Photographers say if you wish to capture the soul of a person, take the photo in black and white. I’m not sure why this is true, but I think it is true. And I don’t really know why. We visited Mary Kellogg the other day – Maria, me and Jackie Thorne, a poet who admires Mary greatly.
Mary is working on her fourth book of poetry, as yet untitled, and we hope to publish it by the October Open House. Maria and I are both close to Maria, she was with us from the beginning of our relationship and we are important to each other. She lives alone on the top of her mountain, on a 30-acre farm she still cares for mostly by herself. She has some help from family members who visit her often. She is 88, the lines in her faced etched more deeply, her smile as radiant as ever.
Mary was an easy subject to photograph, I think, I was seated directly across from her, I had my monochrome camera with a used Zeiss portrait lens, and Mary was sitting in the light. I was struck by her grace, that ready smile and warmth that is so natural to her.
Some Native Americans fear photography because they believe it steals the soul, but I like it because I think the photographers are correct, if you lucky and have the right subject you can capture the soul.
I sank into a dark funk this afternoon, the Black Dog and all. Our power went out – again – it was dark and fierce storms raked the farm, banging and booming and lightning all over the place. I thought my computer might have been damaged by lightning and my back was bothering me, and I am struggling to find time to work on my next book, “Lessons Of Bedlam Farm.”
I sure wasn’t going to get to it today.
Around dinnertime, the power came back on and we decided to go to The Bog for dinner.
We were the only people in the dining room for awhile, and there were only three or four people at the bar, the weather was angry and confusing.
To my surprise and delight Kelly was there. Her smile just lit up the room, as usual, and my black cloud just floated away. I had fish and chips (without the chips) and Maria and I talked how serious we both were and how we worked all the time, and we both wondered if we really knew how to have fun, like some of the people we know.
I know I am sort of serious, and I do not really know how to have fun. We didn’t do that in my family. But Maria and I do have fun together. I think I will always be serious, I am working almost all of the time and when I am not working or writing, I am thinking about working and writing.
I think Maria has a more pronounced fun streak, but she is always working too.
Kelly came over to say hi and ask where we had been. We talked about Gus – she knew about him – and we talked about Red’s illness and the ethical limits and boundaries about caring for these animals and spending so much money when they get sick. Many of you helped pay the $1,300 vet bill when Kelly’s dog nearly died having puppies. “I didn’t want to be a bad pet owner,” she said.
I missed Kelly’s smile, I hadn’t seen it in awhile, and I realized the importance of it tonight. A smile like that justs lifts up the people around and as we left I went over to the bar and we all joked about how popular Kelly was. At the Open House, a number of visitors went to the Bog to see her and meet her, they were excited to find her working.
That smile is a gift, and I am lucky to be able to photograph it. I felt completely at home in the Bog. For years I avoided it, assuming it wasn’t friendly to outsiders. It is actually the friendliest place in town. When I left, I was joking and smiling, and having fun.
In my other life, I never mowed a lawn, not once. In the places I lived, we hired landscape people to keep our lawns green and sharp, so as not to upset the neighbors. Lawns are important in many places. One of the things I love very much about our farm is that I got, for the first time, to mow the lawn. I mowed it at first on Florence Walrath’s aging old riding mower, and when that died, I mowed with a hand power mower, like the one above.
I loved riding that smelly old thing around, I felt like a true owner of land, a real man. I don’t often get to feel that way.
I love mowing the lawn, it releases some deep and atavistic feeling of strength and ownership and accomplishment. I’m finally one of the guys.
Three years ago, I had open heart surgery, and it wasn’t clear if I could mow the lawn again, I took one summer off. Last year I got right back at it. In the fall I was diagnosed with heart angina – pain in the chest when certain things strain the heart.
I was able to shovel snow and lift firewood, I was eager to test-drive my angina this summer. I have had some trouble mowing on an uphill incline, even a slight one. I can’t do all of it by myself any longer.
Maria and I got a smaller mower and the two of us do it together.
When my chest starts to hurt, I stop and rest. Sometimes the pain doesn’t come back, sometimes it does. Angina is funny like that, it doesn’t kill you but it doesn’t go away either, and shows up at odd times. I carry some nitro pills in my pocket all of the time. I have never had to use one.
It is kind of neat for Maria and I do this together. I do the back yard, and some of the front, she does the sides and the corners. It takes us about an hour – we are leaving some of the grass to grow naturally. Usually, I don’t have to stop more than once or twice, and only for a few minutes.
My angina is oddly selective, it lets me do most of the things I want to do. My cardiologist, who says little, urges me not to torture my heart, so I try not to.
I’m hopeful I can mow the lawn for a long time.
It is always nice to see Maria out there with her yellow (of course) mower, she is strong and killed at it. We smile at one another when we pass. We instinctively seem to know where the other is going, and we zig and zag accordingly. Red sits on the porch in the shade and watches, Fate follows one of us, then the other, she is fascinated.
I call this a Willa Cather moment, Maria is an artist through and through, but there is some Prairie Woman in her also, she loves to tackle farm chores and sweat out in the sun. I think it is a useful way for her to relax, she has no farm clothes or jeans, there is no distinction between life and art for her.
When she is mowing, she isn’t thinking of the 1,000 things she ought to be doing. I think it is calming for her. She often feels guilty when she isn’t working, as if she is cheating somebody.
For me (Maria is much younger) I think aging is the slow and deliberate process of letting things go. There are some things I can’t lift anymore, some hills I can’t climb, some lawns I can’t mow. The idea is to accept this, which is an exceptionally difficult thing for many men to do, often to their detriment.
Giving things up does not make me less of a man, accepting life with grace and humor makes me better. And scream if you read me spouting old talk – “at our age” stuff – that is a killer of the spirit. At any age, life if what you make of it.
When the young clerks in the hardware store grab my bags of feed, I don’t stop them any more, I thank them. I even accepted the senior discount at the movies once recently.
I can handle getting older, and I am even coming to accept that I can’t mow the whole lawn by myself in the summer sun. That is not really how I wish to go, although there are worse ways. So mowing has become something we do, not something I do. And that has a sweetness and sense of meaning all of its own.
We went to the dump on Saturday, and one of the men who works there came up and said “hey, there’s a Tin Man in your yard,” as if we might not have known.
We nodded proudly, and said, yes, there a Tin Man in our yard. We said that a dairy farmer and artist named Ed Gulley made him, and he answered: “Ed Gulley? Lives over to White Creek?”
Yes, we said, that’s the guy. In our town, there are some strange people (like us) but really not strangers.
The Tin Man has settled into our farm and our lives and he is fast becoming the way people know who we are. A friend called the other day seeking directions to the farm, he had something to drop off. “Come up past the McGeouch farm,” I said, “and look for the Tin Man on the right. Can’t miss it.”
There was a silence on the other end. “The Tin Man?” Yup, I said, we have a Tin Man on the lawn.
People seem surprised and delighted to see a Tin Man on our lawn, and we are also surprised and delighted to see a Tin Man on our lawn. It startles us almost every day. Ed Gulley, the co-author of the Bejosh Farm Journal, who lives over to White Creek, is a genius in his own right, he grasped the emotional appeal of this much-loved movie character and the ways in which so many people identify with him.
We are thinking of moving him up closer to the road, but for the moment, he seems happy where he is.
Ed says he talked to the Tin Man all the time before selling him to me after a ferocious round of haggling. I haven’t talked to him yet, but maybe that will happen soon.
It seems to me that the hearts of many people in our country are turning to stone these days, and I don’t wish for me to be one of them. The Tin Man is a perfect symbol of Bedlam Farm now, and perhaps, for good.
And there is a great kick from telling people to drive past the McGeouch farm and look for the Tin Man on the lawn. How many people can say that?
