Then she’d attach the new canvas, along with a favorite postcard, to the bookshelves downstairs, turning the whole house into an atelier, a bricolage. She had studied painting with Guy Pène du Bois, of New York’s Ashcan School, and often spent the morning in her third-floor studio, working up abstract green black slashes or flappers doing the Charleston amid pasted-on biscotti wrappers. She swam nude in her ponds, wore diamonds with Keds, decorated us with tippets and muffs and the contents of her “beadlet box” - a bounty of necklaces, stickpins, and tortoiseshell combs that all smelled faintly of nail polish remover. I’ve been out to the flower garden and I’m sweating like a June bride, as my mother used to say - it’s hotter than Dutch love.” Much of her conversation was scraps and tags that would have given a simultaneous translator fits: if she saw a wandering shrew or vole, she’d hail it with “Thar she blows, and sparm at that” when skeptical, she’d scoff, “In a pig’s valise!” and when she wanted attention, she’d cry, “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips, let no dog bark.” When you arrived at the table for Baba’s Baptist cakes, Timmy would poke you with a hard-boiled egg and say, “Good morning, cornucopia, your face is looking soapier. Mom would sleep late at Maplewood, catching up, but we were down early to see what was going on. Up the driveway we’d roar, honking, and Grandma Tim would charge out in a way I’d not see again until Addie, at eighteen months, began to do it when I came home: holding her arms wide and stamping her feet: stamp, stamp, stampstampstamp! Once we got close, crossing the covered bridge over the Ottauquechee, we’d sing “Almost There,” a ditty that celebrated everyone we were about to see down to Mickle, the dachshund. WHEN WE WERE young it was eight hours by car from Buffalo or Swarthmore to Woodstock, journeys that felt heroic.
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