When the grandkids think they are lost in the back woods I ask them if they can find our house, which looks like this from the back. Here it stands, a sprawling old farmhouse full of quirks and charms on two and a quarter acres of land. The place was built at some unknown date before 1900, and  little by little over the past thirty years we have furnished it with shabby chic  antiques from a century ago. 

 Since yesterday, The Private World of Tasha Tudor has been lying on the bed in the Grandmothers’ Room.  Tasha shared a birthday with my mother, which both would have celebrated tomorrow. In honor of the occasion the Tudor family is offering the chance to win a hand-cranked ice cream churn. Wouldn’t homemade ice cream be a delicious treat? We expect very warm days this weekend.

 The perennials rushed into bloom this summer, leading me to expect an early frost. For all these thirty years we have heated with wood. Ten cords of stacked firewood stand ready for the comning winter.  but thus far the leaves remain green and we pick high-bush blueberries every day.  The balmy weather does not stop me from collecting  new yarns and needles for the winter’s knitting, or from exploring further into Barbara Walker’s  Treasury of Knitting Patterns , anticipating quiet hours in an antique rocker near one of the woodstoves, where I plan to knit a shawl in the Rose Trellis pattern using Lorna’s Laces yarns.

I heard that the entire Harvard Library will be available online in about ten years, but I am a lover of books I can hold in my hands, especially old books. The volume pictured is tiny, just three inches wide by four and five eighths, and the gold that edges its pages is almost worn off. The title is Forget-Me-Not; or the Philipena, by Mrs. Lunt. Date of publication is 1848.

The time is good to leave the moment and the era and dwell in a different dimension. I recently called Dahlov, having read the tale of Thomas the Rhymer, who enjoyed the blue veronica blooming and the splashing of the burn. With what other person could I mention an old English ballad and receive in response the gift of several verses spoken from memory? In a folktale version, Thomas does not want to accept from the Queen of Elfland the gift of a tongue that always speaks the truth. He thinks she must know little of the ways of the world, for when he bargains at markets, or speaks at court, or flatters ladies, he cannot safely speak the truth.

After seven years away, Thomas returned home from Elfland and his neighbors and friends asked, “Where have ye been, True Thomas?”

“I have been ~ dreaming,” True Thomas answered.

In Earlston, ivy-covered ruins remain, still called the Rhymer’s Tower.

And so in fairy tale and myth the very core of the here and now has emerged, just as the chunk of green tourmaline appeared in my overturned garden soil last week.

Today I bought a book as old as I am, a Random House publication from 1940. Attracted by the illustrations, I paid $3.50 for a copy formerly owned by Clarence V. Blake, Jr. of Cumberland Foreside. The title page informs the reader that the original color plates reproduced in the volume are in the State Museum at Albany, N.Y.  The artist’s name does not appear but he is Louis Agassiz Fuertes, an ornithologist, illustrator and artist. His signatures appear on the reproduced watercolors. The text of the work is by  science writer and conservationist Maitland A. Edey. I am astonished to learn that in 1957, at the age of 47, Maitland Edey served as a working crew member on the Mayflower II! I have poignant memories of boarding that tiny ship when it lay anchored in New York City.

Arriving home with my songbird book this afternoon, I noticed an unfamiliar bird at the suet feeder. Help me out if you recognize this bird from my description. From my Audubon Field Guide, I would guess it was a Bay-breasted Warbler, attracting my attention with its almost-robin-colored underbody. Larger and rounder than a goldfinch, it had a goldfinch-look to its wings, with perhaps two light-colored bars. I thought at first that I might have seen a Kinglet, but they are tiny, smaller than goldfinches.

In the photo, my antique book lies open to the Kinglet and Wood Thrush page. The flowers in the lower right corner are petunias in one of my porch pots, now thriving indoors in a sunny south window.

This blossom opened today. I bought the plant originally from the Thornton Burgess estate on the Cape.

Today a book by Robert Nathan arrived in the mail. I mentioned him in my post titled “Hurricanes.” He was the author of “some thirty-six volumes of poetry and prose,” I read on the dust jacket, where I find a photo of him. I will try to find some of his poetry.
The Sea-Gull Cry is a novel and a quick glance through its pages reveals that it will be another Cape Cod book, this one written in 1942 when I was two and he was 48. It was probably 1960 when I first began writing to him.
What a kindly author, to answer his fan mail in person!

In his 1997 book THE GIFT OF FEAR Gavin de Becker writes that after the shock of violence has begun to heal, victims “will be carried in their minds…back to the time when they still had choices, before they fell under someone’s malevolent control, before they refused the gift of fear.”

Has anyone considered the possibility of a life that from birth on was never ever free for a moment from someone’s malevolent control? I believe my experience is typical of persons born into religious cults. I was taught to distrust my instincts, to discredit and ignore all of my feelings and to replace them with submission and obedience. The very people who should have protected me and taught me survival skills were themselves dangerous, and deliberately removed from my survival apparatus the tools for recognizing danger. I grew up unable to distinguish between safe and unsafe people, unable to scream, unable to take a stand in my own defense. I was raising children of my own before I recognized some of the voids in my personality development and began to do work that should have been done in early childhood.

Not every therapist is skilled in cult recovery issues. I met any number of them who wanted nothing whatever to do with a person born and raised in a religious cult. I met religious people who wanted nothing to do with me because in their view I still carried with me the contamination of having been raised in a cult. Some of the other ex-members will not speak of the past, because of similar discrimination that they have experienced.

Taking the step to leave the cult is only the beginning of what will be a lifelong journey toward healthy adulthood.

This is the North Truro cabin where my family stayed on the Cape in the summer of 1950 or thereabouts. The photo was taken in 1990.
Author Robert Nathan wrote me that he often noticed the cabin as he drove toward the mainland from Provincetown. Nathan wrote the novel Portrait of Jennie in 1940, the year I was born. I am holding a first edition copy in my hands as I write. The book tells the story of an artist. It opens in New York City with the words, “There is such a thing as hunger for more than food…” and culminates with a hurricane scene set near Truro. I first read the story in the 1960’s, and my letters to and from Robert Nathan date from then.

The Truro cabin no longer exists. I seem to recall that it blew away in a storm but that may have been The Outermost House. I have heard that condominiums now overlook the Bay where our cabin once stood.

I write this entry as the remnant of another hurricane soaks our New England landscape, a storm that today took the life of a young girl at Thunder Hole in Acadia.

Today I stopped at the flea market and noticed a tiny antique book in a jewelry case. I often buy small books at reasonable prices for my gnome dolls. This was a hymnal, leather-bound, with no cover. I asked the vendor for the price. “Ten dollars. Printed in 1839,” she said. “It would be nice if it had a cover,” I replied, and moved away. “I can give it to you for five,” she said. I found a five dollar bill for her in my bag and took the book.

I hoped it contained “Christ before me,” one of the very few hymns I can tolerate, but I could not remember its opening line. I went home and found a beautiful version on YouTube, read first in English and then probably in Irish. The proper name of the hymn is “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” My tiny Methodist Episcopal Hymnal of 1839 does not contain this hymn. What a loss.

I picture a tidy gentleman from Tasha Tudor’s favorite era, dressed in a well-cut suit, wearing a hat and carrying a cane, setting off for church down a country lane with this tiny hymnal tucked into his pocket, together with a magnifying glass. The book is only two inches wide, three inches tall, and an inch thick, with 623 pages!

Since I am capable of playing shoemaker and creating little elven boots, I think I can manage to make a replacement book cover from a scrap of soft old brown leather.