The STUFF Sisters
S. Sloane Simmons and Casey Simmons
Sisters and business partners sharing life's stuff....
From their far off locations away from the noise and jostling, I am tagged in a post or mentioned in a comment.
The next few minutes together is not going to be a pro & con debate about social media. Very boring and overdone. However, that form of communication has always been like a delightful cocktail party to me. I have never typed a comment I would not deliver face-to-face at said garden party or soiree.
Continue reading “The Best of Humanity”
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Thus far, it has been a calm that comes from seeing something with new eyes and in a new way.
Several weeks ago, a friend reached out and used the word I have come to despise.
Cancer.
I read a bit more of what was written, and I set the phone down, screen still bright. I was in a place packed with noise and strangers. A place I had visited only once before. A place where a path was not always apparent. The one thing in this large room that was a constant to me was my sister.
I had been silent for a few minutes, as we were both checking our phones and grabbing handheld lunches. My quiet must have touched her as different, as she asked, “What is it?”
I said, “Cancer.”
She knew it wasn’t a cancer of my own, and she knew to say little and to briefly touch my shoulder.
Continue reading “Finding Signs”
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I do not make resolutions when calendar pages turn or on anniversaries or upon the arrival home after vacations.
The implementation was laughable and not at all picture perfect.
For six nights – randomly spaced from December 12th to December 29th – we sat in the dark and lit a candle. Each night, we chose a single word – I chose three of the nights, my husband chose twice, and, on the 29th, our son spoke the last one. The idea was to sit in silence and consider the word and the single flame. To think about the world. To think about us. To sit in quiet.
Continue reading “For Six Nights”
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As I cursed my way to the bottom of the drawer that holds my handbags lamenting my bad fortune and forgetting just briefly how darn lucky I am to get to attend terrific parties, I happened upon this little number…
Several weeks ago I attended a charity event. The theme was elusive and when I asked around about what to wear, I was told “something sparkly” and “glittery”.
Easy. Black dress and whatever I owned in the way of rhinestone and crystal jewelry. The more, the merrier.
It was the final touch that I sensed I didn’t own. My clutches can run to bright colors but not sparkle, leather not beads.
As I cursed my way to the bottom of the drawer that holds my handbags lamenting my bad fortune and forgetting just briefly how darn lucky I am to get to attend terrific parties, I happened upon this little number. I didn’t remember inheriting it from my grandmother. It was simply perfect. Fully beaded in subdued black beads – some matte finish and some polished – it was going to be my co-pilot in charge of cell phone, credit card and Chapstick! It even sports a twisted silk strap, which I left curled inside.
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The picturesque mascot of all things fall makes me abundantly happy.
Truth: I do not like pumpkin spice anything. Except I do like the spices I mix into the pumpkin pies I make from scratch at Thanksgiving. I like pumpkin pie. I like pumpkin pie with whipped cream, to be precise.
Larger Truth: I love pumpkins. Un-spiced. Big Love. This fruit of the gourd family and the picturesque mascot of all things fall makes me abundantly happy. That’s saying something, because I am a summer person through and through.
Continue reading “Pumpkin Spice”
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When stripped of their cushions and placed seat to seat, these chairs were a houseboat that could hold all three of us on the coursing river – the Persian rug – as we moved downstream.
Our parents are lovely people and provided us with lovely things when we were children. Comfortable & well-furnished homes. Our own bedrooms. Good public educations. Happy & joyful childhoods.
A divorce rocked my world at the end of high school. My parents made sure that as little of that list changed for us as was possible. At the end of the divvying up, my mother ended up with these chairs that had lived in our large living room for years and years. We decided to take them out of her house and get her new recliner handles but didn’t realize that there are a number of side effects when sitting in a recliner for so long.
This year, in late June, my mother sent my sister Casey and me a short text that said, “Curb?” The resounding answer from both my sister and me was a combination of, “Wait.” “I want to see them,” “We might want them,” and, “Are the back pillows still around?”
They are still at her house awaiting a final decision. Mothers are patient souls.
Continue reading “Never Just Chairs”
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We talked of going back outside in slightly wilted tones – rare for us. We had just come in from the 95-degree day that was blasting with sunshine in a clear blue sky. We were drying off by sitting still.
I have changed my ways. Well, “added to my ways” is a better description.
I have always enjoyed art museums. Loved, really. I hold the one in my own hometown so close to my heart as to think of it as my own. My museum. When I was young and reading The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E.Frankweiler, the museum I saw in my mind’s eye was my own, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I have roamed freely its many rooms most of my life, reconnecting with the pieces that have always been there and making sure that new art is fully taken in and welcomed. I don’t have to actually like it to welcome it, but it never hurts.
Continue reading “Going Backwards”
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This is a story about a trash can. Not the slow realization that I will never be a patient patient.
This story is about a trash can. One that has lived in my car since my son was more of a toddler than a baby. There came a point where a truly waterproof catchall could be relied upon to catch unfinished beverages and food remains from a life lived quickly and in transit with a growing child.
Continue reading “About A Trash Can”
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I want to be able to look back – even if over just a few months or years – and see us. Us as we are. Us as we were.
Last Friday took me three hours down the road from my home and forty years back in time.
It was the only day on the calendar that was “free”. When my Sunday New York Times arrived over a month ago and had a flyer in it about a show at the Wichita Art Museum, I did a double-take. Wichita? In Kansas? Then I grabbed my calendar to pick a date to go. A Friday three weeks away was the only day on the whole Month-at-a-Glance that had nothing on it, or at least the only one that could handle six hours of driving for art.
It was a show of pieces by Hudson River School painters curated by the New York Historical Society. Three words hooked me. Hudson. River. School.
When I was in fifth grade at William Cullen Bryant Elementary School, a docent from The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art brought a huge – to all of us – painting from the museum. She talked about it at length, asked us to “look more closely,” and urged us to answer “What else do you see?” with real words.
I was mesmerized by this piece. It was full to the edges with deep, dark corners of trees and bushes. Greens that ran to black but still showed leaves and vines. It was filled near the top of the frame with white clouds and a sky of every shade of blue. A top corner of the canvas held a foreboding cloud out in the distance that warned of change coming. It had animals and flowers and rocks and cliffs and possibly a waterfall. I am unclear on the waterfall, but there was water coursing through it somewhere.
I learned years later that, in the late ’70s, the pieces that went out with the docents to schools were replicas. Being very close to true size and with frames that were gold and fancy, if not as expensive at the originals, they were breathtaking to my 10-year-old self. They even showed brush marks.
I looked deeper, and, when we were told we could come closer, I did. I gazed in to the darkest corner for more and then up to the sky for relief.
I vividly remember telling my parents about it, probably yet that night. I nagged that we had to go to the museum “soon” to see it. I wanted to take them there and walk them to exactly where it hung, knowing I had no idea exactly where that was but sure that someone would know about the huge painting that a blonde lady had brought to my school just a few days ago! I wanted to show my parents what the docent had shown me. I wanted them to look closely and see more than I did. I wanted to talk about it like she did.
The docent kept mentioning the “Hudson River School,” and I just knew that was a place I should go to school. She made it sound like college, whatever that was. A place of learning with dark corners and majestic skies is what hooked into my brain.
I walked to school back then, and my family could have walked to The Nelson had we chosen to. I also walked to the Plaza Library at the corner of Ward Parkway and Main Street. The kids’ section was in the basement, but I knew that any books or information about the Hudson River School would be listed upstairs in the big card racks. I loved that building, and I really, really loved those 3×5 cards and talking to the librarians. Slipping into the Dewey Decimal language always felt special and foreign. And grown up. Sometimes they would give me “the look” that silently willed us younger people to realize we shouldn’t be upstairs. Not this time.
I was happy to know more about the Hudson River School and the painters who defined it using the pile of books I scavenged from the shelves. I spent a fair amount of time that day looking at many paintings in several books, but I was devastated to learn that there was no physical school. I had no desire then – nor do I have now – to be an artist, but I was crushed to find I could never, truly go there.
Except at a museum, which I go to every chance I get. The Hudson River School genre is no longer a true favorite, but it can hold me in its sway for the length of a special visit. I can still hear that docent and see that massive painting she carried into our room. I can still feel the old library and the gazes of those wise women behind the desk as I traipsed by them with my large format books to sit by the big windows.
Last Friday took me three hours down the road from my home and forty years back in time. On the ride back, as the sun was fading in the Flint Hills, I remembered that the original painting I saw when I was ten is still in the collection of The Nelson. I saw it a few years ago as I was hurriedly cruising through the museum on my way to a meeting. It stopped me in my tracks.
I stayed riveted to that spot just as long as I could, and I still can’t tell you if there is a waterfall.
p.s. All the photos above are tiny pieces of paintings I saw at the special exhibition at the Wichita Art Museum. I was enthralled by the skies and water in this particular set of works. The show runs through April 30, 2017. We also strolled the permanent collection and found the woman below. I love her.
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