A Composer’s Journal Entry: June 22, 2005

[figaro]

A Composer’s Journal Entry: June 22, 2005

Wednesday, June 22
11:40 p.m.

Went to Windgarth tonight, after M. got home from work. On the weekend I had reclipped Cindy’s heart-shaped bush, in the shade garden. Not an easy task, it was the last thing we did together. The end of last fall, I had helped her clip all her bushes with my hand shears, and when we got to that shrub I had asked her what shape she wanted me to sculpt. She said a heart. And I had done the rough cut. And now it really already does look like a heart. On our last visit to Windgarth I had planted red and white impatiens around it. Tonight I added a few red dahlias that someone had given me. Ester came over to give me some baby cosmos, volunteers in her garden - and I showed her the heart. I said that it had been my last garden project with Cindy, and we stood there looking at the heart. “It’s Cindy’s heart” I finally said. “She left it here for us, for everyone”, and Ester - for the first time in all these many months - finally said: “I miss her”. And she turned away. Ester & I have talked more this spring than in all the years we have been at Windgarth ... And I am growing very fond of her.

Larry has kept the gardens pristine and has lost much weight. He looks very handsome and clear, and sweetly roams the gardens looking for stray weeds with a small trowel. When Cindy was there, he barely noticed the gardens. He says that he feels Cindy is there with him, telling him how things should be done. I must admit that I also feel her presence in the gardens, and clairvoyantly see a new Light there ...

Wrote some motives and themes down on a piece of paper the other day, in the car coming home from Windgarth. For Spear’s octet of stringed instruments, this time without choir. I will finish the Cycle for strings and choir later. Meanwhile, I am trying to be more practical, as M. suggested. It might be too difficult to find a choir capable of singing what I write - and far too expensive. It is better that they perform what I write more often, than to have the beauty I hear inwardly stay on the score, on pieces of paper, because a choir cannot be found.

Worked in the gardens. Planted asparagus with their ferny tops in the vegetable garden near the locust tree. The lettuce are immense, all different colors and textures; the swiss chard are small, but their red spindly stems already visible from a distance. The peas are almost my height and are flowering. Planted more spanish onions. Late evening was cool, a breeze. Emptied the downstairs for the guests who arrive on Saturday for a week - they have the entire house. M. leaves for Germany for a week on Friday. Watered the gardens. Went down to the dock for a final farewell to the day & was met by an coral colored full moon rising quietly over the lake, its coral band of light streaming towards my feet across the water. I had never seen the moon that color and it took my breath away ... Ester came a bit into Cindy’s garden & called “Do you see the moon? It must be the harvest moon ...” & I answered yes. It was almost startling in its intensity, like a strange chord or floating harmonic passage of music. I must find a way to somehow put it in the string piece I am now writing ... Next week perhaps, when M. is away & the world is quiet. We stood on the dock, the silhouetted martins in Larry’s birdhouse without a roof - some perched on the sides, some down below, their little heads appearing and then disappearing. We must speak with Larry again. Perhaps we can borrow a motor boat steady enough for a ladder ... the martin house pole is fairly tall.

On the way home tonight, the moon followed us home. As we followed the bends in the road, the moon sometimes to our right over the fields, sometimes to our left over the lake or woods - and at other times hung before and over us, like an old fashioned clock on the wall, only made of flaming coral light. Even as we passed through numerous small towns on a detour back to Ithaca, it waited for us. I thought of the words to one of my early songs: “Tonight the moon followed me/ and I smiled.” I had written those words when I lived in the country, on Black Road. A walk by myself down the country road with the dogs, the moon white and wan and clear against the dark sky ...