Georgeann Murphy

Can it be the heat stroke I nearly gave myself when I mowed the grass last steamy Thursday that accounts for the dreams I’ve had in the past couple of days?  Yesterday brought a classic anxiety dream:  being unprepared for a lecture (hadn’t even read the book yet) and then trying to get to class in a version of the Norton Center at Centre College, but in an elevator that impossibly traveled both vertically and—horizontally??  This morning it was sharing a bathtub and shower with Vladimir Putin and his wife (??)—all three of us naked—with diplomatically averted eyes, and then having trouble deciding which jewelry to wear with my formal dress as I stood in my messy freshman dorm room—at summer camp?  I had risked mowing in the heat because the frequency of thunderstorms this summer has meant very limited windows of opportunity to cut grass threatening to grow past the capacity of my EGO mower.   (LOVE that brand!)  But it was near 90, both in temperature and humidity, taxing me AND the EGO’s lithium battery.  I won’t do that again, risking climate-changed weather consequences that have already taken a toll on the peach orchards of New Hampshire.  No fruit this year due to a forward spring followed by a mid-May frost that nipped the crop in the bud. 

The time is, as Hamlet observed, out of joint.

But my hibiscus, outside on the deck for the summer, is flourishing in New Hampshire weather masking as Florida.

Making the most of time between storms, I’ve quite enjoyed July thus far with three outdoor fêtes within the past 8 days.  On Saturday, 1 July, I rode south to Newton, MA with Mara and Peter, relishing the Schadenfreude inspired by the traffic barely creeping north on I-95 in a tailback that stretched all the way to the Whittier Memorial Bridge over the Merrimack at Newburyport.  As we approached the Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, the Boston skyline was obscured by Canadian wood smoke, but that seemed to lift by the time we arrived in Newton.

This reunion of UNH colleagues in the art department, plus spouses and daughter, was made all the more delightful by the patio setting under a canopy of still-spring-green leaves.  A superior evening, both in repast and company.  (I find my diction growing more Dickensian as I reread David Copperfield in preparation for Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead.)

My own on-the-Fourth party was also a reunion of art department colleagues, plus a couple of my newer acquaintance.  The morning’s rain stopped and the sun broke through just as the first guest arrived, allowing for appetizers on the first floor west-facing deck while I grilled burgers on the ground floor driveway to the east.

After the main course, the five guests plus my great neighbors Anne and young Leo adjourned to the deck to view my little fireworks display.

That display provided an unexpected lagniappe of drama when a firework new to me—a ladybug—went airborne from its whirling, shrieking ground display and careened toward the guests up on the deck.  No harm done, though, thanks to the maternal instinct of the supple Anne, who performed a wild duck and roll to protect her 5-year-old son.  Mother and child returned home unscathed, and the rest of us went back to table for Ritz Carlton lemon pound cake with rhubarb sauce and more affable talk, this time including me, having sweatily completed my three-ring-circus hospitality (much assisted by guests who loaded the dishwasher while I was making sure no flaming ladybug was going to light the apse roof on fire).  All hail such friends—and the obligingly timed rain that bookended the celebration.

Then yesterday, 8 July, my friend Vicky and I made our way to Great Island Common on New Castle for a small evening picnic at the beach.  On arrival, a thick, very wet fog threatened to douse that plan.  But a brief stroll along the beach dispelled our fears, and the water I waded was warmer than I’d ever experienced, even as the fog made the nearby lighthouse invisible.  A large diesel engine thrummed from an equally invisible vessel perhaps making its way to the mouth of the Piscataqua as a lone cormorant played the Loch Ness Monster in the mysterious murk and the foghorn made its periodic moan.  Very Eugene O’Neill, all this salty, thick air.  Quite enchanting.  And all the more so when two dear friends unexpectedly emerged through the mist, Carol and Barry, who was making his outdoor debut following ankle surgery, carefully circling the Common with his afflicted foot in a boot resting on a rather high tech scooter.  A happy meeting this; serendipitously lovely conversation ensued before Vicky and I settled in at picnic table with our lobster rolls, watermelon salad, and citronella candle as lone picnikers, soggy but undaunted, enjoying the limited, dreamy ocean view.

I’ve had so many memorable Fourths.  Three from the past stand out.  (Cue Joni Mitchell:  “We can’t return, we can only look behind from where we came . . . .”)

On our first Fourth of July together, 1991 in England, David rented a car and drove us to visit Hammerwood Lodge near East Grinstead in West Sussex, one of the first houses in England to be built in the Greek Revival style and in 1792, Benjamin Latrobe’s first independent work.  America’s first professional architect, Latrobe would go on to modify William Thornton’s original design for the U. S. Capitol, so Hammerwood was an appropriate July Fourth destination for us Americans abroad, so recently having reversed Latrobe’s transatlantic passage.  Deploying his signature charm in such circumstances, David, dressed in jacket and tie and armed with Nikon, was shooting slides of the Hammerwood façade to show in his classes, UNH business card at the ready.  His gradual approach first piqued the interest of and, on introduction to my dear architectural historian professor, so flattered the Lodge’s owner, David Pinnegar (a physicist with an Oxbridge stammer and a wonderfully enthusiastic nature–he literally jumped for joy), that he invited us inside to look and then take tea on the terrace with him and his mother. 

That July Fourth spent in Latrobe’s country house would ten years later help shape the home we designed for ourselves:  from Hammerwood to Gnawwood.

And then there was July 4, 1976, when my beloved dad George drove me and my cat Ariel from the Murphy home in St. Petersburg to New Orleans to help me find an apartment for my first year of graduate school at Tulane.  That Bicentennial Fourth was memorably difficult:  first, there was car trouble that meant a layover at an Alabama garage while my cat, not a good traveler, yowled from underneath the front seat.  The repair took so long that we could not continue on to New Orleans as planned, but because it was the holiday weekend, we went from motel to motel finding there was no room in any inn.  Finally, one place in Mobile had one room left—furnished with only a Murphy bed!  That sufficed, and the next day we drove on to Marrero, where accommodations were less dear across the Mississippi from the Crescent City. My dad’s migraine lifted, and I found my first New Orleans apartment at the end of the St. Charles streetcar line at the intersection of Carrollton and Claiborne:  11 Fountainbleau drive.

When my dad later saw his credit card bill and what that Murphy bed room had cost, always obliging George wrote the motel manager a letter saying he would be glad to pay a reasonable sum for our stay, but would not play so inflated a premium for a very short night in a shared bed cantilevered to a wall.  That manager subsequently comped our Fourth of July room.  And my dad never had another migraine.

But my most iconic Fourth memory comes from furthest back at one of my Aunt Mart and Uncle Kenny Senseman’s annual celebrations at their home on Waving Willow in Kettering, a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, my parents’ hometown and where at the time (~1960) my Murphy grandparents still lived on Springbrook Boulevard.  The Senseman home’s terraced back yard was where most of my childhood July Fourths were celebrated, partly because we visited the Murphys in Ohio each summer, partly because my elegant Aunt Martha was a brilliant cook, and partly because that back yard was so close to the country club with its stupendous annual fireworks display.  My cousins Beverly and Barbara, Bevy and Bobbie, were respectively four and two years older than I, and because Aunt Mart was a beautician, these Big Girls were always turned out and coiffed in the latest fashion.  Fashion was not my own mother Virginia’s forte:  she was a country girl who lived in an un-airconditioned Florida home, and a bit of a bohemian, an early adopter of jeans and strapless bandeau tops.  So my Aunt Mart and, especially, the Big Girls, were my idols.  I felt very smart indeed when I got to wear their glamorous hand-me-down dresses.

On this particular Fourth, I was perhaps 8, so they were 10 and 12.  At the fireworks that night, the country club announcer made clear the plan to fire off a special rocket with a parachute from which a prize, or at least a coupon for a prize, was suspended.  The Big Girls decided we three were Going For That Prize, and so when the rocket went up, they grabbed me by the hands, one on either side, and we took off, racing through the dark over the hills, dales, and wooded hazards of the golf course.  My feet barely touched ground.   I was flying through the night as the rocket’s red glare intermittently lighted our way, and I was With The Big Girls.  We didn’t find the prize that night, but no matter.  The thrill has never left me.

So, what to me does the Fourth of July mean?  Yes, some sad revery over climate change and the state of our republic, so far from its brave declaration of independence:  in Paul Simon’s words, “You can’t be forever blessed.”  But mostly, every Fourth is a posy of memories, a synoptic table of celebrations over so many years, in my mind at least imposing a comforting order on time passing.

Oh, Beautiful!