Flying The Coop - March 1, 2011, London

PREFACE

“In the midst of Winter you can feel the inventions of Spring.”

           Lawrence Durrell

From Justine, The Alexandria Quartet

1^st March, 2011. London

You know how it is when you’re going away, you spend the preceding few weeks trying to make your life perfect in case you have the good fortune to return to it.  So we were looking forward to beginning our  adventure, 6 weeks of being together discovering what would make Provence meaningful for us and hopefully to all of you. 

But first we had to go to England where Joel was the Patron Artist of Derby Format Festival for 5 days.  I stayed in London where all week, to and fro in the hallway, I looked at a pair of Joel’s shoes which he had left next to a pair of mine. All week long, the sense of loss, increased with each passing day until, at last, I spoke the words out loud:

“One Day one of us will be gone

leaving only our shoes

to keep each other company”

The sense of impending loss has been gathering like a brooding storm, adding to the loss of the Cape House.

 This is the house where we met, where Joel proposed to me over the garden gate, where our children and now their children have come every summer.  This is the house that once was a boat shed in Truro and then was floated over the bay to Provincetown.  This the house that was still a shack when we first met, standing on a barren sand lot, just feet from high tide.  This is the house I made into home, my first real home.  This is where I made an English garden by the sea, where Joel and I would slip into the silky bay at sunrise while the town still slept.  Here is where we watched the light, fed the birds, hung the clothes on the line.  Here is where we danced while cooking dinner each evening, where I composed music and wrote in my little shed.  Here is where we spent 3 to 5 months every summer, living according to the tides.  Here is where my daughter propped her bicycle against the hedge, where our grandchildren splashed in the tidal pools. Here is where friends came. Here is where we thought we would grow old.

Feelings, which had been put on hold in order to take care of the business of the sale, began forcing their way into my consciousness from the depths of nightly dreams, disturbing dreams of the Cape House and our New York apartment, the dreams robbing me of the illusion of home and safety. 

 This sense of dislocation and upheaval was exacerbated in England which sounds and looks like home but in fact is not, nor has been for many years.  This is not the England where I grew up.   I cannot wait to get to Provence where I can surrender to being a “homeless” stranger in a strange land.

Maggie begins a new series of photographs entitled, Turning Reality On Its Ear.