The Farm

Eilif's Tractor

The farm is sold.  End of chapter in family history.  Eilif Miller had bought the farm in the late 50s or early 60s.  A work refuge for him:  planting trees, building ponds, raising barns, mowing vast swaths of meadow, growing garden crops, raising children (the supplementary work force)...the joy (for him) of hard, physical labor.  The farm.  Upstate New York, half hour to Albany, in the Helderberg Mountains, long drives from main homes in New York, Maryland, India, Paraguay

The Porch

I did not spend many days at The Farm, but it was always there in the background.  "Eilif went up to The Farm to get the Christmas trees ready for sale."  "He got the tractor fixed."  "Hazel is doing a lot of canning this harvest...lots of beets."

After five years in the trust since Eilif's death, Peter (the eldest) was able to sell the farm.  To a family who wanted the land for hunting, fishing.  They knew they wanted it when they hiked to the upper pond that Eilif had built (with family help) and saw the thick marsh grasses, the deer tracks where the animals come to drink, the thick forest grown up around it.

The Lower Pond

We made this last trip to gather up some of Charlotte's personal books.  I had a last interaction with Eilif when an attic ladder he had installed fell apart (the steps pulled away from the nails (not screws) that held them in) beneath my weight...and that of a box of books...and I crashed to the ground.  I never did much work at The Farm...Eilif had probably wanted me to do more...so this was his final payback.

Ahhh...not often we have such direct commerce with the ghosts in our lives.  

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Freya and Family

Ingrid, Freya, Charlotte

On our East Coast trip this summer, we spent time with family...the folks who share our DNA, our history.  And other people's DNA, history...that is what we are made of, after all, combinations and recombinations of the past...moving into a future.

Ingrid, Freya

Freya is the most recent addition....well, but not really.  When Jose married Nelci this past spring in the Dominican Republic, we acquired Alejandro, her three year old son.  So families expand by birth, marriage, sometimes just hanging around for a long time...some of the "uncles" and "aunts" I knew as a child were really just good, deep friends of my parents.

Families also get smaller...death, movement away, the end of sending Christmas cards, the dropping off of marriage vows...so there is the constant ebb and flow of family units.  In part the expansion (the children of children of children) spreads us out over distance and time, lessens the bonds, forms other units.

Freya

So as Freya learns to crawl, to walk, to climb steps, to "go away from" as well as "go toward," she will possibly carry the family...this collection of genes, DNA, history...into the unfolding future, one we can not see and one, from whose distance, others would look back and ask, "Hmmm....wonder what they were like."

People Watching

Broadway at Times Square

When we lived in North Bergen, my mother and neighbors would put folding aluminum chairs on the sidewalk in the evening.  These chairs were kept in the hallway of our two story attached brick house..  The hallway led to the apartment upstairs where Mildred (and, before her, the Dumeresks) lived.  When I joined them, I sat on the stoop to Zora's apartment next door...sitting in chairs was for the adults.

They would sit for a few hours each evening...chat about the day's events but also say "hello" or not say "hello,"  sometimes just nod a greeting...to people passing by.  They'd be going to the corner store or maybe for a late walk in the park.  And after they passed by, well, there was time for a comment about them...some piece of news...some remark "She's not looking so good."  or "I heard his sister is sick."  Not any backbiting...they were not gossips.  Just collectors and disseminators of  news and observations.

Broadway in North Bergen

The street we lived on, Broadway, did not resemble the Broadway across the river in Manhattan. No room for folding chairs there. Yet that same pleasure is found in the City, as Manhattan was always referred to, as if we ourselves did not live in a city (but then we did not, we lived in a "town.")  This past fall, I was chased off a stoop around the corner from Park Avenue by a maid...so access to this pleasure is not universally granted.

In either place or, for that matter, any place, there is delight in just observing people, watching their movements, identifying characteristics that are different or the same, perhaps pointing out the color or drape of clothing...in a sense, defining ourselves by what we see or do not see in others. Or by where we sit.

Art again

The interaction of art and people is, for me, more interesting than the art in and of itself.  Objects hanging on walls can be emotionally moving...as in this Greek carving of a "maenad," a graceful dancer in worship of Dionysus...god of wine and madness.

But it is the juxtaposition of the viewer with the object that is more dynamic, more lively to me.  The manner in which the observer becomes observed...their reactions becoming part of the art itself.

Cameras, of course, have added to this interaction.  Take a picture of a picture while someone is taking a picture of you taking the picture.  So you can "own" the picture, the art, the artist?  So you can show others that you have seen this particular masterwork, this particular scene?  

So it all could become a bit confusing...if one thought about it enough.  Luckily there is little danger in such thinking since the museums in New York are just flooded with people this time of year, putting a check on the checklist of "things to do"....at least during the day.  .

But then there are refreshinly those folks who have had, well, enough.  And whose posture is less than heroic or even interested.  Waiting for a girlfriend who is still on the 4th floor, overlooking the atrium, taking photos of French impressionists.

So what is art but that which is in the eye of the beholder?

Streets of New York

I have spent many happy days wandering the streets of Manhattan.  Now I was back again for a few days.  Staying in midtown.  51st between 2nd and 3rd Ave...a central location.  Always an astonishing and stimulating place...lots of energy, lots of color, lots of sensory stimulation (good kinds, bad kinds). 

But I had never realized how much my experience was shaped by an 1811 vision of the city by a commission set up by Gov. Clinton (he, also, who began work on the Erie Canal).  When the country was just two decades old and the city had a population of just 100,000.  But more were pouring in.  So he set up a commission with powers of "eminent domain" to design a city that would stretch north of what would be 14th street to Washington Heights.  And it would be "rational"...streets east to west, avenues north to south, streets 60 feet wide, avenues 100 feet wide.  Two thousand blocks in all.  To provide workspace and housing for a projected population of 1,000,000. 

So land was bought, hills were leveled, streets pushed underground, and the blocks marched almost inevitably north.  The rational plan, of course, eventually ran into opposition...it is, after all, New York...and by 1853 a plan was developed for Central Park and, along the way, other small parks and squares were created, mainly at the behest of speculators.  Still the basic plan remained.  It is one of the signature characteristics of the city...I think unique to major world cities which have often been left to grow "organically" as spurts of population increase occur. 




The Museum of the City of New York (103rd and 5th) had an insightful exhibit devoted to this Great Grid.  And funny that as much as I had used the grid all my life as this basic urban landscape, I took it to be something "natural"...like some folks think of Central Park as "natural."  But I had never linked it to someone's "vision" for a city...certainly not to a commission that existed 200 years ago. 

And funny how unconscious we can be of the shapes that shape our lives and how a vision from so long ago can order our daily comings and goings, our sense of place, and that very place itself.