Last year as I began to write my decembrance notes I imagined it to be full of new things, insights about a new life ( based on Larkin our grandson who had just been born). Every year I hope by writing I will find new ways to appreciate the season. Sometimes I am embarrassed by how much I retell family stories.
This fall I lost another important friend, fellow potter, journal keeper and correspondent, Douglass Rankin. With her husband and fellow artist Will Ruggles they composed the duo of Rock Creek Pottery. Today would have been Douglass’s 74th birthday. Our lives became intertwined through pottery. She taught me to love the mountains of North Carolina through pots, walks and gardens.We shared ideas, food, stories and laughs as well as many letters full of images and insights.
When she and Will moved to New Mexico we always intended to visit their new digs. It was still on the list when the pandemic hit. It’s like our lives were vines that twisted for a moment and then growing from a similar root base took off in their own directions. Recently I have paged through my archive of our correspondence. Today I looked back through a slide show I made about a magical visit to their house in 2007.
It seems as if life is full of absences these days. It seems as if I can reach back and taste the light in their mountain cabin. I stretch back in my memory for the spaces that Douglass created. I will struggle to grow around the gaps in our life that she has left. But she is dearly missed as we go forward in our lives full of holes.
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.
— Helen Macdonald, from H is for Hawk
2 replies on “decembrance #20”
Thank you Catherine for these sweet thoughts and memories!
My love to you and Warren!
Will
Thank you for the lovely note about Douglass. Jeani and I would trek up to the cabin in winter during their initial years and similarly planned a trip to Santa Fe. Meanwhile as we plan our house sale and move to France, in a letter Douglass sent earlier in the year, she was full of enthusiasm for our plans without any reference to her own ordeal. Her letter (hand-written) was in response to my own (hand-written) to her and Will. She was just starting her ceramic career during my residency at Penland 73-76 and she and Will visited us in NH in the mid 80s as they searched for a place to start their own practice away from (I think) the Mingesota world…