"House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts c. 1915" - photo by Detroit Publishing Co.
"Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm."
-- Beginning of "The House of the Seven Gables" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Stephen refuses to watch The Last of Us because I made him watch The Walking Dead (and the spinoffs) after it got really bad, but I’ve been slowly catching up when he’s at work. This week, I saw the gay episode with Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett and while there were things I didn’t like about it, on the whole I found it compelling for one reason, which is that it depicted two non-heterosexuals who are basically content entertaining themselves with (each other and) various projects (many artistic or artistic-adjacent, like gardening and rigging up zombie traps). They have virtually no desire to join society beyond the little fortress they create for themselves. Admittedly, the larger society in which they find themselves is broken and populated by criminals and zombies, but [you can see where I’m going with this in terms of our own society and how it treats non-heterosexuals among others]. Anyway, I want to see more gay characters who refute society instead of assimilating, which (assimilation or the desire for it) is so often what happens, and this episode to me was a pretty good example of gays refuting society, which is bad. (I mean society is bad; refuting it is good.) In other news, the park was also beautiful today; I could watch a television series about heather and elm trees :)
I have just completed this painting which is my impression of how our house looked on a Christmas Eve in the 1950's. The car in the driveway is our 1951 (or was it '52?) Dodge Royale. The parrot in the window is Polly whom we inherited from Daddy's Godmother. His cage was perched on a radiator so he never seemed to be troubled by his location near the window.
The large gray tree on the left of the painting represents an American Elm. It truly was in the front yard of the house that was next door to ours, but in this painting I have replanted it nearer to our house so that I could pay homage to those wonderful huge trees. This one was at least 3 feet in diameter. Where they had been planted on either side of a street, their branches extended high above the sidewalks and pavement. When we walked underneath them, it was like walking through a very high tunnel. We lost all of our elms to the Dutch Elm Disease in the late 50's and early 60's.
People were just beginning to display outdoor Christmas lights in our small town during the years when we were growing up. Instead of the multicolored lights that were becoming popular, Mother substituted her own personal touch by buying strings of lights and replacing the many colored bulbs with these pale blue lights. In the years before my brothers were old enough to climb a ladder, she and Daddy themselves draped them along the evergreens in front of our house.
But our indoor tree (which was always too large for our living room) still had multicolored and bubble lights. The lights on the tree in our living room were only multicolored, that is, until the year (around 1955 I think) when Daddy walked past a store that was selling tiny clear lights that seemed to twinkle by blinking on and off in sequence. This was the first time that he (or any of us for that matter) had seen this new variation of holiday lights. That year, of course,our family had already spent hours hanging all the colored lights and decorations on our tree as usual. But Daddy, who always held on to his childlike view of Christmas, couldn't resist this new effect. He bought those new lights and secretly brought them home. On Christmas Eve that year, after we children had gone to bed, with Mother's loyal assistance, he painstakingly removed all the decorations and colored lights from our tree. Then they strung the tiny white lights on the denuded tree, rehung the colored lights over them and replaced all the ornaments so that they hung from the branches just as if they had never been moved.
My brothers and sister and I remember being stunned and enchanted by the magic of those twinkling lights that seemed to us had magically transformed our Christmas tree overnight.
I grew up during the years when people were just beginning to decorate their homes with outdoor lights during the holiday...
