Early Evening: Essays and Poems

By Gail Johnston

Travel into ones past is often a perilous journey to undertake, even if it is only a journey of the mind, but the past is a country, which always offers rich exploration, especially from the unique perspective of age. While nostalgia is usually part of this mental journey, a return in memory to our long ago homes and neighborhoods, friendships, and experiences can inform and enrich the present. As the past is reflected upon, it becomes increasingly evident how often and consistently past choices impact life in the present.

In the book, Early Evening, Gail Johnston uses poetry, much of it written many years ago, and personal essays, all written recently, to reflect on the juxtaposition of these time periods and the implications they have for the paths in life that have been chosen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9781465319852

Gail Johnston

Gail Johnston was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in suburbs there in the 1950’s. The chronicle of her childhood as an only child of older parents, living with an assortment of relatives comprised her first book, “Make a Lot of Noise and Don’t Go on the Porch”. Although she worked as a social worker professionally for a number of years, writing, especially poetry has been an avocation since she was a teenager. In this second book, she combines a collection of poetry, some from a much earlier period, and essays, all focusing on the continual imprinting of past experiences on present time, and the effect of these earlier experiences on the decisions we make throughout life.

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Copyright © 2009 by Gail Johnston.

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Contents

Introduction

Essays

In the House Where I Grew Up

High-Summer, Mid-Twentieth-Century

The Last Summer

September

Early Evening

The Thanksgiving House

The Other Door

Second Sight

Myth and Memory

Two Worlds

Salisbury Dreaming

The Imagined Life

A Sense of Place

February Again

Snow Days

Jazz Time

The Chair

A Year Out of Time

Raccoon

The Wedding Photograph

The Maiden Aunt

Poems

For a Grandfather in Ancient Fields

History Lessons

Midlife Requests

The Missing Picture

Choices

Traveling

Porches

Legacies

Seven Years After

On the Occasion of a Cat’s Seventeenth Birthday

Wishes in Preparation

Jack

Pain Has No Surprises

Knowing

The Last Garden

Thoughts in High Summer

Incantation

For those people and animals, on earth and in heaven who

have given me comfort,

love, and joy throughout my life.

You know your names.

Introduction

I began writing poetry many years ago when I was about fourteen; and some of the poems contained in this volume, though not from that earliest period, are more than twenty-five years old. I did not begin writing personal essays until the last two years, and in reading the poems and the essays now as a body of work, I realize that many of the essays are recollections of the years when the older poems were written. So it is interesting for me to see how the past and present continuously imprint one another, and indeed, this imprinting emerges as a theme in much of my writing, regardless of genre.

Another recurring theme evident in the poetry and the essays is the search for home. I feel most people, whether it is a part of a conscious desire, are always seeking an idea of home, remembered or desired, although that search can abate, intensify, and most certainly change at different times in one’s life. At this time in my life, much of this desire is in the form of remembrance, recollection, and often reflection. The poems, especially those written in earlier years, clarify what constituted home for me at the time they were written; and the essays reflect on the evolution of that search.

And so in this volume, past, present, as well as possibility, are constantly meeting and overlapping as the choices made and the choices rejected are examined.

Essays

In the House Where I Grew Up

In the house where I grew up, small though it was, there was always a feeling of light; and during my college and young adult years, it remained a comforting home to which to return.

Built in 1937 in what was then one of the earliest suburbs of Baltimore, it was one of sixteen two-story brick houses on a court, now called a cul-de-sac. Our house—really my aunt Nornie’s house where I grew up with my parents, two aunts, and an uncle—was at the end of the court, facing a grassy circle filled with shrubs and trees. All the homes had large backyards, many with tall trees. Much of the appeal of my aunt’s home was its lot, which was very deep and thick with maples, oak, cedar, as well as fruit trees.

When I think of that house and my early childhood years there, it is usually summer. On many sunny, warm mornings, I can remember sitting on the arm of the living room sofa, having Nornie, my aunt, braid my hair and looking at the leafy tops of the maples in full green through the tall dining room windows.

It was always a house of voices and conversation spilling from the living room to dining room to front porch in summer. Books, magazines, and newspapers were usually lying about the living room on the fireplace hearth or out on the porch glider. Music—often my aunt’s favorite oratorios, opera, and German lieder—would be playing on the large console record player in the corner of the living room. Whatever the season, Nornie would be in the kitchen, at her pride and joy, her Chambers range, checking on a pot roast or possibly stirring stewed tomatoes. In the winter, lamplight would have brightened all the rooms with a small light left on in empty rooms, so the house was never in darkness. But in the summer, the long hours of daylight would open up the living and dining rooms, and lamps were seldom needed until the late evening hours.

In the forty years since I have been gone from that house, a favorite memory is of dinner on a summer evening in the dining room; and if I could return, as we all sometimes wish to do, it would be to that room and those evenings. All family members would be seated at the table, and conversation would be continual, with my aunts often lapsing into their informal imitations of peripheral family members and church folk.

The room is bright in the summer evening with all four windows open, and the light voile curtains tied back; there is an awareness of green trees on the back and sides of the house. There is a perceptible shift in the day’s rhythms and a sense of stillness not present earlier. We are, at this moment, all at home, safe at this table, in this bright room, for another evening of respite, plentiful food, and one another’s good company.

And in earliest childhood seated at that table, I felt assured always that many more evenings, exactly the same, were to come.

High-Summer, Mid-Twentieth-Century

America

The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.

—William Faulkner

I grew up in the middle of the twentieth century, and summer was my season. Then it was a time when all corners of a neighborhood could be explored in a day; and there was the combination of time, daylight, and weather in which to do it. Without air-conditioning, porches became living rooms, and the intricacies of neighborhood life became more visible. As summer deepened, patterns began to be noted. The Good Humor man could be counted on to arrive at 4:00 p.m. each day, and I could rely on finding a nickel for a Popsicle in the glass dish on top of the living room secretary.

Mrs. Paddon, our neighbor who lived four houses down, had drinks waiting on the front porch by five thirty each day in anticipation of her husband’s arrival