From Where I Sit

By Pat Spilseth, Columnist

Colors were fabulous on our trip to southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, but the brilliant colors of the maples and sumac at home were even better. The rolling hills of roads to Winona and Lacrosse were lovely with reds, oranges, yellows, rust browns and fading greens. Though the weather was cool and frost coated the ground, each day was just fine until we woke up to snow on the ground and high winds in Oconomowoc, which is near Milwaukee.

It’s only October! We’re supposed to still be boating and playing tennis outdoors into early November. Mother Nature must have mixed up her dates for fall and winter. Or, could this mean we’ll have a snowy, cold winter?

We spent an hour or two at the Marine Art Museum in Winona enjoying the paintings and prints, all having to do with water. We were again amazed at the works of the masters like Gauguin and Picasso on display in this small town of Winona, courtesy of private donors and the Fastenal company. A docent at the museum told us that the large empty areas on the walls were because private donors had sold the pieces to high bidders. Recently there has been a lucrative market for Impressionist art work emphasizing the dominance of light in the work.  

  Though we had mixed up our timing for a tour of Taliesin, the Wisconsin home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin, we were able to join a later group. We enjoyed the tour guide who related many personal stories of Wright. What an egotist Wright was! He designed ceiling heights to fit his short stature, not a normal ceiling height convenient to most folks. A disgruntled homeowner of a Wright designed home called Wright to complain about entering his doorway and his hat would be tipped off. Wright abruptly retorted, “Remove your hat,” and ended the phone conversation. The tour guide reiterated several amusing incidents with Wright. For instance his feet were always cold so Wright added blue (a water color) wool shag rugs on the floor. The original rugs remain to this day. When he died, he thought that his houses could deteriorate also.    

He loved fine things, so he had bills and didn’t have great wealth. When he got a large grant, he bought Asian art and didn’t pay his bills. His wife at the time (he had several wives and a mistress) suggested he create a school for students of his designs. The students would pay a fee and do the cooking, cleaning, etc. Residents still live in the house doing daily chores to maintain the house. Our guide was very good, especially when she related personal incidents of Wright. We highly recommend taking the tour.

The furniture Wright designed for his houses was stiff and uncomfortable, but your posture would be perfect as his furniture was so stiff and rigid. His furniture was very low to the floor, designed to accommodate him, not an average sized person. Wright was 5’7”; Wright apparently said a person only needs 6 inches over their heads so, since he was the “human scale,” many of us felt a bit claustrophobic. He liked to build houses into a hillside, not on a hill. The windows were never covered, but were open to a landscape. Windows functioned like paintings on a wall.

From Taliesin we were directed by our GPS guide, Siri, who led us through the countryside on remote scenic routes which were colorful and interesting, so different from driving the freeway. We were told that the glaciers did not go through this area so it was a rolling area of woods, rivers and fields, not the flat fields which the glacier shaved off as they moved over the land. 

Years ago, one of my Sunnyside friends, Avonne, gave us a wooden sign which says “It takes a long time to make old friends.” How true. In Oconomowoc we visited Mary and Greg, Luther College friends since the sixties. We share the same values, taste for comfort food, and we still love our music from that time with Neil Sedaka and Johnny Mathis. It was great to hum along to tunes remembered from 1966.

What a comfortable visit we had with old friends. It wasn’t a problem discussing religion, politics, our children’s lives and neighborhood changes. No feathers were ruffled when we voiced our beliefs and concerns. We chatted comfortably about memories of our past when we welcomed new neighbors with casseroles or cookies, church pews were filled with dressed up congregants, when we understood the words to current music, our children’s views on marriage and church, how to dress and the most common current subject, our health. We could easily share our thoughts on a wide range of health issues: cancer, sleep problems, hearing loss…  

Best of all was recounting our many blessings, how lucky we feel to be living the lives we are enjoying today. Old friends are definitely high on our list of many treasures. Old friends take years to make, and they’re definitely worth the effort.

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To contact Pat, email: pat.spilseth@gmail.com.