A T H OME BETWEEN E ARTH AND S A T H OME KY BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY “Dancing Warriors” Oil on canvas on board Robinson Louise Singleton LRS, 2013 Louise Robinson Singleton $19.95 ISBN 978-0-9908895-3-3 90000> 9 780990 889533 Use Adobe Reader “Two Page View” to see left and right pages side by side. A T H OME BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY An agave blooming in the garden was an unexpected and astonishing blessing. Santa Fe, 2012 A T H OME BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY Louise Robinson Singleton At Home between Earth and Sky © 2015 by Louise Robinson Singleton All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Printed in the United States of America ISBN-13: 978-0-9908895-3-3 (paperback) Self-published for family and friends Design & layout, David Dunn, Mirror Communication Printed by Allegra Print and Image, Santa Fe, New Mexico The text is set in Adobe Garamond Premier Pro. The title and headers are set in ITC Bradley Hand. Photo credits Pictures are primarily family photographs or photos that John or I have taken. Front Cover: “Cloud Vertical,” John W. Singleton, 2015 Pages v and ix: The pen and ink botanical drawings are by Peter Orleans, Denver architect and husband of Mim Orleans, my public health professor. Page 136: The detail of “Aerial View of Oxford” was taken by photographer Dave Price (https://www.flickr.com/photos/superdove/) from his album “First Flight of Autumn 2014.” Page 271: The recent photo of John, Perri, and me was taken by Carol Ahnen, a Denver friend. Page 286: The grama grass seed head on the last page was a specimen scanned by LRS. DEDICATION These stories about my life and homes are dedicated to those mentioned in its pages. You have given me your love, wisdom, collaboration, and liveliness—the makings of a rich and satisfying life. Thank you. I hope this book prompts your own journey to “remember when…” To my parents, Charles and Mildred Robinson, who gave me my first home and taught me to create my own, I wish you were here to read and talk with me about it. You taught me to remember and tell stories. To John, without your love, daily patience, and ability to read the manual, none of this would have been possible. I love you and look forward to making more stories. To our children and grandchildren, this book is for you. I love you and look forward to hearing your stories. Maybe I’ll learn to text, but nothing beats lazy days at the beach as a time to remember. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ix PROLOGUE 1 At Home with My Life 3 LEARNING, GROWING, LOVING, SEARCHING 9 Growing Up a Southern Woman 11 1114 Belgrave Pavement Charlotte, North Carolina A Yankee World 47 831 Old Lancaster Road Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania Finding My Feet 65 Eight Addresses in Six Years: Cambridge, Bethesda, Denver Home Base 79 128 Eudora Street Denver, Colorado The World on My Back 125 Missouri Lakes Basin, the Colorado Rockies At Home with Golden Spires 137 Seven Oaks, 10 Lincombe Lane Boars Hill, Oxford, England THE GROUND SHIFTS 151 What Is My Life About? 153 South House, Blue Island Avenue Chicago, Illinois The Green Lizard with the Curled Tail 169 Pandur, India Dust in My Eyes 179 Ipongo, Zambia A PassION FOR WORK 187 Learning more than Public Health 189 Hunan Medical University Changsha, People’s Republic of China HIV/AIDS: Confronting an African Challenge 211 Ve Golokuate, Ghana NEW EXPLORATIONS 231 Endings 233 Southminster Retirement Residence Charlotte, North Carolina Bienvenidos a Mi Casa 247 4 Calle Aguila Santa Fe, New Mexico EPILOGUE 279 From Nothing of Notice 281 AT HOME WITH MY LIFE TIMELINE 284 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to the members of Escritores, my writing group: Lee Dunne, Kim Knowles, Lib O’Brien, and Sydney Young. Your suggestions and appreciation of these stories encouraged me to think back and enjoy telling them. Enthusiastic thanks to my son, David, and daughter, Martha. David worked for the Globe Pequot Press managing books from the manuscript to the printing. He knows how it needs to be done. And he knows The Chicago Manual of Style. He is a careful reader with helpful suggestions for content as well as writing. Martha is a superb copy editor. When I asked her how she knew all those rules of grammar, she said she learned them in junior high school. Thank you to all who provided family information, facts, stories, and corrections. Please let me know if you find errors. Finally, Ursala Moeller’s memoir, Eirich Family Odyssey, showed me I could publish this book in Santa Fe rather than through an anonymous self-publishing company. That decision led me to my colleague David Dunn of Mirror Communication, who was more than pleased to turn his artistic eye to creating a beautiful book. Writing a book is quite a journey. It helps to have a view of the sky from my office window. ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PROLOGUE Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitment and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace. Frederick Buechner My great-grandmother, Anna Mary Ramsey Randolph, Yellowstone Park, 1931 AT HOME WITH MY LIFE While I was writing and assembling this collection of memories and thoughts about my eighty years, I called it the “House and Homes Project.” I have always been interested in houses and furnishings, read floor plans in magazines for new ideas and looked at old oriental rugs in shops with an expectant lilt of appreciation. I have lived large swaths of my life in pleasurable houses that provided the locale for a lot of living. They were homes. This project was born on an endless airplane trip from Ghana with nothing to do. I closed my eyes and walked in the front door of my Gane grandparents’ home in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I went up steps past the cast iron fence above the sidewalk, up the narrow walk, climbed the half-dozen steps to the porch, went through the outside door, then the storm door, into the spacious front hall, turned right through the parlor where nobody ever sat, back through the double doors to the dining room, into the narrow pantry, and then into the large kitchen. I could remember the golden oak woodwork, the glass front cupboard with the good china in the dining room, the sink in the pantry where I washed dishes, the off-yellow oil cloth covering the half cycle table in the kitchen where I ate Poor Man’s Cake with a glass of milk at ten at night with aunts and uncles. A whole world came tumbling into my memory: the people, the feelings of love and pleasure, mixed with a sense of strangeness about the world I experienced there, quite different from my Charlotte home. 3 On another flight, I walked up the steep brick steps from the garage into the working entrance of the house where I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. I had moved into that house when I was four and called it home until I married. I spent time in every square foot of the house. Again, my family, the community I grew up in, its boundaries and gifts to me, the larger background of the times, and the social environment and customs were present. It was the South in the nineteen thirties, forties, and fifties. A lot was going on, and it shaped my life. Because that house was that house, and the center stage of our lives, I began to think about what a living space and its physical environment added to my life. If I had figured it out when I was in my twenties, I would have become an architect. I like spaces that lift the spirit, with windows that let in the sunlight. I like the small things that make a space beautiful and workable—art, flowers, a comfortable place to sit, and drawers that work. Our home in Denver at 128 Eudora Street was “home base” for forty-four years. John and I raised four children there and welcomed their growing families as they became part of our lives. The house was a Writer Brothers run-of-the-mill development house built after World War II. The plumbing had iron pipes, the back patio was half concrete slab, half flagstone, and the previous owner had committed suicide. But the ceilings were high, the windows had wide tile sills for plants, there was a bedroom for three-year-old Robby and one for two-year-old Martha; the yard had three mature trees. In 1970, instead of moving to a bigger home, we decided to build an addition to accommodate our family, which now had four children, and to stay near the medical school where John went to work everyday. The house grew and changed with us. There was no lack of work and adaptation on everybody’s part. It was the place to venture out from and return home to. As I wrote about these homes, I realized that a home is not necessarily a structure with a front door, closets, and a mailbox. Webster’s definition of home fills a long column. Home is: One’s principle place of residence; the refuge or usual haunt of an animal; one’s abode after death; a familiar or suitable setting or a congenial environment; the country or place of origin; the objective 4 toward which a player progresses in sports or games; a familiar or congenial relationship; the final or closed position, as in driving a nail home.