Visiting the Dark -
An excerpt from the essay
about her grandmother Ruth Stone
By: Nora Croll
I am just as likely to evoke my own childhood recollections of idyllic summers spent in Goshen, VT, in grandma's rambling mountain farmhouse, gathering blueberries and currants by day and listening to poetry at night. During my childhood, the whole family was there, and often some of grandma's students from whichever university she last taught at would be lounging on the porches and basking in grandma's permissive, casual hospitality. Goshen was an artist’s bohemian paradise-a true land of milk and honey-where the stultifying values of the outside world fell away, and the pursuit of art suffused everything...
At night, we would all play the poetry game, even the kids, and the only way to get the adults really mad at us was to make noise while someone was reading. I remember sprawling at my grandmother's feet while her words wrapped around me like a luscious secret. Before I could understand their meanings, the cadence of her language and the timbre of her voice enchanted me. Even now, the patterns on my grandma’s worn living room rug evoke specific phrases in my mind. Poems I heard as child, while I traced their contours with my eyes, come back to me fully formed.
This essay appears in its entirety in PGI #5.
Ruth Stone recently won a National Book Award.
Photo Credit: Paul Boeck Copyright 2001
