us. A little ring. A jigsaw puzzle piece. A couple bulbs of daffodil, one to plant near the catalpa, one on the wild hillside. Other trinkets, now forgotten.
The stick ink stayed planted deep in the house. Give off rays, Ink. Give off roots. Keep anyone from buying this but us.
An entire year went by. At last, the people destined for our farmhouse found it. The day their financing came through, we made the breathless call.
“Is it still available?”
“They’ve shown it for a year and no one else has made an offer. They’ve slashed the price a third. It’s yours.”
Wheee!
Was it the charms that did it? Yes and no. Charms are outward nuggets of intention. Emblems of focus, channels of desire. The power to create or attract what we want is not in the objects, but in the verbs, like desiring and intending and believing. But I do love the cozy little nouns, those playful symbols that make hope physical.
The story could have ended there, but doesn’t.
After fifteen years of working on the house, freeing it from its sour spell detail by detail, the inner camera pulls back to reveal the house as a larger charm on a bigger board, another Monopoly piece.
For if a charm helps you manifest a needy house, the next thing you want to do is manifest good people to work on it. Then you want to create the best working situation for them and encourage their creativity. You want more than a lovely place to live. You want to be the kind of person you’d want to work with. The person you aspire to be. That’s a big game board, and fun. And you’re not the only one playing.
The bigger charm channels not just our hopes, but those of the gifted artists, designers, builders, gardeners, stoneworkers, keepers who hold and fulfill their own visions for the house, for themselves as creators and us as cocreators.
Like our cube of ink, a house, or a job, or a school, or an art form is not an end, but a means. A means of expanding and expressing feelings and aspirations for ourselves, for one another and for beloved physicality. Which is charmed, I’m sure.
Imagine a way in rather than out.
When we were creating our kitchen, the question of tiling in the back of the stove arose. Bulging cornucopias and della Robbia opulences and painted little Quimper figures are available for such kitchen landscapes. Since the shelf-life of tile is nearly eternal, we pored over choices. I finally realized no matter what we installed, after years of standing and stirring, I would tire of looking at it.
But what if we could renew the view? I proposed a niche, for a shifting display of art. So, as the saying goes, we made a niche for ourselves.
It’s just a little tiled seven by nine inch opening cut into the back-splash, off-center. Ironically, art rarely shows up there. It belongs to flowers, which I change almost as often as the menu.
In a world where we’re told to carve our own niches, or find our niche market, we’re often advised to keep doing the same thing to fill that niche. But why display the same inert behavioral cornucopia? The ultimate nature of niches is space for a change.
In a dusty, dim antique shop in a semi-shuttered upstate town, a jutting corner of red caught my eye. I slid out the stained wooden sign from behind the eyesore table lamp. “YAD-OT.” It pleased me immensely instantly, this smooth, hand-crafted piece, even before I got what it said. And then it pleased me even more.
The old salt at the desk told me it dates from the ‘20s or ‘30s. He got it from a printshop on Varick in Manhattan which created signs for movie theatres. Indeed, there was another sign that said “yadrutaS stratS” but this was the one for me. After all, how often is its subject advertised?
The other day, our handyman hung it in the kitchen above our pantry door, where we can see it daily. But later, when I shut the door with some vigor, the sign jumped off the wall, narrowly missing my head. “A fitting end,” I thought with a smile.
Yet I have been granted another and yet another “YAD-OT,” and I am full of gratitude for the gifts each brings. The sign dove off the wall so I would remember to share it with you. (It now hangs securely in a quieter place.) May you be filled with joy and multiple signs of gratitude. And may you enjoy each and every “YAD-OT.”
Meaning appears
in response
to our attempt
to grasp it.
First, the souvenirs: Copper Lady, Plastic Lady, Lady in the Snowball, coinbanks, cedarboxes, thick and tasseled pencils, placemats postcards mirrors spoons cups metal paper rubber bear her blue image. Also fries dogs shakes.
Buy our Admit Ones from the whitehaired grizzlejawed joe sparkling under his cap. A short wait, then board our red white and blue tidy ferry.
Stamping children, flappy flags, ziz of nylon jackets. Every size jeans, polyesters, gold bridges, camera necklaces, not just Americans, but Citizens of Everywhere.
Hair of every kind streaming over faces. Chiffon scarves fluttering, fluttering. The violins within my blood begin to rise.
Thickhand men derope our boat. The Hudson flushes under us. We’re off.
Grey and black and navy hugely tower. The pier disappears as we peer at the flannel and seersucker buildings compressing.
Hoisted like masts in the brisk ferry air, we squint through sun-and-spray-tugged lashes. Teeth dried by windward smiles. Fluttery cheeks. Ferry bottom slaps on the river’s knee. Part of a sandwich flies by.
Old fort, gunhouse, then Ellis on the right. Pink brick sinks in my eyes. My stomach says in another life I knew that place, off the stink of the ship chilly chilly damp harsh pulled shoved cursed, named another name, I embraced my partly hideous destiny. Kindness was not yet popular.
Bright oblongs, slices of light, sun punctuates the water. City reduced to a pattern of blocks, gull-garlanded.
◊◊◊
And there, as silver and as green as juneborn
