Most of my readers already know that Daniel and I have just finished the little film we shot a few years ago -- Multilevel Relationship - and been going to some film festivals.
Probably the most fun was our road trip to Baltimore for the Maryland Film Fest. Pretty much the whole experience was great. Watching some great films, eating at some great restaurants, long walks, wild schemes and hanging out in the filmmakers tent. The filmmakers tent was a lavishly maintained reminder that filmmakers rock. Wine, cheese and hors d'oeuvres at all hours. Non-stop press interviews of the really big deal filmmakers (just to remind those of us just entering this level of the stratosphere of how far we yet had to go
A whole unexpected chapter included connecting to long lost cousins who drove across state lines to see Multilevel. We had some great fun, and ended up enjoying their fantastic hospitality in DC at the end of our trip.
I'm gradually blogging many of the films we saw at the fest - check out my film blog if you're interested. And Multilevel Relationship is still in submission to a few more festivals, but once we're satisfied that it's coming to the end of it's festival life-cycle, it will find a life here on the internet.
You probably did not know that this is actually an attempt to capture a more subjective essence than even the oversaturated outdoors, the blurry lines, the canted angle, the almost-finished roll of paper towels and the mysterious reflection represented to your immediately conscious aesthetic responses.
This photograph is taken in the kitchen of my family cottage. It is the kitchen where my paternal Grandmother, she who most eminently influenced my own disposition, this is the kitchen where that Grandmother spent a great deal of her life.
This photograph does not reveal to you how very small the kitchen is, but believe me when I tell you that it would be logistically impossible to fit more than five full grown humans in this room at a time. Possibly unless the the sixth was given to crowd surfing, but in general, my Grandmother did very little crowdsurfing.
You cannot feel it right now, but believe me when I tell you that this kitchen contains the most magnificent breeze. The breeze is magnificent because the kitchen is at a corner and the cottage is positioned on a peninsula that juts into a bay with a lagoon and a wide creek on either side. The breeze is so cool and refreshing and the windows make you almost want to stay in the otherwise cramped and inconvenient workspace.
Part of me thinks that my Grandmother loved domesticity in general and this kitchen in particular. (Other parts of me are not so sure, but we will not deal with those doubts tonight.) This was her summer home for thirty-some years. She cooked and entertained with such precision and formality that her dinners were almost always enjoyable if not quite tasty. And in the days when her heart was unclouded, when the darkness was not overwhelming, she was free and garrulous with her laughter and witty stories while serving and eating along with the rest of us.
My whole life I spent occasional days and weekends with my grandparents at our cottage. When I turned seventeen, I started the habit of spending whole weeks with them. My grandmother and I were both writers, thinkers, socialites, archivists, and endlessly sentimental. We had grand times talking. We talked about books and art and music and ideas and all the characters from generations and generations of family trees.
She wrote long overly descriptive letters in perfect palmer script every week to the whole family, and whenever we came to visit, she made glass dishes full of chocolate pudding, chocolate puddings topped with whipped cream as dessert for every single meal.
My grandfather and I took long silent walks which were also grand, but in an altogether different way. I do not think that his silence is unrelated to the subjects of this post, or the feeling of this kitchen or the story of my grandmother, but that is not the story of this post, so I'll not diverge any longer.
I do not believe in ghosts and I have never believed in haunting.
But when I was near thirty three and my grandmother had been gone for two years, I saw her ghost here. In this kitchen. I was standing in front of the window that you're looking at now. And there she was, looking at me. Waiting for me to move, so she could return the serving bowl full of vegetables to the refrigerator.
The next time she was standing in front of the window and the refrigerator.
Nothing about it ever felt frightening or eerie. It all felt very normal and true.
But then a couple years ago I took these pictures to try to capture the feeling of seeing someone who so shaped my imagination...and occasionally returned for a benign haunting.
Aesthetically I always liked this cabinet. It hangs in the garage of the house that my in-laws built right after they were married. The house they paid off before getting pregnant with my wife. The house that sits on the top of the hill just down the lane from the original farmhouse where Grandma and Grandpa Erman lived.
My father-in-law Garry wanted to build a house on top of the big hill way *up* the lane (and just past the sightlines) from the original farmhouse, but Grandma and Grandpa Erman didn't approve and so the house was built where it was. The garage is attached to the house. And this cabinet is attached to the back wall of the garage, just before you go up the steps to the back porch which then leads into the house.
I've always loved the fading red paint, the small spread of shelves, the fact that the whole thing closes and turns into something more private and secret.
I also love that it's jumbled full of practical fasteners, adhesives, attachments and lubricants.
My wife's family has been gradually sorting through Garry's stuff since he died. Two barns, one basement, a garage and stuff throughout the house. Garry was a collector and a saver, and just slightly sentimental. His capacity for collecting was tempered by his intensely practical nature. He kept things because they might likely be used. He kept things that might be used by his family, his friends, his neighbors, the school district, the grain elevator or the church.
Touring these collections is as mundane as human life can be, but at the same time, like any museum artifact, each of these artifacts is shot through with magic.
Garry kept every one of these items because he suspected that it might allow him to help someone later, build something later or fix something later. Those items without a future hope enlivening them, were almost always links to a hopeful past - a coin collection, a train-set glued to a plywood board, a meticulously restored tractor.
A small old-fashioned buggy was meticulously restored so that grandchildren could ride in the old-fashioned section of the homecoming parade through downtown West Lafeyette, Ohio. The buggy seemed like both - memory and possibility.
And maybe in that light, the state of everything becomes more clear. We are all, this world is all, drenched in memory & radiating hope.
