24 May 2024

Today, Friday, for the third morning in a row I’ve awakened back in my own bed, and, unlike the previous two mornings, I knew where I was.  Last Tuesday I drove the 508 miles to Madbury NH from Buffalo NY in a single long haul, arriving back at Gnawwood just before the thunderstorm that had been chasing me east much of the way.

At 5.54 on 21 May, I finally pulled into our driveway, 3440 miles more on the odometer than when I left on 1 May, and found all my daffodils spent, their jaunty trumpets replaced by swollen seed pods. The trees that were still bare when I drove away three weeks ago are now effulgent with their luminous early spring chartreuse.  The lilacs and the azaleas—at least the ones beyond the deer’s reach—are in brilliant magenta display.  In this order, I (1) unloaded the car, (2) cracked open a “Young Upstart” IPA from Portsmouth’s Liars’ Bench Brewery, (3) walked with it out the east door to survey the Solomon’s Seals, (4) heard and then spied a hummingbird visiting same, (5) immediately came in to fill and hang the hummingbird feeder, and then did the same with the bird feeders that had been secured in the garage away from bears, (6) sat on the deck as a fine mist turned to rain to finish my beer, and (7) made myself an impossible burger.  The house was warm and smelled of the newsprint from all the New York Times deliveries that kept coming despite my suspension and repeated complaints, all fortunately collected by my friend Jennifer who generously came round to water the plants.

Madbury was still having frosts when I left, but Tuesday’s stormy welcome brought with it summer heat; the porch thermometer registered 88^o yesterday.  I eased back into routine on Wednesday, unpacking, getting a haircut, and—hallelujah!—returning to Ruth’s miraculously restorative yoga class, followed by preparing and enjoying my own Wednesday-is-pasta-night dinner:  primo, Negroni; secondo, tortellini with peas and prosciutto; contorno, ensalada mista with grapefruit vinaigrette, plus a nice Chianti.  Thursday I ordered tickets for Boston’s upcoming Celebrity Series; did laundry; paid bills; had my weekly conversation with Greensboro friend Cameron; prepped for the Madbury Book Club discussion of Percival Everett’s The Trees and enjoyed our two-hour review of that novel, however solemn its initial seductively comic account of a racial reckoning proved; repeated Wednesday night’s dinner offerings; and finished the evening with two episodes of This is Us on Netflix and and the late-night monologists Kimmel, Colbert, and Myers via YouTube.

And then this morning, I awoke grieving.  Nearly caught up on sleep and mostly de-stressed after the all-consuming demands of my long road trip, I am thinking less about the complete success of my travels, during which even the setbacks had abundant compensation, and more of all that’s been lost.  My friends Barry and Ann are back in Ireland for Barry’s mother’s burial yesterday, and Season 6 Episode 5 of This is Us in which Jack mourns his mother left me crying for Barry’s and my own mom’s loss, and then, in the way of grief, all the other losses.  Flinging my sister Jane’s ashes to ride the prevailing winds blowing from Laurel Park’s Jump Off Rock over the Blue Ridge Mountains on Monday, 13 May fulfilled Jane’s wishes and brought us, her family, some peace.  But now it’s Memorial Day weekend, twenty-two years since we bid our wonderful dad George adieu on Memorial Day, scattering his ashes at the Bay Pines National Cemetery near St. Petersburg.  And five years ago this weekend I brought my darling David home from the hospital, where on 27 May 2019 we sang into the phone Happy Birthday to our Miami friend Carol. Only a few days later sometime during the night of 31 May as I slept on an air mattress at his feet, David passed peacefully away, almost 18 years to the day that we moved into Gnawwood, the home we built together. Memorial Day: it’s a lot.

Last week my loving, grieving brother-in-law Richard drove up from Jane’s and his home in Safety Harbor to meet me in the North Carolina mountains, and kindly brought me the carefully bubble-wrapped oil painting my mother Virginia painted in 1970, 333 Homestead;  I think she once exhibited it in a St. Petersburg Art Guild show.  This old house was built by Capt. John T. Lowe, who in the 1850’s sailed his schooner along the west coast of Florida from Cedar Key to Key West and Havana, delivering mail.  He settled at Anona, a small community on Boca Ciega Bay between Indian Rocks and Belleair.  There in 1849 he had a skilled craftsman build him a house “strong as a ship”:  big square nails held pitch-filled planks together.  The house was purchased in 1950 by Maurice P. Condrick of St. Pete, a man enthralled by history and genealogy.  He took the house apart board by board and brought it to St. Petersburg, where he reconstructed it at 800 37^th Street, North.  When he died in May 1970, his sons agreed to give the house and its furnishings to the St. Pete Historical Society.  For a time it seemed that the sturdy old building would be destroyed.  But the City Council overruled the City House Moving Board.  And so the “old timer” was moved down U.S. 19 to its new home next to the Hass Museum at 3511 Second Ave., S.  Oma Cross, curator of the museum at the time, saw to the complete restoration and refurnishing of the house, which was opened to the public six months later.

My mother Virginia recorded all this history on the back of the painting in Magic Marker, along with this note:  “Mick [my dad George, so called to distinguish him from his dad George], Jane, and I spent a good part of Saturday (before moving day) looking over old Homestead.  A workman was loading old bricks to carry to new site.  He said he was to do much of the restoring, too.  Wish I would have gotten his name.  He seemed to feel pride in his work and in being given task of being a part of old Homestead restoration.  Noticed mailbox overgrown with weeds, but number 333 was written on side.  VSM”

When I flew with David down to St. Petersburg to meet my parents in 1993—they had all met in London in December 1990, but before David and I were out as a couple—they drove us to see 333 Homestead, simultaneously honoring David’s expertise as an architectural historian and celebrating their daughter’s happiness.  Mother, aka the Fox, always said that her painting of 333 should go to me at her death, but as the tremendous work of clearing out the family house at 7101 Date Palm Ave., S. and later Mother’s apartment in Clearwater fell to my sister, the painting remained with Jane until Richard brought it to me when we met last week in North Carolina to honor Jane there in Laurel Park. And now 333 Homestead has made its progress north through Danville KY, Gahanna OH, Buffalo NY, and, at long last, to my own homestead, Gnawwood. 

And so, finally, it IS good to be home for Memorial Day.  Virginia always exhorted Jane and me to “make some good memories.”  We did, we have, and I will continue to do so.  There’s no place like home.

More to come, Dear Readers, about my remarkable journey.