Sylvia's Journal

Under a bright blue fall sky we sat in a circle in the yard of Cedar Hill retreat center in Duxbury. Our Quaker meeting goes there every year for its annual fall retreat. I have missed the last four or five years because of travel; being in town this year, I signed us up and Friday night’s internet adventure was only the prelude.

Everyone had brought something to share. It was an interesting mix of pieces: quotes, poems, stories from the bible and less famous books, some familiar and some not. It was like a potluck of food for the soul. We read, recited and listened to all this while the sun was shining, the birds chirping and the wind blowing through the tall trees around us, with an occasional small plane overhead or boat out in the bay. It can’t get more peaceful than that. Maybe for that reason, for the first time in years, the muse was with me; two small poems emerged spontaneously, one about the crabgrass that was the predominant groundcover on the expansive lawn, pockmarked by paw prints of small animals rooting for grubs; the other about the colors you see behind your eyelids when you close your eyes against the sun.

Between the end of our soul potluck and dinner Axel and I walked the shore of the estate, along Duxbury bay, looking for objects on the beach that would make good water color subjects; and careful not to touch the very abundant poison ivy that was as lush as we had seen it in Maine. I have been told poison ivy thrives when the environment degrades and that, eventually, even goats could not save us from this very invasive plant (they would eat everything else too, facilitating a comeback). When I first came to the US I had never heard of poison ivy and had a hard time recognizing it; I would have been seduced by its vibrant fall colors and berries had Axel not held me back. Along the edge of the low woods surrounding the beach the ivy’s flaming red and orange colors burst through the green of the trees; foreground, not background.

Dinner was a wonderful noisy affair with 19 people and a baby, sitting around two tables shoved together. After dinner we brought out the art supplies, part of the very loosely designed program, and musical instruments, to accompany the creative extravaganza. The musicians outlasted the painters and more and more people joined the singers. It reminded me of our Dakar days when we used to spend entire Sunday afternoons sitting in a circle, outside or inside, singing and playing familiar bluegrass songs.

Axel and I had picked the small front room of the old and creaky colonial retreat house as our sleeping quarters, sort of like the concierge’s space, right by the front door. Two old twin beds, placed at an angle, filled up most of the room; mine high off the ground and slanted to one side which made staying on top of it, in my slippery nylon sleeping back, a bit of a challenge; it required a few adjustments during the night.

A small crew of men woke up early in the morning to make us an elaborate breakfast of scones, home fries, crepes, fruit and scrambled eggs. We ended our retreat with our usual meeting for worship, sitting in a circle, in this funky and wonderful place, a silent hour that felt like 15 minutes; then a concerted attempt to return the place to the state in which we had found it, and out at noon exactly, to return home.