— Letter from Marcia McKean to the members of Grace Paley’s 2000 workshop
at Flight of the Mind

Dear Graces:

Here I am, the morning after the Soapstone work party, easing slowly back into the world. I have that pleasant head-to-toe ache that comes from having worked hard doing something good.

And Soapstone, I can report, is something very, very good. We all knew that (How many of you have been there? Bette, I know, but I can’t think of anyone else.), but seeing, feeling, touching, smelling, embracing it is an experience I don’t have words for. Yet. But here goes.

Rode out with Judy Corona, we picked up cement blocks on the way, were there before we knew it. Work was already in progress—whirr of weedwhacker, low murmur of voices punctuated by the occasional yell, and a sound I later identified as a log splitter, a tabletop operation where the log is guided toward a mammoth wedge of metal which does the work of a hefted ax. All operated by women. There were three men out of an eventual total of about fifty of us, but the women were doing the heavy work.

I used to keep a card on my fridge that said, “There is nothing, nothing, nothing, that two women cannot do before noon,” and that’s what this brought to mind. And the WAY the work got done, it was like a dance with Ruth conducting the orchestra quietly in the background and everyone knowing the steps since the day they were born.

We broke for lunch, sat in a huge circle in the driveway, and introduced ourselves and our reasons for being there. I love our story, and I was so proud to tell it. Yes, I felt smug too but mostly just privileged to be there representing all of us and in awe of all the energy around me. Seeing that group of people, I understood how Soapstone went from a dream to what we saw there in such a short time.

Something I didn’t know is that the property belonged to Will Martin, the architect who designed Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland. He built the original structure, but died in an accident flying his plane. Ruth and Judith acquired the property from his widow, and had a chance to look at the journals he had kept with drawings of the flora and plans for things like a tubular bridge over the creek. The front entrance from the road is flanked by two concrete uprights, about six feet square, one with a sunflower covering the surface, the other with a chambered nautilus. Judith said both were cast by him and meant to illustrate the Golden Mean in nature. He must have been quite a guy and his spirit is very much present.

There were five stones to be placed that day, and after lunch a group of us (including Lisa’s friend Beth) walked down the Avenida de las Angeles, a south-north path leading through the trees to a sort of bluff over the creek. We were to get an idea of where the stone should go and then go back to fetch it.

There are quite a few stones already (thirty, I think, before yesterday) and I realized that I was looking for the base of a tree and might not find a vacant one. Then on the left nearly at the end of the path was the most upright Spruce you have ever seen, about four feet in diameter, with roots the size of normal tree trunks radiating across and under the path, Spanish moss festooning the lower branches, the trunk shooting through the canopy, the upper branches almost out of sight. And there sits our stone, nestled between two roots, resting against the base as if the tree had just given birth to it. It faces east and will greet and be greeted by the rising sun.

We went down to the creek and selected five more stones for Ann to bring to Portland, and then went back to work. At about four-thirty the firewood stacking seemed under control so I walked back down the path with a foxglove in my hand and placed it across the stone. I sat down on one of the roots that juts out perpendicular to the trunk and closed my eyes and listened to the voices and the occasional bird and conjured you up, one by one. It’s easy to do it geographically, proceeding south-north from Menlo Park to Seattle, then east through Pendleton and Tarryall and a giant leap to the Other Coast. At first there were words and then I started over and just let images of you flit across my mind. After arriving in Massachusetts I sat still and took a long breath, wanting to make sure I had thought of everyone. A sharp breeze came down the path and I thought, oh, yes, Grace. I reached down and touched the stone and there you all were linking arms with me in a circle. I hope you felt it.

Neighbor stones are Ruth Gundle, Judith Arcana, and Madeleine Babcock Smith. There will be a lot of traffic passing by because the path turns around just past that tree. If you continue and step over a log you will be at the overlook where we placed a willow bench that Wendy Feuer had made by hand just for Soapstone and delivered that day. It was so perfect to stand next to Grace’s tree and see two women sitting on that brand new bench in a patch of afternoon sunlight. They looked like they had been there forever.

I don’t know what, if anything, is forever, but I like to think of beings two thousand or so years from now coming across one of the stones, maybe ours, and wondering. Feeling the power, perhaps, of such a place where the work that went into it and the work that emanated from it and the spirits that came and went had made some kind of a difference and certainly had made it sacred. We are little, all of us, but the small cumulative gestures we make with the right intention will shake the world.

What is more glorious in this world than work?

Love,

Marcia

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