Lilacs and Lullabies

“Earth gave us all the satisfaction we asked.”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences


It has been an odd kind of spring that has promised to warm, but then gone back to ice, and wind and unseemingly long dark nights that give way to frost on young leaves.

Lilacs have come bringing with them so many memories of other springs when a grandmother sat in a backyard swing with her arm around me - back and forth, squeek-squeek, back and forth, sigh-and-smile - softly singing "You Are My Sunshine" and talking of future evenings that would be lit by fireflies.

I can bring those evenings back (with a suddeness that sometimes brings tears) as long as the breeze has a hint of lilac left on it...And when the last hint is gone, all such memories are soflty folded away for another year.
SPM

Keller Williams Red Day

The sky was roughly the color of the flakes of slate that once made up the roof of the Hill House but lay now on the ground at its foundation. Well. Lay in the mud at its foundation, is more accurate because it was pouring cats and dogs. Or ponies and sheep...or radiatiators and wrenches, or...

And in this weather were tromping a little over a dozen Keller Williams agents, friends, family and a random little person. They had all come out to help get the new neighborhood garden started by planting perinnials along what would one day be a fenceline and gate arch but was today just a field of mud under pouring rain.

The effort was one more wonderful contribution of neighbors in the broader sense of the word coming together to help boost the gathering vitality in a pocket of one of Saginaw's wrongly-dreaded East Side neighborhoods. And, Surprise: The rain was the worst thing to befall any of them, and even the rain couldn't dampen grins in the mud...
SPM

All mothers give up something to be what they are...

 “When I try to see her I see more distinctly how our lives are pieces in a pattern and to judge one truly you must consider how this side is squeezed and that indented and a third expanded and none are really isolated, and so I conceive that there were many reasons then to make your mother show herself a little other than she was. We lived in a state of anxious growth; school, reports, professions to be chosen, marriage for the elders, books coming out, bills, health – the future was always too near and too much of a question for any sedate expression. All these activities, too, charged the air with personal emotions and urged even children, and certainly “the eldest,” to develop one side prematurely. To help, to do something was desirable, not to obtrude diffident wishes, irrelevant and possibly expensive.
So your mother, whose sight seemed in some ways so clear, took it upon herself to be what people call “practical”…”
Virginia Woolf, Reminiscences

There are things we can describe, sketch or photograph so that another can hear them, touch them and know what it is that they are...but there are some things that we cannot begin to contain in a bowl made of words or images; then it is only possible to describe how precious they are to us and hope that someone will take the time to try to understand before it is too late. And even as spring unfolds it seems the year is going to be a single, long struggle to describe things faster than they disappear...

SPM

Timothy's Birthday Book

There was a time when I was not sure how many of my little brother, Timothy's, birthdays I might be able to spend with him so - for his 10th birthday - I created a book that incorporated snatches from some of the stories I had read to him when he was small enough to fit beside me in a creaky, overstuffed rocking chair.  The binding is made of acid-free boards covered in handmade marbled paper and with brown silk quarter binding on the front cover. Also on the front cover is an amber cabochon carved hollow from the reverse with my cypher, held to tte the board with a pair of sterling silver straps and surrounded by a band of silver wire wrapped in silk interspersed with seed pearls. Behind the amber are two lilac seeds from the bush our mother planted in our grandmother's back yard on the edge of Bay City, MI. The spine of the book is held together with stitching of waxed linen thread detailed in brown silks. The text block of the book is ma,de of watermarked hand-laid paper from England and the pages consist of my own illustrations to the stories that Timothy grew up hearing with a page here and there headed by the date of a birthday in his future from his 10th birthday to his 21st. Under each date is a question I might have asked him had I been there for that birthday. The book was made seven years ago and is beginning to show wear...SPM

Whatever happened to the concept of homesteading in reality?

Debbie Besanson shared a concern in her comment to the post a couple below this one regarding keeping young people in Saginaw. The standing-but-delapidated buildings in Saginaw and keeping the young here are indirectly linked. But they are linked. I read an article in a Detroit publication recently that profiled a young couple who were using the incredibly low home prices in their Detroit neighborhood (All below $1,000) to attract other artists into their district to build an enclave of working artists. Together they have also taken over the working of an empty house and lot to make a working experiment in urban gardening and studio space.

If we want young people - artistic or not - to stay here there must be an incentive to do so in spite of the current economy.

The city has possession of a powerful bargaining chip to boost young population here in the form of buildings it sees as expendable.

In all of the articles and interviews on urban blight I have heard and read in Saginaw, I have yet to hear one that seriously explored solutions that made an attempt to actively attract residents. Efforts so far seem geared toward not scaring away possible residents; what seems to be consistantly missed is that current young residents must be retained in order to see real population growth in the city.

I am not in the market for a house, but I would be terribly keen on seeing (and helping promote) some kind of homesteading program in certain neighborhoods of inner-city Saginaw that helped attract young couples and artists into putting sweat equity into properties that are currently borderline to being uninhabitable and that are currently not marketable.

It would cost the city less to place a building/home in the hands of an interested party for a very nominal sum of money and see a new resident move there or an existing resident not leave Saginaw than it would to tear said building/home down. Would the now inhabited structure not bring tax revenue to the city over time as it is improved? Just a thought.
SPM

[Rich Life]

when i lived in houston

i thought vacation meant leaving the country
for two weeks
asking the natives
where they ate
because they knew where to find the best food

living in saginaw
vacation means going to detroit for the day
asking bag ladies
and that guy who pees all over Woodward
where they sleep at night
because they know
where to find the most amazing buildings.


brush park, detroit, michigan

SPM