Me, Again: Alice and Remington

Book Shelves: Martin Luther and Martin Luther King

Starbucks Wisdom: Chuck Berry and Elvis

Congressional Cookbook: The Junior League and the Congress

Library Desk: Doors and Desks

Sleigh Bed: Texas and Louisianna

Keepsakes: Earth Stars and Sky Stars

Portrait Table: Icebergs and Angels

Battle of Nashville: Slaves and Soldiers

Maid of Honor Portrait: Three Third Grade Bridesmaids and a Sexy Brilliant Woman Priest

Red Dining Room: Table and Chairs

Madeleines: Cornbread and Proust

Jubilee Singers with Lavender: Alfred Stieglitz and Fisk

Me and My Blog

Mirror Portrait Caroline: Caroline and her Portrait

Sofa: Couches and Dreams

Silver Coffee Urn, Saul Martin Portrait: Zelda Sayre and Gatsby

Sculpture, Candlesticks, Diamonds: Mamas and Vaginas

Magnolias: Magnolias and Magnolia

Harlem Chairs: Tammany Hall and Harlem

Dirty Laundry: Dirt and Laundry

Tuskegee Wardrobe: Brownies and Smithies

Portrait Chair: Harper Lee and Sigourney

Working Library: Cynara and Windsor, and Hope

Fort Pillow Massacre: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Madison Smartt Bell

My Boots: Nancy Sinatra and Roy Rogers

Longpage, 1913: Stephen Stills and Frank Lloyd Wright

Six Cases of Cookbooks: Julia Child and Caroline Williams

Statute of Alexander Pushkin: Pushkin and Othello

Take The Ow Out Of Now: Buddha and Nietzche

Stars and Bars: Stars and Stripes and Stars and Bars

New York Times Editorial: Copyright and the First Amendment, or Margaret Mitchell and John Seigenthaler

Me, Again: Alice and Remington

Grid

Me on a prop. We have manual typewriters that work. This one doesn’t. I wanted it to. Bought it at a garage sale. Couldn’t fix it. One year for Christmas, our family made little poetry books for our friends. I wrote some of the poems. David typed them all up--after we found a cheap typewriter that worked and found some ribbon for it. Caroline assembled some of them. We typed them up on pretty handmade papers I bought from a Yalie in Ann Arbor over the internet. The poems had something to do with preserving the fruit of summer in preparation for winter to come. I will let you read it yourself.

Blackberry Jam

What a thing to find

In a cupboard announced bare

Hiding in the corner of the bottom shelf

Invisible to quick glances and fast thrown open doors

A jar of blackberry jam

We picked that fruit one August

When we were rich and fat

Gobbling more than we carried home

Warm and unwashed we ate them, between kissing,

And we were going to eat them all, chastened by

The Seamus Heaney poem—we feared any bounty we left for another day

Would spoil—

Oddly puritan to worry about winter

Coming in Tennessee August—but we are oddly puritan. I made jam before we made

love, inky kisses, inky fingerprints on my bell, let me help you remember that—

I have not pawned our wedding silver

Here is a spoon for you and a spoon for me

Here is a taste of us then, to hold us till tomorrow

To sweeten our hungry now

It had been a hard year in the marriage. Making the Christmas presents sweetened the pot somehow. Making our little books together we stumbled back into love. And that’s kind a sorta what all of my books are about: Not letting anything prevent the stumble back into love.