LITTLE WOMEN

From one of the upstairs bedrooms these early mornings I hear the voices of little girls singing songs they have made up. The songs are good, from what I can hear and understand-- fun-themed, cutely melodic, harmoniously performed with a native expertise, and all sui generis.  A delightful augmentation of the country silence.

All those biggity surprises grandchildren bring... Back in late winter when we were building the new deck I noticed that numerous bits and scraps, odds and ends of the fine hard wood were piled up next to the stone wall in the garden where the carpenters kept their warming fire; I later learned that they were planning to burn those scraps! I requested that they save it all for me to use in various ways around the garden and in the house, and instead use some old firewood.

I had no idea what I actually might do with all those oddly shaped pieces, but when you live in the country, it's frugal city: you never throw anything away. You have to at least think about it for a few years. No casually tossing bits of wire, lengths of pipe and such-- and especially not oddly shaped scraps of wood, which given enough time will one day fit perfectly into that one-of-a-kind needspace that has arisen spontaneously (and if you have a woodstove, every bit of new wood has a bottom-line importance anyway).

Yes, to me -- he says as he begins to wax poetic right in the middle of this ongoing thought, wandering away from the apparent point as fancy takes him, as though this were a Japanese essay or something --  who over the years has frequently searched for just the odd shape of wood to fit here or there, something strong and long lasting, something with the integrity for the task, here were bushels of the very stuff! Except for the ruinated pieces, it was just too good for burning. So over the next weeks of days I now and then spent a few moments stacking the wood up in a place out  of the weather in anticipation of finding a big strong box in which to store it all until each perfect need came down time's highway.

But my handyman foresight did not include the Trio of Brio, who on their first day in the garden spotted my rough mounds of wood and began gathering it in their arms and in boxes, in baskets and buckets, bringing it all into the house where they spent all that day, all that evening and well into a few tomorrows building houses into cities with streets and railroads (Bob can I have a pencil - What for - I want to draw railroad tracks), homes with lots of rooms and all kinds of furniture for their little dolls. When I bent way down to look inside the rooms I saw for example on the face of one block a small window with flames inside-- a woodstove, with a stovepipe of wood leading upward to the playsky!

The Trio were natural living-space designers! They were, in fact, what they really are: little women!

IRON AND FLINT

She was already on the morning train when I got on at the country station, was sitting in the seat opposite the one I happened to take, and so from under my baseball hat I got to look at her while she gazed at the way to Kyoto.

First at her eyes that had fire in them as a little spark, with the iron and flint that made it, then at her small strong hands with all the character worn in, hands that had fellowed the world, its water and soil, the worn-nailed fingers clenched around the black velvet strings of a soft purply glittery purse of the kind young women used to carry back in the sepia days, when she was a young woman and young women wore kimono...

It was an old purse and the hands were old hands, a farm woman's hands, toughened like walnuts by work and weather, she wore baggy tweed pants, strong as iron but with a touch of non-work-clothes refinement suitable for a farm grandma's rare trip to the city, the pants in the fashion of monpei but distinctly not monpei, a fashion statement in its own way - she clearly had opinions about things - and her mauve jacket, brand new but decades old, they don't make them like that any more, she must have gotten it in one of those little village stores you pass by on drives through the countryside, that have the old wooden walls with little ancient windows where you see just hanging there for what appears to have been a very long time (forget about display these are just clothes after all, buy or pass by,) the taupe and mauve and beige and brown and gray goods in the windows: cardigans, jackets and pants you can't imagine who will buy because you don't live anywhere near that time...

But then all of a sudden in the midst of these hurriedly commuting and generally waning modern up-to-date lives there she is, in brusque just-sitting-there-stone-healthy-at-85 contrast to all this office paleness, this borrowed sophistication and fashionably impending transaction sweat: one beautiful old farmer woman in lovely old-new stodgy eternal clothes from a far away place of mind and time, fashion from way back when there was no fashion except a change from kimono and monpei...

This was rad back then, and that's what she still wears now, elderly rad, this mauve rough weave jacket with the just barely perceptible red threaded through, blossoms in the pattern somewhere, no doubt she knows what blossoms they are, and with shiny purple silver-speckled buttons, a pale violet scarf and one of those taupe sweaters from the window of such a store too, just a little silver in her black hair, her face brown-wrinkled, topographic with life, eyes that reflect all that can be known to the bone about garden and birth, time and death and what the hell are salaries...

She is like a rock in the midst of these fluxy tides and fickle currents, she is the secret rock of this country, of all countries, of all of us who have gotten this far, of whatever constancy humanity can lay claim to... sons and daughters know it is the mothers who carry it all, and if it all falls it is the mothers who remain to get on with the getting on...

I gazed at her secretly until I dozed off, and when I awoke she was gone.