This summer, I travelled to Oxford UK to participate in an adult study program of Irish and Scottish literature post WWI. The program was fairly structured over the two-week period. We attended class every morning and most afternoons, excursions were planned. On the bus one afternoon, a woman in the group asked to sit by me. She said to me- I heard that you worked at Marshall Field's? Why yes, I did. And we fell into an excited conversation about our experiences of what was the empress of empresses of retail. She and I became bus buddies for the rest of the trip. And now home, we are friends (two Marshall Field's gals pictured below).
miss moran
Thursday, September 14, 2023
Through Charley's Door by Emily Kimbrough
This summer, I travelled to Oxford UK to participate in an adult study program of Irish and Scottish literature post WWI. The program was fairly structured over the two-week period. We attended class every morning and most afternoons, excursions were planned. On the bus one afternoon, a woman in the group asked to sit by me. She said to me- I heard that you worked at Marshall Field's? Why yes, I did. And we fell into an excited conversation about our experiences of what was the empress of empresses of retail. She and I became bus buddies for the rest of the trip. And now home, we are friends (two Marshall Field's gals pictured below).
Tuesday, September 20, 2022
Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin
Wright’s home, studio, and garden sanctuary was a laboratory for architecture and design. In its three iterations, Taliesin embodies Wright’s ideas of organic architecture, expanded and refined from his earlier Prairie School works. From the courtyards and gardens to the Living Room, Loggia, and Birdwalk, Taliesin offers a commanding view of the valley, settled by Wright’s Welsh ancestors. Using natural local limestone and Wisconsin River sand, Taliesin stands as “shining brow” on Wright’s favorite boyhood hill. (taliesinpreservation.org/history).
Not a Frank Lloyd Wright fan specifically, I decided to drive up to Wisconsin with it as a destination and for the opportunity to get away to the country and, hopefully, run into a few antique/vintage stores along the way. I booked a 2-hour tour of the house and school, opened by Wright's spinster aunts who instituted a school in the original building found on the land, which was to become Taliesin and later Wright's own school of architecture and eventual home.
The tour began in the school. Apparently, students came to board at it from as far away as Chicago, which is, nowadays, a three hour drive. When the sisters closed the school after 30 years, Wright tore down the original building and built up the existing buildings. I was immediately taken by the beautiful stone used, a local quarry supplied the smooth, porous stone used inside and out. I couldn't help but run my hand along it as we climbed the steps into the main building. There, the ghosts of students past were in attendance, and it wasn't hard to imagine the children attending the Hillside Home School or the men that would travel to work with Wright. The wood floors had a life of their own and the creak and groans reverberated. The floors reminded me of the ones that I walked across early in my career at Marshall Field's State Street store before the big renovation that moved out most of the old charm of the storied department store in the early '90's. The floors in the Ukrainian Village vintage apartment that I lived in for 24 years were much the same. At Taliesin, I walked in circles across them, kicking up the dust in celebration of old, creaky wooden floors.
As we walked outside to the beautiful grounds, I captured the picture of the outdoor chairs scattered under the shade of trees and had a strong sense of my own college campus, which sprawled across an equally green landscape. My campus had been a hippy haven in its day, which I could imagine as I wandered across the naturalscaped lawns and through dusty buildings. The Taliesin School of Architecture began in the 1930's well before the time that I attended college, but the sense of it was overwhelming for me. I transcended to a space and time where the possibility of imagining how different things, natural things, could come together to create something new was possible. The ghosts of the place have free reign in that Wisconsin river valley, and they've stories to tell.
I won't go through each detail of the house. As I have established, I'm not necessarily a fan of Wright's plans. The house itself was one always in progress with the first two having burnt down and the third, never quite completed. I appreciate Wright's idea that a building should become a part of the landscape, not the tower over it. The wide windows allowed for breathtaking views, but the compressed hallways were claustrophobic. I fully understand how his third wife insisted on buying comfortable chairs at Marshall Fields in Chicago as anything that Wright made was hard and unforgiving. But I'm glad that I took the jaunt up to see it for myself, for I determined that it is not thing itself that is the beauty of it; rather, the ideas and inspiration that were the founding of it.
Monday, July 18, 2022
Antiquing: Toby Character Mugs
Sunday, July 17, 2022
Antiquing: Someone Else's Treasures Make for Great Finds
Another event in my life that very well may have contributed to this hobby was the death of my paternal grandmother, Anne. Where I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, my grandmother lived, alone, in the heart of it. We didn't visit here there often, but when we did, the setting was very exotic to my younger self. The apartment was only a studio, but the furnishings were some that I hadn't ever seen before. She had gold metal shelves that were lined with mostly hardcover books that I imagined that I would like to read. Her bed, which was in the main room, was made to look like a sofa. And in a corner of that same room, an easel stood and canvases leaned against the wall that she herself had painted. Grandma Anne died when I was 17 years old. I'm not so sure that her life had become what it was meant to have in her estimation. Her death, I think, was of disappointment more than the cancer that spread through her body. My father was her only child, so her possessions were all dutifully packed up by my mother and brought to our house. Each box held a new treasure to behold. Most of the clothing, my mother put in her closet and used for a new job that she had started as we went off to college. But one wouldn't have been appropriate for the workplace, a pale blue satin dressing gown. When I would put it on, it would transport me back to a time when I suppose that she herself wore it in a glamorous setting. At 17, I didn't have any glamours occasions to wear it, so I would wear it to the local teen disco night. I loved to dance and the disco gave me the floor to live out my love of beats and movement. The gown knew how to move as well. We made a great pair. To this day, I still have a lot of the jewelry that she had left behind. Most of it was costume, but good costume that was made in an earlier time. I visited an antique store in California a few years ago and saw that the shop keeper has used vintage, costume jewelry to decorate a tree shaped styrofoam cone. I borrowed that idea and at Christmas bring out several trees bedazzled with Grandma Anne's jewelry to decorate for the holiday.
In college, I was great friends with someone who also loved to spend the day browsing through other people's cast offs. When he left the Midwest to return to his home in the East, I would visit. There, the antique shops were full of items different from what I was used to discovering. He collected all sorts of sea fearing items like boat flags, buoys, and light house remnants. We spent hours and days going from one warehouse to the next along the water. Then he made some serious money in software design and bought a beautiful house. For the first time, we would crawl through serious antique stores looking at French antique chairs and tables. These items were all well beyond my budget, even now, but it was wonderful imagining who owned them a century before.
Now what to call what it is that I like do. I've always called it antiquing. I expect to find stores or markets full of 'things' that are old. Anymore, the term 'vintage' is used and that they are, however, I'm not inclined to say 'vintaging.' Another term bandied about is 'thrift.' But when I think of a thrift store, I'm more inclined to think of clothing not household items. And as much I love to buy a trinket, I'm not one for buying clothing second hand. For one, I find the sizing to be small. And another, as I worked in retail for ten years at an high end department store, I like my clothing fresh off of the rack ... the clearance rack of course, but brand new none the same. But that is for another sort of post. I'm going to stick with antiquing. And in a new vain of posts, I'll talk to what I've found out on that road. As I look around my house, I have many collections of items and some furniture that I've found in my search. And now that I've been doing this for a few decades, I'm beginning to find a story of what is to be found and what has gone away.
Thursday, February 17, 2022
Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses
While putting away Christmas things, I moved a stack of books that I had hidden from view. It was a stack as many who 'decorate' use as a focal point of interest on the shelves of side tables or displayed on coffee tables. I'm not sure if anyone who visits the house ever opens up one of the books on display, but this time, I took the time to sort and look through the books that are used mostly as dust collectors. Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," I remember very clearly from my childhood. I am not certain how it came to the house. I do remember reading it when I was young.
As a child, I loved the illustration on the cover. Even now, it captures the spirit of what I remember childhood to be for me. My mother would sew jumpers, a simple dress without sleeves that fell from shoulder to knee, often with two pockets on the front for me to wear to school. Underneath the jumper, I wore a white cotton, peter pan collared blouse. I typical wore scuffed, brown leather shoes that were bought new at the beginning of the school year to last the year and white socks. My favorite jumper was cranberry colored, wide wale corduroy. My mom would braid my long hair into plaits that were turned up in circles close to my ears. In the illustration, the girl leads the others in what appears to be an adventure. As young as third grade, maybe even earlier, I too would lead the younger kids in the neighborhood. Or coerce my younger sisters into playing at some planned activity, often centering on a song and a dance or, for one Christmas, a recitation of the "The Night Before Christmas."
My favorite poem in the book was "The Swing." Like many elementary schools, ours had a park nearby. Occasionally, we were allowed to run over to it during out recess. I loved the swings more than anything else in the park. Once I got going, I felt like I could fly so high and see the whole world. In my estimation, it was "the pleasantest thing/Ever a child can do?" Without being aware of it, the poems also taught me how to communicate using a different form than speaking or writing a sentence. Without understanding poetics, I sensed that if I wrote a poem about a subject, I could fully describe the feeling or emotion of the thing I was trying to describe in order to get closest to the heart of what it meant to me. Technically, the poems taught me how to write a poem. All of the poems are written in stanza form and in a rhyme scheme. Sure, nursery rhymes and children's books are written using rhythm and rhyme and I would have had that earlier exposure, but for the most part, those devices were delivered in a sentence or two, not in an organized stanza format.In third grade, the teacher created in class clubs for us to join. I chose the poetry club, possibly because I wanted to write like Robert Louis Stevenson in "A Child's Garden of Verses." I don't know this for sure, but in examining this long ago book that I cherished, I can't help but think that it was the catalyst for my own poetry writing. As I look back on it, the teacher didn't teach poetry to class. Nor did she go over basic principals of what a poem looks like. Once in the club, I took it very seriously. I created my own book of poems using the techniques that I had picked up from Stevenson. How else would I have known to write in stanzas and develop a rhyme and meter scheme.
My First Book of Poetry circa 3rd Grade |
As you can see, my first book of poetry has seen better days. It is old! And I've kept it all of the years as a testament to my earliest work as a poet. Clearly, someone got a hold of it and wrote with crayon across it. I notice that I did not use a pen; rather, I wrote the title and my name, barely visible on the bottom, in pencil. Did third graders use pens? I did include illustrations, as you can see, with each poem. When I composed the poem and wrote the final draft, I did include those. The letter grades and corrections I may have done when I would play school. Good for me that I thought that the originals could do with an edit. The handwriting is so perfectly 'I just learned the Parker method of cursive writing.' The 'Ts' are stellar.
Thursday, April 22, 2021
Looking Forward
Me watching the sunset in Puerto Rico. Spring Break 2021 |