Madeleine LEngle - The Crosswicks Journals: A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention

The Crosswicks Journals

A Circle of Quiet, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother, The Irrational Season, and Two-Part Invention

Madeleine LEngle

CONTENTS

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

These works are memoirs. They reflect the authors present recollections of her experiences over a period of years. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect the identity of certain individuals. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

A Circle of Quiet copyright 1972 by Crosswicks, Ltd.

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother copyright 1974 by Crosswicks, Ltd.

The Irrational Season copyright 1977 by Crosswicks, Ltd.

Two-Part Invention copyright 1988 by Crosswicks, Ltd.

Cover design by Amanda Shaffer

ISBN: 978-1-5040-4622-0

This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

A Circle of Quiet

This book is for Charlotte Rebecca Jones

ONE

We are four generations under one roof this summer, from infant Charlotte to almost-ninety Great-grandmother. This is a situation which is getting rarer and rarer in this day and age when families are divided by large distances and small dwellings. Josephine and Alan and the babies come from England; Great-grandmother from the Deep South; Hugh and I and our younger children from New York; and our assorted adopted children from as far afield as Mexico and as close as across the road; all to be together in Crosswicks, our big, old-fashioned New England farmhouse. Its an ancient house by American standardswell over two hundred years old. It still seems old to me, although Josephine and Alan, in Lincoln, live close by the oldest inhabited house in Europe, built in the eleven-hundreds.

When our children were little and we lived in Crosswicks year round, they liked to count things. They started to count the books, but stopped after they got to three thousand. They also counted beds, and figured that as long as all the double beds held two people, we could sleep twenty-one; that, of course, included the attic. We are using the attic this summer, though we havent yet slept twenty-one. A lot of the time it is twelve, and even more to feed. Cooking is the only part of housekeeping I manage with any grace; its something like writing a book: you look in the refrigerator and see whats there, choose all the ingredients you need, and a few your husband thinks you dont need, and put them all together to concoct a dish. Vacuum cleaners are simply something more for me to trip over; and a kitchen floor, no matter how grubby, looks better before I wax it. The sight of a meals worth of dirty dishes, pots, and pans makes me want to run in the other direction. Every so often I need OUT ; something will throw me into total disproportion, and I have to get away from everybodyaway from all these people I love most in the worldin order to regain a sense of proportion.

I like hanging sheets on lines strung under the apple treesthe birds like it, too. I enjoy going out to the incinerator after dark and watching the flames; my bad feelings burn away with the trash. But the house is still visible, and I can hear the sounds from within; often I need to get away completely, if only for a few minutes. My special place is a small brook in a green glade, a circle of quiet from which there is no visible sign of human beings. Theres a natural stone bridge over the brook, and I sit there, dangling my legs and looking through the foliage at the sky reflected in the water, and things slowly come back into perspective. If the insects are biting meand they usually are; no place is quite perfectI use the pliable branch of a shadblow tree as a fan. The brook wanders through a tunnel of foliage, and the birds sing more sweetly there than anywhere else; or perhaps it is just that when I am at the brook I have time to be aware of them, and I move slowly into a kind of peace that is marvelous, annihilating all thats made to a green thought in a green shade. If I sit for a while, then my impatience, crossness, frustration, are indeed annihilated, and my sense of humor returns.

Its a ten-minute walk to the brook. I cross the lawn and go through the willow tree which splashes its fountain of green down onto the grass so that its almost impossible to mow around it. If its raining and I really need the brook badly, I go in my grandfathers old leather hunting coat and a strange yellow knitted hat from Ireland (one of my children, seeing me set off, asked, Who do you think you are, Mother? Mrs Whatsit?); its amazing what passing the half-century mark does to free one to be eccentric. When my hair gets wet I look like a drowned ostrich, and I much prefer resembling an amiable, myopic giraffe as I wade through the wet clover of the large pasture. Its already been hayed twice this summer: does the neighboring farmer, who uses our pastures in addition to his own, hay clover? I was born in the middle of the asphalt island of Manhattan, and even nearly a decade of living in Crosswicks all year round has not made me conversant with bucolic terms. When Hugh and I bought the house the spring after we were married (we walked into a run-down place that hadnt been loved for years, and it opened its arms to us) and I saw cows in the pasture, they didnt look like cows to me. My idea of cows was from illustrations in childrens books.

After the pasture is traversed, I walk through a smaller pasture which has been let go to seed because of all the rocks, and is now filled with thistles. Then there is a stone wall to be climbed; the only poison ivy around here grows on and by the stones of this wall, and Im trying to kill it by smothering it with wet Sunday Timeses; my children have made me very aware of the danger of using chemical sprays. Perhaps Ive discovered a new use for The New York Times? (We also use it for the cats.) I think the poison ivy is less flourishing than it was; at any rate The New York Times is not going to unbalance the ecology. I love the ology words; ology: the word about. Eco, mans dwelling place. The word about where man lives.

Once Im over the stone wall, the terrain changes. I step into a large field full of rocks left from glacial deposits; there are many ancient apple trees which, this summer, are laden with fruit. From the stone wall to the brook takes two balls of twine. Unreliable eyes make my vision variable, and there are days when my string path is extremely helpful, although, as my husband remarks, All anybody who wants to find your secret hideout needs to do is climb the stone wall and follow the string.

Thats all right. All secret places need to be shared occasionally. So the string guides me across a high ridge where there are large outcroppings of glacial stone, including our special star-watching rock. Then the path becomes full of tussocks and hummocks; my legs are etched by the thorns of blackberry brambles and wild roses. Earlier this summer the laurel burst from snow into fire, and a few weeks later we found a field of sweet wild strawberries. And then there are blueberry bushes, not very many, but a few, taller than I am and, to me, infinitely beautiful.