When Down Her Weedy Trophies and Herself

Just about nine years ago, I got a clivia (that’s a type of lily, not a venereal disease, thou dirty minds). It was a baby from one of my grandmother’s larger plants and helped to give some life to the large rambling Victorian I was occupying during my first residence in Newton. Before that I really had very little ability to keep a plant from dying. But I had a nice triple set of windows on the street side of the living room, complete with shelves and a window seat. I made it part of my morning ritual to water the big green leaves before heading off to Worcester for another marathon day of tours.

I called her Ophelia. In fact, she is really the only living plant I’ve actually named. At that time, I didn’t have much for television beyond some scratchy reception of Boston stations. So I often filled the quiet of that house with the constant repeat of Branagh’s Hamlet. With the quotes of the play running through my mind in the odd quiet moments, I found the inspiration to name her after the play’s doomed heroine.

Ophelia has been with me (except for the months I was in London) ever since, moving with me all over this state. Back to Oakham, to Worcester, to Barre, and then once again to Newton. In the Washington Park apartment, Ophelia found new life in my sunny big room on the third floor. She drank up all that afternoon sun and bloomed for the first time ever while sitting on one of those deep window sills. In my current location, she gained height and breadth on the bookshelf in my Brady Bunch kitchen, where she has bloomed more than once a year.

I was inspired to move her and some of the other plants I’ve managed to collect over the years out onto our little ‘balcony.’ Last summer I moved her back in pretty quickly, uncertain about road dust. But I thought the persistent sun would be a good thing this summer. Unfortunately there were some drenching rain storms at the start of the ‘warm’ season. And, yes, there is a small amount of irony that the plant I named Ophelia drowned.

I brought her back inside when I noticed the leaves lost their perkiness. Worse than that, little holes started drying out in the center of the leaves. It wasn’t a bug situation. I just figured she needed to dry out. So I put her back in her spot by the kitchen window. But it turned out the soil was rotten. So after a couple weeks of hoping for evaporation, I repotted her.

A clivia has roots that densely entangle themselves in the soil. Ophelia’s roots were a soggy, loose mess. Kind of like a brain that has become uncoiled. Indeed, some of it was so severe, I had to amputate. But I put the remnants and her pocky leaves back in the pot with fresh soil… and waited.

She didn’t die in the kitchen. Indeed, as I repotted her, a stem of new blossoms was starting to shoot up. It stopped a third of the way and the blossoms fell too soon, though not losing their orange brilliance. But she had to compete for sun and space with that showy Christmas cactus and the other ravenous sun glutton I’ve rested there. Then, a few weeks ago when I moved the furniture around in my bedroom to make room for my settee, I found a new resting place for Ophelia.

She sits by herself in the sun while I’m at work. I water her with the remnants of my water bottle once a week… and slowly, but surely the bases of her leaves are a fresh green. And now there are two new leaves bursting through the center.

I had to be merciless with some of the big beautiful leaves that just didn’t want to stay connected any longer. Indeed, they may have gone back to the Auburndale days. And some of the remaining elders still have dried out holes. But it is clear she has bounced back and I am confident she will thrive once more, in spite of her name.

I want to sum this up with a Shakespeare quote… but my memory is neither recollecting the play from whence it comes or the correct syntax of the phrase. But it is something relative to ‘drowns in his own too much.’ It is easy to drown in one’s own … especially when one is a plant at the mercy of self-ambulatory beings to transform circumstance.

But with a change of light and some hard, perhaps painful, pruning eventually one can grow green again.

A Dab of Thought

Every once in a while I discover a new thought on one of my tours. I can’t say it’s exactly learning a new fact, more that I see something in a different way and have an original phrase to impart a detail or two about the house.

Last weekend I repeated something I’ve been finding myself using as part of the discussion of Henry’s sexuality. That the house was motivated by his passion and yearning for his next door neighbor. He was moved to collect, connect random dots, and do something no one else thought to do because (I think) he wanted to impress APA and get him to come over to dinner.

I’ve also reflected on how Henry never left the house alone. It was in a constant state of change for the 28 years he possessed it. And yet… he moved onto other houses. After the war is when it seems to have changed. Dabsville was not what it was in the days before France moved them to more serious subjects than antiques. Joanna got married. Y died. APA went to Washington. Henry went off to be inspired for the Rockefellers, Joan Crawford, and John Mack Brown… and Beauport became a rental.

The house is still unfinished and I don’t doubt that he was inspired until he drew his last breath on September 21, 1934. But the drive to create at Beauport slowed down because there wasn’t someone to entice back to the Octagon Room for some French cuisine.

There are stories about him falling asleep in front of the fire in the Pine Kitchen. It’s in that room that I feel myself step into pockets of sadness. I often speculate there is an appropriate verb in the name of that room… but these days I wonder if it was just being at Beauport that made him sad. Sad to reflect on happier days when the early American dining room was alive with laughter and good friends marveling over his clayware. Days that faded away like the mists wear off in the early morning sun.

It was in those later years that he used Beauport to advance himself in another social realm. He went to California and proved the worth of his talent amongst a new group of colleagues and friends. He still went back to Eastern Point, adding and transforming more rooms. But maybe… some of those later transformations were also a way of putting to rest a larger disappointment. And in its own way, that too offered inspiration. The inspiration to move forward and not stay stuck in front of the fire in the Pine Kitchen.

Who is Dabsville Jane?

Nobody knows about Dabsville. Strike that. A few people know about Dabsville. There are hundreds who stroll through Eastern Point on the summer and catch a few choice phrases on an hour long tour. They may or may not retain that information beyond their visit to Gloucester. But I suspect it doesn't linger so well as the secret staircase or the amber glass or the Golden Step dining room. They might remember something about togas and a wink, wink conclusion about what happened in the bedrooms. But Dabsville likely will float out of their brains.

So... I figured... no one else would use it for a name. But it is unique to me. I am enchanted by Dabsville as well as their togas and wink, winks. A group of thirty and forty somethings who found their way to that magical peninsula on Gloucester Harbor. A Harvard professor, a proprietess of a school for girls, a southern bell, a painter, and an interior decorator extraordinaire. But simply, they were friends. Friends who sucked the marrow out of their summer days, had voracious appreciation of art, music, politics, history, craftsmanship, the ocean, the community, the world, and one another. They were unmarried and uanpologetic for being so. They didn't rest on their laurels when the world went to war. And through it all, they were friends.

Jane is not because I was deemed such upon my entrance into this world. I chose Jane because it was a slang term in the 1920's for an ordinary girl. Because, quite assuredly, were I alive a hundred years ago, I would likely have been one of the Irish girls working in the kitchen and going batty over the white-armed mists of the ocean. Nevertheless, I have a strong amount of affection for their story. That is why I return every summer to Beauport in the hopes that one - just one - of the hundreds whom I lead through the house will leave remembering the name, Dabsville.