The Flame Tree

20 minutes after pruning

Day 12. The reckless (& futile) concerns of my mind have peaked, consumed me, tossed me about like a ship in a hurricane, and then, God bless, subsided. I am free now, at peace, liberated, but I still sometimes sense that there are white shapes moving between the trees... 

The kids come screaming down the hill. Screaming! I am sure that this is it---the leg caught in a tractor; the snake bite; the fall from the barn roof. I hear the screams every five minutes. I hear the screams in my sleep. I am a city mother---I take my child rearing neat, clean and ultra-supervised. Life-on-a-Norwegian-farm-where-diplomats-live? Well it's just so... rustic.

But the children are running, screaming and laughing. Phew, as I stand in the door watching them take the last steps down the hill. Mummy! Mummy! Come see the Smudge Wall by Liv & Haakon!! "Smudge" and "wall"? See? Totally rustic.

We're a cross between our parents and hippies in a tent, sings Greg Brown. I've had that line stuck in my head since my daughter was born seven years ago. And I feel the pull happen again within me as I stand before my children's Smudge Wall: how my mother would respond; how a hippie in a tent would respond. I pause and admire. The drawings are done with magic marker, then smudged with dirty hands. They have drawn frames on the wall around the drawings. I reach through the arbitrariness that is my parenting style---seven years and I'm still waiting for the memo, or the conference, or even the a conversation where it will all be revealed. Then I'll be up to speed. Then I won't feel under-employed. Then I will find such joy in coloring! Then I will bring dinner to the table effortlessly and lovingly. Then I will get in the cold water, and teach them how to swim. Until then, however, I'm a babysitter waiting for the parents to return, and I'm a little pissed off that there's no Diet Coke in the fridge.

"That's cool," I say to my two, proud, mural-smudge-painting children. "You should get the camera and take a picture."

I walk back outside, checking the laundry on the line as I pass. The sheets are dry so I take them down and fold them to make room for the next load. As I finish, I remember I was looking for the clippers to prune the bushes a while ago, before I started the laundry, and the writing, and the outdoor pillow fluffing, and the Sound of Music dance performance watching, which led me to get the boom box out of the barn and hook it up to the ipod and play early Bob Dylan tunes on the back porch. I find the clipper and return to this new art of mine. I think I might be a genius with this pruning thing, and I'm sort of surprised my Norwegian family hasn't commented on my work. I always take care to not cut any flowers or buds---would be like shooting a pregnant deer, I think as I snip away. Although when I'm done, I wonder if it would be generous to shoot the deer, and put it out of its misery.

But it is 12:37pm in Norway and the children have just alerted me that the U.S. President is coming for two hours and he would like some proper music, nothing New York, maybe a disco song. Play that Funky Music comes on. The President will love that song! Haakon says, and so that's decided. But so many more preparations still to complete, oh so much to do.

Old Man House and Love

A few weeks ago I returned to New York City from my parents house with a van load of things including: seven glass jars, nine terra cotta jugs, a box filled with seaglass, a wooden Pegasus carved by my sculptor great-grandfather, an etching of my great-grandmother done by the same, a crate of letters written to me from 1969 to 1998 (when email obliterated the art), a twentieth-century Italian bureau, the family Bible, and a 16-year-old cat named Chicken. 

These were the random items that I hauled out of the deep waters of my past---excavated out of the old house where we grew up and my parents have lived for 40 years. We packed them into the rented van early on a beautiful crisp sunny morning. I said goodbye to my parents. Though I will see them in a few weeks, I will never see them at this house again, because I will never see this house again. I waved goodbye to them as I pulled out of the driveway, as I have waved goodbye so many hundreds of times before-----for school mornings, for sleepovers and ski trips, for boarding school, college, graduate school. As I left for California, Central America, New York City and Africa. I waved goodbye to attend a day of second grade with the same combination of dismay and excitement as 25 years later I waved goodbye with my new baby girl, going to Kenya to start another, new life. But this goodbye was the most significant, as it was the last one from this driveway and this house and as I drove away---- I will not lie---- the pain was tremendous. 

I will miss that house because it's a sweet old man of a house. Old, warped and achey, settled into the rocky ground, unfazed by the range of bizarre human behavior and glee that unfolds within it. I will miss that beautiful familiar gentle house, but nothing has been lost----and that's the peculiar, almost vertiginous feeling I'm living with. The house is gone, but there are millions of other houses.

The house is gone but our home remains, because we really do create home within, and create it everyday. My home is our family. And my family is a phone call or an email, a gift of green earrings or black pearls, a drive up to Boston together, a conversation by the kitchen sink, jokes, a snow fort, a movie, a really strong drink when a really strong drink is in order. It's the infinite crackling of the space between us, alive and unpredictable, shifting with every member's move, with every new arrival, with every loss. All of that still remains, and the memories too. So what is there to long for? We are lucky.

"Love conquers all," the priests and the poets keep telling us----and it's an abstraction until you learn that it does actually conquer all, because no one can destroy love, and love can be as simple as you calling your brother. The crackling space can't be cut down, or harassed, intimidated, chased by a car, threatened or yelled at by anyone. They can hang you upside down but the love remains. That must be so annoying for the bad guys. I am beginning to get it now, I really am. 

Tues morning

And so we enter this next room: winter, real winter. The harsh and endless stretch of dirty snow and bent heads walking into wind; not the glittery and festive weeks of joy in December. 

I look down on top of a tree that reaches up from behind the townhouses across the street. The morning sun hits the very tips of the branches; the tips are a burgundy color. The tree's branches are illuminated and reaching up on a mundane Tuesday morning, like a dancer in agony for her lover, an angel in repose, etc. etc. All around those arms reaching high are buildings, windows, chimneys, vents, brick, glass, fans, satellites, ladders, fences on rooftops, an awning fluttering in the severe wind, water towers----a landscape of human genius and audacity that I marvel at every day. 

Look! It's only the end of the paragraph and the whole wonder of that glowing tree is gone. The sun shifted, the branches and those burgundy fingers don't glow. And it's back to washing dishes for me.

hello goodbye

Years ago, my friend's mother was part of a local theater group. I think they were a group of friends or maybe they became friends through the troupe; maybe they met once a week to entertain themselves or maybe they put on shows for others, I don't know. One day, years ago, this friend called to tell me that her parents (her mother of the theater group) were getting divorced. This came as very shocking and sad and disorienting news, as any divorce is, but in this case particularly so because we all loved the couple and the family and had thought the family would go on together for ever and ever.

This theater group did something around that time that I think of often. I wasn't witness to it, my friend told me about it later. One evening during the time of the divorce, my friend's mother came to her theater group and they sat her down and said they were going to do a show just for her.

They silently came together and held hands in a circle and then they let go and together began to build a structure. They worked in silence, with care and attention to their gestures and movement. They piled chairs on top of a table, and maybe a shelf on top of the chairs, and perhaps a rug or a plant or some pots or keys on top of that. Actually, I'm not sure the objects that were used, but I remember my friend mentioning chairs certainly.

When it was finished they paused and appreciated what they had built. Maybe they stood there for a while, I don't know. And then slowly, they began to dismantle the structure. I'm going to assume that they dismantled it with sadness and a heavy heart, but working together meticulously and with care and attention. It's more dangerous, after all, dismantling a structure like that. It could all come crashing down and really hurt someone, and everyone is distracted by sadness and maybe not working together as well. it takes great concentration and certainly depletes one's emotions.

So yes, this small theater production that my friend described to me almost 20 years ago has remained with me and often explained life to me. Is life not always a process of building structures with the materials you have at hand, with the people around you? And then---like the moment an ocean's tide changes from full to retreating---it is time to shift, and begin to dismantle. It happens in a big way (building a new family together, and then, over tine, breaking apart); it's happening in little ways (a project at work starting, overwhelming, then coming to a close).

Last week, a great tide shifted in our life. Seven years of building a life here---first in Uganda, then in Nairobi---the constant moving forward, the constant moving in, the career building, the baby making, the wall painting and bill paying and the community we love---all the daily work and decisions we constantly make to contribute to all of this, suddenly peaked. The moment came when it was time to begin dismantling. In a few months, we're off to New York City to start a new contract, and to begin to build a new structure.

It's a pretty tricky time. I'll be writing about it I'm sure.

David Hockney, Garrowby Hill (1998)

I. the only moving thing

While we were out of town last month, the cottage next door was demolished along with many of its trees, including the flame tree that towered outside our bedroom window. (Unaware of its fate, I happened to post a photo of the tree as a parting shot before we left Nairobi. Here it is again.) In place of the cottage and trees, a developer is building two houses. No doubt they will be like the other houses going up all over Nairobi suburbs: big, glassy, "plot-fillers", with great facades, spacious entryways and a hallway of doors to bedrooms that are as small as an afterthought.

The sound of a gang of men breaking rock with pick-ax accompanies my mornings now. (I guess it's cheaper to pay a few guys a dollar a day than to invest in a jack-hammer.) It's almost peaceful, in a sort of echo-y, haunting, I've been working on the railroad way.

It was shocking and sad the morning we pulled in after six weeks away to find demolition, sky where there was once was trees, and laborers scurrying around the plot. But it's not my place to be enraged, really. I'm not Kenyan, I just have romantic ideals of Nairobi that I find heartbreaking to watch change. I'm preserved from my own anguish, in a way, too. We'll be gone in a year, and Nairobi will carry on without me, and I without it.

August at my parent's house, the house where I grew up, was also addled with the incessant sound of construction from next door. At times it was excruciating: summer by the sea accompanied by the whine of bulldozers and chainsaws. Naturally, it can be heartbreaking to watch a childhood landscape being picked away and replaced with mansions I could never afford. But it's not my place to be annoyed, really. Though I grew up there, it's no longer my home. And, due to the nature of our work, there are no plans to return there to live.

And so, the basic 101 conundrum of the expatriate: no longer entirely of home, never a part of the foreign land.

Topophilia

An artist I admire from afar is beginning a very interesting and beautiful blog project called Topophilia, building a sort of conceptual space that may (or may not) be composed of literature, paintings and video. The project's trigger is his love of place. On the subject, he writes about the idea of home:

Home, aside from being the building in which we live, is a state of mind. Home is an idea that has been silently, and uniquely, cultivated in us throughout childhood. It is where we experience many of our most personal and intimate moments and it is where our memories reside long after we a moved on to other houses: revisiting a home from our past always triggers a flood of forgotten memories that come back as we walk through the rooms in which they were formed. And just as we leave something of ourselves in a home, home leaves something in us... (Click here for the complete project description.)

I'm intrigued and, based on two of the first three installments (I can't access the video), I'm entranced as well. I immediately understand how this house or space will evolve, as the first components triggered quick and clear associations of my own past. As I read the first post, an excerpt of an Auden poem, the cellar of my first home on Highwood Road came to me: the cool wet air, light coming in from the narrow windows at the top of the cellar wall, and our German Shepherd, having been hit by a car, lying on the cool basement floor, blood pooling by his leg. The third post, a painting of a slant of light, was a weekend six years ago at a friend's house in the country, a retreat from a sweltering summer in Brooklyn. I lay on the guest bed on a Saturday afternoon and watched a translucent curtain lift into the room, pushed by the most tenuous breeze.

And so I see how the rooms of this 'conceptual house' (though I don't think the artist would appreciate that description, it's the best I can do) will be complete only with my own associations and experience. Which, I believe, is something true about actual houses too.

The subject of place is my favorite. My first real piece of non-fiction was entitled "These Places," and later I did a series of pieces entitled "Woman House" (the titles based on a series of early prints by Louise Bourgeois). Each piece of Woman House was concerned in some way with domesticity, usually in terms of flight or escape from it. The writing reflected an insecure, smoky, slightly neurotic, seductive, adrenaline-addicted, nocturnal and transient period, one that I've obviously left behind.

Instead, I'm settled, and domestic as a cat, and beginning to build a home for my family. But, from a certain perspective, what we're building is also (like the artist's project) not an actual home. Yes, I paint the walls of this cottage in Nairobi, I hang curtains, I agonize over where a painting or shelves should be placed. But it is all with the eventuality that in a year or two we will uproot everything and move. We will leave behind staff and school, friends and pets. We don't know where we will be next, or when we will go there, only that, as employees of the UN, that is the rote. ['Rote', which means 'routine', is derived from the Middle English word for 'route' or 'traveled way'. So our routine will be a 'traveled way'.]

I have always returned to the house where I grew up and where my parents still live. In the last few years, I have returned for considerable stretches of time, to have the babies. A carriage house built in the 1880s, an lovely old man of a gentle place, the house is intrinsic to my sense of self and security in this world. It is the place I have returned to on a daily or monthly or annual basis since I was five years old. But time passes, and we move on, and now the house is on the market. And so while I build my own home, and redefine what that means to me, I will also be moving away from, and deconstructing (if you will), another home.

So this is all a very gallant and elaborate way of saying, I'm adding a new category to The Flame Tree. I have been thinking about this whole affair for some time but, like the artist on his project, I didn't know where to begin, until his project triggered mine. The category is titled "kitchen windows" because there is something meditative and contemplative about gazing out a kitchen window, which tends to be above the kitchen sink, which is the ultimate symbol of house and home and domesticity to me. I have gazed out many kitchen windows under many different circumstances, and I guess (I hope!) I will gaze out many more.

Who knows exactly what this category will entail (to quote the artist, "Like all spaces, it is starting out empty"), except that it will reflect how we are building a home without a house, sort of, and what that means to me.

(The above painting, Late Afternoon Sunbeam, Guest Bedroom, is by the artist mentioned, Duane Keiser.)