I’d been gifted by foxes twice before. At Slide Lake, up in the northwest corner of Wyoming, a small one appeared in my campground as I sat with my morning coffee. He settled on his haunches, and we watched each other for a bit before he sauntered off. Years later, I was taking an early morning walk in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle when a fox came out of the bushes and stopped in the middle of the path ahead. He scratched his ear, gave me a grin, turned and walked leisurely on for a bit before veering again into the brush on the other side of the path.
Now, early evening, with Lynn inside fixing cocktails, I sat in the shade of the cunningly devised overhang on the patio of the house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Still Bend. I was looking up and to my right at the gulls wheeling above. A motion to the left tugged my eye down to find two beautiful sleek red foxes trotting casually across the lawn. I called Lynn’s name to come see, but she didn’t hear. The nether one stopped, looked over at me, cocked its head, turned back to follow its partner out of my sight. I sat there stunned. A pair of cranes glided overhead.
***
It was chilly when we got up on the last morning. Checkout’s eleven and I asked Lynn if she thought we had time for a fire in the library. Sure, and she immediately set to it.1
What’s called the library is simply the far end of the main room. There’s a banquette couch, bookshelves built into the walls, a simple shelf desk, the smaller of the house’s fireplaces. Part of Wright’s brilliance lay in the ways he defined spaces, so that here, even though this end of the room is completely open to the rest of the house, set off only by that bit of fireplace wall, it feels, when you’re in it, that you’re in your own cozy, private space. Sitting here now, on our fourth morning, I was finally getting a bit past (if not ever over) the disconcerting feeling of awe. I was starting to get a feel for what living in spaces like this every day might be like.
We’ve toured many FLW houses, been to both Taliesins. As a young woman Lynn was even able to visit the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. We’ve read the books, fiction and nonfiction, his and others’. We understand his vocabulary. Before setting out on this year’s Wisconsin trip, we’d watched the Netflix special2 and the house website’s online tour. I still wasn’t prepared. How is it that it looks exactly like the pictures, but the feeling of being in the space is nothing like you could imagine when you were looking at the pictures? When you’re looking at the pictures you’re looking at a surface, a surface representing the colors and tones and spaces and volumes, but you’re still on the outside, separated by the paper or the screen, the medium being that thin transparent barrier that keeps you in your place.
Once you step inside, the barrier dissolves and you’re embraced. Simple. Elegant. Nothing fussy or fancy. Humble, and yet it soars. The palette is red brick brown, cypress red, the deep red ochre of the floor, tones to warm you against a winter chill, but that feel weightless against the cooling breeze from the river on a hot summer’s day.
Lynn went out a couple of times for provisions, but I never left the house. The kitchen was the most fully stocked and easily functional “fully stocked” kitchen of any rental we’ve had. So we fixed all our meals there, eating at the small table just off the patio – another space beautifully cozy in itself, while being completely open to the rest of the first floor.
Harmony. Lynn and I talk often about the challenge in cooking of getting all the ingredients exactly balanced, so that the harmony of the dish lifts it above the individual flavors. It’s what we strive for in our own cooking, what we admire in the dishes of our favorite chefs.3 It’s what Wright manages in the way he manipulates concrete and wood and brick and ten penny nails and a jigsaw for the window inlays and curves and straight lines and always the ever shifting of the light. Every day is new with all that glass opening up the seasons, the dawning and turning and dimming of the day. Shadows never quite the same, the play and patterns of light always new.
***
It doesn’t take much for the burst of emotion that brings me to tears. When Josie was small, and the four of us were more often watching movies together,4 the three of them would start casting sideways glances toward me early, to see which of them would be first to catch Nonai crying.5 A startling kindness, an unlikely insight of tenderness between characters, that moment when the underdog finds her inner fierceness. I feel my chest tighten, the catch in my throat, my nose runs, the tears flow. It’s a kind of catharsis, some barely understood compress from the weight of the world, given exuberant release by some unexpected human action. Books do it as well, of course. I’m particularly fond of the way Terry Pratchett can bring me simultaneously to tears and laughter on the final pages of his Discworld novels. Weirdly, I’m often affected this way by women in sports, although I have no interest whatsoever in the sports themselves. I’ve burst into joyful tears at every success of the Williams sisters, though I’ve probably never watched more than a few moments of any of their matches. Women’s soccer has a huge impact on me, ever since the moment Brandi Chastain tore off her shirt.6 Surely it has something to do with how much harder a woman has to work to achieve comparable success as a man – but why sports?
Lynn is nothing like this. I doubt that in all of the years I’ve known her, she’s ever cried at the emotional climax of a book or a movie (if she has, she’s hidden it completely). Her tears come rarely, and then they’re going to be caused by frustration, exhaustion, that feeling she sometimes gets of being so overwhelmed by the things she needs to do that she’ll never get out from under.7
So it was a remarkable moment, decades ago, as we toured Wright’s home and studio in Oak Park. There were perhaps a dozen of us in the tour group, scrunched together. We were in the studio, standing in front of his drafting table, as the docent carried on. I felt a quivering next to me and looked down to see a single tear trailing down Lynn’s cheek. Her lips were trembling, her eyes taking in the sight of the pencils, lined up on the table, still sharpened, still awaiting the Master’s hand.
As a teenager, she wanted to be an architect. Of course, it was quickly made clear to her that this was not an appropriate desire for a young woman such as herself. But her interest in architecture and interior design never abated. When we went to the Museé d’Orsay twenty years ago, she spent more time photographing the interior walls and galleries, fascinated by how the light moved as the afternoon waned, than she did paying any attention at all to the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world.8 When we ripped out our kitchen to the rafters, she made numerous drawings imagining how the new one should be and the designer who got the job was the one who after many conversations and some drawings that were a little too conventional, hesitantly pulled out one more set, saying, “I did these last night, but they might be a little too...” They were nearly identical to the ones Lynn had sketched for herself a couple of months before.
When she showed me the listing for Still Bend, a Frank Lloyd Wright house you can rent, it took me less than a heartbeat. This was in March 2022 and the house was already booked up well into the next year, but there were still four nights available in August of 2023, dates that just happened to connect to the family picnic that brings us to Wisconsin for two weeks every year. I thanked the angels that I do not believe in and made our reservation.
***
For the first hour we were there she couldn’t even sit. Just kept walking around the house, taking it in. “Did you see this? ... Oh, look at this! ... This is so amazing!” We called Michael9 to let him know we’d arrived, chatted for a bit about the house, about what had brought us here. Lynn unloaded the car, then dashed out for ice cream, while I fixed our supper of sweet corn and some of the leftover ribs that Jake had brought to the family picnic two days earlier.
Compression and release. You enter through a small space and emerge into a large, open space. One of Wright’s signature design elements, he uses it repeatedly at Still Bend. The front door, which opens shyly from the side, leads into the low ceilinged entry foyer. Compression. You turn right, take a few steps and enter the expanse of the main space, full of natural light from the floor to ceiling windows. The release creates a palpable feeling of welcome and emotional warmth.
It's similar with the kitchen. A few steps through the narrow passage and then the two story high ceiling gives it a great feeling of space, even though the kitchen’s footprint is tiny. It’s designed for maximum efficiency, but still with maximum welcoming comfort. The house hugs10 you, happy to have you here.
Wright’s reputation leads with his stunning, one-of-a-kind projects. Falling Water. The Taliesens. Unity Temple. The Imperial Hotel. The Guggenheim. Johnson Wax. Masterpieces that changed how we think about public spaces and that affected the work of every architect who came after. But throughout his very long career, his passion was to find ways to make his vision of human sized spaces that formed naturally from the terrain affordable and convenient for all families. Experimenting with humble materials, pre-fab elements long before pre-fab was a thing, he wanted to prove that elegance and harmony and the spirit that ties an individual building to an individual place could be within everybody’s reach. A grandiose and impossible vision, perhaps; but he was a grandiose and impossible man.
In 1938, Life magazine commissioned Wright to design a modern “dream home” intended to be affordable for a family of four with an annual income in the “$5,000 -- $6,000 range.” That plan, with a couple of tweaks, was realized as Still Bend. His Usonian houses were intended to deliver all of the essential elements of his architecture and design into the hands of everyday people in everyday neighborhoods. Living with light, living with the contours of the natural world. Compression and release.
But it didn’t take. Still Bend is nestled in a pretty little neighborhood of completely conventional houses. Wright built sixty Usonian homes scattered around the country, but they remain curiosities, not the models for a better way of living that Wright hoped for. Affordable, perhaps, but too idiosyncratic for most home buyers.
Which is not to say that his ideas haven’t permeated home architecture in the decades since. We see it in our own house, built in the 90s. The slightly hidden front door, the low ceiling of the gallery, through the dining room, into the high ceilings and glass wall that looks out over Indian Valley Lake. We love our house. But it doesn’t flow like Wright’s houses do, doesn’t have the sinuous, sensuous connection to the land and the sky. It’s still a box of boxes.
***
We were different at Still Bend, the house gently insisting that we pay attention. From my writing spot, a little side table, I looked out the window wall, watching Lynn as she walked the expanse of lawn overlooking the East Twin River. She found a spot to sit and watch the egrets and the cranes lazily snacking in the shallows. We were secured gently to the earth. Conscious in a way that too often eludes us in the press of our days.
When we’re taught how to breathe properly from the diaphragm, we expand that muscle slowly, drawing breath deep into the lungs. Hold it for that moment of pressure, then release, slowly and smoothly. The way we need to breathe when we sing, or when we meditate. It slows us down, anchored to the moment. So it is with the house, the movement of the house, it’s embrace.
The Still Bend foxes were joyful and confident, completely at home. The cranes sailed serene. My spirit animals. At home, in the morning, I look up from my notebook to watch the squirrels leap from branch to trunk to branch, the route well known to the entire tribe. The Cardinal dances along the deck rail, the hummingbird pauses to sit on a branch. Sometimes the great blue herons that live on our lake sail across like elegance itself. The other day one of them was standing regal on a log that floated slowly by. It might’ve been watching for a snack, might’ve been watching for nothing at all. I remembered to breathe, reminded that I am tethered lightly to this earth, one more creature, wild in the world.
She’s the Fire Maiden. Cf. “The Armadillo Ate My Breakfast”
“The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals” Season 2, Episode 1. https://franklloydwright.org/frank-lloyd-wright-home-tour-on-netflix/
That was in those first four years of Josie’s life, when she and I and Marian and Lynn were the tightest family unit I’ve ever known.
I was unprepared for the Southern style of coming up with grandparents’ names and for a couple of months I teased that I’d just be NoName. Lynn had already picked Nonni, so I became Nonai. Josie would sing, “Nonni, Nonai, Mommy, Josie...”
1999. FIFA World Cup. Pasadena.
Except for that one night at the Liberty Bar where the realization that she could truly trust her whole self to me brought forth her tears.
Why look at paintings of light when you can watch the light itself move across the walls and through the halls of that magnificent Beaux-Arts train station?
Michael Ditmer and his brother bought the place some years ago. He’s a marvelous, unobtrusive host and I am overwhelmed at their commitment to the house and their generosity (and bravery!) in making it available to rent.
Lynn’s word. We were talking about how it feels to walk into the release and she said, “The house hugs you”.