Thursday, April 6, 2023
I had the good fortune to grow up next the Schillings, just two doors, one red oak, two tulip poplars and a crab apple away from the most creative people who populated my childhood.
Some of my earliest memories are of the gardens they built, (the steps they created out of tulip poplar stumps-magical!) and staring with wonder at the birdbaths they made out of cement. Best of all was watching Bill’s paintings come and go in a house that seemed forever changing, like childhood itself—like life.
Grant and I watched and followed suit, planting seeds, building, scribbling, dashes of magic marker staining our fingers as we tore into seed packets or gaped at the ponderosa pine seedlings emerging from a near miraculous “Punch and Grow” set. Excitement squirmed in our little boy minds like tadpoles, as our mothers piled us into the Schillings’ white Ford Falcon and we took off to shop, to explore, and once, to pillage white birch saplings from a nearby field.
Then came Harts lane, the mid-century house (all that glass!) the antiques, and the orange-red modernist lamp that glowed above the cherry Nakashima dinner table like a small, stationary sun. Memories rush in:
“I hate potatoes” I declared and Marie suggested I try her “potatoes au gratin” and I greedily finished the whole bowl…
The Schills (a Jill Swingle nickname) feeding me my first beer at age 5? 6? (oh those decadent artists!) and I peed the bed like a little boy wino…
Grant and I arranging the dolls that populated Marie’s huge, victorian doll house in sexual positions, and Marie’s explosive laughter drowning out Bills gentle chuckle…
At my father’s funeral, Marie looking down at the 12 year old me and declaring “You’re going to visit us all the time and we’re all going to have so much fun!” a moment that somehow got me through one of the worst days of my life…
The irregular, wind-swept Christmas trees, all white and gold, that blew my mind and set off a life long obsession with tree ornaments (I’m a collector not a hoarder!) Then later, after Bill, Marie literally hurling lights on a smaller, scaled down tree, declaring the results “Good enough.”
Marie, Grant, and I marching down to the vegetable garden, tamping thin, slivered zinnia seeds into the earth, the brightly colored flowers adorning her house all summer long…
Marie declaring that one of my gardens had “Too much going on in it” and realizing that she was right, I must learn to edit! Marie still influencing me well into my thirties…
Or her cerulean blue painted eyes narrowing in judgement over some vague, understated plant Grant and I had procured, “It’s a native! And pollen positive! A blah blah that bah blahs…” her button chin jutting out in defiance as her surprisingly pink lips parted to declare,
“I like color.”
Warm, direct, unfiltered, a creative force that was, for some us, worth the price of her restless ambition, Marie Schilling was color itself. She remains a guiding force forever reminding me This is the life you can lead, it can contain beauty, creativity, exuberance, and warm those around you like a explosive vase of flowers in the center of a table where everything good happens.
