River Journeys Podcast

Outside, drought weakened / the brittle trees, fading them / to sickly grayish-brown.

Inside, one lone faux fir—imperial, / emerald green, impassive—loomed.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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It stood defiant, smug, pampered, / looking out the window at its / anemic cousins.

Stripping off its gaudy decorations, / I began tugging at its trunk.

It collapsed with a jerk like an / enormous umbrella.

The outside trees swayed in the wind, / nodding their approval.

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I am always doing things I can’t do. That’s how I got to do them.

—Picasso

December clocks have a different rhythm. Instead of a measured analog tick-tock-tick-tock, they move at the speed of my digital kitchen timer—numbers tumbling by in a blur. Every year, Christmas comes sooner. I love Christmas. I love “keeping” Christmas. Why was it becoming more difficult? I pushed the nagging question aside until one recent year when the invisible elephant materialized on Christmas Eve—unexpected, unwelcome, and unavoidable—impossible to ignore any longer.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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In painting the flow and line of the subject shape leads you through the piece. There are lots of rules about using an S curve or a C curve to design. They both give balance as well as make your eye follow a line through the subject rather than having a static non-flowing image. A single flower without stems or leaves in the middle of a plate would be lifeless—no movement. Your eye would lock in one place. Leaves, stems, and subordinate blooms along the curves create energy. Good designs lead your eye through the subject to the edge and back.

I began a January painting class while still packing Christmas away. The first session the teacher critiqued the complicated Dresden flower design I sketched. Her assessment: “No pathways. No connections to the center.”

“That’s it! That’s what’s wrong,” I thought to myself. “Not wrong with the plate. Wrong with Christmas.” Society lost the journey—the “before,” the waiting, the anticipating, the centering—and zoomed in on the day itself. So had I.

The color of truth is gray.

—André Gide

In 2012, the world (or parts of it anyway) was celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. A wealthy woman who painted occasionally with us traveled to England to be part of festivities that included meeting the queen. An adventurous widow of extraordinary means, she had hosted the china painting class at her remarkable three-acre estate—filled with museum-quality work on every wall and available surface. “I’m a collector,” she said. Owner of several homes, by all accounts generous to her family, a patron of another painter I knew, trustee of a small college…I wondered if she understood the Dickens she was celebrating.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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As most schoolchildren used to know, between the 1770s and the 1840s, England was transformed from an essentially agricultural island into the most powerful industrial nation in the world. Machines appeared that revolutionized cotton manufacture—the steam engine, the water frame, the spinning jenny. Transportation networks—canals, roads, railroads—led to a migration from country to city overnight. What happened next—the rise of manufacturers and merchants to political and social power—resulted in the inevitable separation of heads of industry from hands that produced. But human welfare didn’t keep pace with material prosperity. No one wrote about it better than Charles Dickens.

When he first saw grimy, dirty Manchester in 1838 he vowed to “strike the hardest blow in (his) power” for victims of exploitation in cotton mills. He did so over and over, never more than in “Hard Times,” the shortest of his books, but the most direct. In fictional Coketown, a wealthy retired merchant, Thomas Gradgrind, opens a school based on his Utilitarian worldview. A world obsessed with facts. A world where one character says, “I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir…but I am sure you know the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold.”

In the book “Charles Dickens and the Great Theater of the World,” Simon Callow writes, “He knew what poverty was. He knew what it was to be rejected, to be cast aside, to live in squalor.” For Dickens, the narrow focus on profit maximization and self-interest created an aesthetic blindness that squeezed all poetry and kindness from life. Beginning with “Oliver Twist” and its descriptions of the terrible plight of children, he became the most popular writer in England.

My graduate seminar, “Social Foundations of Education” asked the question, “What do people value and want to see in their schools?” I began with Dickens’ “Hard Times.” The novel, with its convoluted Victorian plot, ends with only one character achieving happiness—Sissy Jupe—the person least suited for a world where facts and figures held sway over the more humble ideas of faith and charity. The graduate students were troubled. They wanted to be part of a world with a broader agenda than economic, but they were being swept away on a tidal wave of expectations and assessments that measured less and less with more and more accuracy.

Society told them what to measure, what to stress, what to value. It became all they saw. All they were allowed to see if they wanted to keep their jobs. They packed away their art supplies, music lessons, geography, history, philosophy, physical education, industrial arts. All we have left in public education is what society sees as the path to professional financial success.

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The purest form is still the shape / That mist inhabits, and dissolves, / Trampled snow is the only Rose.

—Yves Bonnefoy

FRAGILE. FLOWERS. I could read the bold words on the tall brown and green box leaning against the front door as I got out of the car.

Misty-eyed, I maneuvered the long awkward shape to the kitchen. Behind the shipping label was a card which read, “To my daughter. Love, Old Dad.” Inside were flowers—roses and lilies from my faraway 90-year-old father, sent for Valentine’s Day. Among the many gifts he showered on the extended family, flowers were among his favorite. He sent them to all of us—for new babies, graduations, birthdays; for successes, for encouragement, for loss of beloved pets, for broken hearts.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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After my first china painting session ended, I registered again. Soon, I was signing up for the afternoon and night class. Wednesdays became synonymous with painting. I took a university academic appointment with the understanding that I wasn’t available any Wednesdays. The routine was a metronome balancing two forces—a conventional activity people understood and a peculiar activity people overlooked. I didn’t mind. In the first I was the teacher. In the second I was the learner. Learning made me a better teacher. It always does.

The painting instructor introduced new subjects every term. Landscapes, still lifes, birds and animals, vegetables, fruits and flowers of every variety—except one. Roses. No matter how often we asked she replied, “You’re not ready.” Eventually, we chose our own compositions. Around the classroom people hunched over everything from enormous bowls to umbrella stands to lamp bases to small tables to dishware. Everyone had a favorite subject: holiday designs, portraits, horses, hummingbirds, exotic animals, water lilies, leaf studies. Just no roses.

To See the World in a Grain of Sand, / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, / And Eternity in an hour.

—William Blake

I couldn’t recognize the train wreck of my once-ordered life. Anxiety, a new unwelcome companion, destroyed my concentration. My mother’s long hospice sojourn, together with disillusionment with a job that was supposed to be the pinnacle of my career, conspired to make me a case straight out of Mignon McLaughlin’s “The Neurotic’s Notebook.” In it he observed, “Love looks forward, hate looks back, anxiety has eyes all over its head.” In 1999—me, me, me.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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On impulse, I decided to visit the local library. I hadn’t stepped inside in a decade. Just another example of how distorted life had become, I thought. Disgusted with myself, I paused by the statue near the front sliding doors. The bronze figure, a young girl, lies on her stomach, gazing into a book. The statue’s title: “Forever Reading.” Once that had been me. Focused. Engaged. Captivated by the artistry of storytellers.

The walkway was a crowded stream funneling young mothers clutching squirmy toddlers, jostling teenagers from the middle school across the street, senior citizens, city employees from the building next door. Everyone looking for something in one of the few places that has something for everyone. What was I looking for? I had no idea.

I had to fight to keep myself as I wanted to be.

—William Carlos Williams

Wandering through the stacks in the University of Oregon library during a break from tole painting in a study carrel I used once a week, thanks to my husband’s faculty status, a book caught my eye: “The Mirror of True Womanhood: A Book of Instruction for Women in the World.” A new mother, I needed advice. The book, published in the late 19th century, didn’t seem out of date when I considered many women I knew in our quiet Eugene neighborhood in 1972. Oregonians described themselves then with some pride as “at least 10 years behind the rest of the country.” Coming from Los Angeles, it seemed like more. Not that I didn’t appreciate the skill and stamina homemaking required, but I felt unbalanced.

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The book wasn’t helpful. Neither were others stretched along the dusty shelf. It shared a call number at the Library of Congress with titles like: “Having It All: Strategy in the Sex Wars,” and “Help for the Hassled, Hurried, and Hustled” — which, in 1877, when it was published, was written by a man. The author, Reverend Bernard O’Reilly, was a New York priest who had been chaplain of the Irish Brigade of the Army of the Potomac during the Civil War. In 22 chapters with titles like “The True Woman’s Kingdom: The Home” and “The Wife’s Crowning Duty: Fidelity,” Father O’Reilly managed to stuff everything he thought a woman should know.

A surfing Madonna appeared just before Easter weekend 2011 in Encinitas, California. Artists disguised as construction workers affixed a striking mosaic of the Virgin of Guadalupe riding a wave to a wall under a train bridge. It technically was graffiti that should be removed under the law.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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But the surfing Madonna’s beauty drew a mass following. City officials spent thousands of dollars to hire an art conservation agency to find the best way to remove her without causing damage. Local opinion was split. Was it art or was it vandalism?

The answer is neither. It’s the wrong question.

A New Dance

A tarnished brass cup cowers behind other / forgotten relics in the dark cupboard.

The faded plaque whispers, “American Legion Essay / contest—first place 1960—“Americanism today.”

The girl who won is gone. She doesn’t remember / what convinced the judges. What were we then?

She does remember the writing instructions. / How odd. Form, not substance.

“Breathe. Feet flat. Relax. Keep tools close. Vary Hand pressure. Find a rhythm. Glide. Twirl. Spin. Move. Chin up. Dance.”

That was it! Form is part of meaning. How we do / what we do matters. It is part of us—but not all.

We were free. Independent. The woman wonders. / Is it still true?

The screen hums. Seductive. Insistent. The sound repeats. / Repeats. Repeats. Repeats.

Like a moth to light, she turns to answer. Her hand / clutches the mouse. Holds tight. Someone else is / leading this dance.

Are we still free?

Maybe.

Not.

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Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

For 20 years, I have lived in a house with a laundry room—a big laundry room. Floor-to-ceiling cupboards wrap around three sides. A deep sink interrupts the tile counters that end where they meet the washer and dryer. Nevertheless, doing laundry there is a challenge. Stacks of greeting card supplies are everywhere—rubber stamps, ribbons, buttons, pressed flowers, cutters, reams of paper, strange devices for crimping, coloring pads, embossing guns, packing tags, cancelled postage stamps.

The middle of the room is filled with a table loaded with artist palettes, an Ott-Light for seeing close detail work, back issues of porcelain painting magazines, white china, and mismatched bottles— mineral oil, turpentine, alcohol. A trash can filled with old wrapping paper and discarded road maps tilts against the wall. A matted wool dog bed takes up the rest of the floor. The appliance surfaces are covered with cards in various stages of assembly. The washer lid is invisible. How did this happen? One conversation.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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In math, a non-linear system is one where output is not directly proportional to input. Most physical systems are inherently non-linear in nature. Weather is one example. Simple changes in one part of a pattern produce complex effects over thousands of miles. The same holds true for human interactions. It’s how my card-making interest began in earnest.

At age 93, Pablo Casals wrote:

"For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner. I go to the piano, and I play two preludes and fugues of Bach. It is sort of a benediction on the house, but that’s not its only meaning. It is a rediscovery of the world in which I have the joy of being a part."

Morning routines. We all have them though parts change with age. Life with very small children creates one rhythm, teenagers another. Even with no one else to manage, launching the day requires a certain presence of mind. Jim begins each morning as he has for many years—breakfast followed by a spiritual reading and meditation.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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I begin by writing one letter… sometimes more. It is a habit I began as a young teacher. Hundreds of students passed through my classroom each year. Part of the fun was connecting with them, not just as students, but as people with lives filled with the joy and heartbreak that follow youth like twin shadows.