August 31st

The last day of the month again, and how shall I mark it?

A moment of silence? A moment of jubilant noise? A Provençale picnic on a blue-and-white cloth? A sombrero and some mariachis? The memory of climbing a Cretan hillside fragrant with wild sage, finding an ancient olive tree above the sea and climbing up into its branches where the last sun of the day had gathered?

With a Bonnard, I think—this, the quintessence of the summer just passing.


image: Pierre Bonnard, Table Set in a Garden, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (though never on display when I've been there)

Light-gathering

Today’s satisfactions:

v the woman buying herself a pint of Ben and Jerry’s for after her colonoscopy

v a bicyclist tackling the hill in an Italia shirt, the green and white and red of the Italian flag

v making a Manchester tart, with custard, olallieberry jam, and coconut

v the smell of roasting vegetables

v a new Charles Todd mystery

v a spill of red geraniums

v filling the Saint Francis bird bath for the towhees

v the sound of the hose on the fruit trees

image: image: Pouring the Tart, Eric Petruno

1183 and All That

My favorite line in The Lion in Winter, the amazing performance closing this weekend at Shakespeare Santa Cruz, is one of Eleanor's—

"Of course he has a knife. We all have knives. This is 1183 and we're Barbarians."

That reminds me too of the Billy Collins poem a friend just sent in connection with castle visits and the like. Another comment on Barbarian times!

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Early British Head

Thought for the Day

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

(Gilbert K. Chesterton)



image: Verschiedene Hartkäse, Eva K.

Abbeys

I've been thinking about abbeys today . . . And how far are they, in their famous dissolution, from the abyss? Or being held in abeyance?

Or from abeilles, for that matter, in the French countryside, the bees that make the sound of that bumbling abeilles, and the honeys that abbeys and monasteries seem to like to gather from them, scented with lavender, with thyme or pine . . .


image: Christie B. Cochrell, St. Mary's Abbey, York

Summer Reading

I love the new mystery series by Alan Bradley, starring the wonderful eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce and her laboratory of glorious poisons (somehow she reminds me of the indefatigable Pippi Longstocking).

I'm also enjoying Bruno Chief of Police, set in the Périgord region of France and full of grilling steaks marinated in red wine, garlic, and mustard, and of herb-scented omelettes enjoyed after a game of tennis.

Escapism for sure—and isn't that what summer reading's all about?


image: Odilon Redon, Elsass oder Lesender Mönch

Being Cool

With the temperature reportedly at 104 in Palo Alto, I'm missing the blessed coolness of those days at Hadrian's Wall; and while I'm indoors at my desk, not out in the infernal sun, I'm equally missing the amazing wide open spaces whose skyscapes are every bit as fascinating as the landscapes, whose vastness is a revelation, an inspiration, an exultation. How closed in we tend to live, from day to day—and how wrong that is for health and spirit both.

In looking for quotes about openness I find these lines by Mary Oliver, ending her The Summer Day; they will do quite nicely, following my plaint.

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Cow at Hadrian's Wall

Monday, Monday

Some remembered color for a drab Monday morning. This from the Museum Gardens, York.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Ruin with Roses

Thought for the Day

There are days when one just can't not have a croissant.


image: Croissants en pastelería de Madrid, Tamorian

Today's Gratitude

I'm thankful that the eggs I just bought are not among those recalled.


image: Chicken Eggs

Castles

Who isn't lured by castles? So much history and myth absorbed into their time-worn stones, from school lessons and romantic costume dramas—Kenilworth, where Queen Elizabeth visited her beloved Leicester; Barnard, where the much maligned Richard III installed a lofty window looking out over the River Tees (the blurry outline of his emblematic boar still barely visible above it); Scarborough, inhabited by the genuinely awful King John; Bamburgh, not far from Lindisfarne, which Mallory opined was Lancelot's Joyous Gard; Helmsley, also owned at one time by Richard, where we sat beside the grassy moat and watched a performance of An Ideal Husband.

John Cheever puts it perfectly in his short story, The Golden Age:

Our ideas of castles, formed in childhood, are inflexible, and why try to reform them? Why point out that in a real castle thistles grow in the courtyard, and the threshold of the ruined throne room is guarded by a nest of green adders? Here are the keep, the drawbridge, the battlements and towers that we took with our lead soldiers when we were down with the chicken pox. The first castle was English, and this one was built by the King of Spain during an occupation of Tuscany, but the sense of imaginative supremacy—the heightened mystery of nobility—is the same. Nothing is inconsequential here. It is thrilling to drink Martinis on the battlements, it is thrilling to bathe in the fountain, it is even thrilling to climb down the stairs into the village after supper and buy a box of matches. The drawbridge is down, the double doors are open, and early one morning we see a family crossing the moat, carrying the paraphernalia of a picnic.

image: Christie B. Cochrell, Helmsley

Hollyhocks

These from Gertrude Jekyll's walled garden at Lindisfarne (like finding Monet on the North Sea).

Very different in effect from New Mexican hollyhocks. I must try again to get some to grow in my patio, against the grainy wood of the back fence. I am desolate now, though, coming back from the lushness of British gardens to the parched August of California.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Hollyhocks, Lindisfarne

Places I Would Rather Be Today

At Lindisfarne, with the sheep.

The English must have as many names for green as the Esquimaux for snow.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Lindisfarne landscape

Places I Would Rather Be Today

Back at Kenilworth.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Large Window, Kenilworth

Castle Living

I love the toaster we had for our breakfasts in the Great Hall of the Castle for our breakfasts in grand style where Bishops used to convene. The slices of bread travelled from front towards back of it on a conveyor belt, and when they got to the far end were flipped headlong onto their other side for their ride out on a lower-down belt.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Durham Castle courtyard

Castle Window

Very old glass indeed, though surely not from the 11th Century, like much of Durham Castle. It was light there by four in the morning, and kept on until after ten at night—while the Cathedral bells went on and on, with solemn regularity.

The peals of bells on Sundays and again on Thursday evening made me think of The Nine Tailors with Lord Peter Wimsey and the happy year at Mills when I devoured all the Wimsey mysteries. In Durham I was reading another book set in a Cathedral close, Charles Palliser's The Unburied.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Castle Window

Turrets and Spires

The view from my window in Durham Castle. (Up 39 steps, all narrow, steep, and winding.) My very own turret!

I could sit on the high window ledge, drinking cardamom-scented coffee—bought from a stall in the covered market on the cobbled square downhill from the Cathedral close, and wonder at getting to stay there in that magic place.


image: Christie B. Cochrell, Turret

Among the Romans VI

Some favorite Classical musicians:

The Beatles = Cimictus

The Rolling Stones = Lapides Provolventes

The Grateful Dead = Mortui Grati

The Beach Boys = Pueri Litoris

The Who = Ille Quis

The Temptations = Inlecebrae

The Monkees = Simitatores

Among the Romans V

Abutebaris modo subjunctivo.

(You've been misusing the subjunctive.
)

Among the Romans IV

Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum qui locutionem tuam corrigant.

(And remember, there aren't any Romans around to correct your pronunciation.)