Dispatches from the Millay Colony

"Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer."
– Louise Glück

Edna's house at Steepletop

Edna St. Vincent Millay, the wildly famous American poet, cultural icon and sexual pioneer, died in 1950 — not from a heart attack as was reported at the time, and maybe not even by accident, though this is never talked about: she pitched backwards down a flight of stairs after first carefully setting her glass of white wine on a ledge.

Edna’s will left her estate, Steepletop, to her older sister, Norma Millay Ellis, who moved into the house and lived there until her own death in 1986. For thirty-six years, Norma treated the house as a museum, carefully preserving all of her sister’s things — every book, paper, picture, article of clothing, even Edna’s toiletries — exactly as Edna had left them. Norma allowed nothing to be disturbed. She became, literally, her sister’s keeper.


"What lips these lips have kissed" -- 
Edna's bed, shared sometimes with her husband,
sometimes with a lover; her bedjacket and bell.

Edna

In her later years Norma established the nonprofit organization that continues to preserve the house. Norma also established the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Throughout Norma's years at Steepletop, the only part of the estate she claimed for her own was a small outbuilding, to which she added a screened porch.

Norma's cabin

We are told, the artists and writers and composers who come to the colony to work, that Edna was a generous woman. Of that I have no doubt. But it is Norma I want to thank.

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

"Poems are perfect.

Picketing sometimes is better."

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1927

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

Would a mountain have meaning, would goldenrod,
if there were no one to write about it?

Dispatches from the Millay Colony

Edna in Autumn

Those brazen nights before the Fish

rose numbly from the sea,

before the fires of summer died—

remember them to me.

I wanted to believe that love

could ripen without rotting,

and candle-yellow evenings

would not burn down to nothing.

Tonight I sit in supper-robe

before an empty plate;

I’ve eaten but I am not full.

The room is dark. I wait.

photographs: gate, Edna's writing cabin at Steepletop 

Why to write, or not

"If I don't feel that something really needs to be written, I'd rather not write it."

-- Suzanne Vega, Solo

Sentence of the day

"Slowly, and with a concentration that totally cancelled out my presence, she slit the tape."

 -- Julia Glass, I See You Everywhere

Reliquary

Day Minders for 2009 and 2010 with nothing written in them.

An emery board.

A cuticle pusher.

A small pair of scissors.

A box of Bandaids.

A mirror and comb.

Tweezers.

A lipstick, coral, ordered from Bloomingdale’s.

A tissue blotter with a coral imprint: her thin, creased lips.

A pouch of coupons, all of which expired before her estate could be inventoried.

A wallet with three twenties, a ten, two quarters, two dimes, a nickel and five pennies, because it’s important to keep cash on hand, which is what the Clerk of Court’s form calls it: “cash on hand.” $70.80.

An unfilled prescription.

Five pens and a pencil.

Pictures of children: great-nieces and great-nephews who, even if they knew her, won't remember her.

Keys to a climate-controlled storage unit full of framed prints, record albums, songbooks, and boxes and boxes and boxes and boxes of unused stamps the Post Office won’t buy back.

Credit cards from the department stores where she liked to go shoe-shopping on her way home from the beauty parlor.  Every week, even after the cancer, after her fall, when she was on oxygen and had little stamina, she managed to get her hair done.  When she went out, she stayed out as long as possible, shopping until she was exhausted, leaving the caregiver to deal with her invalid partner.  Now her closet is full of shoes, many never unboxed.  They could be sent to tornado victims if the Red Cross took shoes but they don’t, it’s money only.

Hand lotion.

Hand sanitizer.

A safety pin.