The Silver Tea Set...

           

          Now that the Peruvian tea set is gone, I have moments when I wonder what Mother would think if she were alive.  Would she have let it go as easily as I did? Rereading her story of the tea set, it was clear that she valued it more than anything else she owned. She guarded it everywhere she lived, through every move, and even put it in the car when she and Dad evacuated Hilton Head Island during a hurricane warning. 

            After keeping the tea set wrapped in flannel in a drawer for the last 10 years since we have lived in Asheville, I took it to Brunk Auctions in Asheville.  They estimated its value between $3,000 - $4,000.  The description of it that appeared online at their September 2021 silver auction read:

Sterling Four Piece Tea Service, Tray and Strainer

Peruvian, 20^th century, pear forms with composite wooden spacers, marks for

 Camusson Silver Co. (Carlo Mario Camusso, Lima, Peru), no monograms,

136.11 oz. T., 10-3/4 in. Coffee pot and matching teapot, covered sugar,

 creamer, strainer with base and 24-1/2 in. two handle tray,

 cracks in spacers, teapot with base dent, tray with dents, all with light scratches.

 

          The tea set sold for less, and by the time I paid the commission fee the total was under $2000.

I was shocked when the silver specialist, who examined it thoroughly and wrote the description above, told me that the silver market is full of tea sets no longer used and many, such as this one, would most likely be purchased to melt down the silver.  I didn’t want to think about that.

            I saved Mother’s Jan. 26, 2010 email to me, in which she told the history of the tea set. It began…

When we lived in Lima in 1948 - 1950 there was nothing to buy except a few silver things.  We bought the tea set before we left Lima.  I chose a plain design and was told it was pure silver. For some reason I was sure I’d need to have one as the wife of a diplomat in Buenos Aires

 

Over the years we always put the valuable things in the round top trunk as we moved from country to country.  That is where the silver tea set went along with the Clock.  As the years went by, I entertained the American wives with teas, and served after dinner coffee in the coffee pot at diplomatic dinners.  The set never sat out but was always locked away, in case a “ladrón” might see it and climb through the French doors in our Lima, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Bogotá houses and steal it. The best polisher I had was our house maid in São Paulo.  How she made it shine as she sat in the kitchen, barefoot, listening to soaps on her little radio.

 

After we retired and moved back to the U.S,. I always guarded the silver tea set, never keeping it out and never letting the packers pack it.  When we were packing our most valuable things, that tea set was at the top of the list…although life in the US never called for a silver tea set.  The first time I lived on Jordan Road in Washington D.C. and asked some neighbor ladies for coffee one morning, I used the silver coffee pot on the silver tray.  A real mistake! That was not done on such an occasion.  Even in Asheville, I would polish the tea set sometimes but kept it hidden.  

 

As the years went by, polishing the tea set was too hard when it turned black. When we moved into the Fairways (assisted living) at Carolina Meadows I could not take it and sent it to granddaughter, Megan, in California.  It stayed in the box in her attic and was never used until Kristina asked for it and it was mailed to her in Vermont.

 

Kris, you can write the last chapter.  Here it is…

 

While living in our house in Vermont I was glad to see the familiar tea set again.  Art polished it until it gleamed and we put it out on the built-in buffet in our dining room to admire.  I may have used it a few times as we started a custom of entertaining friends and neighbors at tea instead of dinner.  In 2011, we moved to Asheville, and the tea set was packed and came with us.  But, at our Biltmore Lake townhouse there is no sideboard or buffet to display it. I put it all in a big chest of drawers in the guest room.

 

After Mother died in 2014, I would get out the tea set from time to time just to look at it.  It brought back memories of my childhood and particularly of Mother.  Then I would put it away.

 

Last summer the task of polishing the tea set became too much work even for Art.  I knew none of the grandchildren nor their children would ever use or want it.  As I was exploring how to get rid of it, a friend told me about Brunk Auction house which happens to be in Asheville.

 

I was relieved when the tea set sold and a check came in the mail. I wasn’t sure how Mother might react to that.  However, Art and I are at a stage where we are letting go of things that we will not have room for as we downsize to move to a retirement community. Then I remember how Mother and Dad did the same thing.  I was there to help them and things I remember Mother treasuring , she simply and easily gave away.  I never have forgotten that and use that as my model for moving on.  After all, things are far less important than memories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

In America: Remember - Washington DC

         

              The 713,000 tiny white flags gently blowing in the breeze at the foot of the Washington Monument, revealed a truly realistic sense of the scale of lives lost during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. The installation opened on September 17^thand just closed on October 3^rd, 2021. Created by artist Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, and installed on 20 acres of the National Mall, it was titled In America: Remember. The large scale of all the flags carefully aligned and set in the ground in perfectly straight rows, was meant to draw attention to those who have died of Covid-19. 

 

            While on a trip to Washington DC, I visited the installation twice.  On two different days the total number of deaths on a large billboard at the entrance changed by hundreds. There is no more graphic portrayal of this American tragedy than being surrounded by a sea of white flags, each memorializing one human being.  When the sun shone the flags sparkled like stars.  It felt as if the spirits of all those gone were there.  The flags surrounding the perimeter of the various sections had names and messages on them left by loved ones but most did not.

 

            Firstenberg uses art to focus on social issues in the world.  Having spent many years as a hospice volunteer, she took art classes later in life and found she had talent and liked it.  For her, art was a way to focus on getting across a particular message.  While she had experience with smaller installations using flags,  this year, she felt that so many deaths from Covid happened in isolation that she needed to bring acknowledgement to them.  She obtained permission to use the most central place in the nation’s capital…the National Mall. She planned and ordered more than 700,000 flags, and with the help of volunteers her vision became a reality.

            During my second visit, the day before the installation was taken down, I stood with my 7-year old grandson gazing across the sea of flags imagining how he might remember this sad moment in US history when he is old.  At first he stood next to me gazing in awe across the landscape of flags, until his childlike joy of walking up and down rows and lying down amongst the flags reminded me that he is still only 7 years old. 

https://suzannefirstenberg.com/artist-bio-suzanne-firstenberg/

Art and Travel Memories

     Why have I never heard of the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup, despite having spent a summer in Bergen, Norway? Born in 1880 in the municipality of Jolster,  200 km north of Bergen, Nikolai Astrup lived his entire life in this scenic part of Western Norway painting the natural world around him. These thoughts came to mind as I recently visited the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass. “Nikolai Astrup: Visions of Norway” is the first special exhibit since Covid. Even more noteworthy is the fact that it is the first time this artist’s work has ever been exhibited in North America.

            “If only we saw the world in our youth with the wisdom we attain with age,” I thought to myself, as I walked slowly through the Astrup exhibit remembering a long ago travel experience. I was 23 the summer I lived with a Norwegian family on the rural outskirts of Bergen. Unprepared for the culture, language, and history of where I was going,  my job was to keep track of a group of American students on a summer abroad program. Norwegian was a difficult language, and young Norwegians, unlike American teenagers, liked hiking and being outdoors. So the most frequent question my high school “charges” asked was, “Where is the nearest mall?” 

 

            I hadn’t thought about that summer for decades, until I saw Nikolai Astrup’s paintings. It was then, that I remembered the breathtaking mountains, forests, bodies of water, simple farm buildings, wooden houses and small churches and gardens in Western Norway. Painting with bold thick brush strokes on large canvases draws you in just as the real landscape does. Astrup painted what he saw around him in a place he lived his entire life, often creating the same scenes during different seasons, times of day, perspectives and angles.  He could look at a familiar view and see something different every time. This is what makes his paintings charming and almost mesmerizing.

 

              Much more can be said about Astrup and what influenced him throughout his artistic life, but I have learned that he is the most well-known artist in Norway even though he died almost 100 years ago. Norwegian homes have prints of Astrup paintings on their walls. 

 

            Now that 85 of his works are being exhibited at the Clark, he is bound to become known outside his homeland.  I, on the other hand, am struck by the desire to return to Norway. Fifty years later, I know I would look at the landscape differently as Astrup did in his paintings, and I would visit the Bergen Art Museum, something that was definitely left off our Norwegian itinerary the summer I lived there so long ago. 

                                                          

The Clark Institute of Art in Williamstown, Mass

 

 

 

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The Brass Door Knocker

 Dear Kristina,

 Thank you for offering the door knocker from your grandparents' home at 1243 43rd St. in Des Moines. It is a delightful story and a tribute to your grandmother in designing the home. It is a lovely colonial revival brick house. I almost feel it belongs back on the front door of the home. Have you contacted the owners of the home?

 

Leo Landis, Curator

State Historical Museum of Iowa

July 2021

 

            Over 100 years ago, Blythe and Harlan Cory, built a house for their family which included two children, Mac and Mary Blythe. They bought a piece of land on 43^rd street in Des Moines, Iowa.  The property had an old barn on it where Harlan would keep a saddle horse.  It was 1918, and in those days this property was on the edge of town. Blythe, who was an artist but no architect, designed the red brick house at #1242, that was unlike any other house on this suburban Des Moines Street. 

            The house had a name, Coral Cote, on its brass door knocker and on Blythe’s stationary.  “Coral” was for the new pink brick, “Cote” for cottage. 

 The Brass Door Knocker

 

            Blythe and Harlan Cory were my grandparents, my mother’s parents.  My mother, Virginia  Cory was born in 1919 in the library, a little room on the first floor of the new house.  The story my mother often repeated, was that Blythe had designed the house with only her two children in mind.  

            “Then I came along, a mistake, and the house was always too small. They always told me this with an arm around me and a reassuring hug,”  she told us. 

            When Blythe’s mother-in-law came to see the house, she said, “Blythe has a very pretty house, but there’s no place to eat or sleep in it.” 

            Mother remembered how they all would laugh at this but it never diminshed the love they had for this house. She always spoke of Coral Cote as being special and took that house in her mind wherever she went all over the world for the rest of her life.

                                                                            Coral Cote

            

            My grandparents lived at Coral Cote for 44 years until the summer of 1962 when Blythe had a stroke and died.  Harlan could not face living there without her and moved to Florida. Coral Cote was sold. My mother and her sister Mary Blythe, spent that summer clearing out their childhood home where it seemed that nothing inside had ever been discarded.  Someone thought to unscrew the brass door knocker from the front door and it ended up with my Mother.  She put it away and from time to time would get it out and tell us stories of Coral Cote.  When my Mother died in 2014, I took the brass door knocker, carefully put it away in a drawer wrapped in flannel as if it were a baby. Somehow it felt sacred.

 

            This summer as I was clearing out a chest of drawers I came across the handsome door knocker that is now 103 years old.  I like holding it in my hand.  It’s heavy and it made me think of all the people through many decades that had used it on the front door of Coral Cote. I felt that now it was my responsibility to decide what to do with it so that it would be kept and its history preserved.

 

            Recently in July, I applied to the State Historical Museum of Iowa in Des Moines to see if they would take it as an artifact.  When Mr. Landis, Curator, suggested I contact the owner of the house he sent me the link to the Polk County Assessor’s website with the name of the current owner, Christina Muell.

 

            Little did I know this would begin a flurry of emails back and forth between Asheville and Des Moines.  Christina Muell Yaeger told me about herself and her family and two children. I described a little about the history of the house she now was living in and my connection to it.  I mailed her several descriptions, stories, and the history that Virginia Cory, my mother had written for our family.  In the second email I described and sent a photo of the Coral Cote brass door knocker with the date 1918 engraved on it. Not knowing if they would want the door knocker I told her that the Curator of the Iowa Historical Museum had suggested I contact her first.  

            That was when she wrote back, “We would be honored to put the door knocker back on the original door! We will continue to share the stories and keep the memory alive!  It would be great to have you and your family visit sometime!”

 

            Had fate intervened to make this all happen?  My worries vanished as Christina Yaeger and I exchanged a few more emails about each other. I was certain that the door knocker would be cherished by this young family because it was going back to where it had come from 103 years ago.  I thought about how delighted my Mother would have been to know the door knocker she carefully saved for over 50 years is on its way home again.

                                The Yaeger family - Christina, LaMar, Jakobe (10) and Currence (3)

Present owners of 1242 43rd Street, Des Moines, Iowa

 

Kristina,

I'm pleased to hear that worked out for getting the door knocker back to the house. I live not too far southeast of the home and will have to ride by on my bicycle.

 

If you have not had a chance, we have an online database that shows the Blythe Cory wedding dress. If you do make it to Des Moines and can give us 72 hours notice we should be able to show it to you in person.*

 

Leo Landis, Curator

August 2021

 

(*In 2012, I donated my grandmother’s 108 year old Victorian wedding dress and wrote the story about it. It now belongs to the State Museum Historical Museum of Iowa.)

 

 

 

 

 

             

 

 

 

 

 

            

Fish, Peaches, Dragonwood and more...

  

            We heard the familiar pit-a-pat of feet on the wooden stairs on Austin’s first morning at our house. Art and I looked at the early hour on the clock.  Austin, up so early?

            “What are you doing up already?” I asked.

            “I’m going fishing with my dad” he told me. “Morning is when the fish are biting.”

 

            I remembered last year’s frustrating attempts to catch a fish because of the line getting tangled in the low-lying trees around the lake.  Now at 7 years old, Austin was more determined than ever to catch something. (Jess had taken him the Sportsman’s Warehouse in the Outlet Mall to buy lures and live bait.)

            Eating a bowl of “Grandma’s Granola” I took in his tall thin figure and the neatly cut short haircut. He looked grown up, all boy, and handsome with his piercing blue eyes. Where did the little boy with the head full of curls go? 

 

             Austin and Hayden headed across the street to Biltmore Lake to a spot I had scoped out without any interfering shrubs or branches.  Before I could get dressed to follow and watch, I had a text ”we caught one” along with photos proving it. “We caught another one” came a second text. Austin’s visit to Biltmore Lake was off to a perfect start.

            During his two weeks here, he had a catch of nine fish!  This is something he won’t forget.  Austin learned to take each fish off the hook and put them back in the water gently. All nine fish came from Biltmore Lake because the attempts to catch something in Lake Powhatan, a Recreation and Campground nearby, failed.

                                                            ***

            “Grandma, can I have a peach?”  I peeled and sliced a South Carolina peach which Austin inhaled as the sweet juice ran down his chin. 

            “I didn’t know you liked peaches,” I said.  Every time we came back to our house he asked for a peach.  When given the choice of my homemade popsicles he chose Peach over Strawberry.  Peaches became the snack of choice as we replenished our supply from the Western Carolina Farmer’s Market every few days.  

            “I love peaches too,” I told him.  “We only get these special ones in July so it’s good you are here now. Now whenever I eat a peach I will always think of Austin.

                                                            ***

            “That was a great show,” Austin told his mom the morning after we had been to the Brevard Music Center.  

            It was Austin’s first live classical music concert.  It’s unusual to see children at the summer Brevard concerts.  We weren’t sure he would like it, much less sit quietly through an evening of classical music.   Austin takes violin lessons in Washington DC, so Art and I chose this concert because of the American violin soloist Anne Akiko Meyers, who played a Beethoven violin concerto.  

            As the lights dimmed and the concert, conducted by the famous and flamboyant Keith Lockhart, began, I glanced two seats over.  Austin sat with his legs crossed focused on the violinist in a long red dress playing a 1741 violin.  It was clear he had never seen anything like this. At intermission, we wandered outdoors on a beautiful summer evening to stretch our legs and look for ice cream. 

            When the second part of the program began Austin was tired.  He moved down to sit by me as there were empty seats in front of us.  I wondered if he would last through Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony.  Jess distracted him for a while with a phone and dimmed screen.  But he came back to life in the energetic fourth movement. He was astonished watching Keith Lockhart, dramatically throw himself into his conducting as he jumped up and down on the podium. The symphony ended with a roar of applause from the audience as Lockhart took his bows drenched in sweat.  

            As we walked out, Austin commented on the conductor’s dramatic movements.

            “He looked like he was doing karate or taekwondo,” he said to me.  He had never seen anything like it.  

            On the drive home to Asheville, we praised him for being such a good listener, while we adults celebrated a new classical music lover into the family. Jess and Hayden were thrilled, and our reward was making the right choice in planning the Brevard outing for all of us.  It was an unforgettable evening.

Brevard Music Center

                                                            ***

            “Can I swim out to the raft?” Austin asked every time I took him swimming in the lake. With life jacket on, Hayden first took him out in the deeper part of the lake and taught him to jump from the raft.  It took several tries because Austin is cautious about trying anything new.  Within a half hour he was climbing up the stairs onto the raft and confident about jumping off. He wanted to do it nonstop. 

            Distracting him to stay in the shallow water with a ball, frisbee or water guns, I told him he couldn’t go into the deep water unless his mom or dad were with him. Being social as he is, he looked for a friend or a group of kids playing and simply joined in.  Sometimes he found a friend to squirt water guns with or throw a ball to. Other days kids came to the beach with their own friends, and he was ignored. Then I suggested building something in the sand.

            Castle building is one of Austin’s specialties.  Once he starts, he can spend hours digging moats, making turreted walls and an entire array of buildings.  His concentration is amazing.  He is distressed when his “work of art” is finished and someone comes along and without noticing, steps on it.

                                                            ***

            I miss our game playing evenings now that Austin has gone home.  Dragonwood, the “roll the dice” and card game I bought him, became a favorite for all of us.  As we learned the rules, we had many fun nights trying to capture the Blue Dragon and get the highest number of point so we could win.  

            Austin is still fiercely competitive as we experienced playing Monopoly on the nights he stayed with us.  “I have a strategy and I always win,” he told us with confidence.  It becomes problematic when he is on the verge of losing.  He will negotiate for properties he didn't buy or raid the bank for more money…all against the rules, of course.  But we let it pass and end the game, hoping that with time he will learn not to take it so seriously and be a better loser.

Monopoly champ...

 

                                                            ***

            Art ,who is passionate about his stamp collection, couldn't get Austin the least bit interested.  

            “I collect Pokémon cards”, was Austin’s response. He brought out his wallet of ‘special cards’ to show us.  Of course, we know nothing about Pokémon and the cards.  One afternoon he had a Zoom meeting for an hour with the Pokémon Club from the Labyrinth Game store near his house in Washington DC.  He sat with his iPad for an hour at our dining room table interacting with fellow Pokémon collectors and a leader discussing details of various cards.  It’s all Greek to us…

            Austin did have fun helping Art with the daily crossword puzzles he loves to do.  He found some clues he thought Austin might know.  When he got the right answer, he was ecstatic.  Austin would pick up the half-finished puzzle on the coffee table and take it to Art to ask him if he could give him some more clues to guess a word.  How many seven-year-olds want to try out the New York Times puzzles, I wondered. And yet Austin loves facts and words, a good combination for solving crosswords.

                                                            ***

            “Remember when we saw the bear over there?” Austin said pointing out the window.  We were driving through the Biltmore Estate to take him for a bike ride on the bike trail.  We had done the same thing last year, and in a field along the entrance road we had seen a large bear.  There were many cars along this same road stopped while watching.

            I suddenly had a new insight. Austin is now at an age when he remembers things we have done in the past.  That feels almost like a milestone.  I thought of the seven summers that Austin has spent at Biltmore Lake with us and know that four or five of those years he doesn’t remember because he was too young.  Now I think of the concert we went to at Biltmore, the nine fish he caught in the lake, the rousing Dragonwood games, and jumping into the water from the raft.  It’s satisfying to think that he’ll remember some of this in months and perhaps years to come.

                                                            ***

            Austin has gone home now.  When I get up each morning, I still listen for him coming down the stairs.  As I continue to enjoy South Carolina peaches, I think of him as I peel one or two daily. Our evenings are quiet without Dragonwood, Monopoly or Clue.  All are memories that I will treasure until we do it all over again next year.  

Contemplating Biltmore Lake...

Summer 2021

A Sense of Place

 An aspect of your current dwelling that affects you…

(Written for a memoir writing class taught by Mary Owen at

Osher Lifelong Learning, Dartmouth College, NH – 2009)

  

            “How does it feel to be back again?”, I asked my friend Sharon. She and her husband, Paul, were visiting after having moved South two years ago.

            “It feels so real,” she replied.

            I knew when she said that that she was experiencing the same feeling I always had coming back to Great Hawk Colony in Rochester, Vt. where I now live. She meant the beauty, serenity, and total peacefulness of this place in the Vermont mountains.  Arriving here you have the sensation of life’s many demands falling away.  Here, you can be your true self and let go of the pretenses modern life imposes.

Hawkcrest 1990-2011

 

            On the road further up the mountain from where I live, and where Sharon and Paul used to live, there is a house perched on the very edge with a panorama of the Green Mountains.  The owners have named their house “Magic Happens” which is exactly right.  When I have been away and come back to Rochester, I take the road a few miles out of town slowly up to Gt. Hawk Colony and the mountain where I live.  I inevitably experience an unburdening, almost a spiritual shift, so that what is exposed is only that which is true and real.  The trees sway gently in the breeze, the birds sound their calls into the natural silence, and the occasional hawk lazily circles about.  There is a total serenity of nature which seems far away from the frenzy of the outside world.

 

            I have spent much of my life thinking about what gives a person a sense of place or a feeling of belonging somewhere.  I have thought about how places I’ve lived have affected me.  For most people, home is where they were born and grew up.  When the expected question “where are you from?” comes up, most everyone can answer with the place name of where they were born and spent their childhood. I always feel inadequate when someone asks me, “where are you from?”.  (The only place where that was not the first question asked was in Huntsville, Alabama where I once lived.  The more important question there was, “what church do you belong to?” For me that was even more disconcerting.)

 

            I was born in Santiago, Chile, and by the time I was a teenager I had spoken Spanish all my life, become fluent in Portuguese, seen the Andes Mountains, crossed the Equator countless times, experienced Christmas in the middle of hot summer, memorized all the capitals of the Argentine provinces, and could sing the Brazilian national anthem as if it were my own.  The name Perón was one I knew well because of the revolution that ousted him from Argentina and resulted in a long school vacation.  His name and Evita’s had to be purged from our textbooks and new ones printed before we returned to classes.

            Eisenhower and Kennedy were familiar names but Janio da Silva Quadros, president of Brazil when we were there, showed up in person at one of Mother and Dad’s dinner parties while my brothers and I peeked down the stairway to watch all the excitement. As a diplomat, my father’s career took us to Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Bogotá to live until I went to college.  We moved from one country to another, and each became a temporary “home”. We knew we were not there to stay.  A sense of belonging to a place only came later when I was grown up, but not because I was born or grew up in a particular place.

 

            Living abroad as a child, I wanted more than anything to be like everyone else around me.  In Buenos Aires, my Argentine girlfriends at school shopped for white bride-like dresses to celebrate First Communion ceremonies.  Mother explained that I couldn’t do that because we weren’t Catholic.  At the São Paulo Graded School in Brazil my few American classmates were going to boarding school in the US.  I begged to go too because I wanted to live in the U.S.  Instead, my parents sent me to live with my grandparents in Florida where I went to a public high school.  I spent my one semester there pretending I knew who Elvis Presley was and trying not to draw attention to my shirtwaist dresses in bright Matarazzo cotton prints made by Raquel, our Brazilian dressmaker who came once a week to sew our clothes. 

Childhood in Buenos Aires

            Arriving on the Cornell College campus in Mt. Vernon, Iowa as a freshman, I was amongst classmates mostly from small midwestern towns I had never heard of.  My photo was in the freshman yearbook, “Faces”, with hometown listed as Bogotá, Colombia where my parents lived then…. although temporarily, of course.  In my mind, that set me apart from the beginning of my college years.

 

            In 1969, Mother and Dad discovered Vermont and built a house at Gt. Hawk Colony in Rochester. Hawkwood, the name Mother gave our house, was where we spent vacations, while they continued their lives abroad in Saigon, Mexico City, Geneva, and eventually Washington D.C.  With college behind me I went to graduate school and then to a first job in Boston.

            While visiting at Hawkwood, as I often did, I began to feel a sense of belonging that I had not known anywhere before.  Strangely, it felt like home, but I didn’t know exactly why.  Perhaps it was living in the country close to nature, a new experience for me.  Within two years I moved to Vermont where I found a job in Proctor and lived at Hawkwood with only a German Shepard for company and my neighbor, Mary Cornwall down the road.  Mary was fifty years older than me, widowed, and one of the wisest women I ever knew.  I wanted to be like her when I was old.  

            One day Mary said ,” Vermont is no place for you to settle at your age.” (I was 26 years old). You must go out in the world and experience much more of life before you will be content to come back and settle here.” A few months later, I left.  It was many years before I came back to Vermont to live. It wasn’t until after marriage, having a family, and an adventurous life of living all over the world that Vermont was the place I wanted to be. I have often wished I could tell Mary Cornwall how right she was.

                

            In the summer of 1990, Art and I drove Hayden and a friend to summer camp at Windridge in Vermont.  On our way back through Rochester I had to stop and visit Hawkwood, which Mother and Dad had sold 10 years before.( It was too isolated and too wintry for the retirement they wanted, and they moved South.)  As we drove up the familiar winding mountain road to Gt. Hawk Colony and stopped at the end of the driveway to Hawkwood, a sense of utter peacefulness came over me again. It was a sensation I hadn’t felt in 10 years.  We bought our own house on the road above Hawkwood, a few months later and named it Hawkcrest.  Though we haven’t always lived there fulltime, the sense of belonging and being at home there, has grown just as my friend Mary Cornwall predicted.

 

            There is something very close to elemental life where I live. It is like a treasure that you are continually discovering and that goes beyond imaginable riches.  Living close to nature in a place where some days the intense blue skies, the soft dark velvet backdrop of the Green Mountains, and the utter silence except for the swish of a wind gust in the trees or the call of a bird, is the realness my friend Sharon described.  The kind people around me, the disregard for where I come from, how I look and what kind of a house I live in, has opened a door to my sense of belong here.

 

            Living in this beautiful natural place in Vermont has sustained me much of my adult life. 

Over the years, I have learned to let go of my feelings of not belonging because I have moved often and lived all over the world and cannot directly answer “where are you from?”  If anything, my discovery of Vermont has given me a place I have learned to belong to… a place where I can be myself.  

_________________________________________

June 2011

            Today, I no longer live in Vermont.  We chose to move 10 years ago to Asheville, N.C., another mountainous community with a gentler climate and easier lifestyle.  It was a new chapter in our lives and a good decision. 

            My sense of place and belonging still rests in Vermont and always will.  I can now live other places knowing that I have a place I treasure on this planet…a place I belong to.

            I am comfortable now with people who ask, “where are you from?”

            “I’m from Vermont,” I like to answer.

            Now, every summer we go “home” to Vermont for several weeks. As we drive up the final windy road to Gt. Hawk in Rochester, I am home.  I feel the realness of nature and the silence embrace me once again. This is my place of belonging and always will be.

My spiritual place...

            

At peace in Vermont...

 

            

 

Letting Go

       I sold my accordion today.  It was only the third one I ever owned.  The first, being a child-size whitepearl Hohner accordion my parents bought for me when I was 8 years old.  The second was a used Italian Salanti I bought at the Accordion Connection in Gilmanton, N.H.  when I was in my 60’s.  The third was a 96-base Hohner Tango II that I exchanged for the Salanti and got from my friend Paul,neighbor in Vermont. That is the one I sold today.

                                                                    Hohner Tango II

            Paul lived across the street from us in Rochester, Vermont, when I discovered he had started a used accordion business . We played duets together and I often went to Paul’s house to see new accordions he was fixing or ones he had been given by people who found them in attics or houses of relatives who had died.  He put ads in small town newspapers and accordions came out of the woodwork.  He took them all. His enthusiasm was catching. I practised often, pleased that some of my learned memory was still alive after a 50-year respite.

Duets with Paul

 

            I was excited to be playing an accordion again because it was a connection to my childhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Tango and the bandoneón and accordion music was all around me as a child.  It seemed to live in the background of daily life, on radios or in open air cafes.  The accordion  brought me closer to Mother in her last years, because she and I had both had accordion lessons and played duets together at our annual recitals.

Me and Mother -  Accordion Recital in Buenos Aires (Circa 1955)

 

            Moving to Asheville in 2011, the Hohner accordion came with me.  I took it out to play occasionally but without a friend or a group or even a teacher to play with my enthusiasm waned.  Mother died and the years have passed.  This year my Hohner began to feel like the “white elephant” in the closet. 

            Occasionally Art would say, “Are you ever going to get out your accordion and play it again?”

            “I will,” I promised but I didn’t follow through.  It was hard to accept that I couldn’t play it very well anymore.  It was heavy and cumbersome, and I tired easily opening and closing the bellows and wearing the straps on my shoulders.

 

            A few weeks ago, I posted an ad on Craig’s List under Instruments for Sale.  Noticing that there was not a single accordion for sale but many guitars and pianos, I thought that no one would respond to my ad.  That would be alright since I wasn’t sure I could really part with it.

 

This morning I received a surprise text message … 

 

            Hello! Is the Hohner accordion still for sale?

            I live nearby in Etowah. Thanks!

 

            My reply…

            Yes, it is still for sale.  I live in Candler.

 

            Response…

            I’m interested in buying it.  When works

            best for you?

We exchanged a few more texts with time and address and the person texting said “Great, thanks!”

 

          At 3pm a bright red Jeep drove up to our house and a tall young man with tattoos on his arms, got out with a little boy. Once in the house, he took one look at the Hohner and said he’d buy it. I noticed he did not know how to take the accordion out of its case and put it on to play.  I showed him how to put the straps over his shoulders and where the bass buttons were.

 

            “Do you know how to play?” I asked.

            “Oh, no,” he replied. “I play the piano, but I want to learn how to play the accordion.”

            “Will you take lessons?”  I asked.

            “No,” he replied,  “I’ll learn watching You-Tube videos. I wanted a Hohner because my background is German,” he added.  

            

            We packed up the accordion and he handed over cash. Accordion in hand, he walked out to his car with his 5-year-old, who had stayed quietly watching this transaction with big eyes. 

 

            “I did it,” I said to Art as the man drove off.

            I had let the Hohner go without shedding a tear. Only I knew how hard  it was for me to give up something that I had once, long ago, loved doing. Another sign of old age, I thought.

            Late this afternoon another text came from the man who bought my accordion. ( We had not even exchanged names it all happened so fast.)  He wrote:

 

            Thank you again.  It’s a lovely instrument and is really eye opening

            to have the chord progressions laid out in rows, coming from someone

            who has played piano by ear.  I will take good care of her.  I’m sorry I

            didn’t ask you to play for us before we left.

 

I could not resist a final text back to him…

 

            I feel very much at peace knowing someone like you will care

            for that accordion and enjoy it!