Miss Otis regrets

or why I won't be teaching in US anytime soon

I have not been to America since the year before the plague. October 2019 to be precise. I miss my friends who live there. I miss visiting old haunts that have been precious to me since childhood (a few are even still quite recognisable some fifty years on). I love the way that Vermont storms from summer dances in a blaze of coloured skirts and that I know where to look for wild grapes that make lovely purple and blue dyes.

I like watching the saltpans on the Bay unfold as the plane lines up for SFO, and driving down the western edge with my friend of over fifty years, to walk on the sands, have lunch at the Moss Beach Distillery and dip a piece of cloth in the ocean in preparation for bundling.

I also love watching the brilliant green and velvet black dragonflies, hearing a cardinal in the orange tree and a band practicing in the distance, getting catfish and grits for breakfast and buying a bunch of flowers at a market in New Orleans and then spending the afternoon in the local cemetery with my friend Shelley, sharing out fragrant offerings to those who sleep there.

Isn’t Pearlie Flower Cotton an adorable name?

I also love New Orleans for saving my sanity after the bushfires of ‘83. It rained for three days straight and doused the fires that lived in my head.

While I’m a country girl at heart and can’t imagine living in a city, I do enjoy being in them for a few days. It’s another world entirely. I love visiting with my friend Claudia who lives somewhere up above the Hollywood Bowl. We have spent entire days hovering around the cauldron on her deck making bundles from windfalls gleaned in the district, and frankly some of my most spectacular prints were made in Los Angeles. I suspect the pollution and the water quality may (surprisingly) have a mordant effect continued within the very leaves of the plants themselves.

I love getting up early when in New York, to head across to the flower district, breathe in the heady scent of the living rainbows and maybe pick up some pavement gleanings.

All this is very self-indulgent, and I know flying is environmentally bad and so is the flower industry. I’m just listing a few of the many things that warm my heart over there, and which led me to give serious consideration when a few months ago two very nice invitations to teach in the United States drifted my way across the Pacific.