Ebb and Flow

Abstract

Ebb and Flow Deborah Cummins (bio) Summer days begin early on this island in Maine. Even when fog blankets the coast and coves, obscures the spruce tops and thumping lobster boats putting out from the harbor, I rise at dawn. I make coffee, feed the dog, linger a bit in the garden to deadhead and prune or to water the planted pots on the deck. Before embarking on the rest of my morning, the best of which include a few hours of writing, I put away last night's dishes, make the bed. I straighten. I descend from a long line of straighteners, women who daily aligned, put things right, performed what I presumed back in the '50s was a necessary housewifely art, like pressed handkerchiefs and Sunday pot roasts. Often, my mother's straightening took on a near Calvinistic zeal. It produced tangible results—a polished tabletop, a dusted Encyclopedia Brittanica bookshelf, a counter cleared of all but the percolator, cookie jar, and rotary phone. But other days, dust rag in hand, she moved through our red brick ranch on Oakdale Avenue in an almost aimless wander, as though with her attempts to straighten, something inside her was expanding, allowing for an un-straightening. By the time I took any notice of her ritual, I had begun to climb alone into my primitive backyard tree house and lose myself to daydreams and adolescent yearnings. I was still years away from understanding how in such housewifely gestures my mother found it possible to withdraw into herself, free there to contemplate whatever she wished, travel wherever consciousness might take her. To my mind, mothers and daydreamers were still worlds apart. I wasn't taught to straighten. Unlike other tasks—ironing blouses, for example, with her directive to always start with the collars—the command [End Page 99] "Go straighten your room" came with only vague instruction. In it, however, dwelled specific expectation, and the understanding the unlikely had occurred—a tornado had dropped down on our house and blown with singular mayhem through my room. Unenthused, I picked up, stashed, stacked, and stowed. I took none of the pleasure I now do in laying my hands on favorite objects—polished rocks from Boom Beach, a local potter's small vases glazed in that dusky sunset violet the sky takes on just before all light over the Camden Hills is extinguished. Now, in my own actions I recognize my mother's ritual, how she lingered before the open shelves of the dining room hutch, arranging her flow blue transferware and Old Willow-patterned plates. Some mornings, a bit like her, I drift. In a doorway, I pause to admire how the light, fixed in a particular moment—Octavio Paz's "time thinking about itself"—gilds the petals of a white rose in a glass on the sill. Straightening has, of course, its practical sides. Behind a framed photograph I find the lost earring. I discover while restacking magazines the mark a wet vase has made on a table. I renew my love of a forgotten object. I honor the beauty of a made thing. Striving for effects, I clear a space around a blue bowl of oranges and make them, to my eye, more appealing. I suppose I could worry that I'm succumbing to the tyranny of inanimate objects, but I prefer to believe straightening helps make the spaces I inhabit more beautiful, a not-so-unworthy result from what is largely seen as a mostly gender-specific pursuit. Or, as colorfully observed by writer John Fowles—with men, it's the "challenging of getting," with women "the elaboration of the got." No apologies. I'm neat. I need straightened surroundings. I require a tranquil place from which to leave and return, launch and retreat. I'm certainly mindful of the writing that doesn't get done when I spend time and energy attending to tasks lacking any real urgency. I don't thumb my nose at such a concern. But as I clear and open physical spaces in a drawer or on a shelf or desktop, it's as if physical and psychological spaces open up in me, places where...