Dispatch from Somewhere Else

First my mother moved in with us for a month.

It is hardly worth mentioning that this was not the original plan and that all has not gone as planned.
The plan was: Given her diagnosis and the impossibility of her remaining at the Orchard (even with more or less full time care, it is too big; and too full of generations of stuff causing her to be in a state of constant panic; and too far from any of her children) my mother would move into the Red Cottage right next door to us, in our back yard actually. We would make some small but necessary changes. [Such as: weed and prune the garden; repoint the brick patio; plant ferns and ginger and astilbe; remove the fence (dating back to a Draper family feud); redo the bathroom for my mother, seal up one wall, cut a door through another wall; redo the powder room to become a proper bathroom for Mom’s caregivers; paint the exterior of the house: Country Redwood, a red but not, per my mother’s description, a flaming red, but rather a tasteful, Harvard red; paint the interior of the house with colors to match my mother’s fabrics; hang my mother’s brass Cairene lamps, and French chandelier. Small changes.] Then the movers would arrive with her clothes and stuff and furniture and rugs and Egyptian objects, and in a jiffy we would set up the house to resemble the Orchard, in tasteful miniature. Then my brother would drive Mom to New York and she would walk into a house all prepared, move in, and all would be well. She would learn to love Maggie, Ada and Shedley and would even remember to turn left and walk twenty yards to get to our house. And not right and end up stranded a park full of dog walkers and Bocce-playing Croatians.

This is what has really happened so far: Redoing the bathroom turned out to be a larger project, involving: demolition, architectural plans (dear Ned Baldwin, scooting over on his Vespa, telling the electrician that no one listens to what he says), getting a building permit, ordering and acquiring and then returning multiple plumbing items and bathroom fixtures, getting plumbers and plumbing inspectors over, ditto electricians and electrical inspectors, moving large cast iron pipes, getting friendly with a dumpster in the driveway, installing plumbing fixtures, discovering that certain plumbing fixtures won’t fit, going to a large discount appliance store late at night to acquire a washer and dryer unit, visiting Home Depot at least once a day and often twice.

Meanwhile, the movers arrived with my mother’s things and put them in the Red Cottage that was nowhere near ready for habitation. Indoor plumbing being considered the sine qua non of 21st century life.

Meanwhile, my mother stayed with my brother in Boston once her things were moved from the Orchard. We hoped this would prevent a trauma by the egregious disruptions to the house she had lived in for the past 50 years. (Even though the house was, and is, still full of furniture and books and objects of mysterious provenance, and multiple portraits of my French maiden aunt’s sister who died in a flaming car crash with her lover, and a good portion of my mother’s camel collection.)
The plan changed.

After a few days in Boston, my brother would bring Mom here to stay with us while we finished up the Red Cottage. All would be fine. It would allow her to gradually transition to life in Hastings.

Then the weather turned chilly, and we turned on the heat and suddenly there was warm and fecund smell, as of a clutch of newly birthed Amazonian howler monkeys breathing heavily. CSB returned from a foray to the furnace room to report that smoke was pouring from the boiler, in an entirely inappropriate manner, and that he had flipped the emergency shut OFF switch. There would be no heat that day.
My mother stayed on at my brother’s house, while we called the plumber. First he attempted to repair the boiler. Then he told us that he had never seen this particular problem happen with this particular boiler. (A 22-year-old Peerless steam boiler.) In the matter of plumbing problems, uniqueness is pretty much the last thing you want to be saddled with.

What I have not mentioned in that without a functioning boiler, my mother could not stay with us because she is 85 years old, weighs 103 lbs., and needs an ambient temperature of at least 77 degrees.

The plumber was unable to repair the boiler. Something about the metal casing being so shot that it was impossible for the screws to get purchase. So we would have to get a new boiler. In order to get a new boiler, the old one had to be dismantled – that is to say demolished – and removed. For this task, Anton, Jimmy and Nelson arrived. Anton was the head guy. He was originally from Bulgaria and upon seeing our chickens roaming loose in the yard, he told me that back in his Bulgarian hometown his grandmother also had chickens and that she could kill and pluck and truss a chicken in less than five minutes, a record in their Bulgarian village. (I have no idea how that time compares to world records, and I was not about to ask.) Jimmy took lots of cigarette breaks out the back door, and communed with the raccoon (a chicken predator) that CSB had caught the night before in our HavaHart trap. Jimmy wanted to make himself a raccoon skin cap. Nelson was quiet and worked steadily.

It took two days to demolish and remove the old boiler. Meanwhile, the weather became warm. Unseasonably warm for November, and my mother had been at my brother’s longer than either had planned, so he brought her to us in Hastings, where we ensconced her in the large ground floor guest room. Theoretically, if she so chose, she could watch and enjoy the destruction and removal of the old and the installation of the new furnace. Theoretically, she could take walks and do jigsaw puzzles.

Reality-wise, the furnace destruction, removal and installation were all mysterious to my mother, the rituals of a tribe so foreign and idiomatically alien that when she asked for the eleventh time what the plumbers were doing, she nodded and kept talking. (There is so much to be said about plumbing. And so many metaphorical possibilities. But we will leave them for the moment.)

Reality-wise, the 500-piece jigsaw puzzles that had amused her a year ago - a painting of Breughel’s, a New Yorker cover, an illustrated floral alphabet, an Egyptian wall painting - were now too complex. The pieces were too small and indistinct. Though with the fancy jigsaw puzzle tray, with its green baize surface and wooden lip and lazy susan, fewer puzzle pieces ended up on the floor, to be sucked into the maw of the vacuum or chewed laconically by Bruno. So we acquired puzzles with 300 pieces, large brighter pieces. On the box we are told that these puzzles are suitable for ages ten and up. Reading those words on side of the cardboard box I recalled and was haunted by the scene in John Bayley’s memoir, Iris, when Iris Murdoch, his beloved wife, the brilliant novelist and philosopher, now engulfed inside Alzheimer’s, watches teletubbie cartoons. With delight. Was she another person then? Has she lost herself in a tangled mess of neurons? Where is the Iris Murdoch who wrote The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and The Word Child, and The Severed Head?

Where is my mother who taught us all the intricacies of fenestration? Where is my mother who could distinguish between Gothic revival architecture and Flamboyant Gothic architecture, not to mention Craftsman Gothic, and for whom this mattered?

She appears to be missing in plain sight. The person impersonating her has now moved, after a month in residence here, right next door to the Red Cottage.

The Importance of Jigsaw Puzzles in American Summer Houses

For a while now I have been pondering this cultural trope. It seems fairly obvious that the chief pleasure of a jigsaw puzzle is in creating (arbitrary) Order out of (contrived) Chaos. What could be more satisfying?
You start with an unsorted pile of oddly shaped bits of wood or cardboard.
Hesiod’s world also starts with Chaos, a shapeless, bundled, tangled and inchoate agglomeration of everything and nothing, neither truly solid nor fluid nor gaseous.
You empty the box onto a flat surface. Before you can do anything else you turn the pieces over onto their ‘correct’ side; the assumption of the existence of a ‘correct’ side already being a great leap away from Chaos.
Hesiod tells us how the earth(Gaea), the sky(Ether) and Eros(the creative force), separate and take on form and emerge from Chaos.
(In Book VII of Paradise Lost, Milton describes Chaos as: “… the vast immeasurable abyss. Outrageous as a sea, dark ,wasteful, wild.” It is the use of the word wasteful here that strikes me for its implied harsh judgment.)
Back in the American summer house, you sort through the turned-over pieces to find the Edges, because knowing the periphery of a thing is so helpful in defining it. Where we would be without Limits? Edges or Borders or Fences? (As you can see, we have already ventured far from a ‘simple’ jigsaw puzzle into some fairly ponderous questions.)
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the gods, the Titans and finally mankind develop on earth.
Your hands hover over the random pieces as your eye scans for matching colors and shapes; even so, your mind wanders. This puzzle featuring water birds of North America inexorably leads you to the skeleton of a Great Blue Heron that dangled from a rafter of the screened porch in Marshfield for many years. Your ex/late husband found this prize one day on the salt marsh at low tide. He strung it with fishing line and set it to spin above your heads as you dined and played Risk and painted pictures. When you last inhabited the house on the marsh, the delicate bird bones were already finely swaddled in dust and scented with marijuana and fish. Perhaps it hangs there still, witness to another decade of revelry and discord.
You return to the puzzle and discover that the blue-greenish underbelly of the avocet is similar in shade to a watery frond.
Each completed bird is created out of Chaos; each time the pieces smoothly interlock a small breath of Order enters the room.
All this, and it is only a rainy day in a musty house by a lake, where the loons sing duets in the mornings and the moose are always on the other side.

What to do when it is rain rain raining at Pleasant Pond for days on end?

• Wrack your brain for synonyms for rain & its attributes: deluge, precipitation, perilous precipitation, burst clouds & cloudbursts, torrential downpour, monsoon, cataract, pluvial unloading… swampy, malarial, foetid, muggy, miasmic, wet.
• Study the sky and look for cracks in the clouds that will reveal a leakage of blue; interpret every shift in light as “the sun coming out”.
• Get out the puzzles. Luckily for us – or not? - CSB’s grandmother, L.M., was very fond of puzzles and amassed a collection of wooden jigsaw puzzles featuring bucolic rural scenes. L.M. was born in Bingham, Maine, back when Bingham was a good place to be born. Now that the lumber mill has closed, “hoodlums” hang out on every corner and the Odd Fellows Hall is for sale, along with most every other building. She favored a brand of Wood Interlocking Jigsaw Puzzles made in England and sold at Glencraft, in South Windham, Maine.
• Read the local papers. CSB has turned me into a devoteé of the Morning Sentinel. He has taught me to appreciate obits written by family members: in central Maine every deceased was married to “the love of his/her life” and they are without fail “avid” hunters/fishermen/ outdoorsmen. Women are always “devoted” to their children and/or their husbands; absent those basic appendages it is their nieces, nephews and/or cats to whom the female in question was devoted. Given the state of the local economy, the obituaries are often the most cheerful section of the paper.
• Read about Madame de Staël (1766-1817) and Benjamin Constant (1767-1830). Whenever I see the name Benjamin Constant my ears/eyes perk up, and not on account of my encyclopedic knowledge of French literature. Many years ago I went to the Colombian Amazon. Colombia has a sliver of land that extends down to the Amazon, because of course they want a piece of the Amazonian shore, as any self-respecting country would, and at the tip of the sliver is a town called Leticia. That is where we went. Leticia was a muddy, swampy, humid (Sound familiar? Leticia was MUCH hotter.) dump populated by escaped convicts, three-headed tapirs and defrocked priests. If you walked across the border into Brazil you were in the town of Benjamin Constant*, also a fetid agglomeration of shabby decaying houses. We walked to Benjamin Constant and visited a lopsided church on stilts. Inside the church (Saô Lorenço I think) a tape recorder was plugged into a long extension cord running down the nave, and all day long it played a recording of a Mass, including the music, the sermon in Portuguese, and the mumbled responses. Someone had rigged the recorder to play continuously, though I don’t know how. I didn’t know then that Benjamin Constant had been a lover of Madame de Staël, and I certainly didn’t know that his novel Adolphe (1816) is considered to be, by some, the forerunner of the modern psychological novel. On the other side of Leticia was Peru.
• Play full contact Scrabble. This means we thumb or arm wrestle to determine the correctness of a challenged word. Does TRAVELLER have one or two L’s? I would like it to be 2, because then I also get CURL from CUR. I lost the wrestle.
• Make collages from newspaper and NYRB cuttings.
• Listen to messages on the home answering machine. Long lost friends visiting from afar; a neighbor heading for the beach; a recording of the county executive expressing his deep concern about identity theft and encouraging us to bring our papers to the county’s mobile shredder (little does he know how excited I get by the very thought of a mobile shredder); my dentist reminding me I am six months overdue for a cleaning; and CSB’s x-wife gratuitously casting aspersions on my looks and moral character.
• You know it has rained for too many days when Listening to the Answering Machine is considered an Activity.

* It seems that for all these years I have been mistaken, in error and very wrong about the eponymous Benjamin Constant. The town, according to Wikipedia, was named for a Brazilian military man (1836-1891), who, having been born 6 years after the death of THE Benjamin Constant, I have to assume was named for the French writer and lover.