Mill Brook House News

Perfect Days: A Wenders/Ozu Mash-up

Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day.  Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many Hirayamas in Ozu’s films, takes in his daily routine, he is an elderly version of the lonely, isolated, alienated young men who can relate to children but are terrified of women that populate Wenders’ early films.  Wenders, in fact, includes deliberate references to those films.  Like Bruno in Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976), Hirayama reads Faulkner, and on his last trip to his local bookstore, he purchases a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose Ripley’s Game was adapted by Wenders to become The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977).  (The bookstore which Hirayama visits repeatedly may itself be a nod to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière [2003], another less than inspiring attempt to channel Ozu.) 

Hirayama photographs routinely with a now-archaic, small, point-and-shoot film camera, heir to Philip’s exploration of all manner of photography in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), and he listens to rock music from the 1960s and 70s like all of Wenders’ characters from that era.  Hirayama’s music comes from his large collection of cassette tapes, another throwback to the 20^th century, while the diegetic rock music in the early films generally came from the radio.

Perfect Days ends almost exactly as Kings of the Road does.  A close-up of Hirayama driving his van, while Nina Simone’s rendition of Feeling Good (which originated in the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd) blares on the sound track, echoes Kings, which ends with a close-up of Bruno driving while Roger Miller’s 1964 ballad King of the Road plays.  The “protagonist” in both sixties ballads is an outsider who sings of life apart from the constraints of society.  The only difference in these two final sequences is that the shot of Hirayama is severely frontal while that of Bruno is lateral.  The severity in the framing and cutting in Perfect Daysmay be another homage to Ozu, but it also reflects the severity of the life choices Hirayama has made.

Unlike Wenders’ early films, which were road movies—messy, energetic and pressing forward, despite having little in the way of plot—Perfect Days has a cyclical structure, intended, perhaps, to evoke Ozu, but also in keeping with the fact that Hirayama, as an older man, has settled on his life choices and adopted a routine that varies little from day to day.

The protagonists in Wenders’ early films struggle against history, American hegemony, and bourgeois conformity, but similar struggles, primarily against the salaryman life expected of middle class Japanese men, are in Hirayama’s past.  He has broken with his family.  We are told his father stopped speaking to him—reminiscent of the confrontation between Robert and his father in Kings—and now the father has dementia, but Hirayama still refuses to visit him.  This refusal, along with the visit from his niece and sister, are the only indications that Hirayama is still processing the alienation that drove him to become a toilet cleaner.  Otherwise, his life is composed of set routines that seem to please him but which render the film rather dull.  Perfect Days attempts to capture a kind of Zen stasis, the mu that Ozu so treasured, but mu, often translated as nothingness, indicates a nothingness that is the gateway to sublimity.  The nothingness in Perfect Days—despite brief interludes of pathos, charm and humor—seems mostly to be just nothingness.

 

 

Maple Sugaring Along the Mohawk Trail

When nights are cold and daytime temperatures rise above freezing, sap starts to run, and buckets hang from maple trees all over rural New England.  Visitors, eager for some diversion between ski season and summer, flock to sugarhouses to watch the evaporation process, buy maple products, and eat at sugarhouse restaurants.

Colonists first learned about the sweetness of maple sap from Native Americans, who collected it from V-shaped slashes they made on the trunks of maple trees, and the newcomers subsequently developed their own techniques for tapping trees and reducing the sap to syrup or sugar.  When England forbid trade with the West Indies in 1765, colonists looked to maple sugar to fill their sweet needs.

In earlier times, farmers with a substantial "sugar bush" set up sugar camps in the woods, and the whole family would move to the camp to help with the labor-intensive process of gathering and boiling sap.  So originated the one-week "winter vacation" still observed every February by New England schools, a custom non-natives find bizarre--who wants their kids home in February when they can't go outside to play?   What began as time off from school to work at a sugar camp is, today, an opportunity to visit a modern-day sugarhouse.

During the Civil War, cane sugar became scarce once again, and maple sugar, supplied to the troops and used at home, was considered the "patriotic" alternative to sugar produced in the South.  Metal buckets with lids, such as you see here, were developed to aid in collecting sap, and the development of the tin can in these years allowed syrup to be preserved, shipped, and used year round.

Today large sugaring operations use less quaint, time-saving tubing to collect sap, but small producers still use sap buckets, and many larger operations use buckets to collect sap from outlying trees.  A single farmer may tap the trees on many properties, paying his neighbors for sap in gallons of finished syrup.  The ratio of sap to syrup is 40:1--forty gallons of sap to one gallon of syrup.  To be tapped, trees need to be 10 inches in diameter, which means they need to be c. 40 years old.  Each tap hole will yield about 10 gallons of sap, which will reduce to 1 quart of syrup.

Maple syrup comes in four different grades, named by color: golden, amber, dark, and very dark.  The darker the color, the stronger the flavor.  Which is best depends on one's personal taste.  Each has the same proportion of maple to water, and the producer has no control over which grade each boil will produce, but darker syrup tends to come later in the season.  In addition to syrup, producers usually offer maple sugar, often made into candies, and maple cream.  A favorite at Western Massachusetts' many fall fairs is fried dough smeared with maple cream.   

In the 1960's, three Franklin County sugarhouses, Gray's in Ashfield, Davenport's and Gould's in Shelburne, began offering maple-syrup-laced breakfasts during the sugar season, an early foray into the now popular "agri-tourism."

Of the three, only Davenport Maple Farm, up Little Mohawk Rd. off Route 2, still offers breakfast during the sugar season. (See Sugarshack Restaurants in Western Massachusetts.)  Gould's has ceased all operations for the present.

Gould's Sugarhouse

The evaporator at rest

Gould's evaporator in action

Monitoring the syrup

 

While Canada, mainly Quebec, produces 80% of the world's maple syrup and Vermont leads the U.S. with around 1 million gallons, Massachusetts, ninth in the nation, produces about 60,000 gallons, worth 5-6 million dollars, and interest in this local industry is growing.  Eighty percent of our 300 plus producers are located west of I-91. Sales of Massachusetts syrup are mainly within the state.  For more information visit www.massmaple.org.

                           Syrup flows from the evaporator

Maple syrup production benefits the environment by preserving forests and woodlots, important habitat for birds and other animals.  By making commercial use of forested areas, sugaring saves them from other uses that might destroy the trees.  Sugaring preserves approximately 15,000 acres of open space in Massachusetts.  It also allows local dairy farmers to stay in business by giving them additional income.                  

Unfortunately, maple sugar production everywhere is is threatened by the invasion of the Asian longhorned beetle, which destroys hardwood trees, particularly maples.   It was  discovered in Worcester, MA, where 25,000 trees were destroyed to stop its spread.  Today officials urge people to keep an eye out for the pest and, most particularly, never to transport firewood from one location to another, but always to burn local wood.  For more on the beetle and how to identify it, see www.beetlebusters.info.

Maple syrup is high in antioxidants, minerals, especially manganese, vitamins, especially Riboflavin (B2), and low in fructose.  For recipes that use maple syrup, visit millbrookhouserecipes.com.

Historic Deerfield’s Leap Year Celebration

In John Ford’s enormously seminal film The Searchers (1956), two men spend five years searching for a young girl who has been abducted by Indians. When they find her, she has entered her teens and become one of the chief’s wives. At first she declares her allegiance to the tribe but later changes her mind and agrees to return home with the men. The reasons for her change of heart are never explained, nor did they need to be for a 1950’s audience. The girl had obviously come to her senses, remembered her past, and realized the advantages of returning to “civilization.” Such was not the case, however, with most white women captured as children and raised up in Indian tribes.

One of the best documented cases is that of Eunice Williams, daughter of a prominent Puritan clergyman, who, with her father and brother, was captured in the 1704 raid on Deerfield, Massachusetts, by Mohawk Indians and their French allies and marched 300 miles to Montreal through deep snow. The raid was a small piece of the War of the Spanish Succession—the one that made Winston Churchill’s ancestor Lord Marlborough famous—which had spilled over onto the American continent. The raid took place before dawn on February 29 and is commemorated every leap year by the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. (Pocumtuck is the name both natives and colonists used for Deerfield at one time.)

This year’s commemorative events included lectures, reenactments, and demonstrations of colonial housekeeping crafts.

 Re-enactors, many of whom had come considerable distance, staged the battle that took place after the attack on Deerfield when militiamen from Northampton and other nearby settlements, seeing flames, marched to Deerfield and engaged the French and Indians as the last of them were leaving the burning village. Turned back by an ambush, the militiamen were unable to rescue any of the captives. This year about twenty re-enactors, pretending to be Frenchmen, English colonials, Mohawk and Abenaki, stood in for what had been a battle involving about 300 men. This left much to the imagination, but a narrator helpfully told the story while the actors “did battle” on a field at the Deerfield Academy.

As for Eunice Williams, although her father and brother were eventually “redeemed” (ransomed) and returned to Deerfield, she never went home. Captured specifically to take the place of a Mohawk child who had died, and converted to Catholicism by her Indian family, who lived in close proximity to the French, she refused every attempt by her father and brother to persuade her to return. As a teenager, she fell in love with a fellow tribesman, and, although dubious about the inter-racial union, the local padre married them when they declared they would live together unwed if he did not. Throughout his life, her brother, a clergyman like his father and tortured by fears for her immortal soul, wrote to and of her, and, on occasion, she and her husband visited him, pitching their tent in his yard in preference to sleeping in the house. Eunice herself remained illiterate, so we have no record of what she actually thought about her life with the Mohawk, although her actions speak quite loudly.

For more on Eunice Williams and the conundrum she posed for her family, see John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive (1994). To observe the next commemoration of the 1704 raid on Deerfield, you’ll have to wait until 2020.

Pyrex vs. Depression Glass

                                                Green Depression Glass (photograph: Steven Sternbach)

I first encountered the fashion for “vintage Pyrex” a decade ago when I discovered that the mother of a Japanese student I was tutoring shopped for it regularly in antique and second hand stores, intending to ship it back to Japan where it sold for a bundle.  Recently I came across an article citing pieces that sell for hundreds even thousands of dollars in this country.  I gag.  This pale milky glass kitchenware with insipid floral designs is the stuff your mother gave you when you got your first apartment.  It goes with olive stoves and yellow refrigerators.  Who wants to remember that unfortunate period of kitchen design?  A lot of people, apparently.

I am reminded of the first time I came across Depression glass in my late teens.  I was fascinated by the colors.  My mother sniffed, “Oh, Depression glass.”  People couldn’t afford quality glass in the 1930s, so manufacturers colored the glass to cover up its imperfections.  My mom didn’t find the Depression and its necessities any more nostalgic than I find the tastes of the 1970s.  Unlike Pyrex, you can’t apply heat to Depression glass, but I still treasure the large emerald green salt and pepper shakers, the pale green reamer and the four-cup measuring cup that I have acquired over the years from flea markets and antique stores, and I use all of them, careful never to put hot water in the measuring cup.  Nostalgia is clearly in the eyes of the nostalgic. 

 

   

Dreams Deferred

In his children’s book, A Home Run for Bunny, Western Mass author Robert Andersen tells the story of local heroes Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro and Tony King, high school athletes from Springfield, MA. Taliaferro, an immensely gifted African-American athlete, and King, captain of their American Legion summer baseball team, were set to compete in a regional championship. The year was 1934, the region was the entire Atlantic seaboard, and the playoffs were held in Gastonia, North Carolina. A Gastonia band greeting the boys, none of whom had otherwise travelled further than Vermont, stopped dead when Bunny emerged from the train, and a confrontation with Southern apartheid began. Bunny, so nicknamed because of his jackrabbit running speeds, was forced to register as his coach’s valet and sleep on a cot rather than a bed in the team’s North Carolina hotel. His demonstrated prowess on the field during practice further enraged the local community, and the boys endured not only cat calls and an avalanche of projectiles but threats of violence, purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan. When teams from Florida and Maryland refused to play with Bunny on the field and it became clear that the local police would be unlikely to protect the Massachusetts boys from an angry mob if Bunny played, the youngsters were forced to choose between a championship they could likely win, even without Bunny, and loyalty to their teammate.  Captain Tony voted to abandon the playoffs, and his team members agreed without a single dissent.

For the locals, it wasn’t enough that the Massachusetts team had withdrawn. Refusing to honor their segregationist rules made the team a target, so the boys left town in the middle of the night, ferried to an abandoned railroad station in cars driven by sympathizers who left quickly, fearing for their own safety. A train headed north made an unscheduled stop and eventually deposited the young athletes in Springfield, where news of the incident had preceded their arrival. A huge cheering crowd greeted them with more fanfare and celebration than would have followed an actual victory.  Many years later one team member remarked on the quirks of history: “If we had gone ahead without Bunny, even if we had won the championship, no one would ever have heard of us.” Protesting the national organization’s indifference to racism, Springfield’s American Legion Post 21 disbanded its team in 1935. It was not revived until 2010.

Andersen’s picture book, illustrated by Gerald Purnell, received many plaudits when it was published in 2013 for reviving the story of Tony and Bunny, though I wonder if the subject matter isn’t too sophisticated for the Winnie-the-Pooh set, who know little of valets, the intricacies of regional sports competitions, or Jim Crow laws (as distinct from slavery or the bullying little ones are likely to be warned about today). A novella for older children, replete with more detail and fuller explanations as well as the imagined thoughts and feelings of the characters, the sights and sounds of each location, the thrill of train travel, the joy of playing sports and so on would be a more appropriate vehicle. Andersen is reportedly working on such a project, and I hope it finds a willing publisher.

Although Andersen makes Bunny the focus of his book, the story is not told from his point of view, and, given the current topicality of "white privilege," we should note that Tony King is the actual hero of the tale.  He is, in Biblical parlance, "a righteous man."  Tony and his white teammates have choices; Bunny has none, and his experience in Gastonia would shape his life.  Both Tony and Bunny remained in Western Massachusetts, but Tony just celebrated his 102nd birthday; Bunny would die at 50. Like many Holocaust victims and World War II vets, he never once told his children about his humiliating and terrifying encounter with race hatred and segregation in North Carolina. Referring to a newspaper picture her mother had kept of the crowd greeting the returning players, Bunny’s daughter Linda Taliaferro said, “Our grandparents were in that picture, and they had such anxious looks on their faces. I asked my mother why that was. ‘They didn’t know if their son would be coming home dead or alive,’” was the answer.  

Throughout his life Bunny continued to exhibit extraordinary skill in sports and played on some Triple A teams after high school, but he turned down college scholarships, including one to Dartmouth, married a local girl, raised six children and worked at the Springfield Armory and then a tire company.  As an African-American athlete he faced dubious alternatives in the late 1930’s. He could have accepted recruitment to a college team from which he would inevitably have been cut anytime the team ventured south of the Mason-Dixon line.  (Ivy League teams notoriously sidestepped the scruples of 15-year-old Tony King.)  He could have joined the poorly paid, roustabout, and ultimately frustrating world of the Negro Leagues or served in a segregated Armed Forces.  Jackie Robinson, two years Bunny's junior, would do all of these things and, in 1947, break the color barrier in major league baseball, but this was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The 1930’s were a progressive period fraught with inconsistencies in which Jesse Owens, fresh from his triumphs in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, was feted with a ticker tape parade down Broadway and, that same night, refused a hotel room in New York City; a time when Hattie McDaniel, awarded an Oscar (the first and last black actress so honored until Whoopi Goldberg in 1990) for her role as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, was compelled to sit at a segregated table in the back of the auditorium during the ceremony.  Even the lives of celebrated African-Americans, living outside the South, were rife with racist booby traps.

That Bunny chose to stay in Springfield, where he was known, loved, and celebrated, is understandable, but clearly the suppression of so much talent took a toll. He died in 1967, the same year Thurgood Marshall was elevated to the Supreme Court and a few years after major Civil Rights legislation was passed by Congress—all too late for the Springfield athlete. Tony King and other former team members carried his casket; the summer of '34 had forged lifelong bonds.  King would live to see Barak Obama serve two terms as President and his 1934 team remembered and honored in the first decades of the 21^st Century.  But it is probably Langston Hughes who, in 1951, evoked the ethos of Bunny’s story most poignantly:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Jackie Robinson did not outlive Bunny Taliaferro by many years.  Robinson lived his dream while Taliaferro shelved his, but both suffered under the burden of the era's unspeakable racism, and neither saw a ripe old age.

From Thanksgiving to Christmas

 We spent our first Halloween at Mill Brook several years ago, and to mark the occasion, we purchased three pumpkins, one large and two small, and placed them by the front porch.  It poured rain, so no tricker-or-treaters came; they weren’t used to having us there for that holiday anyway, but the pumpkins remained until Thanksgiving, after which we carried them out to the septic mound for the benefit of any animals partial to pumpkin.  Before we left for home, I dug out the Christmas wreath Kathy Hallenbeck made for us last year and hung it on the front door.

            On the drive home, I pondered the firm divide we Americans create between Christmas and Thanksgiving, between our fall holidays and our winter ones.  Only on the day after Thanksgiving does Christmas shopping officially begin, and we castigate merchants as crass and thoughtless who jump the gun by putting out Christmas decorations before we’ve finished roasting our turkeys and devouring pumpkin pies.  Franklin Roosevelt tried to move Thanksgiving forward one week in order to boost the economy by allowing more days for Christmas shopping, testimony to our distaste for doing anything Christmas before Thanksgiving.

            Why this rigidity?  In Europe, autumn flows naturally into winter.  In October, fresh game with cranberry sauce is featured on menus, butchers hang dressed rabbits and pheasants outside their shops, and slowly fruit breads and Christmas stollen appear in bakery windows.  (“Backbeginn November” is the chapter in my German cookbook that covers these holiday breads.)  The aroma of sugar-coated nuts and roasting chestnuts fills town squares; outdoor markets sell springerle forms, cookie cutters, and crèche figures.  Giant lighted stars, strung above the main shopping streets, announce Advent: the bakeries now feature Christmas cookies, and churches fill up with candle-laden fir trees or other seasonal decorations.  The transition has been seamless.

            We Americans explain the line we draw between Thanksgiving and Christmas on the grounds that we have Thanksgiving and Europeans do not, but I think the real answer lies in the fact that our American fall traditions are all uniquely American: the squash and pumpkins, the turkeys, the brilliant autumn leaves, the scarecrows and cornstalks, the history of the Pilgrims, and the big deal we make out of Halloween—all American.  Our Christmas customs, on the other hand—decorated trees, holly, yule logs, mistletoe, carols, glass ornaments, roasted birds or roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, fruitcake and other confections—all derive, in one way or another, from Europe.  Even Santa Claus, uniquely American, especially when advertising Coke (!) started out as Saint Nicholas.  We don’t shift seasons as much as we shift cultures and continents, and the traditionalists among us don’t do it lightly.

         

 

Over the River and Through the Woods

Steven Sternbach, Holland Dell, Heath, MA* 

One of our most memorable Thanksgiving dinners took place over a decade ago in New York’s Essex Hotel on Central Park South, where we were guests of our Manhattan relatives.  But through the decades “Over the River and Through the Woods” has conditioned most of us to think of a country Thanksgiving as the ideal.  That song, with words by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, references the author’s early 19^th century childhood in Medford, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb and home to Tufts University.  The river in question is the Mystic, of book and movie fame.  (The first line of the poem is actually "Over the river and through the wood"--no 's'--but most of us sang "woods.")

    Just as the struggle for Civil Rights in the 1960’s ushered in a host of liberation movements, the ferment over slavery gave rise to wide-ranging liberal views among reformers, who embraced feminism, environmentalism, vegetarianism, as well as educational and religious reform.  The first female American author to support herself by writing, Maria Child, as she preferred to be called, went beyond passionately advocating for the abolition of slavery, to calling for a just nation which respected Native American rights and condoned interracial marriage.  Who knew?

    Child’s original words to “Over the River,” have the children going to “Grandfather’s house,” whereas Steve and I are quite sure we learned it as “Grandmother’s house.”  Why the shift?  In the mid-20^th century, it seems we referenced everything old-fashioned as belonging to “grandma.”  The John Lennon wire-rimmed glasses, first popularized by the film Dr. Zhivago, were “granny glasses,” and the long, colorful skirts we wore as an alternative to the mini-skirt were “granny dresses.”  Somewhere along the line, grandpa dropped out of consciousness, perhaps because at mid-century grandmas were in far greater abundance than grandpas.  We were well into an era, unknown to Child, in which women lived considerably longer than men, and men had shorter lives than they do today.  Neither Steve nor I, for example, knew any of our four grandfathers, whereas all of our grandmothers survived to see us born, and three of them lived long enough to have influenced our lives.

    Since purchasing Mill Brook House, our every Thanksgiving is a country Thanksgiving, and, although we have no grandchildren to join us, we sometimes host members of Steve’s extended family.  Once an 11-year-old third cousin complained, “This house is stuck in the 19…”--we waited for him to say “19^th century,” but instead heard “1960’s!”  We laughed, not because there were no microwaves, VCRs, DVDs, or even reliable color televisions in the 1960’s--all of which exist at Mill Brook House--but because it had never occurred to us that the 1960’s were something to be stuck in.  But then Maria Child’s own progressive era was refashioned with the notion of quaintness, and her sentimental poem about Thanksgiving near the Mystic River became her best remembered legacy.

 

*Large format C-prints of this photograph are available from Steven Sternbach; please contact  [email protected].   

 

Abe Sternbach 1916-2002

In 2002, my father-in-law passed away after a short illness, leaving us the money with which we purchased Mill Brook House. None of our parents ever saw the house, but it’s no stretch to connect Abe to it. Without him, our life in Charlemont would not exist.  This is his centennial year.

Abe was the oldest son of first generation, Ellis Island, Lower East Side Jewish immigrants. His father, a house painter, died of lead poisoning in his 30’s, leaving Abe’s mother Sophie to raise six children alone. Sophie was a hell-raiser, who paid the rent by marching in demonstrations for the Communist Party, but life was hard and money scarce. As the oldest child, Abe had to step into his father’s shoes and help raise the younger children. Fortunately, both he and kid brother Izzy inherited a drawing and drafting ability, which provided both with a good living as commercial artists later in life.

Despite poor eyesight, Abe was drafted toward the end of World War II and served behind the lines as a sign painter. Deployed to the Philippines in 1945, he caught up with Izzy, who, ten years younger, was stationed there as an infantryman being readied for the invasion of Japan. (After its surrender, Izzy was among the first American troops to land on Japan's main islands.)

Demobilized, Abe returned to Lower Manhattan and married his sweetheart, Gertrude Erlich. Steve was born three years later and would remain their only child. Shortly after Steve’s birth, the couple moved to Brooklyn and never left, although they spent summers at a bungalow colony in the Catskills. (This was still the Borscht-Belt era in which Catskill summer resorts were either Jewish or not.)

A fabulous draftsman, Abe had a passion for painting and filled dozens of canvasses with pictures in oil, pastel, or acrylic, for which he crafted beautiful frames. He refused to consider selling them, hanging and storing the paintings throughout his home, where they created an overwhelming presence.

Abe’s was the archetypal turn-of-the-century immigrant story: child of a generation that sought and struggled to make a better life in a new land, he served in WWII, rose into the middle class buoyed by postwar prosperity, and lived to see anti-Semitic discrimination made illegal, an arc of success that seems more elusive today.

The Sternbach boys, Hymie, Izzy, and Abe, on the roof of their tenement, 1930's.

 

About Screen Doors

In a recent Christian Science Monitor Home Forum essay, Robert Klose recalled the joys and utility of wooden screen doors, which slammed happily all summer long, announcing arrivals and departures. I, too, remember the wooden screen doors of my childhood. There were several on my grandma’s cottage and one on our back door at home in Michigan, although at some point in my youth my parents replaced that one with an aluminum door, which seemed unstable and insubstantial compared to the old one.

At Mill Brook House we replaced that same chintzy aluminum door, now decades old, with today’s solid heavy-duty version, but upstairs—the floor which had never ever been renovated since, at best, the 1890’s—we have a beautiful old wooden screen door. When we bought a new weather-proof fiberglass door to replace the incredibly thin old door to our upstairs balcony, I refused to let the old screen door go, despite its not being entirely insect-proof. It slams with that wonderful bang Robert Klose finds so nostalgic. Our cat uses it to let himself on and off the balcony, and, being a cat, he bangs the door with considerable frequency as soon as I unhook it in the morning. My husband has dubbed him “the waiter.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                              

                                                                                  

Kagoshima, Mon Amour

My favorite city in Japan made the news a few months ago, following a burst of lava from the side of its volcano, Sakurajima, sited in Kagoshima Bay. Sakurajima has had small eruptions for some time now, which are of concern because a nuclear plant lies only 30 miles away. For me the concern is personal, for Kagoshima holds a special place in my heart that stretches back to childhood.

It all began in 1957 when my parents took me to see Teahouse of the August Moon, a service comedy about the early days of the American Occupation of Okinawa. I adored it. (That Sakini, the Okinawan interpreter, was being played in yellow face by Marlon Brando went by me completely.) I watched my first grown-up movies (Oklahoma!, Tammy and the Bachelor) that summer, but in retrospect I realize that the trip to see Teahouse was meant mainly as a softening up tactic. A few weeks later, my mother confided that we ourselves would move to Okinawa that fall. I was thrilled.

When did I become a Japanophile? Was it pouring over Little Pictures of Japan from the My Book House series (of which we owned every volume) or playing with the clamshell novelties my mother brought back from New York’s Chinatown that opened up into beautiful paper flowers when soaked in a glass of water? Didn’t all children at the time try to dig a hole to China (which, we were told, lay just below us on the opposite side of the earth)? Perhaps we were all incipient orientalists. But in my case, it lay very close to the surface.

Eagerly anticipating a land of pine-covered hills and kimono-clad geishas, I was horribly disappointed six months later to find myself on a sub-tropical island, whose bright sunlight was blindingly intensified by the ubiquitous coral dust. A battle 12 years earlier had scoured the island, leaving much of it treeless. Pampas grass and sugar cane grew where vicious fighting once took place and often covered deadly unexploded ordinance. As ubiquitous as the coral dust were American military vehicles and installations. No pine trees lit by moonlight, no geishas, no soft breezes, no distant mountains. Teahouse, it turned out, had been shot on the Japanese mainland, not on Okinawa. (A recently constructed Teahouse of the August Moon did exist in Okinawa, but it had been inspired by the movie, not vice versa.)      

Although the island abounded in ancient local arts, whose revival the American military government had encouraged (and—as per the movie—cricket cages were for sale in every local tchotchke shop), at nine I had no more ability to appreciate the local pottery and textiles than I had to discern Marlon Brando under his make-up. I longed for the classical arts and picturesque landscapes of “real,” Japan, land of lanterns, ukiyoe and fireflies.

I was ecstatic, therefore, as I embarked with my mother and sister on my first trip to the main islands of Japan. We left on the overnight boat from Naha, Okinawa’s capital city, and landed the next day in Kagoshima, the southernmost port city of Japan’s four main islands. This time it was love at first sight. My mother had splurged and booked us into a genuine ryokan [Japanese inn]. Our tatami-mat-covered room opened onto an exquisite garden, and waitresses in kimono served our dinner and made up our beds, futon [thick quilts—the foam rubber kind hadn’t been invented yet] spread on the floor.

The inn sat atop the kind of pine-covered hill I had been waiting a whole year to see and looked down over the city. Houses with black tile roofs lay below, a contrast to the red tile roofs of the more affluent homes in Okinawa, and they had good reason to be black. Sakurajima, sitting majestically in the distance, issued a thin plume of smoke from its conical peak. Smoke billowed, too, from the steam locomotives that pulled the trains that wound around the city in the valley below us.

I had not been on a train since I was three and could only dimly remember the experience. Trains did not even exist in Okinawa, so I could barely contain my excitement, knowing we would soon be on that train, heading north to other cities in Japan.

Watching the train and actually riding on it were two different things, however. These steam-driven vehicles had no air conditioning, and, it being summer, the windows were all open, allowing soot from the smokestack to blow in, covering passengers, seats, and floors alike. Tunnels, of which there were many, particularly on the tracks between Kyoto and Tokyo, proved particularly obnoxious as the smoke had nowhere to go except into the train. Passengers rushed to close the windows, rendering the carriage hot and stuffy. Mostly, though, the long slow journey—Kagoshima to Kyoto required an overnight trip—felt incredibly boring to a ten-year-old.

At stations, hawkers filled the platforms, selling bento [lunch] boxes, constructed from the thinnest of thinly shaved wood, and tiny clay pots of tea, and passengers purchased these refreshments through their open windows. Once their contents had been consumed, the empty boxes and teapots, along with disposable chopsticks, all ended up on the floor of the train. Bored by the journey and  fascinated by the perfectly shaped clay pots, whose covers served as tiny cups and which varied in color, shape, and markings from station to station, I amused myself by crawling underneath the seats on the train’s dirty floor to collect them, much to our fellow passengers’ surprise and my mother’s chagrin. (Incredibly, this saintly woman, at my insistence, carried a very large basket of these discarded vessels back to Okinawa for me.)

The little teapots and many other charms of mainland Japan notwithstanding, the trip was hard on one as young as I. The shrines and temples in Kyoto began to all look alike, and in Tokyo I spent a whole day in bed, possibly sick but probably just exhausted. We broke our return journey in the spa town of Beppu—no one had warned us how tacky spa towns in Japan can be—but the long trip south was as tedious as the trip north, and the inn in Kagoshima beckoned like a long lost friend. (Trains, I decided, were best experienced from that hill above the city.)

 Besides Sakurajima and the beautiful ryokan, Kagoshima featured Satsuma-ware, an elegant white ceramic with a crackled glaze covered by delicately painted bird and flower decorations. Shiny and colorful—in contrast to subtle earth tones of much Japanese pottery, including Okinawan—it captured my ten-year-old heart and has never lost its charm for me.

Satsuma-ware derives its name from the feudal Satsuma Domain, which was ruled by the Shimazu daimyo from Kagoshima. Satsuma,
along with other southern provinces, led the revolt against the moldering Tokugawa Shogunate that produced the Meiji Reformation. Satsuma had, in fact, colonized Okinawa in 1609, making it a vassal state, although the island remained “officially” independent until 1879—one reason its culture remains so distinctive—when it was officially annexed to Meiji Japan.

Two summers after that first rocky trip to mainland Japan, we returned to the U.S. (though not before docking in Tokyo Bay in the midst of the 1960 Anpo riots), but 1964 found us back in Okinawa.  The following summer my mother and I made a three-week trip to Kyushu, Honshu and Shikoku where we visited with family, friends, and an array of Japanese potters. Once again Kagoshima welcomed us and became the first stop on our pottery tour, where my mother hunted down the Korean potters whose ancestors had developed Satsuma-ware. The ryokan had been a one-time extravagance, so we stayed in a modern hotel with a large accommodating garden.

Although the shinkansen [bullet train] now ran between Tokyo and Kyoto, Kagoshima to Tokyo still required an overnight journey, but diesel engines had replaced the steam engines, and, sadly, plastic teapots had replaced the charming clay ones formerly sold on station platforms. (Progress, as we know, is a two-edged sword.) I had looked forward to this trip as keenly as the first one, but, at 17, I was old enough to relish every aspect of it. Mist rising from acres of rice paddies graced by egrets, wooden houses with sliding doors and tile roofs, blocks of traditional wood-framed storefronts with their goods out front for customers to see and living quarters—with a cup of green tea for special guests—behind the store—today these things are mostly relegated to movies, museums and theme parks, but they were my Japan. In Shikoku, emerald green rivers ran down the mountains alongside the road our bus travelled. In Tokyo I joined Hiroko, my father’s former secretary, at her local public bath, and far up in the mountains of Kyushu, we visited potters in Onda, where all day long pestles, fueled by water flowing off the mountains, pounded clay. Thrilling but tiring, our trip ended once more in Kagoshima, where our gracious hotel and our ship home to Okinawa awaited us.  

A year later I went to camp in Tokyo with my Girl Scout troop. We travelled TDY in an Army cargo plane, but when I stayed on after camp to visit Hiroko in Tokyo, I was back to using local transportation. I rode the shinkansen for the first time to visit friends in Kyoto, then, late one night, boarded the overnight train to Kagoshima. The next evening I met a family in the garden of the hotel where my mother and I had stayed the year before, and, seeing I was alone, they scooped me up the next morning and brought me to their home for tea and a visit before my boat departed. This would not be my last encounter with the warm hospitality of Kagoshima.

I returned to the United States, went to college, became an art historian, and spent many years in Europe. Finally, in my mid-30’s I reunited with my Asian past when I began to study the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. (Ironically, in Okinawa Hiroko had taken my father to see Ohayo, one of Ozu’s late films, and he had described the delightful comedy to me in some detail. When, many years later, I finally connected the film he had described, which for a long time was marketed in the U.S. under the title “Good Morning,” to my beloved director, I asked my father if he remembered it. Although his account of the film had imbedded itself in my mind all those many years before, he had no recollection of it at all!)

In 1991, I returned to Japan, having accepted a teaching job at a college near Nagoya. That summer, my husband and I travelled south, visiting friends and tourist destinations and managing to attend memorial ceremonies for the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From Nagasaki, we headed, for nostalgia’s sake, to Kagoshima to catch the boat to Okinawa. No overnight sleeper this time, but our destination nevertheless required us to travel all day by bus, ferry, and train. The city had modernized, of course, but its rolling hills and comparative lack of congestion made a soothing contrast to the crowded cities of Honshu. I purchased my own Satsuma-ware, and rediscovered the hospitality I had enjoyed as a teenager when the young host at our minshuku [Japanese-style B&B] insisted on performing a tea ceremony for us.

We took the ferry to Sakurajima, but the majestic volcano seemed less benign than before. A thin layer of ash lay over the city and more thickly on the volcanic island itself. Several volcanoes near Nagasaki had erupted within the previous two years, and the ash around Kagoshima looked ominous.

Sakurajima’s largest eruption in modern times actually occurred in 1914. Thirty-five people on the island died and lava poured into the sea, creating the land bridge to the city of Kagoshima that exists today. The city itself was covered in a thick layer of ash but otherwise remained intact. Subsequently, the volcano lay quiet until 1955 when small eruptions began, hence the smoke I witnessed first in 1957. In 2009 the volcano spewed lava and ash more than a mile above its crater and exploded most recently on Feb. 5, 2016. No one was injured and Kagoshima-jin [people] considered the 2016 eruption “average.”

The threat posed by Sakurajima’s increased activity arises mainly from the fact that the Sendai nuclear plant in Satsumasendai, former capital of the Satsuma Domain, lies only 30 miles away. The first Sendai reactor was built in 1984, the second in 1985. (Japan’s first nuclear reactor was built in 1966.) After all of Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down in 2011 in the wake of the Fukushima meltdown, Sendai was the first to re-open (2015). Why Japan builds reactors close to live volcanos or on tidal plains or builds them at all, given the likelihood of earthquakes, is a mystery beyond solving in this essay.

Mainly, Sakurajima’s 2016 eruption reminded me of a city dear to my heart, which, like so much of Japan, lives on the edge of disaster with calm and dignity and grace.

 

Sakurajima photographs by Steven Sternbach 

 

 

Good-bye, Fiestaware!

 

Observing my china cabinet, a friend who knew my mother once observed that I had inherited her love of dishes. It’s not as though I never met a dish I didn’t like, but I do like far too many. Sifting through all the dinnerware suddenly available to me at Mill Brook House, it seems sad to give up the “Monticello” Hall China—soft white with a rim of tiny flowers—bought for the house for $5 at a rummage sale and replace it with our elegant Dansk plates from the condo, and, as usual, I wonder how much of my mother’s formal Noritake—white edged with gold (and 12 of everything!)—I will ever use again.

This causes me to reminisce about my mother’s own journey through dishware. Until I was nine, we ate off Fiestaware. Introduced to the market in 1936, it was rapidly becoming outmoded in the course of the 1950’s. Then a miracle happened which would forever alter our lives and our dishes: my father, through Michigan State University, accepted a Defense Department contract to mentor and teach at the University of Ryukyus in Okinawa. Unlike most of the military personnel stationed there, my parents found the island and its culture—Japan’s fused onto an ancient local folk culture—immensely fascinating, so much so that they spent every weekend driving around the island, visiting small villages and combing the beautiful beaches. Because the island remained under American military occupation, it had Japanese goods, sold in local shops, but no Japanese industry or tourism, no hotels or large chain department stores, and only one highway (Highway 1, of course), which petered out somewhere beyond the large air base in Kadena, about 18 miles north of the capital city Naha.

Although the Army generously shipped household goods around the world for its soldiers and civilian employees, my mother was only too happy to leave her outmoded Fiestaware behind. Instead of replacing it with whatever the Post Exchange (PX) had on offer, however, my parents, charmed as they were by the local culture, bought mountains of cheap Japanese dishes, available throughout the island in dozens of small shops dedicated to selling all the varied dishes required for a Japanese meal. Among these were dinner-sized plates, presumably intended as serving dishes, which my mother adopted as our new dinnerware. The plates had a soft, blue-green glaze with cranes and pine, symbols of good fortune and longevity, placed asymmetrically to one side. The only problem? They were not flat, and American cuisine at the time still dwelt primarily in meat-and-potatoes-land. Whenever one tried to use a knife and fork, the food on the far side of the plate was inclined to springboard up and hit one in the face.

Nonetheless, my mother never went back to her Fiestaware, even after returning home to Michigan. We endured those Japanese plates until our next sojourn in Okinawa when she purchased a more suitably designed stoneware, which had recently come into fashion, at the PX. Her Noritake, too, was purchased there during this second tenure. The Fiestaware lived in the basement for many years, but by the time it came back into fashion in the 1980’s those original plates had disappeared, probably donated to a cache reserved for MSU’s foreign student families. But that’s okay. Athough it evokes fond memories, Fiestaware was never really my taste, either.  

 

Josh Simpson, Glass Master

Apart from Bill Cosby, whose reputation has suffered recently, our most famous local resident is probably glassmaker Josh Simpson. I first encountered Simpson’s work years ago at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, which owns one of his “megaplanets.” A Simpson “planet” is a spherical ball with shapes inside made with a variety of techniques and an abundance of glassmaker’s “cane” (similar to a glass version of candy cane, sliced up to reveal intricate patterns).   The planets evoke other worlds—Avatar-land or underwater seascapes—without actually depicting identifiable forms. A “megaplanet” is a large planet, a 4.5 diameter counts as a megaplanet, but Simpson has made several weighing over 100 pounds.

This megaplanet weighs 111 pounds

The Peabody-Essex also owns a very large plate by Simpson in what he calls New Mexico glass. Inspired by southwestern night skies, these large, dark blue plates and bowls, as simple in their colorscape (if not their execution) as the planets are lively and complex, invite meditation.

A wall of Simpson plates at the Salmon Falls Gallery; New Mexico glass bowls sit beneath.

I was instantly smitten with Simpson’s work and always sought out the megaplanet whenever I visited the Peabody-Essex. When we moved to Western Massachusetts a decade later, I was thrilled to discover we were living in fairly close proximity to this master craftsman.

A psychology major, Simpson discovered glass blowing while an undergraduate and never looked back. His work is featured in many galleries and major museums including Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Corning Glass Museum, which commissioned the first 100-pound megaplanet. In 1997 Simpson married future astronaut Catherine “Cady” Coleman, at this writing a space shuttle and International Space Station vet, who has logged over 4000 hours outside planet Earth.

Simpson blows glass while Cady Coleman looks on

We recently attended a rare open studio at the Simpsons’ mountaintop establishment in Shelburne. Josh talked while he demonstrated his techniques and introduced Cady, who was between a baby shower and a soccer game, having just spent the week criss-crossing the world on NASA business. Meanwhile, I purchased a paperweight planet and a signature blue plate—similar to but much smaller than the objects I first fell in love with at the Peabody-Essex—purchases I could never have afforded at Simpson’s Salmon Falls Gallery in Shelburne Falls. The gallery is magical, however; walk in and you’re surrounded, enveloped really, by this glass artist’s amazing creations.

A row of gradated planets at the Salmon Falls Gallery

Photographs by Steven Sternbach

For more on Josh Simpson, see this article in The Recorder: http://www.recorder.com/One-of-a-kind-glass-planets-keep-trade-fresh-for-glass-artist-Josh-Simpson-16674820

Wim Wenders’ Salt of the Earth

I once wrote a book about Wim Wenders.  It covered the first 20 years of his career, his breakout years in Germany, where he became one of the luminaries of the New German Cinema, which sought to separate itself from the mostly mediocre studio films of Germany’s postwar economic-miracle era, and his foray into American filmmaking, a rocky period which, nevertheless, culminated in the highly successful collaboration with Sam Shepherd on Paris, Texas (1984).  In a recent interview with NPR, Wenders noted that critics characterized these years by three A’s: angst, alienation, and America, and that’s not a bad summation.  The angst was always male; women, if they appeared in the films at all, inspired the intensest angst.  Relationships never worked out (on or off screen).  Wenders collaborated with Peter Handke, a more disciplined, but even more alienated artist, on many of the German films.  They were slow and contemplative and asked more questions than they answered.  Composed of inner journeys and outer landscapes more than real stories, they anticipated Wenders’ eventual turn to documentary, as many of them were already quasi-documentaries.  Kings of the Road (1976) documented the last of Germany’s rural movie theaters; Lightning Over Water (1980), supposed to be a collaboration with Nicolas Ray on a last movie, ended up documenting Ray’s last days, while The State of Things (1982), though fiction, chronicled the all-too-real dilemma of a film crew stuck with an unworkable project.

Although preceded by two short films for French television, the delightful, Chris-Marker-like Tokyo-ga (1985), represents Wenders’ first notable foray into documentary.  The film explores idiosyncratic aspects of Japanese culture on the way to finding out more about Wenders’ hero (and mine), Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.  Another decade of both fictional and documentary films followed, culminating in three Academy Award nominations for Best Documentary: The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Pina (2011), and, this past season, Salt of the Earth (2014).

With Salt of the Earth Wenders has achieved his most compelling work to date.  A chronicle of the life and work of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, the film takes us through Salgado’s short-lived beginnings as a revolutionary, which effectively exiled him from Brazil for a decade, his decision to give up a comfortable life as an economist to become a photographer, and the many photo projects he embarked on, projects that increasingly centered on the world’s marginalized.  The title “Salt of the Earth” is also the title of the 1954 Herbert Biberman fiction film about a strike by mine workers in New Mexico.  In early interviews Wenders sometimes named the Biberman film as one of his favorites, though his inward-looking early films gave little indication of own interest in such subject matter.  

As chronicled by Wenders, Salgado’s photo career reaches a literal dead end when he photographs the Rwandan genocide and its less publicized aftermath, the death by starvation or disease of hundreds of thousands of Hutus, expelled from Rwanda when the Tutsis regained power.  Emotionally and artistically exhausted, Salgado returns to his father’s farm, where he grew up.  It too has been devastated—by drought and poor farming methods—but, together with his wife and life partner Lélia, Salgado successfully replants a rainforest, tiny tree by tiny tree, and the couple establishes the Instituto Terra (earth institute) on the farm, which has since become a national park, to teach others how to restore devastated land.  The reclamation project restores Salgado’s faith in living, and he goes on to become a nature photographer, giving to these images the same breath-taking depth, beauty, and grittiness that had characterized his earlier work, continuing to travel the world and risk his life—as the film documents when the crew has to crawl on its collective belly to elude a polar bear while Salgado photographs walruses in the Arctic.

In creating the film, Wenders collaborated with Salgado’s son Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, who accompanied his father on the later expeditions recorded in the film, both to get footage for his own film and to get to know his so often absent father better.  The collaboration with Wenders, the young with the old, was, according to both men, difficult, and editing alone took about 18 months.  However, struggling through hours of footage and differing visions of how to shape the film eventually brought the depth, breadth, intensity, and plenitude that characterize the end product.    

The film is structured around ever-widening circles of family (something a young Wenders found difficult to believe in).  First, there are the three generations of the Salgado family, central to which is the life-long love affair and partnership between Sebastião and Lélia that endures constant separation, yet survives and flourishes; next the human family that Sebastião photographs in all its variety, pathos, and savagery; and finally the family of all living things, at the same time fragile and resilient.  No more angst, alienation, or America.  Wenders confidently embraces the world in this rich, mature, affirmative work of art.

Wim Wenders, 1980's

 

Charlemont at 250

We spent most of Saturday, June 20, celebrating Charlemont’s 250^th birthday.  State Representative Paul Mark and Senator Benjamin Downing presented the Town with a framed facsimile of its original charter, which the two men had paid to have restored.  Five towns in Downing’s district had 250^th birthdays this weekend, so the senator was busy.  I asked if they financed restored charters for all of them, and Mark replied that this was only the third he’d ever done; not all town charters need restoring and/or not all are restorable.

          State Sen. Benjamin Downing and Rep. Paul Mark with members of the 250th Anniversary Committee presenting the Town's restored Charter in Charlemont's Federated Church

        Incorporated in 1765, two years after the end of the French and Indian War had made western settlement more attractive, Charlemont was already hostile to British rule.  Attempts to limit westward expansion no doubt rankled, and the distinctly American culture that had emerged in the colonies by then was even more pronounced in Western Massachusetts than along the coast.  A tradition of radicalism still permeates the region today with Western Mass in the vanguard of “liberal Massachusetts'" liberalism. 

            After lunch with Downing and Mark, which ended with a surprisingly delicious chocolate birthday cake baked for the occasion, we toured Charlemont’s historical museum, where we found a picture of our house c. 1900.  (More on that to follow in a later post.)  In the afternoon we headed to a pick-up softball game at the Hawlemont Elementary School and a picnic dinner, accompanied by the delightful Small Change, a country/swing quartet featuring our General Store proprietors, Dennis Avery and Karen Hogness, both talented musicians as well as dedicated shopkeepers.

            Festivities continue all summer, especially the weekend of Yankee Doodle Days, July 24-26, when, along with the fireworks and other attractions, there will be a special 250^th celebratory parade.  A special Bissell Bridge dedication with potluck supper and square dancing is scheduled for September 26.  (This particular celebration was supposed to happen six years ago when restoration of the bridge was completed.  However, before the party could happen, a tree fell on the bridge, putting a hole in the new roof, and by the time it was repaired, a year had elapsed and enthusiasm for the party had waned.)

The Bissell Bridge dressed up for the 250th Anniversary

            We’ve made new friends this weekend and learned more about our town’s history.  I have been particularly struck by the number of times historic landscapes and even traditions like Yankee Doodle Days have been allowed to fall into disuse or disrepair, only to be revived by later generations.  The 2009 restoration of the Bissell Bridge, which had been out of commission for 17 years, is one recent example. 

           At 250, Charlemont is looking to both the past and the future.  The Hawlemont Elementary School, established in 1953 to serve both Hawley and Charlemont after the last of the one-room school houses had closed, has introduced a new agricultural program in an attempt to support the region’s revived interest in farming.  At the same time, a battle to bring in a fiber optic cable network is being waged by residents tired of DSL or, worse, dial-up internet.  Meanwhile, a new, year-round mountain coaster at Berkshire East, our local ski resort, is boosting tourism and increasing business opportunities.  A town with its roots in the French and Indian War and home to America’s first scenic highway (1914), Charlemont is looking forward even as it celebrates its past.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CHARLEMONT!! 

 

Photographs by Steven Sternbach.  For more photographs of these celebrations, the parade, and the 2015 Yankee Doodle Days, see our photo album: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/charlemont250/index.html. 

 

 

Woman in Gold

We watched Woman in Gold with about four other people last Sunday at the Greenfield Garden Cinema’s noon screening.  It tells the story of Maria Altmann’s recovery of five Klimt paintings, including the iconic “Woman in Gold,” a portrait of her aunt, which were stolen from her family by the Nazis.  Maria’s story, at least as told in cinema, is an upper class parallel to 2013’s Philomena: a young male professional helps an elderly woman right the institutional wrongs done her when she was very young.  The two criss-cross the Atlantic seeking truth and justice, and the initially shallow young man discovers his soul.  Helen Mirren as Maria is as captivating as Judi Dench’s Philomena.

Maria’s story begins in Vienna where the Bloch-Bauer brothers, Ferdinand and Gustav, live with their wives and Gustav’s children, Luise and Maria.  The wealthy family hosts the cream of Vienna’s arts community and count Gustav Klimt and Arnold Schoenberg among their friends.  Ferdinand’s wife Adele sits for Klimt, and the portrait, with its intricate gold leaf patterns, hangs in their drawing room.  When the Nazis march into Vienna, persecution of the Jews follows swiftly, the Bloch-Bauer home is looted, and escape becomes nearly impossible.  Adele has died a decade earlier, and Ferdinand has fled to Switzerland ahead of the Nazi invasion.  Maria, now married, and her husband Fritz escape with the help of friends, but they must leave her parents behind.  After the war, art works looted from Austria are returned to the Austrian government, but not to their original owners.  In 1998 Austrian law regarding the stolen art changes, and Maria and her lawyer Randy Schoenberg (Arnold Schoenberg’s grandson) begin a quest to have some of the looted art returned.

 Among Holocaust movies, Woman in Gold stands with Schindler’s List and The Pianist as one of the best.  It has less violence than most Holocaust movies, but Maria’s confession at the end that neither the justice she’s won nor the priceless paintings she’s recovered can compensate her for having had to leave her parents behind in Nazi-occupied Austria is wrenching.  Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of young émigrés, it illustrates the anguish that haunted a generation long after the Holocaust ended.

Saving Mr. Banks and Philomena

With 2013 so rife with docudramas that NPR’s Robert Siegel felt the need to fact-check them, we managed to see two more over the Christmas holidays, films in which the protagonists attempt to heal relationships long severed by time and space: Saving Mr. Banks at the Greenfield Garden Cinema and Philomena at Images, a small non-profit, one-screen movie theater in Williamstown (charming home of Williams College).

The films differ in many of the ways I cited when comparing Apollo 13 and Captain Phillips (10/21/13), with Mr. Banks far more structurally complex than Philomena, a fairly linear narrative recounting an Irish woman’s search for her out-of wedlock child, taken from her when he was three.  As part of Philomena’s story, the film informs us of the horrors of a particular Catholic home for unwed mothers (and we remember the many  exposés in recent decades of similarly abusive Irish institutions for children that thrived in the 1950s).  Flashbacks tell us how Philomena conceived and then lost her child.  Somewhat more avant-garde are the flash-forwards that seem to be Philomena’s imaginings of her son and turn out to be part of a video montage of the child’s life that his friend has compiled.  An on-going dialogue between the two main characters about the virtues and abuses of faith never fully resolves the issue, but the narrative’s many unexpected twists and turns organize the film and hold our attention 

By contrast, Saving Mr. Banks, which tells the story of P.L. Travers’ negotiations with Walt Disney over the rights to film Mary Poppins, has a much more complex, multi-layered structure, whose over-arching theme is the redemption of all imperfect fathers through art, e.g. cinema.  Where the flashbacks in Philomena fill in the beginning of her story, the purpose of the flashbacks in Mr. Banks, which detail Travers’ rich and troubled childhood relationship with her alcoholic father, remains a mystery until the various threads of the father theme begin to coalesce in the last third of the film.   Although both Judi Dench as Philomena and Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers are worth the price of admission, Saving Mr. Banks is more artistically satisfying and, for anyone who is or has had an imperfect father—which may include most of us—cathartic and restorative.  We are moved by Philomena’s story, but Mr. Banks’s story is ultimately our own.

 Both films expand on a recent trend in docudrama—one Steve and I find delightful—of including film footage, stills, and, in the case of Mr. Banks, audio recordings of the actual historical characters in the credit roll.         

Gretel Marie Geist Rutledge, 1941-2015

When I asked my father why, when he graduated with his Ph.D. in 1940, he didn’t immediately begin a job search, he answered, “Because I knew we were going to war.”  Apparently that same logic applied in reverse when it came to having a baby.   With war looming, their biological clocks ticking, and the optimism of youth, my parents had a baby.  Gretel Marie was born thirteen days after bombs fell on Pearl Harbor.

 
Daddy's girl

With the exception of my Uncle Walter and a few older cousins, I have known her longer than anyone living.

  Gretel and Kathe, March 1948

Because of the age difference, we didn’t play together much, except on holidays...

Christmas, 1951

...but with our parents, we explored the Far East...

Okinawa, 1960

...and the Far West together.

Yellowstone National Park, 1960 

After a few false starts, Gretel would pursue a successful career in college theater as a costume designer, marry the love of her life, Frank Rutledge, and have two beautiful children, Jenny and Weldon, both of whom are ensconced today in careers that they love, married, and starting families.

After years of watching her artwork disappear every time a theatrical production closed, Gretel took up printmaking, and, over time, explored other fine and applied arts.  Her prints were shown and sold in shows and galleries throughout Michigan.

 She visited us at Mill Brook House at least once a year, where she and Frank, who died in 2008, made many valuable contributions.  More than that she was our cheerleader, always happy to hear news of our adventures in Charlemont.  In what would be our last conversation, I told her about a bald eagle we had seen a few days before, perched in a tree along Route 2, not far from the house; her face lit up in that trademark smile we have known and loved for so long.

"Woman in the Wilderness," 2013
 

"The Judge," starring Robert Duvall, Robert Downey, Jr. and SHELBURNE FALLS!!

The excitement from Labor Day’s shoot (2012) had barely settled down when another movie crew came to Shelburne Falls to film The Judge, a melodrama set in Indiana.  Mistaking Shelburne Falls for a town in Indiana requires considerable suspension of disbelief, but, as Irving Thalberg told his art director, who complained about using an ocean backdrop for a scene set in Paris, “We can’t cater to a handful of people who know Paris.”  And, in contrast to Labor Day, Shelburne Falls appears in the film a lot as do various nearby locations, including repeated aerial shots of the Mt. Massaemet Fire Tower.  (Two days of shooting at Avery’s General Store in Charlemont seem to have been left on the cutting room floor, however.)

Not only does The Judge, directed by David Dobkin, include abundant footage from the ‘hood, it’s actually a pretty good movie.  Robert Duvall is superb as the title character, and Robert Downey, Jr. as his smart-ass lawyer son is fun to watch.  The film’s love story never quite rings true, the final court room showdown is the sort of thing that gives melodrama a bad name, the ending is too drawn out, and the evil-city-versus-virtuous-small-town plot premise is both clichéd and dated, but the characters are well-drawn, and Downey’s two on-screen brothers, played by Vince D’Onofrio and Jeremy Strong, are a delight.  Billy Bob Thornton gives a fine performance as the righteous, low-key, out-of-town prosecutor.  In addition to the actors, the writers (Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque) help to save the film from being just another hackneyed prodigal son story.  Wit and irony not only suffuse the Robert Downey character’s outlook on life but, apparently, the filmmakers' as well, for, in a self-reflexive move, they include one character, the youngest brother, who is a compulsive, amateur filmmaker and also mentally handicapped (in a charming Hollywood kind of way).

If you’re from Western Massachusetts, be sure to sit through all the final credits, which include the “Shelburne Falls Crew” and gratitude to the people of Shelburne Falls and Buckland.  While the production offices were set up in Shelburne Falls, shooting took place in a number of other Massachusetts towns as well.  IMDb credits Boston as the film’s location, but that is an error, no doubt born of the West Coast assumption that Massachusetts is so small it must all be Boston.  I suspect that in LA one can drive 100 miles and still be in LA (or somewhere similar).  Drive 100 miles from Boston, and if you’re not in a different state entirely, you’re definitely in a different world (although not one that looks anything like Indiana).

But, seriously, if you love Western Mass, Robert Duvall, or both, go see the film!     

My Agrarian Childhood

My husband insists that Mill Brook House has returned me to my agrarian roots.  I insist I don’t really have agrarian roots, but compared to growing up in a Brooklyn housing project…yes, okay.  I grew up on the edge of the Michigan State University campus, an agrarian college, in the early 1950’s.  Our neighborhood had been carved from a sizeable farm in the 1920’s, but when the Depression hit, home sales slowed, and there were empty lots even on our block, the first to have been developed.  A veterinarian lived and worked in a tiny old house on the corner across the street and next to the deco-trimmed, brick headquarters of the State Police.  The vet, Dr. Patton, pastured two horses in the field behind his house, and we fed them sugar cubes when we could get them.  (When Patton died, the police bought the property and used it for a parking lot, much to my parents’ relief, for it had been part of a different farm and was zoned commercial.  The police even kept the funny old house intact and over many decades used it for offices.)

With stay-at-home moms on every corner and the streets behind our house all dead-ends, we enjoyed what amounted to a huge, three-block-square daycare center.  My parents built a stile over our fence so that we could climb from our yard directly into the neighbors’ without having to walk along our own road, which, in the course of time, had turned into a busy commuter route from Lansing to East Lansing.  Each yard had its own delights, swing sets, sand boxes, and plenty of trees to climb in.  It being the 50’s, new construction was everywhere, and no one thought, in those times, to fence it off, so we enjoyed playing on construction sites, finding nails, and walking up and down half-finished stairways to nowhere.  For years small scars remained where I skinned my hands swinging on the naked steel girders of my elementary school's new wing while it was under construction. 

In time our “territory” extended to include the school, its generous grounds and the surrounding, unused acreage.  There was no fence around the schoolyard, so no one gave much thought to where it ended, other than it was somewhere before the dirt road that ran along the railroad tracks.  We got to school on a path that wandered  past a cornfield and over a creek bordered by woods.  Although we were duly warned at school not to talk to strangers, our parents never supposed our sleepy blocks would attract child molesters, and, as far as I know, they never did.  We lived outdoors from April to the end of October and went barefoot all summer.

During my early childhood, my parents tended a sizeable garden in the backyard.  I’m told that at one time I had no aversion to tomato worms and happily tore apart the biggest and ugliest of them, but once a fully conscious human being, I developed a horror I retain to this day.  (Slaying seven of them one afternoon last summer left me a nauseous wreck.)  In addition to the vegetable garden, we had raspberry bushes, from which we harvested berries for our morning cereal, rhubarb and a large asparagus patch, a cherry tree, from whose fruit my parents made pies and jam, an apple tree whose blighted apples nevertheless went into applesauce, and black currents, which we children labored in the hot sun to pick so my mother could make jelly.  In addition, we had mulberry trees, which stained our feet and whose fruit we loved to eat.  (Eventually my father cut them down because of the mess they made, a decision that felt like a betrayal!)

It was the early 50’s and, politically, the country was going through the worst of times, the McCarthy era, which silenced many a professor at MSU who had come of age in the New Deal era.  But none of that filtered down to us.  We knew only that on football Saturdays bumper-to-bumper traffic clogged our road, the cats had to be confined indoors, and trips to town carefully planned to avoid the beginning or end of the game.  From four blocks away, we could hear the roar of the crowd in the MSU stadium, and we loved watching the airplanes that flew above it, dragging advertising banners we could not yet read.

Nuclear bomb fever also gripped the nation, but just as we didn’t suppose child molesters would be interested in us, so we didn’t expect to be targeted by nuclear warfare.  At school we practiced tornado drills but were never subjected to the idiocy of “duck-and-cover.”  The Cold War was not on our radar.  On the playground, the boys continued to blissfully bomb Tokyo, seemingly unaware that the war with Japan had ended some years before their birth.  When tired of dropping payloads on the “Japs,” they wandered off to catch snakes in nearby fields and admire the powerful new “double-diesel” engines that pulled trains along the tracks behind the school and were slowly replacing steam engines.  (In kindergarten we visited a roundhouse, a place for turning steam engines around so that they could go back the way they came.  I stood dwarfed by the steaming black engine’s giant front wheel, a shiver of fear running through me, but within a few years both the engine and the roundhouse would be obsolete.)

If not agrarian, it was a pastoral childhood and, despite all that the outside world was doing to itself, an incredibly secure one.  In contrast to adult life, which speeds by in fits and starts of stress and self-doubt, the first six years of childhood last forever.  Garrison Keillor remarked recently that childhood is the only part of our lives that really makes sense.  And so, at sixty-five, my “agrarian” past informs my future.

The author (in overalls) and best friend Sandy in the apple tree

        

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas!

         

        Every Christmas at Mill Brook House we bring out our “Christmas movies,” It’s a Wonderful Life and The Shop Around the Corner.  For  some reason we’ve added To Be or Not to Be to the mix, perhaps because, like Shop Around the Corner, it takes place in winter in another Lubitsch-in-Hollywood evocation of an Eastern Europe city (Warsaw). 

         Actually, my favorite Christmas scenes occur in films not strictly devoted to Christmas: who can forget Margaret O’Brien destroying her snow people in Meet Me in St. Louis just after Judy Garland sings a teary Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas? Although not a Christmas film per se, Meet Me in St. Louis was released just after Thanksgiving in 1944, and Garland crooned more to a war-weary nation waiting for its sons to come home than to Margaret O’Brien: “Someday soon, we all will be together/If the Fates allow. /Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.”  Those downer words would later be changed to: “Through the years/We all will be together/If the Fates allow./Hang a shining star upon the highest bough!”  But the original words fit the times.  Within two weeks of the film’s release, the Battle of the Bulge began.  “It ruined our Christmas,” my father, still serving stateside at the time, recalled, citing the sudden increase in War Department telegrams informing neighbors that loved ones had been killed in the offensive. 

    In Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, which treats the fragility of love in wartime directly, the lovers, Maréchal and Elsa, first connect over the tiny, table-top Christmas tree and crèche--its Christ Child constructed of potatoes--that Rosenthal and Maréchel have created for Elsa’s daughter Lotte.  These heart-ache-y Christmases, along with the beginning of Empire of the Sun--where the children sing the hauntingly beautiful Suo Gân, followed by the ship-of-fools-like Christmas party in the British Concession of old Shanghai--move me more than the straight-out Christmas films.  But it wouldn’t quite be Christmas without Jimmy Stewart rejoicing with his neighbors in It’s a Wonderful Life or making a fool out of Margaret Sullavan in Shop Around the Corner.  And how could we let a year go by without watching the beautiful Carole Lombard outfoxing both her husband and the Nazis while Jack Benny makes a fool out of himself?  What could accompany the familiar, well-loved ornaments and tinsel on our tree better than these funny, timeless, feel-good gifts from Tinseltown?

 

Late Autumn

 

Late Autumn is the name of a film by Ozu, who often named his films after seasons: Late Spring, Early Spring, Early Summer (despite being best known for Tokyo Story).  Western culture doesn’t usually draw such fine distinctions between the seasons, but country life has sharpened my sensitivity to the differences between the early, late, and mid of any given season.  Late autumn is a particularly delicate time of year--often gray, an impression heightened (so to speak) by the tall bare deciduous trees all around us.  But within that grayness, muted splashes of color still abound.  Baby trees, with perhaps only a dozen leaves, are bright red or yellow.  Weeds, touched by frost, color up.  The fuzzy, cream-colored tops of goldenrod gone gray nod in the fields and white splashes of milkweed seeds unfurl.  Juncos settle on the fields to enjoy the weed seeds and fly up when startled, darting and tumbling like a gust of leaves in a fall wind.  They, too, are gray with a striking splash of white on their tails, which fan out when they fly.

With trees and bushes bare, I can better see the contours of the Mill Brook and down into the mini-gorge below the dam: the ancient retaining walls, crumbled cabins, and abandoned machinery, covered in rust and fallen leaves.

Late autumn brings hunting to Massachusetts, and last year we discovered a refugee in our backyard, a male pheasant unable to find his way past the new fence that cut off the back fields from the front.  He walked up and down the fence, staying close to the gate as if he knew that was the way out if only it would magically open.  He seemed not to think about other options.  He could have flown out or gone back the way he came, but he apparently felt  strongly about walking through the gate.   We watched him for some time, sure he would momentarily take to the air, but he stayed stubbornly by the fence.  Steve grabbed a camera and, coming quite close, photographed him, then took pity and opened the gate.  Magic at last!  Our bird strode through the opening and only then took flight.

 

Three Children's Books

Not being either a school teacher, mother or grandmother, my familiarity with children’s books written after the 1960’s is sketchy at best, although I did read the entire Harry Potter series.  I was inspired to do a little catching up when author Sheila O’Connor stayed with us this past summer, and, later in the summer, The [Greenfield] Recorder ran a story about a new children’s book involving a Civil War vet buried in Greenfield.  

Sheila O’Connor,  Sparrow Road

Like O’Connor’s award-winning adult novel, Where No Gods Came, Sparrow Road is a meditation on absent or delinquent parents and a child’s inner strength and ability to cope in the face of such loss.  Sparrow Road, named for the novel’s erstwhile orphanage-turned-artist-colony, is also a celebration of the arts as a means of both communication and healing, a joy comparable to the lovely nature that surrounds the residents of Sparrow Road.  Everyone at Sparrow Road has an art, even the long-departed orphan Lyman, whom the book’s protagonist Raine reconstructs in her heart.  Like the author, Raine discovers her art to be writing, as she delves into Lyman’s story.  Through Raine and her artist friends, Josie and Diego, O’Connor suggests that we all have some art within us that can help to heal our hearts if we spend enough quiet time listening and opening up to it.

Sheila O’Connor,  Keeping Safe the Stars

In her second novel for children, O’Connor takes greater risks than in Sparrow Road, creating an eccentric trio of orphans who attempt to live on their own when their grandfather guardian, Old Finn, suddenly succumbs to a serious illness.  Unlike her other bookish, intelligent, scribbling heroines, O’Connor creates a Willa-Cather-esque character in her sturdy, independent narrator Kathleen Star (“Pride”), who prefers handiwork to academics.  The book explores in poignant detail the gap between a child’s limited understanding of the world and adult reality.  As in O'Connor's other novels, Keeping Safe the Stars deals with children who strive to keep family intact against a current of adults who are, in some combination, absent, ill, dysfunctional, or irresponsible.

         While children’s literature is littered with orphans, the better to create an unfettered, independent young person who can have adventures, O’Connor’s work seizes on the real agony and desperation of children cut off from the adults who should love and care for them.  The strong meat of Where No Gods Came, an adult novel, is tempered in the children’s books, but O’Connor pushes the envelope further in Keeping Safe the Stars than in Sparrow Road, provoking real discomfort in the reader as the children’s plight worsens until they finally hatch a plot to find the one adult who can help them.

Nancy Bestuhl,  The Mystery of the Lost Canteen

This story is based on a wooden Confederate canteen, recovered and decorated by one Charles Ulrich, who served first with the 25^th Connecticut Volunteers and later became one of the white officers who led all-black regiments (like the Massachusetts 54^th, subject of the film Glory).  Beginning in 1864, Ulrich led the 31^st USCI (United States Colored Infantry).  Ulrich’s family moved to Greenfield when he was a teen, and his body was returned to Greenfield when he died in 1902.

    Nancy Bestuhl’s husband found the canteen in his house in Virginia in 1950.  No one knows how it got there, but it obviously intrigued the author, a former school teacher, and her husband, so she wrote a story in which the canteen is found by a boy, Jimmy, in 2009.  The canteen serves as a kind of portal, and  Jimmy travels in time back to the Battle of Port Huron on the Mississippi River, the place Ulrich apparently found the canteen.  Jimmy meets Charles Ulrich and learns first hand the horrors of war, particularly as fought in 1863.

    The story seems, in many ways, superficial and simplistic, although the details of the battles are quite realistic, and, at the end, Jimmy meets a descendant of one of Ulrich’s black infantrymen.  The book’s high point comes when, halfway through, Jimmy helps Ulrich blow up a Confederate ammo dump and take several enemy soldiers prisoner.

 

 

Nellie Fox, the Fierce Shiba Inu

 

                                                                                                              copyright Steven Sternbach

We were considering names.  “How about Nellie Fox?”  Steve suggested as we sat on a log having lunch, hoping not to be shot by one of deer rifles echoing from the  New Hampshire woods behind us. 

            “That’s brilliant!” I replied.  “Who’s Nellie Fox?”  We were en route to view a newborn Shiba Inu puppy, the only girl in a litter of six, (and along the way, we were forming a decidedly scary view of the wilds in which she had been born.)  Steve explained that Nellie [Jacob Nelson] Fox had been a second basemen for the Chicago White Sox in the 1950’s.  Fox, a 12-time All Star, had died relatively young, and for years a Nellie Fox fan club had tried to get him inducted into the Hall of Fame.  In 1997, his last year of eligibility, they succeeded, but that’s getting ahead of my story.

            The puppy fit into one of my hands.   We paid a deposit and returned seven weeks later to collect her.  Pam, the breeder, forgot we were coming and greeted us with a pointed rifle, reinforcing our skeptical view the neighborhood.  “She bit her brother,” Pam announced, as I wrote out a check.  Right then, we should have reconsidered.  The bundle of less-than-happy fur we were about to collect—she panted from fear all the way home—was a fighter, and not a very wise one.  For one thing, she never grew to be more than half the size of a normal Shiba and had absolutely no sense about what she could take on.  Exploring some odd sounds at our otherwise empty campground one night in 2004, I looked down to see her standing on her hind legs, straining on her leash, and beating the air with her paws in an effort to get at what I soon realized was a bear the size of a Volkswagen. 

           For her first year Nellie played happily in the dog park across the street, but when it closed for renovations, any hope that she might get along with other dogs closed with it.  Even as a puppy, she responded fiercely to anything she perceived as an affront to her sovereignty—a big dog running over her, for example—and soon lost the ability to distinguish play from fighting.  She didn’t like being touched, not by dogs and not by humans.  We had to teach her to enjoy being petted, and she never got used to being brushed.  I brushed her fur and her teeth almost every week for 17 years, and she screamed and struggled and threatened to bite every one of those 884 weeks!  Fortunately, she was not usually aggressive, unless provoked, and eventually developed a Garbo-esque desire to simply be left alone, at least by strangers.

            She was breed-conscious and had an uncanny ability to recognize dogs that were like her: Huskies, Akitas, other Shibas, and so on.  She was drawn to them, even if a fight was likely to ensue, and as a puppy she fell in love with Jason, a handsome, laid-back dude, tannish-white and part Norwegian elkhound.  She met him during our dog-park year, and long after the park was closed and she lost her ability to play with other dogs, she greeted Jason with spasms of joy.

            If she didn’t like the usual rough and tumble of the dog park, she loved  running. Whenever possible, she encouraged dogs to chase her, and she was so fast that few could catch her.  Once during our dog-park year, a young German shepherd took off after her and fell far enough behind that he found it necessary to “cheat” by jumping over a low bench in order to shorten the distance between them.  Sometimes, with no one to chase her, she would take off in mad circles, running round and round until exhausted.  Frisbee was another pleasure that found her running back and forth under the flying disks.

            Obedience eluded her.  Shibas are an atavistic breed, descended, or so the Japanese claim, from pre-history.  I once read an article on Carolina dogs, believed to be descended from dogs that accompanied the earliest immigrants over the landmass that once bridged the Bering Strait, and I found descriptions of their idiosyncrasies similar to Nellie’s—the sudden, frantic, spontaneous digging of small holes, for example.  Nellie’s whole life was one long compromise, trying to conform her wildness to domestic life.  It wasn’t that she never learned to “come,” she militantly refused to learn to come.  Following my dog book, I tried treats and a training leash.  As long as the leash was on, she “came” for the treat, but as soon as it was off, she weighed the treat against freedom and opted for freedom.  Steve and I spent a great deal of her life involuntarily chasing her, and she loved every minute!  She wasn’t dumb, but she used her smarts in the interest of staying wild instead of becoming domesticated.  Once on the Cape’s Marconi dunes, when I dropped her leash, thinking she would run to “Daddy,” she darted under the fence instead, running round and round the protected dune where we couldn’t follow.  We watched helplessly until finally Steve was able to grab her leash as she cruised close to the fence for the fifteenth time.  She loved us, and she never wanted to run “away” exactly; she just wanted to be free.

            So how was it we came to love this dog like our very life?  For starters, she was, by all objective standards, incredibly beautiful.  Descended on her father’s side from two of Richard Tomita’s original Shibas from Japan, she bore a strong resemblance to “Chibi,” the cover dog on Tomita’s Shibas book, whose thick soft fur, rounded features, and soulful eyes made him particularly handsome.  Those features and her small size gave Nellie a perpetual puppy look.  Up to a few months before she died, people were still stopping us to ask if she were fully grown. (Our local bookstore featured an amazingly cute picture of her at six months in their 1996 fall newsletter.)

            Steve summed it up best when he looked at her one day and said, “If you weren’t so cute, you’d just be a bad dog!”  She beguiled with her actions as well as her looks.  Steve’s father called her a little “vance” (mischievous child), and she mortified his mother when, on her first visit to their high rise Brooklyn apartment, she dove under the sofa, a space two inches high, to emerge minutes later with a desiccated  mouse!  My sister, impatient with Nellie’s waywardness, shook with  helpless laughter one night as she watched her chase June bugs on our deck.  For better or worse, Shibas have an amazing range of vocalizations, so I taught her to sing.  She frequently serenaded us, hoping for a treat, and always accompanied us on “Happy Birthday,” her favorite song because birthdays meant presents.  She could never quite understand that not every birthday was hers and always looked forward to opening presents, no matter whose.  She paced around the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve as impatient as any child to start opening her gifts. 

       She played hard, indoors and out.  She could pluck balls from mid-air and would do handstands to field grounders.  Passers-by stopped to watch her play “soccer” in the park, chasing a beach ball around, pushing it with her nose like a seal, while we ran in and kicked it away from her.  She had a variety of indoor toys for chasing and chewing, but particularly loved tug-of-war with her rope toy, standing on her hind legs to wrestle it away from Steve in a pose we dubbed “Tyrannosaurus Fox.”

       Although she was almost nine when we purchased Mill Brook House, she had many good years there, running through the fields, chasing turkeys, hunting for mice, and fishing for leaves as they floated down the Mill Brook.  We built her a pen from the sturdy fence that had surrounded the defunct swimming pool we filled in, so she could spend time lolling in the sunshine and chasing bugs.  Although we tossed balls for her both outside and inside the pen, she came, in her last years, to distrust the open fields—too many smells from animals she knew she could no longer defend herself against—and to prefer the security of her pen.  As she aged, the pen became the last place I could get her to play ball.  When Hurricane Irene destroyed it in the late summer of 2011, she never chased balls again.  Becoming ever more fragile and dependent, she left us a few days after Christmas in 2012, bequeathing indelible memories of a charming, difficult, unique little personality.

 

Good night, little Princess...

 

For more photographs of Nellie Fox, click on the album in our sidebar "Nellie Fox in Pictures" or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/nellie_fox_in_pictures/index.html

The Children's Crusade

Bruce Watson's Freedom Summer

In the summer of 1967, I went to Holly Springs, Mississippi with a group of students from Michigan State to conduct a summer workshop for incoming freshman at Rust College, an historic black college, which had lost its accreditation because of low academic standards.  Products of segregated schools, Rust students had few academic skills when they entered, giving their teachers little to build on.  A remedial program intended to give freshman a leg up in reading and math, the 6-week summer workshop was intended to help the college raise standards and regain accreditation.  (Such remedial programs, ubiquitous on college campuses today, were more or less unheard of in 1967, when college classrooms overflowed with more baby boomers than they could handle.)

Before leaving for Mississippi, veterans of the program schooled us in how to behave, both off and on campus, to avoid either stirring up trouble with white Mississippians or breaking the rigid rules of our host college.  Rust strictly forbade any form of PDA—public display of affection—no matter what color or combination of colors the couple.  Frankly, this worried us more than the threat of violence, but we heard stories of “varmint guns” carried in the backs of pickup trucks and knew, in a general way, of violence throughout the South, targeting civil rights workers.  Although heinous race-based crimes had continued to occur in Mississippi through 1966, the state had, by 1967, settled down considerably since the infamous summer of 1964, when three young men were abducted and murdered, and the state was gripped by a veritable guerilla war.  In Freedom Summer, fellow Franklin County resident Bruce Watson documents that war and, to a lesser extent, its aftermath, the relatively peaceful Mississippi that I encountered. 

Mississippi in 1964 was considered so violently racist that even Martin Luther King avoided it, preferring to stage his actions in his home state of Alabama.  Taming Mississippi was left to SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). “Freedom Summer,” which, working out of Freedom Houses throughout the state, spearheaded voter registration drives and established consciousness-raising Freedom Schools, was the brainchild of Robert Parris Moses, SNCC’s field secretary.  Volunteers were recruited from college campuses across the country.  In the end about 300 young people, most under 25, participated in Freedom Summer, half of them Northern, relatively privileged, and mainly white; the others members of Misissippi’s chapter of SNCC, veterans of shootings, beatings and Southern apartheid.

On the first day of the project, three of the workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by Klan members, the county sheriff among them.  It would take the rest of the summer for the FBI to locate their bodies and issue indictments.  Watson’s narrative jumps skillfully between the FBI search and the events and achievements of Freedom Summer, using the stories of four volunteers from the North, one black, three white, two men and two women, to give a face to the narrative and tie it together.  Most poignant is the story of shy Fran O’Brien, who spent the summer teaching young children in a Freedom School, only to be abducted and beaten by Klansmen at the end of the summer.  At one point, Fran asks her young pupils to name the countries from which Americans had come.  The children begin with European countries and move on to China and India when Fran finally asks them “What about Africa?”  “Does that count?” they ask her dubiously.

Threats and violence came non-stop.  Highly organized, Freedom Summer volunteers kept in touch via a WATS line (precursor to 800 numbers) and wrote up logs, which recorded each incident.  Page 7 in one log leads off with a familiar name: “Holly Springs: … Threats of dynamiting Freedom House tonight.  Guys driving around with guns….” 

Celebrities came to Mississippi, some to entertain, some to volunteer, among them actress and activist Shirley MacLaine, as well as Richard Beymer, star of the film version of West Side Story, who worked alongside [my congressman] Barney Frank, a Harvard student at the time.  “I am prouder of being there than of anything else in my life,” Frank has said.  Harry Belafonte, along with a terrified Sidney Poitier, delivered $60,000 in cash to bankroll Freedom Summer’s final project, sending an all-black delegation to the Democratic National Convention.  Fannie Lou Hamer, activist from Ruleville, Mississippi, would become a celebrity (although never a wealthy one) because of that convention.

In the years after Freedom Summer, Mississippians came to be embarrassed by their singular status as the most racist state in America and, according to Watson, worked hard to modify that image.  Already in 1967, I found Rust students quick to tell me that Mississippi was bad, but Alabama was worse!

So many years after and with later generations of young people famous for their apathy and/or incubation of cynical right-wing extremists like Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, and Grover Norquist, one wonders why so many were willing to risk their lives in Freedom Rides, Freedom Summer, and other aspects of the Movement.  One answer is that the children of the 40’s and 50’s grew up acutely conscious that their parents had fought and sacrificed to win a momentous victory over fascism abroad.  They could do no less than fight it at home.  And then there was the martyred president, who had admonished them to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship … to assure the survival and success of liberty.”  Kennedy himself was taken aback when young people applied his words almost immediately to the Civil Rights struggle, but once spoken, they inspired a generation to fight the battles their elders would not fight.  

 

Spielberg's Lincoln

    Every Thanksgiving and Christmas, when our garden is frozen and we have more time to be in town, we try to catch up with a few movies at the Greenfield Garden Cinema.  This year we caught Spielberg’s Lincoln on the Sunday before Christmas and enjoyed it, especially the acting.  Critics have heaped praise on Daniel Day-Lewis for his amazing portrayal of Lincoln, but all of the acting was superb.  Who would recognize Sally “You-Really-Like-Me” Field as the terse Mary Todd Lincoln?  Awards have also been rightly heaped on Tommy Lee Jones for his performance as Thaddeus Stevens (who, by the way, really did have a 23-year liaison with his “quadroon” [one quarter black] housekeeper).  James Spader, Hal Holbrook, and David Strathairn gave outstanding performances as did the less well-known actors.  Janusz Kaminski’s award-winning low-light cinematography, capturing the era in the sepia tones we associate with wood, candles, and early photography, is also treat. 

    The film’s story-telling (script and editing) is uneven, however, and often leaves the audience, at least this audience, squirming with embarrassment.  Spielberg has never known when to end his films and has ruined many a good one (The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, for example) with too many endings, and Lincoln is no different.  We do not need to be walked through the assassination, his cabinet gathered round the crumpled body, or flashback to his Second Inaugural.  Lincoln descending the White House stairs on his way to the theater, framed by the dark arch of the portico, would have been enough.  The rest, as they say, is history.  (Steve bought me Sunrise at Campobello on DVD for Christmas.  As Ralph Bellamy’s Roosevelt begins his speech nominating Al Smith at the 1924 Democratic Convention, the culmination of a three-year struggle to find a life after polio, the camera pulls back amid confetti, balloons, and cheers.  We know the rest of the story.  Spielberg should have studied his prototypes better!)

    Unfortunately for this film, not only the end but the beginning is mishandled with two soldiers, one black, one white, telling Lincoln of their exploits on the battlefield and reciting the Gettysburg Address for him.  It doesn’t get more embarrassingly didactic than that.  I once published an article on “Old Age Cinema,” in which I discussed the characteristics that I thought films created by directors in their later years had in common.  As Lincoln started out, I wondered if Spielberg was falling into that category, and not in a good way, but the core of the film, the fight for the 13^th Amendment, was as tight, lively, and irreverent as anything Spielberg or anyone else, for that matter, has made.   That and the acting are worth the price of admission.

 

One Year After

The one-year anniversary of Hurricane Irene came and went, and I tried not to notice.  Grass has grown back, as best it could, given the drought.  The garden is re-established, still lacking many perennials but with improved soil and design; we have added a second garden, especially for daylilies.  We love the broad, mow-able path down to the brook that Jonathan, our landscaper, created out of the tangle of rocks, trees, and eroded soil the storm left.  We still miss our secure dog pen—created from the fence around the defunct swimming pool that became my garden—but we’re managing with enough fencing to keep the dog off the road.  With the constant labor these improvements have required, my sense of trauma has receded.

         But all disasters, natural and man-made, leave silences.  For us the sights, sounds, and, yes, smells of the goat farm are an echoing absence.  I stand long on the bridge by the former farm.  2004 (the year we bought Mill Brook House) is carved into it.  I can remember the construction and how we first visited the farm, using a temporary bridge to cross the brook.  John and his aunt had owned it only a year and welcomed more newcomers.  We admired the goats and the single Jersey cow.  I was glowing with excitement over our new adventure.  Hard to believe that seven years later the bridge would split apart and leave a car dangling over the edge of the ravine.*  I stare at the empty farm. A family lives there, but they do not keep animals.  Across the street the homeowner has purchased four donkeys, one pregnant, as pets.  They are shy and often prefer their pen to the narrow field along the road that she has fenced off for them, but they alleviate the silence.

     I return some weeks later to take pictures of the reconstructed brook, and then I hear it: a rooster crowing.  I look at the farm, and there are chickens in the coop and baby goats in the pasture.  As if a paintbrush wielded by Disney were filling them in, the animals are reappearing.  A week later a duck appears and sheep.  New folks, oh my! 

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road before the hurricane

The bridge at Mountain Road after Hurricane Irene

The Mill Brook at Mountain Road today

*A picture of the car hanging off a collapsed Mountain Road, which we included in our blog entry “Good Night, Irene,” was published three (!) times—once in reverse on the back cover—in the recent book of the same name, Good Night Irene, by Craig Brandon, Nicole Garman, and Michael Ryan.  The book details the stories and destruction from eight locations in New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont (mostly Vermont).  About 25 pages are devoted to the Deerfield Valley from Williamstown to Greenfield, with several pages and pictures covering Charlemont.

Robert John Geist 1912-1985

 

On a recent visit to Mill Brook House, my sister asked if I remembered eating in our dinette when we were kids.  From the 1920’s-1940’s dinettes, small alcoves with a built-in table and benches, made smaller more efficient kitchens possible.  Ours was generally packed with no fewer than five people, my mother presiding over the meal from a stool at the end of the table, my father in the corner, pressed against the window—the better to observe his bird feeders—instructing us in all that interested him.  “Of course,” I exclaimed, “I learned everything I know about history and politics in that dinette!”  Well, not everything.  I went on to earn a history minor and a Ph.D. in art history, but in that cramped space my mind expanded as it absorbed my father’s most dearly held beliefs: Hitler was bad, the New Deal was good, Roosevelt was practically a god, World War II a noble cause, and racism, red-baiting, Republicans and Joseph McCarthy all bad.  Republicans were bad only if they held office; otherwise they were merely misguided, and he stated his reasons simply: their policies made the rich richer and the poor poorer.  He had no use for political independents either because, he insisted, organization was the only way to get things done.  In one discussion he noted that the Depression had also made the rich richer and the poor poorer.  Though young, I was fully engaged and reminded him that, according to his own accounts, the Great Depression had made everyone poorer.  No, he countered, the very rich had gotten richer.  (Who, experiencing our own Great Depression, can doubt the wisdom of that insight?)

         Appropriately, my father shares his centennial with Fenway Park and Woody Guthrie.  He was an avid baseball fan at a time when sports enthusiasm was considered déclassé among intellectuals and academics, and, if he could never really relate to “Woody’s children,” the leftie balladeers of the 1960’s, he appreciated the original as well as the tragic severity of the Dust Bowl Woody emerged from.  Musically challenged, he nevertheless collected the work of Odetta, Lead Belly, and Burl Ives.  Only later in my life did I understand them as precursors to my beloved folkies of the 60’s.

         Although my father died well before I married and almost 20 years before we bought Mill Brook House, we feel his influence here.  An intermittent gardener, he enjoyed tending plants, and when I was small, he and my mother gardened seriously in an attempt to save money on food bills, a challenge I’ve taken up at Mill Brook House (with mixed results).  He began his academic career in Cornell’s School of Natural Resources, specializing in ornithology.  Although he would switch to English for his Ph.D., he never lost his love of birds, one of our special delights at Mill Brook House. 

         Beyond these enthusiasms, another of my father’s enduring legacies was his great respect for neighbors.  Shy and academic, he found small talk difficult, even painful, but he always maintained a special relationship with our neighbors, befriending them, supporting them when needed, and cooperating on numerous projects with them.  The value he placed on neighbors was different from my mother’s all-purpose gregariousness; it carried a moral force. 

         When we moved to Mill Brook House, I made a point of meeting and greeting all our neighbors up and down the road.  On Christmas Eve I left treats at every door.  I understood instinctively that for second-home owners, especially, neighbors are a lifeline, as Hurricane Irene would prove, and this, at least in part, because my father had taught me early on that neighbors constitute a special class of friend.          

 

You CAN Get There from Here

  

For the first time since we bought the house, we made what used to be our annual trek to Tanglewood.  Armed with eggs (boiled) and cheese from Goat Rising and bread and muffins from the Country Store, we headed southwest to the music camp.  Arriving around 10:30, we found a shady spot for the car and spread out our brunch under the trees in the parking lot.  The gates opened at noon, and soon after we went in and toured the lovely grounds outside the Koussevitsky Shed.  The program was, uncharacteristically, a Pops concert, featuring Alec Baldwin and Arlo Guthrie.  We, uncharacteristically, had seats inside so that we could see them both.  Baldwin read excerpts from Kennedy brothers’ speeches, and Arlo was, characteristically, Arlo.

I have never encouraged people with Tanglewood on their mind to stay with us, and if that is the only destination, there are closer places for rent.  But for anyone staying with us a week or two, Tanglewood should make the short list of day trips.  The ride, alongside lakes and streams through pleasant countryside and forests, takes about an hour. 

From Charlemont, take Route 2 through town to 8A South.  Turn left and travel for about 10 miles.  Turn right when 8A joins 116 and left when 8A leaves 116 to continue south.  When 8A ends at Route 9, turn right and follow 9 into and through Pittsfield until it joins Route 7.  Follow 7 south to 7A in Lenox and turn right on 183.  You’ll see signs for Tanglewood.  

If you’re traveling with a dog, seek out the wooded section at the far end of the East Parking Lot.  Arrive before 11:30 and tell the parking lot attendant you want to park in the shade.  At that hour, you’ll have your choice of spots.  Pick out the most densely covered, and your dog will be fine throughout the concert.  We always check on ours during intermission, and this time found her so fast asleep she didn’t know we’d come and gone.

 For tickets and box office hours, go to tanglewood.org.

(photos courtesy Steven Sternbach)  

  

 

MassMoCA

True confession: I dragged my feet getting to MassMoCA.  After six years in the Berkshires and numerous trips to North Adams, we finally made it there January 1, 2011.  I’d never been a fan of contemporary art, even though this was ostensibly the area of my Ph.D.  But as a medievalist-turned-film-historian, I was much less interested in contemporary plastic arts than celluloid ones--film was still on celluloid back then--less interested in philosophical/theoretical meditations, than theological/humanist ones.  MassMoCA, however, awoke my dormant medievalist and turned me into a believer.

It starts with the building.  As much a monument to an era of faith—faith in industry, the American worker, and the rivers tumbling out of the mountains of the Northeast—as a Gothic cathedral, as huge, awe-inspiring, and archaic, the rugged old mill buildings that house MassMoCA are as present as the art they house.  Built between 1860 and 1890 for the textile firm Arnold Print Works, the buildings were purchased in 1942 by the Sprague Electric Company, a major R&D firm that made electric components until overseas competition drove it out of business.  Their cavernous spaces are ideal for monumental installations that mingle with rough brickwork, vaults and arches, high windows, and heavy wooden beams from a bye-gone era.

Purchased for a museum in 1986, the site didn't open until 1999 as its founders dealt with on-going funding difficulties.  Since opening with 208,000 square feet of renovated space, the 13-acre campus has doubled and now includes a concert hall, artist workspace, office and retail space, as well as its 110,000 square feet of installation exhibit space. Unless an artist aspires, Christo-like, to complement nature, only his or her imagination limits what can be displayed here.

Among the most arresting works we saw were Orly Genger’s miles of intricately knotted, orange rope that burst through one wall and lay in piles in an adjoining room and Katharina Grosse’s enormous icebergs of Styrofoam and brightly colored earth.

Orly Genger, Big Boss, 2009-10

Mounded up in front of two stories of huge windows, its spray-painted primary colors straying onto several of them, Grosse’s installation, indeed, reminds one of a cathedral. 

 Katharina Grosse, One Floor Up More Highly, 2010 

Evoking both the subject matter and aura of 17^th century still lifes, particularly dark Spanish ones, Petah Coyne filled one windowless room with islands and hanging orbs of dark flowers, decorated with stuffed birds and animals, an installation that, eerie and claustrophobic, was disturbingly beautiful.

Petah Coyne, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 2010 

Of the installations we saw, only Frederico Diaz’s cascades of black balls, arranged near the museum’s entrance, remains, but only until March.

 Frederico Diaz, Geometric Death Frequency--141, 2010

A retrospective of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings occupies one entire three-story building.  From 1968 to his death in 2007, LeWitt created mathematically-based line configurations for wall drawings that were subsequently painted on real walls by a team of assistants.  Conceived in 2003 in cooperation with LeWitt and his wife, work on the MassMoCA project began in 2007 with three LeWitt assistants directing a team of 62 artists, who filled walls erected in the 27,000 foot interior of “Building #7.”  The exhibit moves chronologically and vertically through LeWitt’s work with the 1960’s and 70’s on the first floor, the 80’s and 90’s on the second floor, and the incredibly colorful and exuberant work of the late 1990’s to 2007 on the third floor.

 
    Sol LeWitt, A Wall Drawing Retrospective

Mindful of his wall-painting predecessors, LeWitt once said, “I would like to produce something that I would not be ashamed to show Giotto.”  My inner medievalist says that he has.  The exhibit will be on display for the next 25 years, but don’t wait for the last day to see it!

For more images of the MassMoCA exhibits from 2010, click on our MassMoCA photo album in the column on the right side of this blog or use this link: http://www.millbrookhousenews.com/photos/Art/ 

For information on current exhibits, see massmoca.org.

 

Mill Brook House Reopens June 1

Flower by flower, Mill Brook House is coming back.  There are bluebirds in the birdhouses, yellow-bellied sapsuckers tapping up a storm in the woods, and a great blue heron is frequenting the Irene-enlarged stream that runs behind the house.  Having channeled the entire Mill Brook for one week, the stream is now large enough to support thumb-sized minnows that interest the heron.  Frogs, silenced by the cold snap after the March heat wave, will be calling and singing again soon. 

 

 

A giant log swept in by the storm and lodged against one bank of the Mill Brook, where it runs through our land.

 

It has been an arduous and sometimes frustrating road to recovery, but we are almost there.  All of our systems had to be rebuilt or replaced, work that was finally complete by Christmas 2011.  Our humble thanks to the diligent tradesmen who persisted until everything was working again.  Thanks, too, to our neighbor Ian, who had the good sense to tie our propane tank to the deck, lest it join hundreds of other tanks washed down the Deerfield in the storm.  Sadly, our secure dog pen, which took the full force of the flood, was completely destroyed.

Clearing sand and debris, front and back, so that our garden and driveway could be restored took most of the fall.  We continue to work on resurrecting the garden, the lawns and the meadows and removing flotsam from the woods.

 

 

Jonathan Winfisky clears sand from the backyard.  Jonathan runs heavy equipment in the summer and blows glass in the winter. 

 

Living with our cheerless landscape through the fall and snowless winter was depressing, but with spring’s renewal finally here, each survivor that pokes its head up in the garden, each new blade of grass—even the garden’s unwanted grass, which we carefully remove and plant elsewhere—and every returning bird bring enormous joy.  Mill Brook House is coming back!

We will be ready for guests on June 1.  For prices and availability, please check our listing at: http://www.homeaway.com/vacation-rental/p144555 .

 

Look what the cat dragged in!

Jonathan Winfisky's glass (above) can be purchased

at the Grow Gallery in Shelburne Falls. 

 

 

Re-Opened Route 2 Greets the New Year

A year that started out so hopefully for us in Charlemont, a new windmill and an old store turned 150, turned out to contain multiple weather disasters for Western Massachusetts with Hurricane Irene causing the most distress in the hilltowns. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Avery's store c. 1880

 

 

The Mill Brook off course during Hurricane Irene 

As 2011 drew to a close, however, there was much to celebrate in the re-opening of Route 2 between Charlemont and North Adams.  Six miles of this major artery, closed since the hurricane on August 28, re-opened the week before Christmas.  Until we traveled the newly opened roadway, we had no idea of the magnitude of the damage: entire mountainsides had washed onto the road, which had toppled into the river in many places.  With crews working round the clock, what should have taken an entire year to complete was finished in less than four months, although men and machines are still at work to stabilize the landscape.

Route 2 in Savoy, December 30, 2011

Stabilizing the banks of the Cold River

Thankful for this 23 million dollar Christmas present from our state and federal governments, we pray that continued "recovery" continues to bless us all in 2012.

 

Happy New Year from Mill Brook House!!

 

Good-bye, Goat Rising

 

Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye

With enormous regret we announce the departure of John Miller and Goat Rising from the farmstead at the corner of Route 8A North and Mountain Road.  Goat Rising, under new ownership, has moved to Plainfield while John and his Jerseys have joined the centuries-old Appleton Farms in Ipswich.

John and his aunt purchased the farmstead in 2003, the year before we bought Mill Brook House. As John added Jersey cows to the goat farm, the herd increasing each year, the farm’s limited pastureland became an increasing liability.  The addition of the Curtis Country Store to the farm’s enterprises, delightful though it was, turned into another liability.  Recession, bad tenants, and a devastated real estate market combined to make for steep losses.  But the straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been Hurricane Irene and the damaged bridge over the Mill Brook in front of the farm.  The months-long four-mile detour over dirt roads meant headaches for John and his family getting out and deterred customers for the farm’s store from coming in.  More losses. 

 

Ironically, the week John moved, the bridge was finally repaired.

 

 

 

The boutique farm with its prize-winning cheeses, raw milk, fresh eggs and delightful animals was the highlight of our neighborhood, a favored destination for a walk for ourselves and our guests, a wonderful of source not just of local produce, but of produce from animals we knew personally.  John’s mother was a superb baker, and after the Country Store closed, her cookies and muffins appeared serendipitously next to the ice cream freezer in the farm store, providing a quick pick-me-up after a day of painting or laboring in the garden.

 

 

True, it wasn’t all Irene’s fault, but the loss of Goat Rising after so many other losses from the hurricane is painful and deeply felt.

I attach my review of Brad Kessler's memoire of goat farming, which evokes our own fond memories of Goat Rising.

Book Review: Goat Song

This book was a natural choice, given the goat farm down the street from us.  Raising goats is clearly not for the dilettante or the faint-hearted, and we’ve seen evidence of that, too, in our immediate neighborhood.  One neighbor thought she would rescue a male kid, slated to be shipped off to more or less certain death by Goat Rising.  (Few males survive in the world of domesticated goats, where milk and cheese are the goal.)  Our friend stuck it out for several years, taking him for walks among the stones and boulders in the Mill Brook, but he finally became too much for her (though I believe she found another home for him, where he could continue being a pet).  Further up the road in Heath, we met a woman keen to raise goats as a hobby, but the young kids we saw on her property at the time have long since disappeared. 

            These failures become understandable when one reads of the sheer hard labor involved in raising goats in Brad Kessler’s Goat Song, which Kessler’s poetic style does not disguise.  The book makes a good companion and intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year-long quest to live off her land or that of local farmers.  Where Kingsolver is polemical, Kessler is lyrical and philosophical (and far more economical with words).  Where Kingsolver gives us current information about government policies and the sad, wasteful state of our food supply, Kessler delves into our pastoral and etymological history—all the English words that derive from Indo-European, Greek, and Hebrew for goats and herding, along with slivers of poetry and wisdom on same, passed down from the earliest civilizations to the present.  Where Kingsolver may leave us feeling frustrated at the imperfect state of our of lives and our government—most of us don’t have the time, the land, or the money to eat as much local produce as we’d like—Kessler leaves us feeling ennobled by our rich pastoral heritage, even as we experience it vicariously through his labors            

     Surprisingly, this tiny, erudite volume involves a certain amount of suspense: when one of the goats sickened, I couldn’t stop reading until I learned the outcome.  Ditto when the herd was threatened by coyotes.  (The battle with the coyotes calls to mind Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where two characters duel over the merits of conserving vs. killing these predators.) 

            Romantics will revel in the connections Kessler discovers between pastoralism and the notion of a lost paradise, as well as his discussions of shepherd-kings, poet-herders, and the haunting music of herding. Animal-lovers will understand better what they already intuit but society too often denies: that out of our deep connection to animals arises our humanness. Foodies will enjoy Kessler’s blow-by-blow description of cheese-making, although theologians and devout Christians may wince at the parallels he draws between cheese-making and Christianity, however much the two crossed paths in ancient monasteries.

            By the end we understand that this rich tale has been Kessler’s own spiritual journey, even as it has rubbed off on us and contributed  to our own enlightenment.  “A goat has led me here,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph.  “I’m the boy in the Yiddish tale who’s followed her all along—she always knew the way back home.”

 

 

Margaret Antoinette Story Geist

Veteran’s Day this year will be 11-11-11.  It won’t happen again for another millennium.  2011 is also my mother’s centennial, a year she didn't live to see, although she came close.

    

She died in 2004, the year we bought Milll Brook House, and money from selling the modest home in Michigan where she had lived since my birth helped us survive unemployment in 2006 and retain our our new old house.  I sometimes wonder what she would have thought of our purchase.  She would have worried that we could never manage such a big project on our small budget (as I often do myself), but she would have taken pleasure in the thought that we were embarking on a new adventure, living out a dream that she had had.  Although she did not live in a large city, she always hankered to move outside of town and live in the countryside.  Driving through woods and fields to a neighboring town, she liked to point out the house, about halfway between, that she had always wanted to buy.

Yet her own life was not without adventure, some of her own making, some her husband’s and some the world’s.  As a high school graduate, she went off, without her mother’s blessing, to study art at Pratt Institute in New York City.  She was nine months pregnant when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  Baby in tow, she joined my father where he was stationed in Texas, and, like hundreds of other Army wives, criss-crossed the country by train with her toddler as the Army shifted my father around, eventually sending him overseas.

In the late 1950’s, she followed him to Okinawa, where he, a civilian college professor by then, advised and taught English teachers at the University of the Ryukyus.  Interested above all in people and art, she took the island by storm, encouraging local artists and befriending a multitude of Okinawans and other island residents, instilling confidence and burnishing pride in a population traditionally held in low esteem by mainland Japanese and still reeling from war.  Those friendships lasted a lifetime, and among a certain, now-aging circle she is still a legend.

Unselfconscious, she lacked the “shy-gene” that plagues the rest of our family and had, as my father liked to say, a gift for friendship.  There was hardly a place I could travel where she didn’t have friends for me to look up, and they always showered me with kindness in remembrance of her hospitality and affection toward them.

She was part of the “Greatest Generation,” and she lived up to that moniker.        

 

Goodnight, Irene

        The beautiful Mill Brook

Downgraded to a tropical storm, Hurricane Irene made its way relatively languidly through the northern Appalachians, dumping record amounts of rain and causing massive flooding.  Little Charlemont, which, in the past, had escaped floods, ice storms, and tornadoes, took a direct hit.  The beautiful Mill Brook, for which our place is named, decided to play Niagara Falls for a day and roared down the valley, ripping out trees along the banks, which smashed into bridges and destroyed them. 

The bridge by Goat Rising

In DuPree’s horse pasture, the brook jumped its banks, tumbled across the field and roared around our house, wiping out the dog pen and turning our meadows into moonscapes.  For five stomach-churning days, it continued to race past us along the beds of two small streams that surround the back field, while its normal course lay empty. 

Trees and silt caused the brook to change course.

On Thursday, Jerry and Brian DuPree tried, with backhoes and a small bulldozer, to force the brook back into place, only to watch it jump out again in the wake of another flash flood.

At 5:00 Friday afternoon the cavalry finally arrived. 

Help at last

National Guard troops with giant bulldozers moved earth and rocks and trees to get the Mill Brook back on course.  No Frenchman on D-Day was ever more elated to see American soldiers take to the field.  They worked through the Labor Day weekend, securing the brook, and on Monday, with more flash floods predicted, they showed up on our property to cut up trees already in the brook to prevent them hitting the Bissell Bridge, which, thankfully, received no injuries from the storm.

Entertaining the troops at Mill Brook House       

Badly in need of relandscaping, Mill Brook House is presently closed to guests.  We hope to open again next summer.  Goodnight, Irene.

(Photos courtesy of Steven Sternbach and Jerry DuPree.)

Neighbors

Culling our video collection prior to the latest renovation project, I came across some old dubs of Northern Exposure which we’d made in the mid 90s.  (Both TVs at Mill Brook House have video playback, so most of our videotapes have migrated here.)  While I’d seen the shows broadcast, I’d never actually watched these tapes.  Throwing one into a video player, I quickly entered a time warp.  Intelligent people being kind to one another, enjoying quiet moments of self-realization and personal growth—when was the last time I had seen that acted out on television?

         What gave these old dubs even more resonance, however, was how much more I could identify with the residents of Cicely now that I know Charlemont; the need to accept people, whatever their politics, religion, sexual preference or profession because they’re all you’ve got, was suddenly very real.  I used to wonder about the eight principals on Northern Exposure—why only them?  Didn’t other people live in Cicely?  But, in fact, my circle in Charlemont is pretty much confined to the same ten or twelve people I encounter regularly as neighbors, tradesmen, shopkeepers, farmers—and not to forget the post mistress.  For me, Cicely, Alaska, has become a little less of a fantasy town than it used to be.

         Below are some of my four-footed and post-and-lintel neighbors.  Just out of sight are some really great people.

 

The Hallenbeck House in Winter

 

Bissell Bridge and Waterfall 

 

Fawn in our Front Meadow

 

 
Former One-Room Schoolhouse

 

Schoolhouse seen from Goat Rising Farm

 

Goat Rising Goat

 

Goat Rising Cow

 

Next Door Neighbors  

Charlemont Spans the Centuries

Charlemont is indeed a Janus-head looking backwards and forwards.

This year Avery’s general store turns 150.  The Averys have owned the store since it was built in 1861, which makes it the oldest general store in America to have been owned by the same family.

 
  

 

 

 

       Avery's store c. 1880         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                          Avery's store, 2009       

 

 

 

 Meanwhile, our ski resort Berkshire East has brought us into the 21^st century with a giant windmill, which will provide enough electricity to run the resort and then some.

  

HAPPY 2011 from MILL BROOK HOUSE!!

 

In Defense of Hanging Laundry

         As a 60-something, I am appalled and mystified whenever I read some community has discouraged or banned hanging laundry outdoors.  For the land of the free, this seems a petty and ridiculous, not to mention environmentally disadvantageous, limit on personal freedom.  I was well into grade school before my mother had the option of giving up the dangers of a wringer washer and the inconvenience of hanging her laundry outdoors for the joys of an automatic spin washer and an electric dryer.  (Floating around our backyard in those days remained a zinc washtub and a rippled washboard, compared to which the wringer-washer had been a marvel.) She, of course, never looked back and sometime in the 1960’s dismantled our complicated apparatus for hanging laundry outside, but not before I had been imprinted with the magic of wandering through groves of sheets billowing in the wind.  When we learned at school that water evaporates even when it has turned to ice, our teacher reminded us that our mothers’ laundry dried in the winter, even as it froze!  (If you watch carefully, you will see Marjorie Main gesturing with a pair of frozen bloomers in the 1944 film Meet Me in Saint Louis as she takes laundry off the line while the children make snowmen.) Hanging laundry outdoors was universal, and no one found the sight of it offensive.  How did we go so off the rails?

         I myself took up hanging laundry as a graduate student studying in Germany, back before global warming was a popular concept much less a cause celebré.  The home I rented had a washing machine, but no dryer, so I hung my laundry on a line next to the washer and, despite the long drying time in that damp climate, I loved the results.  I, too, never looked back.  From then on I hung laundry in every apartment where I lived or in its basement.  I found hanging laundry, like cooking, calming and therapeutic, perhaps because both reminded me of the security of early childhood when mom was always at my side and my worst problem was having the snarls combed out of my hair.

         When my migrations took me to Hawaii, I quickly discovered that every dwelling in that sweet climate came with a laundry line—what luxury!  My boyfriend, also a recent transplant, was likewise seduced by the improvement air-dried laundry made in his clothes.  A big date was a trip to the laundromat, followed by hauling the heavy wet clothes back to hang on his lanai.  Eventually we married—clearly a match made in heaven!  Next stop, Japan: again we found most apartment dwellers owned a simple washing machine and hung laundry on their balconies.  (Traditionally, Japanese hung their clothes outdoors on poles threaded through the loose sleeves of their kimonos and similarly constructed garments.  That lovely sight has been immortalized by Yasujiro Ozu, whose films  often cut to such pole-hung laundry flapping in the breeze.)

         Except in Hawaii and Japan, I have, as an apartment dweller, always had to hang laundry indoors, not altogether bad since I avoid the inconvenience of inclement weather.  Imagine, though, the thrill of discovering our house in Charlemont came complete with a laundry line on a covered balcony.  Our clothes hang there unabashed to the amusement, I’m sure, of every passing driver.  I admit it sometimes gives our house a roguish appearance, never more so than back when the balcony’s peeling paint already made us look like a hillbilly encampment.  But there are days when the laundry’s bright colors against our new beige paint job create an enchanting composition, akin to the visual poetry Ozu extracted from drying clothes.

         For those who didn’t grow up playing hide-and-seek amid their mothers’ flapping sheets, hanging laundry may be more of a time-consuming chore than a pleasure, but those who embrace it from consciences stricken by a warming earth should be supported, not discouraged.  Notions of beauty can be reversed much more easily than climate change.