Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees

Margotlog: Cold and Cats and Joyce Lyon's Drawings of Trees

    "Bundle up!" My mother used to say. We were kids in Charleston, South Carolina, and "bundling," as in wrapping a girl in a blanket and putting her to bed with a visiting young man (when sleeping space was scarce--or not)--well, it was something they did in our mother's North Dakota, not in S. Carolina where the weather was mild.

     But even when we walked home from school, lowering winter days sent humid cold went right through us. In our Old Citadel apartment with its sixteen-foot ceilings, heat rose and disappeared. Our father, who "felt the cold," wrapped a gray-blue scarf around his neck and pinned it in place. He wasn't Santa Claus but something like the Muffin Man or the "old man dressed all up in leather,"
               I asked his destination and said the day was fine,
               He said he was on his way to Dalton by way of the Alton line
So memory has it in those "misty, moisty mornings of real Chicago weather." Another from my mother's cornucopia of sayings.

     Today before I began walking our Saint Paul neighborhood, it rained, then snowed furiously for twenty minutes, then settled into a gray-white wind. I had to go back for a scarf before heading out along rain-wet sidewalk, past piles of musty, declining snow.

     On either side of us now live members of the next younger generation. Pet ownership, in place for decades at our house, now attracts them. Other homeowners along the block have put up bird feeders. I don't complain of these expansions of sympathy. But I have to remind myself that, like them, we began by adopting cats that actually lived elsewhere, or cats that wandered the neighborhood, taking hand-outs where offered.

    With all the cat action, the birds I've enjoyed feeding for years now disappear for days at a time. It doesn't help that hawks fly over periodically. A few days ago, a mound of white feathers tinged with gray identified the remains of a pigeon. Only a large hawk, a red-tailed hawk, could have carried away a bird that big. A slanting streak of blood on my side window marked the passage.

     What, after all, do we care about? Good question to ask this season when politicians of many stripes seek to engage us. Yesterday evening, Fran and I visited Form and Content Gallery, a Minneapolis cooperative just north of Hennepin Avenue. Our friend Joyce Lyon had new work there.

     What, after all, captures and moves us? I have admired her large pastel drawings for a long time, especially those early ones of her night backyard in South Minneapolis--the dark suffused with bright light from indoors, as if a fire burned and menaced the arms of trees and the rigid angles of a clothes pole.

     Now she has created watery daylight where sparse trunks of trees bend slightly, move off into their own business, or align themselves either side of a goddess beam. Now we are quiet observers, letting the trees make what they will of us.

     There is both vacancy and relief in this quiet grove. We don't always have a say.