Plant Dreaming Deep: A Journal

by May Sarton

Overview

The author’s tribute to the 18th-century New England farmhouse she called home: “[A] tender and often poignant book by a woman of many insights” (The New York Times Book Review).

In Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton shares an intensely personal account of transforming a house into a home. She begins with an introduction to the enchanting village of Nelson, where she first meets her house. Sarton finds she must “dream the house alive” inside herself before taking the major step of signing the deed. She paints the walls white in order to catch the light and searches for the precise shade of yellow for the kitchen floor. She discovers peace and beauty in solitude, whether she is toiling in the garden or writing at her desk.

This is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life.

This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781497646322
Publisher:	Open Road Media
Publication date:	07/22/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	896,725
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award.

An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

May Sarton (1912–1995) was born on May 3 in Wondelgem, Belgium, and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first volume of poetry, Encounters in April, was published in 1937 and her first novel, The Single Hound, in 1938. Her novels A Shower of Summer Days, The Birth of a Grandfather, and Faithful Are the Wounds, as well as her poetry collection In Time Like Air, all received nominations for the National Book Award.

An accomplished memoirist, Sarton came out as a lesbian in her 1965 book Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. Her memoir Journal of a Solitude (1973) was an account of her experiences as a female artist. Sarton spent her later years in York, Maine, living and writing by the sea. In her last memoir, Endgame: A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year (1992), she shares her own personal thoughts on getting older. Her final poetry collection, Coming into Eighty, was published in 1994. Sarton died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine.

Read an Excerpt

Plant Dreaming Deep

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By May Sarton

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 1968 May Sarton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4632-2

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CHAPTER 1

I Meet My House

It was a fine May morning when we set out, Mrs. Rundlett and I and a friend of mine, to take a look at five houses. I do not have happy memories of that day; I was too anxious, and much of the time too depressed. The fact is that a house for sale has a slightly sinister atmosphere; life has gone stale in its abandoned shell. It happened that those we saw were far from each other, so that we trundled through unknown country for what seemed like hours, and I was over-aware of scrubby woods and sad stone walls with their silent testament to the fact that all this land had been cleared a hundred years or more ago and then grown back to jungle. One of the houses, it is true, was beautiful and stood in an open sunny meadow, but it was huge, still furnished, and smelled of other people's lives. Why had they left, I wondered? I had never hunted a house before and was unprepared for the shock of this public invasion of private atmospheres. By eleven o'clock I was almost ready to call off the whole thing, except that it did seem foolish not to take a look at the last house on the list, that dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse in the village of Nelson.

From Dublin we followed an interminable road through lonely woods for four miles, then emerged into a charming brick mill town sitting sedately beside a lake, and again veered off into thick woods. It began to feel like one of those journeys one takes in a dream, a journey that has no end, in search of something that can never be found, where if one wakes at last it is to the accelerated heartbeat of terror. I did not intend to live on the edge of nowhere.

But then, quite suddenly, the long road took an abrupt turn to the left and we found ourselves out in the sunlight of a small village green.

"This," Mrs. Rundlett said, "is Nelson."

I saw a tall white church with a tall white spire, a cluster of houses, an abandoned brick schoolhouse beside a clapboarded town hall, a tiny memorial library ... and that was all. So silent, so serene, it felt as if we had just pushed a magic door open into the nineteenth century. There was not a soul to be seen.

Beyond the church we turned in under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. Still under the spell of so much light after so much darkness, I drank the sight in—first the pleated green fan over the white door, then the door itself, ample and welcoming, framed in two narrow windows, set off by delicate carved white pillars. I noted the wide granite step and the way it slipped into a grassy slope; the twelve-paned windows, the gently sloping roof above them, a chimney at each end. The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classic form, and I was so dazzled by this presence that for a moment I could only see, not hear. But then I heard it—an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs.

I had not heard an oriole since I was a child; in my agitated state these notes fell with an extraordinary resonance. I felt reassured. It seemed, in fact, like a sign. And then, as if woven through the song, I heard the silence. Each time I come back here the same miracle happens. I bring the world with me, but at a certain moment the world falls away and I am inside the life-restoring silence.

I shook myself free of the spell, and we went together to take a look at the realities—the tumble-down sheds that were pulling one end of the house askew, the ugly wreckage of an old barn left to rot where it had fallen, the unpainted back of the house. The word "dilapidated" began to loom rather large.

Though we had an appointment with the tenants, it took them a long time to answer our knock, and when they did, it was clear that they resented this invasion by prospective buyers, so our situation was awkward. Once more we were pushing in to an alien atmosphere; once more I felt ill at ease, swallowing the comments and questions I should have liked to make to Mrs. Rundlett. We went through the house in silence—through the low-ceilinged, dark kitchen, down a small dark passage to the privy, in bad condition. There was no running water, of course, only a rusty pump in the kitchen sink.

"There's a good well," Mrs. Rundlett said into the general gloom, "fed by three sources, I understand. It has never gone dry—built right into the back porch, you see."

Off the kitchen was a strange shallow room with a huge fireplace on one side. It was almost filled that day by a king-size, unmade bed. Here too we felt the cramp, as if we had entered the cave of shy wild animals. So it was a relief to emerge into the two front rooms, only one of them in use.

"A rare piece of luck to find five fireplaces and mantels intact," Mrs. Rundlett pointed out. "Usually in old houses they are boarded up. No one wants to keep five fireplaces going in winter when they can put in oil heaters."

My eyes rested on the lovely mantels, and on the moulding round the windows, and on the staircase with its elegant maple banister and thin white balusters. It was clear that the original builder had been a man of taste and an excellent craftsman, but these forlorn relics of his way with things seemed almost inappropriate to the house as it had become.

Only three of the five rooms downstairs were in use; upstairs all four were abandoned dumps of rubbish. Had I come too late? Could it still be brought back to life? Could the original builder's vision and style be resurrected through so much waste and the ravages of time and neglect? I felt a ray of hope—those mantels and moldings—but no conviction, no rising of the spirits such as had been induced by the oriole and the moment of rapt contemplation of the façade.

It was good to get out into the sunlight, the fresh May air, and to walk around the "new" barn at the back. "In good condition, as you see," Mrs. Rundlett reassured. What I saw was the lovely tobacco brown of the weathered boards, tobacco with a touch of lavender; what I saw was harness and other gear hanging inside as if someone had just put the horses out to pasture; and what I saw as I came out was the long meadow, an acre or so, rolling off toward woods and a gentle profile of hills, that necessary open space for the meditative eye. The barn and its surroundings felt alive.

Finally we got back into the car, and I took a last look at all that had quickened my heart at the beginning. Yes, it was beautiful. My mother would have felt its beauty deeply. But if I undertook to rehabilitate this derelict, I would have to do it alone. Did I have the courage to lift it out of its depression? The enormity of the undertaking lay heavy on my mind, so heavy that I did not even ask about the brook that day (it was nowhere in sight). My practical friend had grave doubts. She persuaded me at least to get some estimates from plumbers, carpenters, and a chimney man as to what it might cost to make the shell habitable, and Mrs. Rundlett agreed to do so and to let me know within a week.

So for a week I engaged in endless speculations and imaginings, trying to visualize not the present, but the past and the future. I was held by it, as one is held by a poem that has not quite jelled, that haunts the nights. I had first to dream the house alive inside myself. The most important thing was to make light, air, space, within the dark cramped rooms. If I painted the walls white, would that help? Would the dear Flemish furniture ever fit into those spaces? Where would I sleep? Where would I work? And if I could move out all that wreckage of the old barn, would it be possible, maybe, to use the foundation as the wall of a long perennial border? One thing was clear. I could very well live in the five downstairs rooms and leave the second floor for a later time. That would cut down on cost considerably.

It was a painful week, swung between doubt and hope. I knew that tension well. It is just the same before I begin to write a book or a poem. It is the tension of being on the brink of a major commitment, and not being quite sure whether one has it in one to carry it through—the stage where the impossible almost exactly balances the possible, and a thistledown may shift the scales one way or the other.

At last the estimates came in: $800 for chimney work; $4000 for carpentry and general contracting work; $3000 for plumbing, cesspool, bathroom, furnace. I could buy the place as it stood (with thirty-six acres of woods and meadow) for $3900. That made twelve thousand as a start, but everyone warned me that these estimates were sure to be on the hopeful side.

In the end I knew I would have to trust to instinct, not estimates. Could I be happy in that house? Would poetry come there? How could I know? I couldn't. What I came back to was the structure: I had a solid, beautiful frame in which to create something, if possible, worthy of it. What I came back to was that moment of silence, and the oriole. Everything here has been a matter of believing in intangibles, of watching for the signs, of trying to be aware of unseen presences. In the end the oriole tipped the scales.

On June 7th, 1958, I signed the deed and became the owner of a broken-down house, a barn, and thirty-six acres in a remote New Hampshire village—a village of which I knew absolutely nothing.

CHAPTER 2

Nest-Building

Has anyone ever invested in a house and land whose ignorance was as total as mine? I knew absolutely nothing about houses, and next to nothing about country life. I had to depend on a stranger for the men I was hiring, sight unseen, but fortunately Mrs. Rundlett proved to be a wise and practical guide: she brought me Earle Naglie as general contractor. A wiry man with keen blue eyes and the gentlest manners, he must have realized at once that he had a tyro on his hands, and took me under his wing. I had, for instance, never heard of "sills," so I did not even know how lucky I was that the sills of my house were not rotten, and that the roof was good and solid.

I did have definite ideas of what I wanted done, but I hadn't the faintest idea how it was to be done. I wanted air, light, and space. I wanted to keep everything that gave the house its distinction, the work of the original builder, but I had no intention of making an historical reconstruction. I saw the house as becoming my own creation within a traditional frame, in much the same way as a poet pours his vision of life into the traditional form of the sonnet. Finally, I was determined to bring the old furniture up from that cellar and into a warm shelter by October first. What I told Earle Naglie was, in effect: "Keep costs down, and get me in by October." If he was sometimes dismayed by the impetuous, ignorant poet he had undertaken to work for he did not show it.

We sat down together one June morning on the granite step and drew up the big plans. I was rather reluctant to part with the sheds, but Earle told me that it would be impossible to shore them up. As it was, that whole end of the house had been pulled so far askew that the kitchen felt rather like the deck of a ship in a rough sea. Since the sheds would have to go, the possibility opened up of making a new kitchen wall with place for a sink, stove, frigidaire, and built-in cupboards and drawers—above all, two small windows to let in some light. I vetoed traditional pine paneling for the sake of white walls everywhere except in the front hall. I had seen how splendid the old Spanish chests and tables in Santa Fe looked against white adobe, and, besides making a good background for the Flemish furniture, white would reflect all the light the house could hold. What color there was would be paint on the floors—only one, in my study, was in good enough condition to be sanded down and waxed. As in the writing of a poem, ideas popped into my head as we went along, and I suddenly remembered that I had been struck on our house-hunting day by a mustard-yellow floor and how fine some rather elegant old furniture looked standing on it. Why not a yellow kitchen floor, a sour blue for the cabinets? Speaking in terms of color made what we were doing seem real to me, and soon I was beginning to tear out advertisements to show Earle the exact blue and yellow I had in mind. The actual mixing and painting was still months away, of course. And when the time came we had to experiment a good deal before we could get the colors exactly right.

Color was my province, but everything else was in Earle's hands, from finding a space for a bathroom (he managed to squeeze one in behind the stairs) to making a new keyhole for the front door, to building a whole new end of the house, and (horrendous job!) getting rid of the privy at the back and carting off not only the sheds but the tons of rubbish that had collected beneath their shaky walls—those and hundreds of other jobs, small and big, which I do not even know about.

Considering how definite my ideas were, it must have seemed strange to the workmen that I did not hover over each stage of the transformation of this broken-down shell into a livable house. I suppose I came about five times during the summer to see how things were going. I was too ignorant to realize how many small decisions Earle had to make on his own because I was not there, and when I did come I was apt to have a new idea and ask casually for some apparently "little thing" which took time he had not counted on spending. But he was never discouraging, although he sometimes looked a little quizzical when I insisted "I have to move in in October, come what may!" He just smiled and said he would do his best.

Earle was an experienced and inventive contractor and carpenter and I had a pretty clear notion of what I wanted, but I know now that we would never have managed without the guardian angel. He was kept busy seeing to it that the right people turned up at the right moment. How often an unexpected visitor just "happened" to be there when a crucial decision had to be made! One day late in June it was Jeanne Taylor, a painter with a keen eye. She walked in, looked around, and said, "Why don't you knock out that wall between the kitchen and the back room and make one big kitchen-living-room out of it?" The minute she spoke I saw how genial an idea she had given us. The present partition contained a closet and a useless flight of back stairs; once it was taken down, we would have one splendid long room instead of two cramped ones, and the boxlike structure of the house would be opened up to a new amplitude and variety.

Earle sat down with his pad and pencil and made some calculations. The change would mean putting in a whole new forty-foot-long floor, for one thing, but he too saw that it must be done. "Never mind the cost," I said to myself, "that room will make the house," and so it has. The long floor still tilts slightly like the deck of a ship, a great place to walk up and down while thinking. What had been the cooking fireplace in the house (it still has a crane in it and ovens to one side) helps make a charming living end to the kitchen, instead of overheating the shallow little room it dominated before. There I can sit and read while something is cooking, or, when I have guests, still be part of the family while I stand at the stove. And the great yellow floor, twice as long as I had thought it would be, is an unending joy, especially in winter when even on a dark day I seem to be treading on sunlight.

Between visits of the guardian angel, the hard work went on, and once in a while I missed the heavenly hand. The hauling off of the fallen-in barn, a piece of work that had loomed large in my mind when I was making the decision to buy, proved to be quite simple and not expensive. The bulldozer is a great invention! It took just a few hours to clear the rubble away. But when I decided to get the loam from my own land to fill in what was to become a terraced garden in the foundations, there was no hand on my shoulder to warn me that my decision would make a garden full of rocks and stones on the one hand, and a sad pitted meadow on the other. I am still struggling with the former; nature is taking care of the latter, for already the naked places are covered with daisies and black-eyed Susans and wild strawberries. Nevertheless it was a mistake.

Then one day quite late in the summer Earle said to me, "About time you told me about that kitchen wall."

I had some ideas, but they were rather vague. We had pretty well cleared away what remained here of the life of Dr. Rand, the first owner, when we tore out the sheds, including the one where his boy had slept next to the barn, ready to leap up and harness the horses while the doctor dressed if a call came late at night. But I had begged Earle to hang onto two sets of square stubby drawers where medicines had been stored. I wanted to build those in. I wanted to keep something here of Dr. Rand's presence, in case a friendly ghost came back looking for home.

I felt a slight panic coming on about that wall, when Don Jasinski, an architect, architect, just "happened" to walk in. He was the last person I expected to see, and he has never been back. But he had clearly got the message. I have not come to the conclusion that there is a guardian angel without considerable evidence!

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton. Copyright © 1968 May Sarton. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Prologue: The Ancestor Comes Home
• One: I Meet My House
• Two: Nest-Building
• Three: Moving In
• Four: With Solitude for My Domain
• Five: The House Opens Its Door
• Six: Neighbors Happen
• Seven: The Edge of Nowhere
• Eight: Mud Season
• Nine: Perley Cole
• Ten: A Flower-Arranging Summer
• Eleven: Death and the Maple
• Twelve: Learning about Water
• Thirteen: Guests and Ghosts
• Fourteen: The Turn of the Year
• Fifteen: Plant Dreaming Deep
• A Biography of May Sarton
• Copyright Page