Two Bad Women and One Good Apple

The Apple Was a Northern Invention

When she ate the pomegranate,
it was as if the seed
with its wet red shining coat
of sweet flesh clinging to the dark core
was one of nature’s eyes. Afterward,
it was nature that was blind,
and she who was wild
with vision, condemned
to see what was before her, and behind.

The poet Eleanor Rand Wilner has a different view on this most well-known ‘apple’ story. I’m not referring to the pomegranate versus apple question — that debate we may never resolve, but to Wilner's portrayal of Eve as ‘wild with vision,’ a seer and a mystic. The poet completely uproots the traditional portrayal of Eve as a fallen women unable to resist the tantalizing offer of the serpent. 

The story of Adam and Eve is a collective, cultural invention. However, in my personal version, our sister Eve has been condemned for two thousand years because she satisfied her desire to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, because she wanted to know the deep truth about who she was and the meaning of life.

Our Eve had much in common with Lalla or Lal Ded, the 14th century Hindi mystic poet, who also experienced her own expulsion. Married at twelve, starved, beaten, and abused by her husband and in-laws, Lalla was finally able to leave that household when she was in her twenties. She found spiritual teachers and eventually, her own divine wisdom. 

I Lalla set forth blooming as a cotton flower
Then the carder and the cleaner kicked me again and again
Next a woman spun me and lifted me from her wheel as gossamer
And in the weaver's room they hung me as warp on the loom
~ Lalla 102

Then the washermen beat and dashed me on the stone
And rubbed me with clay and soap to whiten me
Then the tailor cut me piece by piece
Now, as finished cloth, I have found my way at last to Freedom
~ Lalla 103

Tr. Jennifer Sundeen

Lalla had to tear off the cloth of the society in which she was born and, piece by piece, remake herself from within. She danced naked through the streets, uttering verses that were remembered and passed down, adn then finally recorded 400 years later. A rebel, a seeker, she gave up the comforts of hearth and home to wander, always loving and always teaching. She didn’t follow a prescribed path or religious dogma, but discovered her own truths from within her own body.

Photo: Carol J. Hicks

Then there is Reinette Clochard, an old French variety, an apple we grow in the orchard. Reinette means ‘little Queen’ in French, and a clochard is a bum, a vagabond, a homeless person. Not only is this a strange name for an apple, but it is an odd juxtaposition of social classes. And why the queen and not the king? The apple is small in size, giving meaning to ‘little’ queen; but her mottled yellow color of skin is more like a wild apple found in the woods, an apple without regal color, one that Thoreau would have grabbed, bitten into, found to be hard, and delighted in its ordinariness. Reinette Clochard’s flesh is pale and soft, creamy, the opposite of the crunchy sweet apples preferred by many today. She can be kept easily at room temperature for several months. That’s why she used to be loaded onto ships for sailors to eat, their only fresh food. 

 In France, Reinette Clochard is making a comeback. She comes packaged in wooden boxes and is sold as a specialty apple. In our orchard, people disdain her. They don’t know what to make of the name or her appearance.

The apple season at Old Frog Pond Farm has reached its fullest expression. Pickers have been walking the orchard rows, counting the color-coded blocks on their maps to find the Honey Crisp and Crimson Crisp. Once these were picked out, they began picking Liberty and Freedom. Reinette Clochard remained on the tree, her ripe fruit finally falling to the ground, until I went out and rescued her.  

And now, you may be wanting to ask, what does Eve, the mystic poet Lalla, and this old French apple have in common? 

Apples originated in the forests of Kazakhstan, traveled along the Silk Road in horses’ bellies, and in the pockets of Roman soldiers through Europe and to England, and eventually to America. The apple carries within its skin poetic, mythological, geographic, social, and scientific history. As women, we belong to the lineage of expulsed women seers. We carry the seeds from these early destroyers of social conventions. We need to clamor loudly for what we want. Can you imagine being named little homeless queen?  Surely no woman named this apple. We should reject the labels that society assigns us.

When I think of Eve, I see her as a nonconformist, a woman with the strength to go against convention. The same is true for the wild mystic Lalla. Sometimes I forget the lessons they both exemplify. I don’t allow myself to do what matters most to me, what connects me to my deepest roots, or speak my truth. And Reinette Clochard?  We shouldn’t forget the girls and women all over the world who are without education, who are demeaned, abused, or locked into confining roles, who still need our help.

Two of the newer apples we grow in the orchard are named Liberty and Freedom. Odd names for a fruit, you might think, but these are disease-resistant varieties. The suggestion is that the orchardist is free from the concern of scab, liberated from the fungal disease that makes growing apples in new England so challenging. These names reflect the significant changes in plant breeding in the last century. If only changing the human heart was as simple.

Today is our last day  for apple picking. There are only a few Liberty and Freedom apples on the trees. We need more of both in this world. We need to remember the Eves, the Lallas, and the Reinette Clochards. We need to remember all those, both men and women, who sought knowledge and freedom and did not settle for less.

Plein Air Poetry

Today is for poetry at Old Frog Pond Farm. This afternoon, twenty-four poets will gather and walk the trail around the pond and through the woods, along the orchard, to the meditation hut, with a stop at the rock turtle, and back to the dam. The poets will be reading the poems they began writing earlier in the year inspired by a visit to the farm.

We need poetry to mine the subtle, the tenuous, the painful, the ecstatic, and elegiac feelings of our humanness. We need poetry when we are tired, hurt, hassled, and missing connection to our own heart. “I come to the farm,/having very nearly forgotten myself,” begins Lucinda Bowen. “And here blooms a memory. . . my surprise at improbable sweetness.”

Early in the year, Susan Edwards Richmond, organizer of the event, and I, choose a theme. This year’s subject, Memoir, “invited the poets to dig deeper, to go beyond surfaces, and draw, sometimes unbidden, wells of feeling from the landscape,” wrote Richmond in her introduction to the chapbook of poems. 

Susan Edwards Richmond, Plein Air Reading, 2013

Poets sign up to participate. Throughout the spring and early summer, they visit the farm and walk the paths. When they come upon a view, a place, a tree, or a sound that awakens their muse, they stop and write. They return home, work on their poems, sometimes visiting again. In mid-summer, they submit their poems to Richmond, editor of the chapbook. For some, Richmond responds with suggestions, working closely with the writer to enhance the poem; others’ work arrives fully fledged. Then Richmond orders the collection, giving shape not only to the book, but to the walking event. Our slow-moving herd of poetry appreciators can’t be running from the dam to the orchard to the bell; then flying to the meditation hut and back again — or the walk would take us far into the evening hours.

Sometimes it is one of the outdoor sculptures at the farm that moves the poet to words. For poet David Davis, the ringing of Paul Matisse’s Olympic Bell brought back memories of Nepal. “Forty years ago in Katmandu/I heard a monk ring a temple bell/That shook my chest and opened my ears.” Polly Brown begins her poem with, “A sculpted figure by the pond,/gathering sky in her round arms,/Is my mother—alive but so lightly tethered/to the place and condition of her body.” She, too, mentions the bell, “hauling on the hammer I sound the bell/in the woods,/ and they [her mother and father] fly to me.”

Some poets invite us to feel the plight of the greater world. Linda Fialkoff writes, “So many refugees/choked into one small boat/fueled by a damp, ragged/body long held hostage.” It is as if she knew that Alicia Dwyer’s Suspended Encampment, a hanging sculpture behind the Medicine Wheel, would be arriving for the sculpture exhibit. Dwyer’s sculpture not only refers to the plight of Monarch butterflies, but to the migrations of people, the refugees throughout Europe, and now, the homeless millions in the aftermath of the recent violent storms and earthquakes.

Suspended Encampment, Alicia Dwyer (partial)     Photo:Robert Hesse

bg Thurston picks up a stone and hears, “Sometimes sorrow/sits like a stone in your heart/and you are unable to lift it.” For Heather Connelly Bryant, the raspberry patch evokes a strong memory, “Yet I was wrong—now there is new life, new love, new/hope— infidelity no longer hangs in the air, everywhere.” Richmond, also wrote near the raspberries, “each of us now with our own green past, red stained fingers. Only rarely/was there enough/but we were always sated.” 

Richmond and her husband brought their children to pick raspberries at this farm years before I moved in, and she was so happy when she learned that I would continue to care for the patch and open it for public picking. Since that time, Richmond and I have collaborated on many projects — Wild Apples, a journal of nature, art, and inquiry, five years of Plein Air Poetry at the farm, and our most recent collaboration, a children’s book, Where’s My Bonkers? about a girl, her mother, and an apple. It’s always about collaboration at the farm. We share, inspire, and co-create together.

Cover Art & Design:  Lynn Horsky

We invite you to join us this afternoon, Sunday, September 17 at 2pm to walk and listen to the poets read their poems. I guarantee you will be sated.

If you can’t make the event, a limited number of chapbooks will be for sale at the farmstand and on the farm’s website. The walk is free and open to the public.

The Changing Landscape

Change is in the air. The studio that I moved into sixteen years ago with a truckload of metal, wood, and cloth is quiet. This studio that supported the work on projects such as the emotional fourteen panels of The Stations of the Heart, the outdoor sculpture exhibit A Circus Comes to Fruitlands, and the ten Zen Ox Herding sculptures, has no discernible pulse of life. It is now empty.

Before my arrival at the farm, the space had been used as an unheated garage for an old Model T.  I did the cheapest and quickest redo to turn the space into my studio. I added heat, posts to support a dropped ceiling, fluorescent lights, and windows. The floor remained; its old boards spattered with oil and grease had character. In recent years, the studio has been a carnival of activity, a crowded side show with circus barkers calling out from every direction, “Finish me! Work on me! Pick me up! Use me! ”

Studio, March, 2011

I’ve made close to two hundred small sculptures with found objects, wood, stone, and bronze figures. Though many have sold, the studio feels cramped with surplus materials. I had hoped to extend the footprint with a construction project, but that plan was delayed and the permit lapsed. I didn’t have the heart to go back through the entire process of site plan review and other hearings. The studio is within the wetlands buffer and to enlarge it requires these approvals. But even without the enlargement, I still wanted to make a change.

With a couple of our farm workers, we carried out and stored the large items like my workbench and tables. We carried metal to one location and wood to another; the welder and tools went below the studio while paint supplies, tape and epoxy glues went to the house along with wax sculpture-making supplies. The studio emptied quickly and easily. Oddly, I was never bereft or hesitant about what was happening. I felt only a keen anticipation for the unknown ahead. If I try to think of a parallel situation, like emptying my closet and giving away most of my clothes except for the most useful items, it doesn’t feel at all related. This isn’t about clutter clearing; I gave away very few items. It has more to do with wanting to experience the blank canvas, the way a painter often prepares a fresh surface to begin a new painting. I want to experience an empty space before I begin to work again.

Studio, August 30, 2017

I remember reading that Japanese farmers used to write haiku in winter when their farms were at rest. But today agricultural production has expanded with the use of hoop houses and greenhouses to produce food for more months of the year. Farmers no longer write poetry because there is no break in the seasons. They have no time to experience the quiet, the emptiness, that inspires an expression of intimacy. There is no fallow ground. Emptying my studio feels like purposely leaving a field unplanted.

I will be making some structural changes inside the space. The ceiling will be opened to the roof over two-thirds of the room, and a new loft with dormer windows will occupy the other third. The west wall will have no windows — I can't wait to have one large wall with nothing on it. The south side will have more windows for two large camellia plants, a lemon tree, and a bird of paradise plant that live inside the studio all winter.

The improvements will be wonderful, but I know that the real improvement has already happened. I'm getting rid of things – old stories and habits. I am committed to re-entering this space in a quiet way so that I can listen to what my innermost being truly wants to do. The empty studio is an open heart where all is waiting, beautiful, possible, and vulnerable.

Fall is a good time for renewal. It’s that delicious season when the fruit is ripe for picking, yet the trees have already begun to store sugars for winter. Here, at Old Frog Pond Farm, we are only one week away from opening the orchard for pick-your-own apples, a most splendid time, yet like the trees, I too, am preparing for winter.

All About Art

A friend of mine paints barns. That is, she makes paintings of the same barn over and over, in all seasons and at all times of day. The angle of her view may shift or the size of her canvas, the palette, or the medium, but the barn remains, a presence in the landscape. In fact, it feels inseparable from the earth, as if she was a painting a mountain or a great tree. Brenda Cirioni’s barns are rooted and alive.

But the real barn, the barn that she connects with through her painting, no longer exists:

When I was sixteen years old my family home burned to the ground. Memories of that experience – both visual and visceral – surfaced in 2012 and found expression in Barn Series.

It was years after the event that Brenda realized that she had never truly mourned that frightening loss. Painting is a way to heal our wounds, even the hidden, unarticulated ones.

The first Barn Series Painting, 2011, Brenda Cirioni Photo:BC

As artists, we are fortunate when we find a subject that captivates us. Like many people, I have an attraction to the natural world, to old objects and worn tools. Growing up with an anthropologist mother and traveling with her to Mexico and Guatemala, as well as to India and Papua New Guinea, I learned to respect material culture and appreciate how it reveals information about people and their worlds. I have a natural affinity for old objects and textiles because they connect me to my childhood and early adolescence. I use them in sculpture, often combining them with small figures. I play.

I think of art as a form of play that connects our inner and outer worlds. Children play naturally. Children like to arrange things, to build towers, to line up stones on a beach, or arrange a series of stuffed animals on a shelf. Artists, when painting a landscape or making a sculpture, also arrange objects. Brush strokes form buildings or trees, people or abstract shapes. If I want to paint grasses that are dark green at the bottom and become pale above, I stroke the canvas with color in a particular pattern and with an intensity and intentionality to recreate the density of green below and the lighter colored, thinner reeds above. It’s the way I imagine Brenda paints a barn, filling her brush with color and forming the angles, the light, the textures — all with intuitively complex decision making that no one else can replicate. It’s authentic playing — the playing of an experienced artist.

When we are self-conscious and trying too hard at this art making, it feels all wrong. It’s only when we find the sweet spot that has similarities to child’s play that discoveries happen. I have a friend who has recently become obsessed with mosaics. She has a tree stump on which she hammers stones to break them down into small mosaic pieces. She then fits them in patterns, setting the stone shards in cement. She loves this work — and can’t find enough time to spend at her mosaic table. She is tapping into her true self. As she breaks these rocks from the earth into small pieces and arranges them in a specific way with colors and shapes, I feel like she is breaking down difficult places in the world and creating peace — like she is breaking down the hard places inside of herself and turning them into art.

Untilted, Shea Ikusei Settimi

Children play with stones, soil, sand, containers, the contents of the kitchen utensil drawer, anything that they can pick up. When we become an artist, we reconnect with that innocent and serious play. Many of the sculptors exhibiting this year at the farm’s annual sculpture exhibit play seriously in this way. Barbara Andrus strung curly willow twigs across the pond. Is this so different than lining up teddy bears? Of course it is – and there is much more work involved and commitment to her vision, but the essence is still there.

We’re fortunate when we find a medium that appeals to us and that we can work and develop. Alicia Dwyer’s Dyads are eyes that peer out from among the forest trees. They seem to be staring at us as we walk along the path; we have the uncomfortable feeling of being followed. Painted on aluminum flashing, the Dyads were made eight years ago, her first time working with aluminum. She has continued with this medium, creating armor women, and this year, a new piece in which beautiful butterflies suspended in captivity remind us of the refugee problems in many parts of the world.

My daughter, Ariel Matisse, has found that wire is her chosen medium of expression. For the sculpture exhibit, she’s making a willow tree growing out of a hollow tree stump. The willow trunk is a twisting shape made from a fistful of long wires, where one end forms the branches and the other the roots. She uses a ball peen hammer to flatten and make the branches reflect light. She grew up watching me drag tree trunks home from the woods or from a trip to Cape Cod. I can easily see my influence on my daughter and also how her own truth leads her in a new direction.

On Samantha Pasapane’s website she writes, “I love steel.” Samantha will be bringing a new sculpture in her Savaging Series to the farm.

Savaging, Smantha Pasapane

Lydia Musco has already installed her sculpture, Organizing Echoes with Ash, on the concrete pier in the middle of the lower pond. The title of her sculpture suggests ‘creating order.’ Lydia’s column is made of ceramic tiles that she combines and stacks. Her sculpture, though abstract, entices the viewer to linger with its physicality. I see a figure or even two figures together, and then when I look again, it seems to be echoing the play of light on the rippling water. 

Organizing Echoes with Ash, Lydia Musco, installed at Old Frog Pond Farm, 2017 Photo:LH

Art making connects us to something original inside us, to a truth about who we are and how we relate to our world as human beings from our very origin. Brenda Cirioni’s most recent paintings are what she calls Spirit Houses.

Spirit House I, 2016, Brenda Cirioni Photo:BC

They seem a natural progression from the Barn Series. In these paintings, the landscape with identifiable trees and grasses is gone, but the body of the barn remains without the old story. In the painting above, the white shape is floating as if on a sea. It’s haunting and surreal, yet familiar, a space we have all inhabited — one where we just don’t know. That’s when there’s nothing left to do but find a medium that resonates — words, paint, wire, clay, even fruits and vegetables — and get down to some serious play.

Old Frog Pond Farm's outdoor sculpture exhibit opens on Friday, September 8 and will be open every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday through Columbus Day. Hours are 11-5pm and admission is $7. Join us for an opening reception and meet the artists on Sunday, September 10 from 1-4pm. In the next few weeks I will be writing about more of the artists and fall activities. Join us at the farm!