The Past Is Close at Hand

Where am I?

 

On Sunday morning I finished one nonfiction book I’d been reading and had knocked off the remainder of another in the afternoon after housework, so at bedtime I was thrown back on a volume from Robert Hale’s Regional Series, books written in the mid-20^th century on various parts of England, featuring history, landscape, architecture, and so on. This second one, Exmoor, I’m not finding as charming as Olive Cook’s Breckland (each book in the series has a different author), but I am not reading it carefully for legal-historical detail, simply as escape from the present to another place and time. The “historic” parts that please me most are the most purely local. Here is an example: 

 

"From here we will cross Hoar Oak Hill to Hoar Oak Tree. This celebrated tree was, from 1300 when the Forest was curtailed until 1815 when Simonsbath was colonized, one of the only two trees in the entire Forest. In 1658 it fell from “very age and rottenness,” and four years later a young tree was planted there to take its place, and this newcomer was in turn blown down in 1916."

 

-      Lawrence Meynell, Exmoor (1953)

 

Bits like that I slow down to read and re-read, picturing the scene in my mind. I wonder if the replacement tree was replaced in turn when it fell in 1916. The author doesn’t say. 

 

I didn’t read very far in that book on Sunday evening before falling asleep, however, because before picking it up I read my entire 190-page journal from December 12, 2019, to March 16, 2020, reliving a long trip west (seven days on the road, longer than usual because in New Mexico I was felled by what I considered at the time a migraine attack but have since learned was more probably vertigo), ghost town hikes and social events, a first exploration of Turkey Creek Road, our “Coyote Christmas” (I would link this if I could, but the platform is not cooperating), Sarah’s last full winter with us, the onset of the pandemic, and so much more. A friend and I had been trying to remember when she and her then-partner visited us, first in Willcox and later in Dos Cabezas, and both of those visits I found recorded in this 2019-20 journal, the first of a series that has now reached Vol. XIII and page 2240 (as of this morning), memories important only to me. 

Sarah in Tucson, Arizona

The Artist and I made a couple of trips to Tucson that winter and visited bookstores in the “Old Pueblo,” as locals still like to call their city. David loved Speedway Boulevard! I was happy to get back to our quiet ghost town. We both loved the old library in Bisbee. 

In the library, Bisbee, AZ

My son’s father died in the spring, and I spoke with my son by phone almost every day. The Artist and I found again, having become yearlings, the new foals on the edge of Willcox that had captured my heart the winter before. On Monday mornings I volunteered at the Friendly Bookstore and on Wednesdays at Willcox Elementary School. We made new friends in Willcox. I hiked with neighbors on our home ground and a piece of public land down the road. 

 

"Sandhill cranes not far off, heard before seen & sometimes not seen at all, they fly so high. Brief thrill of daily passenger train [speeding through town nonstop], and in the quiet that follows its disappearance, again the distant, purling music of the cranes, now visible overhead, sunlit in their turning."  

 

-      1/25/2020, Willcox, AZ

 

"A high forest of ocotillo as we climbed & at the peak gave way partway down along a fault line to beargrass at the sedimentary/igneous shift. Northeast slope, shaded, held surprising pockets of tiny ferns & flourishing mosses, & the trail in places was muddy. Moisture no doubt came from snowmelt; springs that high unlikely."

 

      2/3/2020

 

 

We saw the new “Little Women" film in Willcox, and a Stage-to-Cinema showing of “The Nutcracker,” the 1984 production of the Royal London Ballet created by Peter Wright. 

 

"And while a large group, we were told, had formed the afternoon audience, we were the audience at 7 o’clock. A private showing! As if we were the king and queen!

 

"David loved it every bit as much as I did. “Superb! Magnificent!” It was a perfect holiday gift. And before & after the show, there were the magical lights in Railroad Park, their glorious colors reflected in puddles from the day’s storms….

 

"Two years ago we went to Paris at the Willcox Historic Theatre when the show was “Figaro” from the Opera de la Bastille. Now, London. It would be thrilling to attend the opera in Paris, the ballet in London, but having these experiences in a little Arizona cow town & coming outside to the dark of high desert winter has a magic all its own, almost as unlikely as the fantastical “Nutcracker” story itself."

 

      - 1/29/19

Railroad Park, Willcox, AZ, lighted for holidays in 2019

Sketchbooks were still part of my life that year.

 

"I had two sketchbooks with me yesterday, having taken the second as a mental reminder to get started. [Apparently the second was still empty, the first almost full.] It isn’t that anyone else cares … or that I would “do” anything with [the] drawings, even having made them. It’s that I feel good when drawing. Leave thoughts & self behind. Exist purely in the moment. See fully. And afterwards I can revisit those places & times: by looking at old drawings, I am plunged back into the ‘now’ of ‘then.’"

 

-      1/25/2020

Exploring up Turkey Creek Road in the Chiricahua Mountains

The ‘Now’ of ‘Now’!

Monday, March 24, 2025

From ‘then’ I return to ‘now,’ as winter weather has returned once more to spring Leelanau, snow deep and heavy and still coming down as Sunny and I ventured out into the morning. Maybe I will not get to Northport today, after all, and that’s all right. There are potatoes and onions and lentils a-plenty in the house—“lentils for the apocalypse,” I found myself thinking, a thought perhaps arising from recollections of the drive the Artist and I made back to Michigan in June 2020, one night staying in a three-story motel in which we seemed to be the only guests, an eerie place I named “the motel of the Apocalypse.”

As always, the present is saturated with the past. We are time beings.

"No dog park today, huh?"

Note: As I say, the platform has turned uncooperative, and one of the several things it will not let me do is format quotations as indented paragraphs. I don't know if this is a temporary or a permanent problem. All I can do is use quotation marks and a different color font.

Little Women: The Book and the Movie

“Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. 

"It's so dreadful to be poor!" sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress. 

"I don't think it's fair for some girls to have plenty of pretty things, and other girls nothing at all," added little Amy, with an injured sniff. 

"We've got Father and Mother, and each other," said Beth contentedly from her corner.” 

- Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

Alcott's novel is very formulaic, and the formula repeats over and over — when the four sisters are together, whatever the topic, each takes a turn speaking: 1, 2, 3, 4. Yet the overall effect somehow works, at least it did, when we were young, for those of us who grew up with the book. And while I don’t know what the experience would be for a sophisticated reader coming to the book for the first time as an older adult, I find I can re-read it now and be seduced all over again by the March family, even as I am aware of that repetitious, somewhat stilted formula. It’s because Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, for lifetime fans of Little Women, are real girls — always were and always will be. Where the magic comes from, I cannot say.

Why is it, though, that every girl who reads the book identifies herself as Jo? A recent NPR segment began by asking callers to say which girl they identified with and why, but the question had to be quickly discarded, as no one ever saw her girlhood self as conventional Meg, vain Amy, or shy, stay-at-home Beth. No, every girl-reader-become-woman claimed to have been, in her mind, as she read the book, tomboy-writer Jo, whether or not she’d been a tomboy (or even wished to be a boy) or hoped to be a writer when she grew up. Why?

I had occasion to reflect on this question some years ago, when one of my sisters and I had an exchange on the topic. I’d been amazed that she saw herself as Jo! Who, then, pray tell, did she imagine I would be? I was the oldest, but I was no Meg! Puzzling, I have come up at last with a two-pronged explanation: 

(1) Jo was the bookish sister. An aspiring writer, she was naturally a voracious reader. Girls who read Little Women were, obviously, readers themselves. In my family, three sisters (as were our parents) were all readers! Ipso facto, we were all Jo!

(2) Readers see an author’s fictional world through the author’s eyes, even when that author isn’t one of the characters. Little Women is written in the third person, but Jo is clearly the author’s alter ego. So it’s Jo’s head and heart we inhabit as we read the story. How could it be otherwise?

Moving from page to screen, there have been more than twelve adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s classic girls’ story, beginning with silent film versions in 1917 and 1918. I’ll have to watch Katherine Hepburn again as Jo (1933), but just thinking of Hepburn you can see why she would be a natural in the role. By contrast, whoever saw June Allyson as Jo (1949) ought to have had his (and I’m sure it was ‘his’) head examined. 

As for Winona Ryder (1994), sorry, I did not care for that version at all, though I realize it introduced a whole generation to the story. I became near-apoplectic at Jo and Professor Baer kissing in the balcony of a theatre! So wrong, so very wrong! Nineteenth-century PDA among the genteel, aspirational, theatre-going poor? Hardly! Besides that, the chapter in which the kiss takes place is called “Under the Umbrella”! Jo and the professor kiss under the umbrella after he tells her that all he has to offer are “these empty hands,” and she puts her hands in his and replies, “Not empty now.” I seem to recall I didn’t care for Susan Sarandon as Marmee, either, but as I’ve never wanted to see that film version a second time I cannot give a detailed critique. 

Because of my feelings about the 1994 film, I was nervous at first about seeing yet another adaptation. Now, after only my first viewing of Greta Gerwig’s version (which I’m sure I will see again many times in the future), I find myself agreeing with another audience member I overheard telling companions on the way out of the theatre, “I’ve seen three different movies made of ‘Little Women,’ but this is my favorite.” 

The dialogue at the top of this post opens the story of Alcott’s Little Women. In the new adaptation, the pre-Christmas complaint scene is moved and solutions the sisters find in making and/or purchasing modest gifts are omitted, but Gerwig does what she does so gracefully that I cannot object. The all-important introductory visit to the Hummels is there, intact. And that brings me to something the film adds that a book cannot: strong, big-screen visuals that put the viewer not only in the heart of the family but also in a geographical/historical context. I found myself devouring outdoor and street scenes and interiors of houses, as their world became as real to me as the sisters themselves. 

I did wonder, early on while watching, if someone unfamiliar with the story would find the time shifts confusing (there is nothing faintly like that in the strictly chronological presentation of the written book) and have difficulty catching all the dialogue when many voices were speaking together. My own movie-going companion, the Artist, never having read the book, was that very person: unfamiliar with the story, he did have difficulty catching everything that was said and making sense of all the time shifts. Well, I told him, I was completely lost the first time I saw (never having read) the film version of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, but I certainly wouldn’t change it. And I wouldn’t change Gerwig’s “Little Women,” either.

So many of the scenes from the book were there, just as L.M. Alcott wrote them, such as Amy falling through the ice when she follows Jo and Laurie after having burned Jo’s manuscript. Laurie’s proposal and Jo’s refusal: that scene, too, was straight from the book. I know the written story so well that I was aware of every addition or subtraction or substitution, but they were masterfully done, and I felt the story flowed along seamlessly. 

I’m still thinking about the ages of two characters, however: Laurie and Professor Bhaer (the latter generally referred to by his first name in the film). Both appeared much younger to me than I would have made them. I am coming around to accepting boyish Laurie, but Friedrich I can’t help wishing older and maybe not so handsome, more as he was in the book — though the actor’s very winsomeness makes it hard to complain about his looks!

The Artist asked me if the mother had been as much a background figure in the book as she was in the movie. I hadn’t thought about that before, but I think the answer is yes. She appears from time to time to offer sympathy and guidance, but it is the sisters themselves who form their own world, as young people always do, as each generation does.

In the car on the way home, I found myself telling the Artist about parts of the book that hadn’t made it to the screen. For instance, I loved the way they reminisced about the childhood game they played when small. “Backstory?” Yes. They played at being pilgrims, from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and as children would carry little bags of “burdens” that tumbled down the stairs when they reached the “Celestial City” at the top. Approaching womanhood, their burdens change: Meg hates being poor, Jo’s patience is tried by her work with demanding Aunt March, Beth struggles with near-crippling shyness, and Amy can’t help envying “girls with nice noses.” She so wants a classical nose!

They are so real to me, the March girls. Do you know them, too? What do you remember most? Or did you not care for them at all?

We Experience Different Worlds!

Saturday was a wild day of cold and wind and snow here in the mountains! Temperature hovered near the freezing mark all day, but the wind gave Willcox a “feels like” of 24 degrees, so you can just imagine how much colder it was here at our elevation. My walk to the mailbox with Sarah was quite an expedition, so when the Artist wanted to drive into town around midday, I almost stayed home. Once we got out on the highway, only a mile or so from the cabin, I was very glad I hadn’t missed the larger day! 

There was sunshine down below but none back in the mountains when we returned to the cabin. We are in another world up here. It may be raining in Willcox, but that can easily be snow in Dos Cabezas and above.

Tough day for LBBs (little brown birds)

Later we drove again to Willcox, through the dark, into swirling snow -- oh, what a day! You may remember that back in February of 2015 we were part of an audience of six people (including the manager) in the Willcox Historic Theatre for a screen viewing of the Opera of the Bastille, from Paris, performing “The Marriage of Figaro,” and how absolutely transported I was by that show. Well, last night we were practically the King and Queen, the only two viewers (in the much smaller Studio 128), given our own private showing of Peter Wright’s 1984 “Nutcracker,” performed by the Royal Ballet in the London Opera House. It was absolutely magnificent! Every moment was stunningly beautiful. What a great Christmas gift, one I will never forget — well, until I forget my own name, anyway.

There had been a large group for the afternoon show, so you should not get the impression that we were the only people in Willcox to see and appreciate the show. There had also been a Friday afternoon show. Maybe everyone who wanted to attend had already been to the show, or maybe the storm gave otherwise eager viewers second thoughts.

But here’s the thing: While I know it would be a thrilling and unforgettable experience to attend the opera in Paris or the ballet in London, there is also something magical and moving about seeing these performances in a little old theatre in a cow town in southern Arizona, being transported to Paris or London and from there into the story of the opera or ballet, and coming out again afterward into the quiet, dark, high desert night. No crowds, no traffic, just dark stillness, except for brightly colored holiday lights in Railroad Park. Both times the whole experience felt so unlikely — and last night, I thought, it felt as unlikely as the “Nutcracker” story itself, as if we ourselves, like the young girl in the ballet, had been transported into a fantasy world.

Then this morning the sun came up over the mountain and lit the snowy ground, flooding the cabin with light. Birds clustered around the suet feeder. Another winter storm is past. Was it “only a dream”?