Back in the Shed

Confessions and A Dream

“Cognition is the enactment of a world and a mind.” Eleanor Rosch.

The smell of cedar intermingles with the fragrance of a Diptyque candle that is part of a series called “City Candles”, gifted to me from a past life. Each candle sits in a beautiful jewel toned colored glass holder that makes me hold my breath when the light passes through them. The saturated and rich colors lay puddled on my desk. The fragrances assigned to each city are distinct from each other, and I can now recognize where I am by its smell. The idea of the series is to capture the essence of each city, inspired by its unique architecture and its secrets. Fragrance and design being the storytelling mode. Like most luxury items they are available in limited places (only in a Diptyque store in the city they represent) and limited times (in store only until the moments you can get them on-line, which are rare) When I light them, I travel back to some cities I visited during my 10 yearlong dream life, Paris, New York, and Beverly Hills. I’ve not visited the other two, Peking (though I’ve been to China) and Seoul. There are three more I’d like to acquire: Shanghai, Tokyo and London. I would like to conjure up memories of the time I spent in those cities and that their fragrance evokes. I balance the cost in my head, while pricey as most real (and this is a very layered conversation) luxury items are, they last longer and have a scent that also lingers like the feeling you get when you wake up from a lovely dream you want to keep dreaming.

On this first day back in my Shed, a catbird sits on the roof, hops on the window box, looks at me through the window as if to say welcome back. “Well,” I think, “You were the one who left, this time it’s not me.” I’ve had the bad habit of needing to be angry at someone or something I love as an excuse to separate and leave them or it. Sometimes the leaving is justified, others not so much. I see now how angry I had to get at Accidental Icon to leave her. I also tend to leave someone I love before they have time to leave me. This dynamic seems to have been at play in how abruptly and angrily I renounced her and her clothes. Some of my readers have noted how punitive I sounded when I wrote about it here and in my memoir. Today as I watch the flickering candle throw shadows that dance across the cedar panels of my Shed, I realize a part of me wishes to keep having that lovely dream.

Yesterday, for some reason, I spotted my Leica sitting on top of the glass-fronted cabinet in the dressing room, unused, both batteries dead. When I charged them up and looked at the last photo I took with it, an entire year has passed. When we first moved here and Calvin was still commuting to work, I used my Leica and the self-timer to take my own photos for posting, of myself and the places we visited. While I would also write, the composition of a photo, the capture of a detail, the observation of an interaction, the memorialization of the drape of a garment I realize now was an essential part of the process. Without them, my writing feels flattened and lonely.

While the website and other reminders are gone, I hang on to Instagram. Now identified in my profile as Lyn Slater, Ph.D. Writer, my handle still reads @iconaccidental. When I was at my creative peak, Instagram was where I had the most fun; when it was expressing your creative self, whatever mode that meant. The lack of gatekeepers—unlike editors, gallery owners back then, or today’s algorithms—allowed people to share and appreciate your creations and art. Composing a post for me involved a series of creative acts, choosing articles of clothing and accessories that would convey the person I wished to be that day and then scouting a location in the city where I could find just the right setting to frame the look and convey the central idea about this woman and her clothes. I would provide Calvin with directions about angles and experiment with different poses. Then came the editing process, where I would choose three or four photos out of the many Calvin took that would convey my vision. Only then would I sit down to write the blog post that would spring from the imagination of the woman who appeared in the photo. I suppose in some ways it was like writing, directing, doing costume and set design then performing for a piece of theater. It was a rich, full-bodied and sensory satisfying experience.

These days I mainly post to my grid announcements of a new piece of writing using a stock template sent by Substack whenever I write something new. I do post almost daily on Stories where I share a wide range of other posts, mainly photos of things that aesthetically please me or iPhone pictures of my garden. These are photos, sometimes accompanied by music that seem to awaken something inside me, a longing for something not yet found. Yet with a certainty I will find it. I am always drawn to the image; in some ways, the text is secondary. Until the pandemic, I let the photos speak for themselves. I seldom had captions and if I did, they were a word or two. During the pandemic, with limited photo opportunities outside my home, I started mini-blogging. Something about this interplay of image, text and sound has made me unwilling to let go of this platform even though there are many days I want to.

The other day, I received yet another royalty check from the book I co-wrote with a lawyer friend published in 2011. It remains my most successful writing project as it stands up to the test of time. We wrote this book in a bakery in Brooklyn. My lawyer co-author, whose profession gave her a different worldview than mine, suggested the bakery, known for its exquisite cakes, as our writing spot. Every weekend for the nine months it took us to write the book (and each gain 5 lbs.), we entered what I can only describe as the most delicious experience of sights, sounds, tastes and smells. Climbing the spiral staircase upstairs, we chose a small seating area next to the actual bakery where we could watch, smell, and listen to the sounds that eventually became the most inventive and colorful cakes. Delicious pastries found their way to our table as we opened our laptops and began a conversation that turned into a google doc. The muted conversations of others sitting downstairs floated up and around our ears like music.

The sensory stimulation of the bakery and the improvisational way we wrote seemed to make our client characters come to life and by sharing our different perspectives, challenged each other to think differently and better than if we had been writing alone. Even though it was supposed to be a textbook, I realized recently it was also a memoir, the story of how my friend and I saw the systems we worked in, how these institutions at times oppressed our clients and as women working in them, us too. We used a composite of our many clients to construct a complex and multi-layered client story that we used as an entry point and an ongoing narrative device to teach students about the law. We were both women and mothers, writing about a woman/mother and the systems we lived and worked within, how they constructed us, the way power flowed and how we might push back against it. We delightedly shared all the creative ways we found to confront the challenges using the best aspects of our professions. The glee we felt when we overcame them and won our cases for our clients sits there in between the lines of the text.

I often wonder if seeing, smelling, listening and tasting these creative concoctions and writing in a setting where every sense was engaged was what inspired us to push traditional textbook forms and the limits of our own profession. Maybe these circumstances supported the narrative devices that helped engage the reader, revealed the power of a respectful approach to difference and collaboration, and allowed the textbook to have an empowered voice, characteristics noted in the positive journal reviews the book received and probably the cause of its ongoing appeal.

Perhaps being back in my Shed, where there are certainly more sensory impressions than those in my wintertime writing room inside, is stimulating my need for my writing and creativity to be more sensory engaged and less isolating than it has been. Even though there are not humans present when I write in my Shed, the open windows bring in the smell of lilacs, the sound of birdsong. I watch them fly back and forth across the marsh. Butterflies pass by on their way to the peonies and I spot a rabbit or a squirrel. In this context, I never feel the same sense of isolation as I do when writing inside. I feel in the company of…something but certainly in the company of. I feel something MORE.

Or maybe I am just responding to, rebelling against, the natural process of aging that results in our senses becoming less sensitive, less sharp. That makes me feel a little like being wrapped in cotton. A recent hearing test shows there is some early loss, particularly in one ear. Cataract surgery has had the surprising benefit of clear and better vision without glasses or contacts. My 60s rebellion was Accidental Icon, but this need to immerse myself in sensory experiences might be my 70s rebellion; we can always stimulate our senses and brains, and these memories remind me of that.

I am so used to stimulating my intellect, I often forget about the rest of my body. This means being purposeful about trying some new flavors this summer in the salads and dishes I’ll concoct from the garden, listening to music as I run on my rebounder, taking my Leica along on our one tank of gas visits to places we’ve never been to before. Making time to walk slowly through my yard so I might smell each plant, bush and flower, especially after the rain, when everything is lush, and you can smell the richness of the earth. Frequents hugs from my grandchildren (of which they are quite generous in providing). It may mean revisiting my love of clothing because of the myriad array of textures they present my fingers and skin to explore and delight in. I’ve taken a baby step back to a relationship in the form of the cloudlike soft drape of my long silky scarves. While I don’t have to style them or show me wearing them, I can still derive enormous pleasure from the aesthetics of them. I can talk about them, feel and touch them, photograph them, tell you what I think about them and what they could convey. The phrase, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water comes to mind.

Let’s see where these admissions and realizations take my writing this summer with the added benefit of challenging the onset of sensory decline, providing me with the satisfaction and glee that comes from rebellion just like the way my lawyer friend and I felt when we challenged the systems we worked in and won our case.

What contexts are you interacting in and what’s the result?