I’m back posting again after more than a week off. To those of you who told me you missed my posts, thank you! I was refilling the well of inspiration by visiting my hometown in upstate New York and touring the Finger Lakes region. I plan to write more about my travels soon.
I’m writing today on my back patio, which is quite a novelty to me. Only yesterday a good friend was kind enough to set up a wireless network for my new notebook computer, and now I’m feeling so modern, tapping away out here in the dappled sunlight under my shady pergola. Behind me a small fountain is splashing. There are crickets in the flowerbeds and birds in the trees. With all these organic sounds, I hardly notice the background city noises that are part of living inside the Washington Beltway. Planes and helicopters go overhead regularly, traffic passes by in the street in front of my house, but the closer sounds are all natural.
I say I feel modern, but I also feel quite old-fashioned. The photograph at the top of today’s entry is of the porch where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did her writing in the nineteen-thirties and -forties. She’s best known for her novel The Yearling, which was made into film at least twice (once with Gregory Peck). My favorite book is her memoir of her life in central Florida, Cross Creek. I have a treasured first edition I picked up for $1.00 in a used bookstore. It’s too well-loved to be valuable, and I’m glad—I wouldn’t want to feel inhibited from re-reading it as often as I do.
I went looking for the book after seeing a film based on her life. I saw it at an impressionable age, and it set my ideas of what writing life should be. I was seventeen in 1983, the year the movie came out. It starred Mary Steenburgen as Miss Rawlings, and I was so fascinated with the tale of a woman who’d left everything to take up a dilapidated orange grove she’d inherited in the middle of nowhere and concentrate on writing. The middle of nowhere was much more isolated in 1930 than it is in 2005. No wireless internet connections, no phone, few neighbors. Despite coming from what was at the time the wealthy industrial city of Rochester, New York, she settled into that retiring life with tremendous affection for its details. I’ve read her memoir over and over, and it’s been a major influence upon my own character. She showed that you can cultivate the life of the mind and still take pride in your cooking. She lived the life of an independent artist, while remaining a very feminine woman who enjoyed the company of men. She was a kindred spirit for me, someone else who appreciated the magic of the everyday, the mundane.
Mulberry Jam, the blog, is a direct response to her inspiration. In a way I’m still trying to absorb the principle that creation can happen wherever you are. Art can be made on a porch, or in a kitchen, or in an orange grove. Although I never got stuck with that image of the urban garret as the ideal locus for the creative life, I do sometimes need to remind myself that even here, on a suburban patio, I can build my own Cross Creek of the soul.
