I call her Queen Frieda now, because she had a regal sense of entitlement, and I love the sophisticated way she has of crossing her legs. She loves to gaze out at the world these days, and watch me take photos. I had a rugged writing day. I set out to write a short story about a woman who has to decide whether or not to put her dog down, and the story just didn’t. I wrote it, sent it to some friends and my daughter Emma, and nobody liked it much. It was hard to write, because I wanted to make a point about how dogs die, and I see it as a celebratory story. I just couldn’t put it together.
I decided that I lost it, couldn’t write well anymore. Had to find something else to do. I brooded, pouted, walked in the woods. Maria was off working, so I had nobody to whine to. I read a sad story about Haiti, and then drove to get the new Michael Lewis book about the madness of our financial system. Then I tried to meditate, and couldn’t and felt myself crashing. Then I got a bowl of tomato soup and took Frieda and Izzy for a walk, and then it occurred to me that I had missed the point of my story, and I went back to the computer and rewrote it, and I will look at it in the morning and see. I think I might have figured it out. I hope Maria gets home soon.
I’m thinking of a stone wall notecard series. These walls criss-cross the woods, and suggest all kinds of life – farms, animals – that went before me. They provide perspective on time and life. Life does move quickly, and thus days are precious. I think I just realized this about a year ago, when I was bludgeoned into consciousness by the understanding that I was hiding from my life, from myself, from the people I loved.
Someone wrote that stone walls are inherently meditative, and I think that is so, because they are humbling.
When I looked out the window, I didn’t believe it. Rose hates being brushed, fights it all the way, and I have never been able to get her to sit still for long without holding her down and bellowing at her. She loves Maria, as do all of the living things on the farm, and Maria was talking softly to her and Rose actually seemed to be loving it, to my complete amazement. It was a very touching thing to see. Maria exudes love. She is the most loving person I have known and the animals pick it up. But Rose sitting still for brushing? Wow.
__ Spring Bedlam Farm notecards are onsale at Redux. Chickens, flowers, eggs.
On Friday, March 26, at 7 p.m., my daughter Emma Span and I will be the Red Fox Bookstore in Glens Falls, N.Y. to celebrate her new book, “90 per cent of the game is half mental,” and to offer a sneak preview of my novel, “Rose In A Storm,” out in October. This will be the first reading from the novel. Em and I will also talk about our writing lives. She is bringing Pearl, the wonderful Yellow Lab and writing dog.
Em and I will also be at Northshire Books, Manchester, Vt. on May 8. You can check it all out on Em’s new website.
I think notions about aging and getting older are among the last acceptable forms of bigotry in America. I got a message from one person – surely meant to be sympathetic – saying she understood why I might be thinking of selling the farm, as we often change when we get older. But it felt more patronizing than sympathetic.
Her assumption that I was thinking of selling the farm because I was getting older is typical, I think, of the way our culture has come to view aging – as a time when we must shrink our lives, downsize, get ready for the ultimate journey, give up on our ambitions and expectations. Phooey to that.
Aging, as it happens, has nothing at all to do with my thoughts about staying on the farm or selling it. I came to the farm when I was in my late 50’s, a time when I was supposed to be looking for my condo and getting rid of stuff. I became a photographer when I was nearly 60. I have just begun writing children’s books, returning to fiction, and discovering the love of my life.
Coming to the farm was one of the best moves of my life, although it certainly defined conventional wisdoms about getting older. My friends all thought I was crazy. So did my family.
In America, advertisers care only about between between the ages of 18 and 49 because they have many years of spending ahead of them. And in our society, it is money that defines expectations, not reality. I am surrounded by 90-year-0ld farmers who could run circles around me any day of the week, and who would find the idea that they are too old to be on their farms nearly insane, as well as insulting. They like having sex, too.
My ideas about selling the farm are simple. Do I want to be a writer or a farmer? Do I want to spend my day tending to fences and water mains, or writing novels, children’s books, taking photos and working on being creative. It takes little energy to have two donkeys and some sheep. It takes a lot more to write a novel. It’s a question of identity, not of sore knees (which I have some days.)
I am at a point in life where I am just beginning to consider life – creativity, travel, love, sex, challenge and opportunity. Do I want to live on a farm? Go to Costa Rica for a year? Join the Peace Corps? Do a photo book?
I am not, as the writer suggested, thinking of retreating from life because I am getting “older” and need to be safe and less isolated. Quite the opposite. These are bigoted stereotypes and ought to be challenged as vigorously as other dumb stereotypes. Older people should not let the witless define them and their expectations. I have never had more energy, been in better health, or more looked forward to expanding my horizons, growing, learning and changing in positive and creative ways.
I should say that I am well aware of where I am in life. I have too few years ahead of me to do all of the things I want, or spend as much time as I would love to spend with Maria, my daughter, my work. But that reality will not define me or what I am, or where I love or what I do. Our culture would like older people to go away, so corporations can sell things to people with more money and buying time. Don’t do it.
Selling the farm is a tough decision mostly because I love it so much. As to getting older, I absolutely refuse to be bound or defined by our timid and health-care and money-obsessed culture into crawling under a rock and vanishing to the safer life. Nuts to that.
The Bedlam Farm Notecards represent a turning point for me, the culmination of a two-year puzzlement over what to do with my photographs. These days, selling them for $500 does not seem the way to go. It makes me uncomfortable as well as people who would like to buy or own them. Smaller prints and notecards seems much more realistic and accessible.
Inspired by Maria’s potholders, it occurred to me that art needs to change with and reflect the times. Art needs to be good, affordable and relevant, at least to me. The idea of art, like many things will, I think, change, and creative people need to get creative.
I believe people need art, and want it. A culture without art is soulness, barren. A culture worried only about money and security is a cold place. But people also have to able to fit art into their lives and afford it. People who are financially stressed or out of work should not be shut out of art or deprived of it. Maria’s potholders are making that point. I believe in art for the times, and in the notion of artists fighting back against a political culture that has abandoned them because they can’t afford expensive lobbyists. These cards are my way of fighting back.
I love the idea of my photographs sailing out in functional and affordable form, where people can actually get and use them. So in addition to the Dogs of Bedlam Farm and Red Barns in the Snow and other sets already out, we are happy to announced that the Spring Bedlam Farm notecards – flowers, chickens and eggs, are available.
They will shortly be up on Redux Art Gallery website and are now available for purchase.
