Remembering the Beautiful, the Ever-Bright Tessa Edwards

The blogging world has lost one of its most exquisite voices this week, and I am brokenhearted.  Tessa Edwards was a woman who taught us how to love the world and what it means when the world loves you back.  She took us, by way of her artful, inimitable blog, to Africa, to the sighting of whales, to the pleasures of a fresh fruit dish, to the children whose health, through the Swazi Project, she so steadfastly supported.  She painted art, she cooked it, she wrote it, and when she sent this print of hers to me, by way of London, it was packaged in gold and sealed with gold bees—so gorgeously delivered, so lovingly done up that I did not dare open it for days.

Tessa fiercely loved her husband and her children, and was never afraid to say so.  When she grew ill, she did not complain.  She would somehow find a shred of goodness in it—would celebrate the hours she now spent reading, or the travels her daughter took when she could no longer travel herself.  We became friends through her blog, but I loved our private conversations, too, the emails she would send explaining a bit more about her life or about her home.  Modesty, always, prevailed, as when she wrote, about her beautiful home:

We've been lucky with South Down - it's such a well proportioned house so it's easy to make it look quite pretty.  Anyone with a love of colour could do it without blinking...honestly.

A desire to share the world she was privileged to see was all-pervasive, too:

Dearest Beth - Hello!  Thank you for your sweet note.  I'm very fine thank you, all sun-soaked and brown after our most wonderful trip to Turkey.  What a magical place it is - so seeped in history and so astonishingly unspoilt and so utterly beautiful.  We'd been to Istanbul before - a truly marvellous city - but had never visited the eastern coast.  Far from the madding crowds, it is a place where time has stood still and pastoral life continues as it has done for centuries.  I will be writing more about the region and posting photos on my blog in order to share its charm.

She made us feel, finally, as if we were there with her, as if we had indeed traversed oceans and miles and found ourselves in the same living room, sitting with a cup of tea.  She wasn't virtual to me, ever.  She was real and alive, and she will always be.  I am posting this, from an email, so that it will always live, and so that you will see how she made all of us more alive, with her:

Dearest Beth -

Oh, I'm almost dumb-struck!  

I had just finished catching up on your always fascinating, always thought-provoking, always profoundly luminous blog posts - and reading all the interviews you've had recently when I heard a knock on the door.  I got up from my desk, my mind awhirl with images and words from you, and opened the front door to Mr. Postieman.  He smiled and chatted about the weather as he handed me my mail which I took from him in dreamy manner, nodding vaguely at his forecast of rain to come.  

Scuttling off to the kitchen with the pile of magazines and envelopes and leaflets that he'd given me, I absently flicked through the stack and put it on the table for later perusal.   Then I filled the kettle and while waiting for it to boil, I noticed that a white package had slipped out from between two magazines.  I picked it up and looked at the postmark.   USA.    Hmmmm, I wonder......

I opened the seal and drew out a book which I recognised instantly -  Ghosts In The Garden! There, on the flyleaf, a message from the author herself to make it even more special, if that were possible.   Beth!  How will I ever be able to thank you sufficiently for this beautiful, precious gift?  Having literally just left your blog, it felt as though you were right there in the room with me - handing the book to me yourself.  I'll remember that moment always.

Sweet travels, Tessa.  We love you.

Read more...

When the World was New (an excerpt from Ghosts in the Garden, a moment for Tessa)

I know that I've said it, but it bears multiple repeatings: An Aerial Armadillo is one of the most blessed blog spots on the virtual earth. Go there and be somewhere else—in Southern Africa, in Lantau, in a sacred before, above a plate of sushi. Go there and see beauty captured with utter verisimilitude, or with bold, painterly geometries. Go there. That's the thing. You won't want to come back.

Tessa, the force behind An Aerial Armadillo, has been reading a book I once wrote about marriage and El Salvador. I was honored this week when she mentioned Still Love in Strange Places alongside a mention of the reliably hysterical (humanly, craftily, and originally so) Anna Lefler.

Today is Earth Day, of course, a day that always has me remembering a long time ago, when the world was new to me. That's something I wrote about in Ghosts in the Garden, and so I excerpt that here.

We come to gardens bearing memories of gardens. I came to Chanticleer remembering a fringe of strawberries that pressed up against my childhood home. Whether we ever actually ate the strawberries that those tousled plants bore, I don’t remember. Whether my mother planted them there, or perhaps my father, I cannot say for sure. But I know I crouched the little girl’s crouch and peered, the way children peer, toward the fruit. I know I loved how the red would follow white, and how the white had come from green, and how the pendant of juice, with its thistle of seeds, would plump until it was too fat for its serrated cap. There is nothing exotic about a strawberry patch except that it delivers on its promise.

A strawberry fringe is a garden to a girl, just as the creek that runs between the old shade trees across the street is a child’s haven. I was the one who didn’t mind mud in her shoes, the child who named the tadpoles, then the frogs. I was an adventureress at the creek across the street, where it was cool and dark and also many shades of green (moss, algae, leaves). In a year I would move with my family to an isolated outpost in Alberta, Canada, where nothing anywhere was the lucky color of the Irish and I couldn’t find a seed, and I grew determined — always, forever — never to see that much comatose brown again. Three months later we would be home again, in the house with the strawberry fringe. My toes in the creek. My hands on the frogs. My dreams of fruit and flowers.

Read more...

San Miguel de Allende, and the beginning of story

I found her in a marketplace at the edge of San Miguel and she has haunted me ever since—the way she dared me with her eyes (Go on, take my picture), the way the haphazard quality of those many cloths massed together as a somehow virgin art.

Yesterday, while trolling through one of my new favorite blogs, Aerial Armadillo, I found what I imagine is this character's younger self in a painting that is so classically Tessa's—bold, brilliantly hued, shapely, seductive.

So that now the younger and the older versions of this singular woman have begun caroming about in my head. A dialogue that could only lead to story.

NOTE FOR TODAY: For any of you who might live in sunny Orange County, I'll be on the beloved Barbara DeMarco-Barrett show, Writers on Writing (88.9, KUCI-FM,) at 9 AM California time today. I'll be talking about books read, books written, books loved. I'll share podcast information once I have it.

Read more...