ve never lived by the sea on a remotish-island. I am so excited for you.

 

 

 

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April 30, 2014 · 10:24 pm

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme

Duftkräuter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am sitting in a coffee shop at San Francisco International Airport enjoying an expresso and the calligraphic quotations that wrap around the room high on the walls like crown molding:

One day if I do go to heaven… I’ll look around and say, “It ain’t bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.” Herb Caen. Leaving San Francisco is like saying goodbye to an old sweetheart. You want to linger as long as possible. Walter Cronkite. San Francisco has only one drawback. Tis hard to leave. Rudyard Kipling

Caen, Cronkite and Kipling. I’m in good company.

Aside from the fact that San Francisco is fast becoming my second city, I feel remarkably at home in this establishment of dark cherry tables, counters and woodwork atop a vintage black & white mosaic tile floor. Twenty years ago while working as an interior designer, I did a kitchen in this scheme for a client in San Diego. It was a grand house and my client was in over his head.

In the end, that traditional kitchen was what grounded the house.

It was the age of McMansions. Architects ran away with themselves upon the drawing board, and builders followed. Custom homes popped up in developments like track housing for the sheer newness of every home, the immaturity of landscape, and in many instances, the lack of land. Gluttonous sweeping driveways, elaborate portico entries, patios, pools, pool houses, sports courts, as well as the enormous house itself, consumed the lot. As a designer I inherited a few of these projects, and the challenge was to turn them into homes.

I’m glad those days are over. Apparently, we do learn.

But whether we learn fast enough, remains to be seen. Who would have thought, twenty years ago–when architects were drawing with a liberal hand and builders were building whatever was drawn—who would have thought we would go from a consumer throw-away society such as ours, to one where everyone learned to recycle?

A handful of idealists, that’s who.

Any gardener worth her salt has done her share of dumpster diving in the course of planting and cleaning up. Invariably, a plastic pot or tag gets tossed into the yard waste bin by mistake. Down, down, into the bin we go, making every effort to fetch it.

It always struck me as hypocritical that the growers, the nursery industry, were plastic dependent. So in planting my herb garden this spring I was delighted to see so many plants packaged in biodegradable pots. All we have to do now is go after the tags.

It’s easy to find fault, but let’s not overlook all that we are doing right too. People are walking where they once drove. Hopping on buses for longer stints in the city. Moving into the city or into town in order that we might reduce our environmental footprint.

In the city of Seattle, our collected yard waste fuels the city buses. Single-use plastic bags are illegal, and we carry our own totes to stores. San Francisco has now passed a law against single-use plastic water bottles as well.

With each passing year our recycle and yard waste (and food scraps) bins are larger, and the trash containers diminish. A generation ago, who would have thought that one day we would all pick up after our dogs? In biodegradable bags, no less.

Now we just have to go after those plastic plant tags.

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April 23, 2014 · 7:36 pm

Practical Jokes

the-joker

I should have known better. I had no sooner thrown out “write about a practical joke you played” as a prompt in my writing workshop last week, when all the faces around the table looked puzzled.

Practical jokes seem to have gone out of favor, which makes me wonder whether we might be too serious? Down right dour, in fact.

I found a couple, but it wasn’t easy. Had to go back nearly fifty years to fetch them. Slippery things, I had to grab them by the tail.

Mine were played with the same accomplice, my younger sister, Beth. In the first instance we enjoyed switching places on the telephone. Based on more than one adult exclaiming that our voices sounded remarkably alike, and that they couldn’t tell who they were talking to unless we identified ourselves. Based on this, we had some fun.

Beth would get on the phone with her friend, Jill, for example, and I’d hear her every word. You have to remember this was back in the days when phones were tied to the wall and the person on the phone couldn’t wander more than a few feet. Everyone heard everything.

Then with just a nod from Beth, I’d take the phone from her midstream in her conversation, and keep it going—while she peddled as fast as she could a mile or so down the road to Jill’s house.

“Hold on, someone’s at the door,” Jill would say, as she put the receiver down for a moment.

I had heard the doorbell ring, and soon the shrieks. It happened every time as she opened the door to find my sister standing at her door, panting.

It took us awhile to outgrow this prank and move on. We were good at it, and it worked every time.

The next level happened a few years later. I was at an all-girls’ school by then, early high school, in which our entire social life with boys came down to occasional “mixers.” Dances with all-boys schools a good distance away. Either the boys were bussed, or we were bussed, and maybe there would be some follow up in calls or letters. Otherwise it was pretty impossible to see anyone again, which I’m sure was the whole point.

At one mixer I met a boy named David, and we managed to stay in touch. Months later, on a vacation when he we were both at home, he called and asked me out on a date. David must have been sixteen and had wheels.

How his call got past my sister, I don’t know. But her wheels were spinning when she dropped into my room as I was getting dressed.

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” Beth mused, “if we switched, and I came down the stairs instead? Do you think he’d notice?”

I looked at her—she was only about thirteen, still in pedal pushers with skinned knees. But a budding actress, you have to remember, sees clothes as costumes. Opportunities.

I went along with it only because I thought it would all be over fast.

Next we had to convince my grandmother to play along, as she was sitting while our folks were out of town. But Nana too thought he’d get to the end of the driveway with Beth, and bring her back.

When David arrived I was dressed and waiting upstairs, listening over the stairwell. The surprising thing was how well it was all going, including dear Nana calling Beth by my name. There was the usual flurry of goodbyes, the front door shut, and silence.

They didn’t come back and they didn’t come back.

Nana and I waited up on the sofa together until what seemed like 2 am, but wasn’t. Again and again, I assured her that this young man I hardly knew was “a nice boy.” Which he was.

Postscript: Thank you, David Nathan, wherever you are out there.

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April 16, 2014 · 6:20 pm

Love Beyond Death

by Teri Clifford

Every now and then a piece comes out of our writing workshop that is the best thing I’ve read all week. Teri runs the workshops with me, and our prompt this week was “write about love.”

Both professionally and personally, I have been a part of numerous conversations on the meaning of love lately. They left me reflecting on an experience over ten years ago that I had with my mom as she lay dying at my house. My mother and father had eloped when they were in their late teens. It was wartime and I imagine a sense of love and urgency was in the air, as well as a lack of sufficient funds for a formal wedding. My parents were married for nearly 40 years when my dad died at 56 years old. Fifty-six is young by current standards.

My mom went on to live until she was 82 years old, at least we think that she was somewhere in that age range. She didn’t believe she should tell her age or that one should ask a woman. True to form, every important paper we looked after her death had a different birth year. This was before hospital births or electronic records.

Mom never remarried and she gave various reasons for this over the years. Reasons like she never loved anyone else after my father. Or that men of her age were too controlling, and she never wanted to be under anyone’s thumb. As far as I can remember, she rarely if ever dated after my dad died.

Decades later, she lay dying in a hospital bed at my house and over time she slipped into sleeping more and more, and finally she didn’t have any waking states at all anymore.

One day I was sitting with her and telling her that everything was all right and that we would always love her and would always miss her, but if she was ready, it would be OK to let go. I’m not sure where I’d heard this type of thing but I was very sincere about it. Perhaps since both my dad and my older sister had died at home, I had a bit more thought and practice on the process than some. I decided to keep talking.

Growing more prolific and specific in the space of the deep quiet of a deathbed, I suggested that many family members would be waiting for her, in fact. I began to list the members of our family who had passed on, such as her mom whom she loved very much, and her dad although I did remember that he died when she was young. The father of 9 children, he called all the girls “Sis,” suggesting he hadn’t bothered to remember their names.

Without slowing down I reminded her of her beloved sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Reece who would be waiting as well, as Uncle Bud and Uncle George. At this point I must have been in a welcome party hallucination inviting the dead from the worlds beyond. Finally saving the best for last, I recalled for her that her dear daughter Gina would be waiting, as would her only husband. Dad would be waiting to welcome her, too, after 30 years of absence.

At this suggestion, my mother opened her eyes, sat up and grabbed my arm with surprising strength and declared, “I don’t want him to be there!”

Startled out of party planning reverie and more than a little shocked I said, “OK, he doesn’t have to be there.” I glanced anxiously around the empty room hoping someone else had witnessed this.

After this declaration, my mother lay back down closed her eyes again and returned to her coma like state. I slowly recovered and offered a compromise of optimism for her peace of mind and soul (as I believed at the time).

“Well Mom”, I said, “Dad’s been dead a long time and I think its possible he may have changed and been growing over the years. You might enjoy meeting him again.”

With no apparent response from mom, I was finally quiet.

Now more that ten years later I still wonder about my parents love. I don’t believe my mom ever stopped loving him. But I’m pretty sure she had not forgiven him for dying young and leaving her either.

 

Teri Clifford is a masters level trained hypnotherapist and change coach with a private practice on Queen Anne. She loves to help her clients free themselves of limiting beliefs, habits and lifestyles. Teri believes that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood and live your life fully.

website: MakingChangeWithYou.com

contact: teri@makingchangewithyou.com or (866) 282 5676

 

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April 10, 2014 · 10:39 pm

Paris Piece II

louvre 2

We were going blind living in that small dark hotel in The Latin Quarter. Not really blind, but accustomed to night blindness any hour of the day. It didn’t much matter as every morning we dressed in black and went out. Into the light. Perhaps the only couple in Paris wearing sunglasses. Coming from Seattle, we are accustomed to that.

Back to Paris: if I were transported there in my sleep, I would wake knowing where in the world I was. I was aware of that every minute of every day.

The word for tourist, translated from Greek, is “the lucky invited.” Note to self: remember that, always, when traveling.

Our city treks took us primarily to cathedrals and museums, and it didn’t take long to find our preferences in both. Notre Dame is gothic and dark, and the Musee du Louvre, vast and heavy. Following the arc of the history of art, we were drawn to the light. Impressionism, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Claude Monet.

Monet’s immense water lily canvases had moved from the Jeu de Paume over to L’Orangerie since I last visited Paris. Surrounding an oval room with a circular sofa placed in the center, the series was meditative then and meditative now. Nothing in life has changed before these paintings.

In the city I considered neighborhoods built around squares as the most desirable places in which to live. Looking up at their tall graceful windows, I imagined their views of parks and people and green. Living in a painting, what could be lovelier than that?

Then boating on the Seine, riverfront residences replaced all of that for me. Old cities such as Paris were designed to be approached from the water. Suddenly I wanted to go down the river and see all of Europe this way, traveling in all that light.

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April 2, 2014 · 3:38 pm

Paris Piece I

photo

It was not enough to pack all black for Paris. My husband and I checked into a boutique hotel in The Latin Quarter in which everything was designed to be as dark as night. Black carpeted floors, black upholstered walls, window treatment: black-out drapery, of course. And a night sky ceiling for all the time one spends in bed.

This is the reason women should make the reservations.

Every day we go out, we experience difficulty finding the hotel again. It’s not that way with other sites in Paris, we return to the Orangerie and the parks and markets again and again. But The Seven Hotel, I suspect, moves around by day. It makes sense.

The couple beside me at breakfast converse without words. I suspect everyone here is a spy. My husband, a James Bond fan, has to be in heaven. From now on, for the duration of our stay, I will call him James.

While I grope around with night blindness, James has the lighting mastered. Intricate overhead switches, over the bed, turn on the lowest possible level of light in stars in the sky (our ceiling), and with a little more intensity—all low, mind you—the Lucite “floating” furniture. The bed floats as well. Small room/ big bed. Picture yourself in a spacecraft at night, when the sun is on the other side of the earth from your craft.

Mirrors help enormously. Stepping out of the shower and unable to find bath towels, I looked up and spotted them in the mirror. But how I do my make-up daily is anyone’s guess.

James turned fifty-eight here this week. We were quiet about it, of course.

The last time I was in Paris was with my sister right after college. I won’t tell you how many years ago. But this I know in Paris: I am still the same age here, with all of my life before me. Didn’t need make-up then, and maybe I don’t now.

Now how many places on earth can make you feel like that?

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March 26, 2014 · 3:08 pm

Priorities

woman trimming tree

I had every intention of writing about priorities, but I’m having issues. Priority issues. Writer, teacher, feminist and activist Grace Paley noted, “Writers write about what we don’t know about what we know.” In which case I should be able to write volumes.

My experience in graduate school was much the same. The weekly requirement to read a book and write an annotation on it trumped moving my thesis along. Now I need to see that blogging doesn’t encroach on editing and publishing that manuscript, a novel. Or the gardening memoir that has been marinating far too long.

Things are piling up around here.

But it’s all good. All writing is rewriting, and that’s what I am doing.

Quit blogging, you say? Not a chance. The first step in writing is observation. Writers walk into the world with antennae, and prompts pop up as sure as spring. Themes seem to find us. The rest is practice.

“If you write for yourself,” writes William Zinsser, “you’ll reach all the people you want in your writing.” This line could be a blogger’s maxim.

Today one of the first questions that an agent or publisher asks a writer is whether she has an audience. Well, that would be you.

We can make this happen.

The gardening memoir should be published first. I have already purchased the stationery with which I intend to reply to readers’ letters. Stored in safekeeping: dozens of orange boxes of notecards of ladies gardening, as well as designs for gentlemen, illustrated by Laura Stoddart (pictured). Hopefully one day you’ll receive one.

And so it goes, carts before horses in everything. Priorities.

Man with Flower

 

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March 19, 2014 · 3:18 am

Sign of the Whale

bulletin_summer2009-killer-whale1I have a friend with a home in the San Juan Islands that has everything one would want in an island home: simplicity of style, plenty of light, beds, beds, beds. Acreage, a deer-fenced garden, Adirondack chairs upon a porch, a lodge pole pavilion with a wood burning fireplace, sunsets over the water, trees, trees, trees. And a writing hut, for she is a writer. I have never been able to understand why my friend is not out there all the time.

Here we go again, ferrying to the San Juan Islands. This would all be good but the boating is flanked by I 5 freeway driving to and fro Seattle. That’s the part that isn’t right. Otherwise we are talking about what I consider one of the nicest cities in the country and one of the most pastoral and serene of seaside places. “The islands,” as they are locally known. A tough choice.

On our last trip out to the islands a pod of orcas was alongside us like synchronized swimmers, perhaps as many as twenty. The boat was in waters between San Juan Island and Jones Island, not where whales normally pass. In that moment our boat was the only one around, and we were the only people in the world enjoying the magnificent  sighting. A good sign, I know it is. I could feel it.

Maybe we should say we have lived in the city for a number of years, and a change could be good.

One thing is for sure: we know of no other way to find out.

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