Still Life in Cornwall

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been in Cornwall, Connecticut for ten days now.  The creaking old house, the quiet fields, the late-summer beauty, the town full of memories, have woven a spell about me.  The days with my brother have been spent running common errands, visiting old friends (the few who remain here), taking walks, making meals, reading and watching TV, or sitting out on the grass behind the back porch looking up at the stars.  In my childhood the Cornwall house was the setting for summer vacations from school, and by arriving here to stay a month I seem to have triggered a great recrudescence of relaxation, unconscionably abetted by the wave of balmy weather mingling the last lush verdancy with the first twinkling snowfalls of yellow leaves and sudden crimson spirals of vines, as I drove my Miata slowly half-lost down almost-familiar roads through thin woods, past open fields anchored by old barns, along already autumnal lakes.

But as I should have known, coming straight from a writers’ retreat, you can’t go back again.  It’s been a decade or so since my brother Ben took over the house after my parents died, and any change of generations in a house makes it an entirely new dwelling.  In this case Ben’s musician lifestyle has been overlaid on my parents’ literate-weekender one, so that the study is now filled unwalkably with guitars, the dining-room table hidden under disassembled amps, etc.c., and I needed to forge with two hands through a tangle of TV, Apple receiver and sound bar wires to get to the bookshelf where I pulled out my parents’ dusty, sunfaded hardcover of John Cheever short stories.

And I’m also here with a purpose.  Ben is going through a broke, hard-luck period, and in between Cheever stories and Netflix TV (he’s turned me on to the excellent “Jessica Jones” series), I’ve been trying to help him find a job and stabilize his life, pretending for the moment that I’m qualified for such a task.  We’ll see how that goes.

Despite the flavor of elder-brother intervention, we’ve been having fun together.  In addition to walks and living-room jam sessions (and “Jessica Jones”), last weekend we went down to East Haven to visit our cousin Larry Kurt and his wife Sherrie.  Larry’s the kind of great cousin who, given the sunny day, scooped us directly from the Miata into his speedboat, and within an hour of our arrival we were pounding our fiberglass bow over the blue chop on Long Island Sound.  We spent a fabulous morning on the water, drinking beer and exploring the ritzy coinage of the Thimble Islands, where every little round isle sported a million-dollar mansion. 

My cousin's speedboat, the Avalon

It was great to catch up with a side of the family I hadn’t seen in a while, and it made me wish I had a boat of my own on Puget Sound.  But the path to get there is clear enough.  (1) Find my brother a job, (2) find myself a job, (3) revise my novel and get it to that agent, (4) have it sell real well. 

We’ll see how that goes.

Me with Larry, Sherrie, and Ben