A Break In Renovations For Life Milestones
a little trip to the Hudson Valley and the Norwegian wood
It was a week of milestones, and for a change I’m not talking about the renovations on the Portugal property but my life: our oldest daughter has a new baby, Octavia, who is our first grandchild. And our youngest just graduated from college.
We flew to New York to see our little neta for the first time then we all - even Octavia - drove up to Massachusetts for the graduation festivities. I know that everything that can be said about a baby has been said over and over and I will not be adding anything to the conversation except to be on record declaring her the absolute cutest baby there ever was, is or shall be, the end. I got to babysit while her mama and the h had pedicures and there was a wee moment where I almost nibbled her chonky thigh with its little chonky chonk chonk creases but I settled for making up songs about what her life is going to be like.
After graduation Sophia and her astrophysicist namorado Tasan will climb to the top of the campus observatory and view the night sky at Williams one final time. Then they will climb into a car and drive to the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, then North Carolina, Tennessee, New Orleans and Mississippi where they will stay at a Buddhist retreat before spending the next twenty years crossing the state of Texas on their way to California, the same place we departed from four long-short years ago, driving all the way to Massachusetts during COVID to start her freshman year.
I have never been to a Buddhist retreat but I have been in the Nevada desert lying in a camper with the back door propped open to the calm, sleepable dessert air while Tasan played the cello under a dark night sky fuming with starlight. We were there in the darkest part of the desert where no light pollution penetrated so Tasan could take pictures of the night sky with his astrophysics equipment that is too complicated for me to understand even after I ask and he explained. It was one of the best nights of sleep I’ve ever had, everyone should fall asleep to live cello music in the desert some time.
If cello music is the best music to fall asleep by, the songs of frogs are a close second. At Agatha’s, we fell into bed the first night, exhausted from a full morning at the fazenda before crossing an ocean for twelve hours, then renting a car and making the two hour drive to the Hudson Valley. I was falling asleep during the drive and then jerking awake; I can never sleep in the car at night while someone else is doing the driving. I actually try, but something deep inside me wakes me up just as I start falling down the sleep rabbit hole.
We pulled up to Agatha’s place around midnight and I was never so happy to find a beautifully made bed waiting for me. The window was open to their backyard, a screen in place to keep out the bugs but let in the sound of the bullfrogs calling back and forth. As I lay down it began to rain, so I fell asleep to the sound of rain pattering onto the surface of the pond.
Hearing these sounds transported me back a year ago, when we spent nearly a month with Agatha and Paul while waiting to finalize paperwork for getting our temporary visas and transporting our dog Jake to Portugal.
That thirty days was like a lilypad floating on a chaotic year; everything that happened before and after that thirty days was difficult, complicated and required the h and I to pull together as a team like never before.
Now I’m not a good relaxer. Even when I smoke weed, I have to have the kind that makes your head blast off from your neck like a rocketship full of ideas. I loathe being a couch potato. But the property that our daughter and her husband have started their family on is a magical little place - a craftsman cottage of wood and stone that sits on twenty acres with a large pond as the centerpiece, innumerable trees plus big gardens of vegetables and flowers. While we were there, time seemed to simultaneously stretch out and stand still, especially at night when we lay in bed with the windows open listening to the frogs and the peepers.
Whereas this summer is one of milestones, last summer was one of transitions - we had sold our ski cabin in January, given up our beloved apartment in the Presidio of San Francisco in February, flown to Portugal to finalize buying the property in Belas, stayed on site for a few months getting renovations started before returning to the US to consolidate all of our storage units - there were seven - into containers (there are five, four headed to Portugal, one to Alaska), and had the final meeting to get our residence visas (a snafu with my fingerprinting on the FBI report being unreadable added two months to the process).
Immediately after the visa meeting, we drove away from the Bay Area for the last time. Though we will visit again - we have many friends there - that drive on 101 with the city skyline in our rearview mirror was a true farewell. We no longer had a home in the mountains or the city, and we were waiting for word from the Portuguese consulate that our temporary visas were approved. When that happened we’d fly to Portugal and begin occupying our new home. There would be no respite from the buildings full of junk that would need to be hauled away, the ancient dirt that would have to be cleaned, the broken windows and doors, holes in ceilings and floors and whatever else lurked within a house that had been unslept in for more than four decades. Like it or not, wise move or not, it would be home, to make of it what we will.
But first we had to get our dog Jake to New York, where we’d depart for Portugal to keep the flight as short as possible for him. We drove across the United States, stopping first in southern Illinois to spend time with my mom who is now living alone for the first time in her life after my daddy, her husband of more than 60 years, died last June. It was hard going into that familiar house, feeling dad’s absence like a presence. It overwhelmed me and I went downstairs on the pretext of getting a bottle of water from the fridge, thinking I could get a hold of myself but that was a mistake - the basement was where dad had his workshop, and the orderly silence of it hit me like a blow. There on the sawhorses were the beginnings of a project he would never finish. The surface of his workbench was tidy as usual. His tools were all neatly hung on the pegboard (for some reason it was this sight that brought the tears). I will never understand how I can have two parents who have genius-level organization skills and turn out the way I did, piles of books and papers everywhere, a place that looks like an I’ve Been Meaning To Get To This tornado keeps passing through.
I brought the h down to dad’s workshop and we fingered the tools and just looked around in a kind of awe. Someday, love, the h said, and I knew what he meant - it’s a kind of code we share. Meaning, someday it will happen to us too, we will die, and be missed by the ones who love us, and the world will go on without us, our once-precious-to-us stuff scattered to family members and strangers and landfills.
I picked up the tiniest screwdriver in the line of screwdrivers stuck through holes in a row, remembering how dad would give me a tiny screw and piece of wood so that I could “work” alongside him when I was small. The h picked a few more tools, and packed them away, and they came with us to Portugal, making a stop in Greenville to visit his sister Kim. We’d arrived, a bunch of us, after a family gathering at the h’s mom’s lake house in South Carolina, where Agatha announced her pregnancy. We were on our way, driving, to NY; everyone else was flying home to scattered points. The house was full, every bed in the house claimed when Kim announced that the shower had stopped working. It was a holiday weekend and no plumber could make it out and even if they could at what cost? The h went into action and fixed the problem and everyone had showers and we all crowded onto the big sectional to watch the US Open. I knew you could fix it, I told the h. I couldn’t have done it without your dad’s tools, he whispered, and I sniffed a little and he put his arm around me. It’s still such a shock, remembering my dad isn’t in the world.
Our month-long road trip from west to east terminated in upstate New York where our oldest was in the early months of her first pregnancy. We took over the guest room, waiting for notification from the Portuguese embassy that our visas were approved, and taking the steps necessary to get Jake ready for his first and only airplane flight, to his new home. The process to get Jake abroad were filled with setbacks but step by step we got them accomplished, and in the meantime there were benefits, with Jake swimming every day in the pond, wrestling with Agatha’s rambunctious German Shepherd puppy Caju, meandering around the property and the little villages that dot the upstate area. We saw the films Oppenheimer and Barbie, went to a house party, ate pizza on the spreading lawn of the Rose Hill Farm. Finally in mid-August we flew to our new home, and two days later Jake joined us.
Now here we were returning just a year later, and everything is different. Jake is back in Portugal with the Alaskans, who were still exploring. When we arrived at Agatha’s it was late, everyone in bed, the house dark and quiet. We greeted Caju who whimpered with joy to see us, then fell into bed and asleep almost immediately. I awoke a few hours later to the sound of rain falling on the pond, the bullfrogs calling in their stentorian voices. The recall of last summer was so total that when I got up to go to the bathroom I looked downstairs on the couch for Jake, but there was only Caju with his quizzical ears. I missed my guy. Kirsten and Tim sent us pictures every day - at the beach running with other dogs one day, another shows him grinning at me in front of a cliff, a group of climbers gathered behind him, one dangling from a rope in midair.
In the morning we woke to the sound of birds and made a quick trip to a bakery in Red Hook, returning home as baby Octavia was just waking up. She is a long baby with blue eyes and a monk’s tonsure of dark hair. She has a serious expression - one grandfather is a judge and when she scowls she looks like him. It should also be noted that she has a skeptical arch in her right eyebrow just like the h, and Agatha. She makes adorable baby sounds - little hiccups and coos and phhhats and beeyoops. She has edible cheeks.
I asked Aggie if there was anything she wanted to do but couldn’t with a baby and that is how I got her and the h to go get dad-and-daughter pedicures while I got Octavia all to myself. Many avo achievements were unlocked - diaper change and singing her to sleep, the same songs I sang Sophia to sleep with.
The property had a few changes since last year, namely the addition of two Oz-worthy platts of Icelandic poppies of all colors and even stripes near the low swamplands of the pond, beyond its ring of monster cattails.
Two nights with Agatha and we were off again, headed to Williamstown Massachusetts and Sophia’s graduation. I love driving through the Hudson Valley with all of its gorgeous old barns cheek by jowl with the windy two lane highway running through it. The azaleas blazed in giant pink mounds that dwarfed the bushes I had in Houston.
Sophia’s mom rented an AirBnB for her parents and various others traveling to town to cheer Sophia out of college. There we reunited with Sophia’s grandparents and joked around with her grandad per usual, and laughed at the mug grandmom was drinking coffee from (We’re bad ass, let’s keep that shit up). We had wine and cheese then we were all treated to dinner at The Barn by Sophia’s stepdad, a cool modern and yes barn-like space with a private room with a table that could fit Sophia’s crew and her boyfriend’s crew plus a few friends besides. It was a jolly dinner, everyone catching up with each other’s stories, the air above the table filled with crisscrossing conversations like invisible spiderwebs. Everyone had interesting stories and moving to Portugal ranked high among them.
We got to cross-examine Sophia’s boyfriend’s little brother, who was like a super nerd mini-me of his graduating brother and who often caught me off guard with his humor (also like his brother). The h kept teasing Sophia’s grandmother that he doesn’t remember her. Now who are you, he would say to her. Oh I always forget who people are too, she would reply, laughing, and in fact, she was saying something true, but also recognizing she was being teased, which was the h’s point. People with Alzheimer’s don’t slip away all at once, and often they surprise you with what they do remember.
Mother this is Sophia’s dad, you remember him, Sophia’s mom said in a loud patient voice and the three of us suppressed laughter at our little joke. It made me miss my daddy so.
When I last saw Sophia’s younger half brother Benjamin he was a little squirt playing with Star Wars toys, now he is a tall teenager with a sense of style and nimbly quick witted like his dad. At one point the h, god knows why, mentioned I’d recently done quite a bit of research on rats, which is true but I am not sure relevant to anything one needs to talk about at a group dinner…and then young Benjamin piped up Yeah but do you know what a rat king is? with all the confidence of a 15 year old that was one hundred percent certain I did not, could not, would not know. But reader - I knew.
Yeah in my short story The Mischief Queen the main character goes to her mom’s room wearing one on her head like a hat, I told him with a big grin. He agreed that is pretty gross and suggested a rat king could also make a good choker necklace. I said he showed promise but that I think the more interesting question of the night wasn’t, do I know what a rat king is but rather why does *he* know? He ducked the question. His dad roared with laughter. His mom rolled her eyes and called them co-conspirators. It was as good a time as any to tell Sophia there was a final test. Okay what, she said.
I don’t like snails, I said.
Or toads or frogs, she said.
Or strange things, I said.
Living under logs, she said.
Everyone was laughing now, so loud that I’m not sure they heard all the words. The h laughed so hard he cried. Oh my god, he said. I can totally remember standing in the kitchen hearing the two of you singing that in Sophia’s room.
I don’t like snails or toads or frogs
or strange things living under logs
but mmmm, I love onions.
I don’t like shoes that pinch my toes
or people that squirt me with the garden hose
but mmmm, I love onions.
The Onion Song was an early favorite bedtime song. I also sang selections from Elton John, The Beatles, Crystal Gale, and The Eagles, but this one hit wonder by Susan Christie was interactive and always a signal Sophia would really have to go to bed after the next song. I always sang it in my best Ginger Grant from Gilligan’s Island voice.
Jet-lagged, we were up by 5a and walking around the campus by six, where workers were already banging together the platform the speakers would speak from and the graduates would cross later that day.
The wind was blowing last night something smaaaat said one of the workers in a thick Massachusetts accent that made me feel like I was in a movie, with the sun slanting through the trees on the morning-quiet campus. The grass sparkled with dew, the empty tennis courts showing off their Williams purple surfacing. The flowers everywhere were Williams colors, purple and yellow.
The h and I stayed in a dorm room on campus, as the AirBnB was overcrowded and we liked the idea of the dorm room. We were on the 4th floor, our rooms floating at the tops of trees, a much better view than I ever had from my college dorms. In the morning after our first night I had to tiptoe over to the h’s room where I had left my shoes and jacket and purse, and do a five foot walk of shame back to my own room. It made me absurdly happy to be doing that at an age that I once considered ancient, and now consider to be in the teenage stage of my old age.
It was not a restful night, despite the absolute quiet of the trees, because my room was between the h’s room and the father of Sophia’s boyfriend, putting me in the middle of a world class snoring competition.
SSSnnnnggghhhhs said the h.
Ghhhhhrrrrrrkkkk said Tasan’s dad.
When I entered the h’s room for my things he woke up immediately with a Who’s there and climbing out of bed before his eyes were fully open. So you can hear a really light snick of the door opening, but not you own deafening snores, I said. He agreed that this is the way it is. I feel like if I move to another room and his snores follow me, the snoring is now *his* problem to solve, and not mine by continuing to find alternative places to sleep, but I don’t think my opinion had much impact.
Luckily the palaceta has four floors, one of them is even below ground, and quiet as a tomb. The fourth floor is kind of a big attic like the one those kids lived in in that horror trilogy, Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews. Snoring in those places wouldn’t bother anyone. Don’t tell the h I brought any of this up.
There were many little ceremonies before the big day. Sophia and Tasan were inducted into the Society of Sigma Psi, a scientific research community by invitation only which includes 180 Nobel winners so not a bad club to belong to. Watching each recipient cross the stage then turn to face the crowd, beaming, I thought There they are, the next generation of scientists, they looked like kids but they hold the future in their hands more than any other group of graduates.
There was a musical program put on by the musical scientists which turns out there were a lot - cellists and pianists and singers and a jazz quartet. It was my favorite part of the weekend program, and Tasan himself closed out the performance with a cello solo.
The day of the graduation ceremony was like every other graduation ceremony - everyone sweating in the hot sun for a long time for a brief look at their graduate, pacing in cap and gown, walking across a stage, throwing a mortarboard and just like that, their childhoods would be over. They would leave different people than they woke as.
The h found seats in the bleachers under a shade tree. To entertain myself I parent-watched. The lemony yellow sun of early morning in early summer shone down, the crowd was all dressed in light colors. I spotted a sari in saffron and orange hues. A blue polka dotted dress with blue hat that looked just like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, a look I thought was pretty subversive in a quiet way. A woman with a sage green dress with such a perfect straw boater a line from an Adele song rose to mind, You look like a movie…..
The colors for Williams are purple and yellow so those colors were represented in clothing choices - blouses, button downs, ties, hats - even the bows in little girls’ hair. I was the only parent with purple hair; there was a student with lavender ombre hair, a graduate from biology who also played the piano.
All fashion modalities were represented, from the dad with the Aussie cowboy hat and the aloha rubber slippers to the Breakfast At Tiffany’s mom with her perfect navy dress with just the right amount of white piping and gold aviators. She looked cool as lemonade.
There was a woman who was style perfection in a cream sleeveless sheath with black embroidery at the waist, lucite heels, a perfect yellow purse over one arm, an even more perfect red blazer over the other arm.
The audience was a sea of tasteful hats. An awesome purple and yellow Pucci bucket hat caught my eye. There was a beret the velvety color of petunia purple. A mom and daughter with identical shades of auburn hair glowing in the afternoon sun like banked embers. I saw two long lavendar prairie-style dresses I loved but could never pull off. A woman in a crisp white dress with a purple umbrella and shining black bob of hair was sculptural in her stylishness. Another woman in a flawless khai coat dress and navy blue parasol made me want to start dressing just like her, every day. A young man in a. cream fedora-like hat and blue blazer reminded me of an ice cream cone; when another young man stood near him in cream pants and shirt and pale pink blazer it was like we were suddenly in The Great Gatsby. Someone blew bubbles, their pink iridescence drifting over the crowd and adding to the film-like sense of unreality to the beauty of the day.
The ceremony started with a bagpipe solo, a good choice as slowly but surely everyone starts feeling the import of seriousness begin.
A phalanx of professors in red and blue striped robes, in orange embroidered and purple velvet caps, in colored stolls of pink and royal blue and vermillion led the procession. They were followed by the students, grouped according to school. Parents yelled for their kids to look over here. Over here! Two sets of parents blew airhorns to get their kid’s attention. Everyone behind me and the h yelled in unison WE LOVE YOU KEVIN! The students from forty two different countries blew kisses and looked around with tassels swinging past their eyes and it was grand.
There were the obligatory speeches. A few sentences seemed to throw themselves clear from all the other speeches, words spoken by the only living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre - laying them out, they pretty much make a speech by themselves:
Life is hard enough without doing it alone
Never be afraid to ask for help and stand firm in what is right
Help comes from unexpected places
Make America better and kinder.
Point yourself in the direction of doing good
One of the student speakers talked about this graduating class having the distinction of being the COVID class - no high school graduation ceremony, college drop off a touchless affair, no parents allowed out of cars, and now a college graduation that actually featured a speaker appearing by video because he had, you guessed it, COVID.
Remember, the boy said, how you could walk all the way across campus and never see a single other student?
My fellow classmates, he said. Each of us have our own paths to follow… he choked up a bit and had to take a moment. I think something about saying “My fellow classmates” made him realize, some of these people he would never see again, that they were all really doing it, graduating and leaving school and by the end of the week they would be scattered to all points of the globe
After the ceremony we met Sophia’s adviser, who was just returned from a long research trip in Alaska. Then we were off to the airport, zipping past the neat barns and red Japanese maples and the White mountains on three sides of us. Then we were on the train to the terminal, the distant NY skyline blue with twilight. As I watched the skyline a shaft of sunset light pierced the clouds, giving the city a shining red halo. The kids in the seats opposite me notice it too and snapped picture after picture. I wonder if all the pictures will show their own ghostly reflections on the windows.
Two planes in one day to get to Oslo, where we attended a conference during the day and stayed with good friends at night. On the second flight, my seatmate was going to Norway for the first time. I showed her pictures of Octavia. She told me her husband died, last year, and that he had wanted her to start a new chapter. So here I am, she said, resolved but with a palpable sadness that made me want to hug her.
Later that evening when we headed to the house of our friends, I watched the landscape slide past the train window, the houses in shades of red and yellow and black, the traditional grassy roofs dotted with daisies. I love Norway. It always feels like home to come here. I especially love the house of our friends, made of reclaimed wood with traditional fencing, a sprawling garden dotted with ancient statues. You never really leave the outside behind in this house; it follows you from room to room, peering in at the floor to ceiling windows. Everywhere there are books - on shelves, in towers stacked on the floor. Every time I come here I resume reading what I was reading on the last trip - this time it is The Sea The Sea by Iris Murdoch.
We climbed the ladder to our sleeping loft. It was my destiny as always to stay awake very late into the night for the rest of the trip - the white nights of midsummer call their siren song to me. But on the first night I was too tired to do anything but wait for sleep. I remembered a little girl on the train earlier in the day. She said hi to everyone, and when she saw me looking at her she said hi twice. Hi, I said, and waved. She imitated my wave; she was maybe two, maybe bit younger with a sweet joyful pixie face that made something inside you go, Aw. Her mom smiled at me; the sun slanting through the train window illuminated them like a renaissance Madonna and child.
The h napped in his train seat; I wanted to close my eyes but was worried I’d fall so deeply asleep I wouldn’t hear our stop called. I needn’t have worried though; when my eyes closed of their own accord I could hear the little girl calling Hi, hi! her friendly little vioce like a talking daisy, a filament connection to reality, the two of us hurtling through space and time on a journey on a day she won’t even remember and I won’t ever forget.
Today is the final day of our trip. Tomorrow we will return home to our dog and our chickens and all the work that awaits us…but today we will wander the Norwegian wood and I will stay awake late into the night reading the book our host has gifted me, Journey to Portugal by Jose Saramago, so that by the time I wake I will be halfway home.
What a wonderful moving piece of writing! I absolutely teared up in your Daddy's workshop! I was with you in the snoring dorm and saw with you the fabulous outfits! I am an absolute wreck when the cello plays , and wish I could have experienced the star-fumed sky as you did. The Norway section has me reaching for a travel guide and wishing to stay in that book-lined wooden house. But am cheered to think of you returning to those glorious chickens- Princess Leia- and her companions; to the endless stone steps; and most of all- to that silver muzzled darling that is Jake!
Adding “falling asleep to cello music in the desert” to my bucket list! ❤️