Blossoms

Some blossoms for another rainy day. This, the last painting Bonnard worked on, at eighty, just before his death.

Too ill to hold the brush, Bonnard begged his nephew Charles Terrasse to change a green patch to orange. It is one of the most intensely poetic pictures in this century. The 80-year-old creator had just managed to complete his hymn to joy, discreetly sung in deep solitude.

image: Pierre Bonnard, L'amandier en fleurs (The Almond Tree in Blossom), 1945

Maps

I've been intrigued by the concept and execution of monsters on ancient maps—charting what's fearful to us, the unknown, which yet has its own lure and an at least aesthetic charm.


image: w:Carta marina, a wallmap of Scandinavia, by w:Olaus Magnus. A part of entire map showing part of Norwegian coast. Legendary whirl of water has caught a ship and monsters attacks other ships. James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota

More Fruit

And on the same theme, in the same palette (which I always confuse with palate), this from Cezanne.


image: Stilleben mit Granatapfel und Birnen, Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH

Fruit

The flats of strawberries on offer now from solitary vendors standing on street corners on and near campus are somehow not appealing in the least. Not like the sliced fruit dripping juices wrist to elbow at the fruit stands in the square in Mexico City that spring—papaya, mango, melon, what?—dipped in lime juice and chili powder, said to be unsafe to eat and so much more desirable for that. Safer were greenish glass bottles of CocaCola at the Mercado, and a soup made from succulent pink shrimp and cilantro eaten with handshaped corn tortillas. The wondrous market offered everything from slabs of beef dizzy with flies to fragile butterflies in silver filagree, from onyx chess pieces to cotton dresses embroidered with every color thread, the light material kind to sunburned arms and shins. My first trip to a foreign place—what made me never want to do without again.

image: Mangga gedong gincu, a cultivar of mango, Mangifera indica, from Tomo, Sumedang, West Java, Indonesia, W.A. Djatmiko

Coffee

It's made such a difference to my mornings having my little French press coffeemaker at work, and my poppy-painted Cretan coffee cup. 

What is it about coffee, even decaf, that offers so much comfort and solace? The lure of copper samovars in dusty souks, the blue-tabled taverna on the harbor at Mochlos after a morning swim, the coffee berries we saw ripening red on the Kona Coast each year again . . . That isn't all of it, but some. The sensual memories stirred, the deep connection with the world evoked—so much contained there in a little cup that fits so naturally into a cupping hand.

image: Bubbles atop freshly brewed coffee in a french press, Salimfadhley

Diversions

I go out to buy shredded carrots, but come back with wild strawberry liqueur instead.

For dinner I will make Italian Wedding Soup, with tiny turkey meatballs, escarole, and maybe sage rather than the oregano called for. Some mandolin music would be nice, and of course our Deruta bowls painted with green roosters.

All this against the rain.


image: Piatto in ceramica di Cerreto Sannita del '700 nella chiesa di San Gennaro in Cerreto Sannita (Bn), Adam91

Volcanoes on the Mind

I’ve been fascinated by volcanoes all my life, maybe because they’ve formed the landscapes closest to my heart, and been so key in archaeology—destroying and preserving, both. Pompeii and Herculaneum, Akrotiri . . . but first of all the cliffs of the ruined cliff dwellings in northern New Mexico where I grew up, as a child climbing into tufa caves and wondering about those who climbed before.

And I’ve been drawn almost like fate to volcanic islands across the world. I've known many, as long back as I can remember. They’ve meant to me yearning and loss, and always at the same time (there's their charm, perhaps) the beginning of new hope. Like the delicate pink grasses that are the first thing to grow on the pitch-black desolation of the lava flows on the Kohala Coast, there's been awakening for me on fire-born islands.


Stromboli

I'm devastated that in seventh grade my classmates are the daughters of women photographers, of writers with dovecotes in their high-walled patios on Canyon Road, of archaeologists who take them to spend summers on volcanic islands where they speak Italian and pick apricots and keep a donkey at the bottom of the
garden—things they talk about together while I live in the most boring part of town and have silly, short bangs, and can be nothing, ever, other than awkward, gawky, and hopelessly unremarkable. I haven’t lived on a romantic island always in danger of being blown away. I haven’t lived at all, really, I understand—as paradoxically I begin to.


Santorini

I’m here at last, a lifelong dream—four thousand years too late. Looking across at the place beyond lights. Buried Akrotiri on its black height. Around it are the Burnt Islands, the immense void in the Aegean where island used to be, before the volcano hollowed it out, too deep and fathomless for ships to anchor anywhere.

We take a boat across to the caldera. We climb in perfect silence, subsumed by the cindery blackness on every side. There's wind as always from between the Burned Islands, the blackened bones of what was once whole and intact. This is the newest: what they call the New Burned Island. There's room for only one small boat to dock against the rock, so any that come after are tied to the first. We disembark by being handed across all the boats in turn—a bridge of boats.

After climbing we swim where hot springs come up in the sea. There is a small white church there in the cove, and above it a cave with an outhouse, overrun with goats.


Pantelleria

On this other island south of Sicily formed by volcanoes, they come by early each morning selling fish, along the coast road, in one of the little three-wheelers—spada, thick swordfish steaks, to marinate in lemon, olive oil, parsley, salt.

Besides the famous capers that grow on the island there is yellow fennel, which Lawrence Durrell in Bitter Lemons says "likes old ruins best, growing there more freely than on the natural rock." And there are little rust-colored oysters which taste pungent and rusty, like their color. We drink a dry volcanic wine with them, having driven up steep streets to buy a dozen bottles from a man in a dim shop.

This is what I've left my husband for.

Years later, when it's done, I'll think of dancing in darkness above the sea on that island, just thirty miles from Africa. I'll remember heavy pots of oregano on the long smooth-tiled terrazza, crushing up against oregano with bare legs in the dark, releasing the fragrance. I'll remember being in love with the place as much as the man I was with. I'll wonder whether it has always been places, with me.


Hawai’i

Keauhou Bay. Across the harbor is the birthplace of the stillborn king. I look out at the kayaks slipping in and out of it like needles through green silk. The gentle long curve of the old defunct volcano above it, almost obliterated by wet cloud.

I taught my father volcanoes. I travelled to Pompeii one year, Etna another; and while he was going up Mt. St. Helens with my cousins, near the end, I was on my way to Thera, the island we had read about entranced, blown out of the Aegean some four thousand years ago, leaving a shadow island, an aching imprint of absence in the sea. Another time we walked out on the molten lava on Hawaii's southern coast; the heat came through the soles of our beach shoes. I didn’t feel afraid for him there, somehow, as I did in the waves, the dazzling white breakers, where I saw all of a sudden how small and how frail he looked, battling through, delighted, to the outer calm.

Against the blue-black of the coast at Keauhou were the bright yellow fish we found together, splashed out on the rock like the great caves in France where creatures of the darkness swam to light. At O Honaunau, the place of refuge of the ancient Hawaiians where second chances are given and wise old sea turtles the color of the water paddle in their Buddhist way about, we watched a big man carving gods.

And in the end I leave him there, in the black lava tidepools of that island that has unexpectedly been home to us, the pools of blackest lava with their mirroring blue.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Kona tidepool

More of Ostia Antica

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Ostia Three

Places I Would Rather Be Today

One of the appeals of archaeology is that cities buried in earth, like seeds, emerge again, reveal themselves come Spring, and grow back into what they were before planting. I'm thinking of cities buried in ash—Pompeii, Herculaneum, Akrotiri—but also Ostia Antica, Rome's old port, silted over and so preserved, seedlike, to bloom again under the freeing trowel.

To get there we took a train covered completely in grafitti. Wildflowers were everywhere, and the lovely cross-hatched patterns of brick. Remarkably extensive black and white mosaics of ships, horses with sea serpent tails, dolphins, and an elephant or two, advertising ancient shipping firms. Fragments of frescoes; stone mills; storage jars; statues; columns; inscriptions. There were rounded clay ovens that looked strangely like the adobe hornos of the New Mexico pueblos (just as I learned the Navajos glaze their pottery with piñon sap, as the ancient Greeks did their amphoras). Wildflowers, and umbrella pines. The feeling of the past permeating everything. The fascination of the ruined places, the traces of lives. Fragments. What charms me.

And then the schoolchildren who overran the café outside the area of scavi. The archaeologist who sat drawing under the pines. Getting to know it line by line, in different moods, intimate with the wind over the old stone, and the presence of the shipbuilders who walked there in the ancient times—not so far off that day.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Ostia One

Thought for the Day

We can't all, and some of us don't. That's all there is to it.

—Eeyore


image: http://www.winnie-pooh.org/eeyore-quotes.htm

And Yet More Eggs

These dyed yesterday, with friends.

Happy Easter—despite the rain! I'm roasting a chicken, and planning to saute Swiss chard to serve with goat cheese and pine nuts.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Eggs8

Easter Sunday

image: Christie B. Cochrell, St. Francis

Easter Eggs

More eggs, with Easter on its way.

image: Easter eggs in Greeece /Athens market, Reinhard Kirchner

Thought for the Day

“A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.”

(John Barrymore)

image:  Autographed photograph of the American actor John Barrymore as William Shakespeare's Hamlet, in 1922.